Thoughts after reading a thousand popular physics and science books:
It's not even true to say that physics is complicated. To be complicated, something has to exist as an integrated entity. Things that are too big with too many random parts get treated statistically instead. China is more complicated than Asia.
It's the various parts of physics that are complicated. Reading essays about superstrings, dark energy, quarks, spin and symmetry, or quantum anything, science fans might be forgiven for thinking the science popularizers know what they're writing about. In fact they're dancing on the edge of what they think they know.
They know too much about too little. To explain what they know, they would have to forget most of their mental simplifications, twice the effort for half the gain.
Physics appears inherently misleading.
A spaceship circling the earth in an elliptical orbit from 300 to 36,000 kilometers would need as much energy to move to a circular orbit 36,000 kilometers high, as it would to travel to the moon, or hundreds of millions of kilometers beyond. When orbital mechanics are explained, the initial mental image resembles quantum mechanics.
Heat will move through liquid helium II at 20 meters per second as 'second sound'. Light can be amplified through phase shifts in a microscope. A specimen beam is aligned with a reference beam of the same frequency, so that patterns of interference reveal the insides of a transparent cell.
The explanations are too complicated because of all that's missing. The Sokal Hoax was an act of war between science and the humanities. How can we tell physics isn't a gigantic practical joke? Because the truth is even stranger.
In String Theory, something unimaginable combines with something incomprehensible to do something inconceivable. Supposedly, particles are not made of points but of infinitely thin vibrating 'sinoids' called strings, extensions of distorted space moving through mostly imaginary space.
There's no way to undistort the strings without distorting or folding up surrounding areas, thereby creating new strings.
A mass of strings can be compressed forever, but the mathematical description of that compression is equivalent to the description of a different mass of strings expanding.
A string traveling across the universe could appear as wide as the universe, as it occupies every 'point' along its path. It has no fixed shape.
Two observers passing each other while watching the same strings would see them move through space/time from different angles. Movement through time would appear as movement through space to the other observer.
To the first observer, one end of a string seen by the second observer would appear to be in the future, the other end in the past. Part of one string could appear as part of another string in the process of merging with it to the other observer. They wouldn't agree where the strings first touched. It could be anywhere, if the speed difference was large enough, even ten billion years in the past. To the slower observer, the two strings were then at opposite ends of the universe, but thanks to relativity, space can appear enormously contracted if not tilted sideways.
Superstrings are much more elaborate than presented in popular science articles. They communicate through almost unlimited graviton-like and other force-carrying virtual intermediaries. The most popular explanations of string theory subtract information for the sake of elegance.
Also, string theory does not predict or explain quantum mechanics in any way, but is completely bound by its laws. It seems to contain no philosophical insights at all, only mathematical insights, which are magnificent enough according to those who understand them.
Strings could be thought of as pure data, alternating ones and zeros like an equation. This is where reality turns into software. Data is energy.
Most energy in the universe is confined and constantly being recycled.
In a way, a building is doing just as much 'work' as a jumbo jet taking off, but makes a lot less noise doing it.
The collisions of all the particles that together form the earth are so elastic they support themselves essentially forever like a vast spherical cloud. Unlike a cloud, most particles are confined to tiny fixed areas through local links.
As far back as the nineteenth century, long before Bose-Einstein condensates, it appeared that if this process contained even the slightest inefficiency, the earth should eventually shrink to a point.
Energy is best described by general relativity, which combines space and time. To vastly oversimplify in ordinary words, when a planet like Mercury swings closer to the sun, its local time slows. It takes slightly longer to swing back so the other planets have moved on by then. Space is also stretched out slightly, so Mercury has traveled further as well.
Intergalactic space, on the other hand, may not be as empty as thought. According to the controversial MOND theory, very distant objects affect each other more than they should. Gravity doesn't diffuse as much as expected.
Maybe gravity can't be quantized. Gravitons may not be ordinary particles, but something simpler. They may operate in more dimensions or even universes at once, explaining their relative weakness.
Quantum theory describes nature at the smallest scales. Every atom is like a roulette wheel. A typical quark does zillions of things per second, a storm of pseudo-random vibrations adding up to apparent stability.
Quantum events get rarer as they require more energy. An electron and a proton aren't likely to swap charges.
The outcome of a collision between two particles is fundamentally unpredictable, but simpler, low-energy outcomes are more likely.
To oversimplify unforgivably, if a collision between two particles is repeated exactly the same, they will bounce differently each time because of quantum uncertainty. However, if this experiment is repeated many times, the average of all the collisions will become identical to the result of a normal collision between classical particles. Only after many collisions have been observed does this pattern become clear. No one knows what this means.
Because of their inherent uncertainty, particles can't even hold perfectly still.
Trajectories can be predicted by adding up all possible paths that a particle could take, and removing those paths that cancel out or mirror each other. This may reveal the most likely path.
There are countless possible states in which a particle can find itself. Only one state seems to become real. None are real, until the particle influences another particle.
It takes borrowed energy to determine a particle's state. Particles can be described as swarms of positive and negative energy called 'quantum fluctuations', which represent mass. Apparently, one reason a neutron is heavier than a neutrino is the more energetic Higgs bosons surrounding the former.
The universe is filled with decision points, in which possible futures multiply. According to the Many Worlds Interpretation, at every point where particles act, the universe splits into countless slightly different copies, a new universe for each possibility.
This process also happens in reverse, albeit less often in our low-entropy timestream. If two universes become identical again by chance, they will recombine.
This constant splitting and recombining implies that the past is being slowly erased. The vanishing information is consistent with many possible histories. Wait long enough, and there's no way to find out what really happened.
Past uncertainty is the closest thing to mythology. Eventually, it becomes impossible to be certain that anything has not happened.
Thanks to quantum uncertainty, there is energy and therefore mass in empty space. Zero-Point Energy is sometimes compared to perpetual motion.
Unfortunately, the Zero-Point energy surrounding ordinary energy is only a field. It's as difficult to extract useful energy from virtual particles as from a rubber band. It can only be done by 'investing' an equal amount of ordinary energy first. The first zero-point battery has already been patented, but not yet constructed.
The only loophole might be a hypothetical way to tap into the expansion of space or unknown fields inside ordinary matter.
The greatest quantum conundrum is called Bell's Inequality.
There is an infinite number of ways to measure any particle from any direction. A particle can't 'know' in advance how it would respond to all possible measurements or tests.
It appears that specific measurements can affect the results, though they will still be completely random.
When two 'entangled particles' are measured separately, they always return matching results, no matter how many lightyears apart they may be. This statistical effect emerges after many measurements. It happens in a way that proves that measuring one particle actually really influenced the other particle, if you perform the measurements at certain angles.
They seemingly instantaneously 'communicated' faster than light. In a sense, they are the same particle in two places at once.
This method can't be used to transmit information from one particle to the other. In that sense, it's as if the correlation existed before the measurement.
Is the ratio of the strength of the electromagnetic force to gravity (or any other fundamental constants) a rational or an irrational number?
If physics has a simple structure at the smallest distance scale (like a grid), it would have to be a finite number. Maybe there is no smallest distance scale.
It only takes a few thousand digits to define the precise coordinates of any quark in the universe.
If physical reality is infinitely complex, some 'placeholder entity' might still have to remember that number during every subatomic interaction (though quantum theory implies the complexity may be generated on the spot). Every particle would be like an oracle accessing transcendental information.
Each universe may be a digital representation, while the quantum multiverse spawning them may be continuous.
This may become the subject of the new science of Paraphysics, or Anthropic Entropy (Enthropics?).
In theory, our universe could have been very different, with staggering implications. Most changes would have prevented our form of life.
The first clue emerged from the field of nuclear physics (not to be confused with chemistry). The ratio of the nuclear binding strengths happens to be ideal for the stellar formation of elements like carbon, required for life.
Why are there no enzymes that build diamond in our universe? They would poison most life. Imagine a universe without glass or explosives. Or a cosmos where antigravity machines are possible, but no useful electronic devices; only microfilm or chemical or mechanical computers.
A universe with too many physical laws could degenerate into chaos or frozen complexity.
Quantum physics may be nature's way of generating as many universes as possible with the least amount of computation.
Different categories of universes may be multiplying at ever-accelerating rates in a process of anthropic competition. This would explain our arbitrary yet effective physical laws and energy distributions.
Many anomalies can't be explained, such as matter/antimatter asymmetry.
Perhaps our universe balances simplicity (ease and speed of creation) and abundance (complex physics and ultimate awareness).
Awareness might be like a force of nature.
Matter in this universe can exist at temperatures ranging from a tad above absolute zero to trillions of degrees Kelvin and much higher. Humans can handle any temperature between 300 and 310 Kelvins.
All this vast, untapped energy is humanity's birthright, but to fully exploit it, post-humanity will have to change. Eventually, this means all organized processes may have to operate at a quantum level.
According to a few eccentric philosophers who dared think this far ahead (Teilhard, Tipler), any complex universe must eventually evolve into a single, hyper-intelligent entity.
It better hurry up. According to one interpretation, at the first instant of time our universe was like a quasi-crystal, a mathematical object as close to perfection as possible. It has been disintegrating ever since.
This crumbling can never end. Yet if it's a finite process, it must end.
Our finite, observable universe appears to be slowly fading as the stars go out one by one (though it has trillions of years to go).
Even worse, as space continues to expand, matter becomes more diffuse and less able to delay further expansion.
According to another theory, the expansion may feed on itself to such an extent that even atoms (and a few minutes later their nuclei, seconds later to be followed by the protons composing them) will be torn apart.
There may come a moment when every remaining particle is cut off from every other particle by an unbridgeable gap, forever isolated behind its own event horizon - like an almost perfect quasi-crystal. At that moment, the universe might come full circle.
Post your comments here
blog zone
Be the first to read Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
The book that took a quarter century to plan and write.
With more original scientific, sociological, and technical ideas than any science fiction novel ever published.
Original source of the Anonymous meme.
Buy the book
Read chapters for free