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Science dudes are always trying to explain stuff, but their explanations are so complicated that most of us don’t really know what they are talking about. We try to take science into our lives, to embrace its concepts, to welcome it into our lives, to work with its ideas and adopt its ways of looking at the world. Our efforts to do this often resemble a dog attempting to ride a motorcycle backwards underwater.
We shall therefore begin our exploration of physics with the Hisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Most of us reduce this principle to “you can never really be sure about anything”, but it’s actually more like “you can know something about something, but you can’t really know everything about anything.”
What the Uncertainty Principle (I’ll start calling it the U.P. for short) really refers to applies mainly to matter in motion. When stuff is sitting still, you can get a pretty good look at it. Moving stuff is harder to study unless you happen to be moving right along with it. If you are trying to study a Toyota Prius as it’s driving past you, you can calculate its speed by using a radar gun or you can take a photo of its exact location in one moment of time by using a camera, but you can’t know its exact speed and its exact location at exactly the same time unless you are the person driving the Prius. But in that case, you would want to keep your focus on the exact location of the emergency brake.
Now that you are more certain about uncertainty, we can move on to dimensionality.
Scence fiction has caused a lot of misunderstanding about what dimensionality is. Actual physics hasn’t helped much either. Science fiction has led us all to imagine alternate universes and parallel dimensions where stuff exists right next to us that we can’t see because it’s in a different dimension. Meanwhile, physicists have been trying to find a theory that reconciles General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. Each of those theories works very well within their respective domains…
Sorry. What I meant was that there are two different kinds of math that scientists use to figure stuff out. One is for bigger stuff that travels fast and the other is for tiny stuff that travels even faster. The two kinds of math don’t always agree, even though each one works on its own. So the really most big-headed scientists keep trying to come up with ways to make the two kinds of math work together and all the new kinds of math they come up with require way more dimensions than there actually are in the real world. Not even the most big-headed scientists really understand that, so it’s not a big surprise that no one else understands it either.
At any rate, one of the leading contenders for this “Grand Unified Theory of Everything” is something called superstrings. Superstring theory basically says that everything is made of tiny strands of matter that vibrate. That’s a very easy thing to imagine. People love superstrings! The unfortunate part is that for superstring math to work, the physics dudes have to use something like 23 dimensions. So we have a thing that non-physicists are able to take into their minds (everything is vibrating strings; guitarists especially love this idea) and we have to include a bunch of extra dimensions in that idea. Hey Presto, people decide that there really are a bunch of dimensions around that we don’t see.
Dimesions are ways of measuring. That is all they are. In the normal world, the dimensions are length, width, height and time. You have to start from there if you want to understand anything about dimensions. They are mental constructs we use to describe the world in mathematical terms. Time is an important dimension because time in ratio to one of the other dimensions–we’ll call those “spatial” dimensions because they’re special–is the way we describe speed or velocity: something travels an amount of distance in an amount of time. This becomes a very valuable concept for many reasons. I want to point out that the inclusion of time as a dimension makes infinity possible. If you start from any point on a round planet and travel in a “straight” line (it can’t really be a straight line if it’s on a curved surface) common sense tells you that you will eventually come all the way around to the place you started from. Except that the place will have changed while you were traveling and won’t really be the same place at all. Time changes everything, including our understanding of the world around us.
In actual factuals, dimensions are measurements. We normally think of the physical world in terms of 3 or 4 dimensions because those are the easiest ways of measuring space and time, but any number of unique ways of measuring can be used as dimensions. If more measurements help us understand more, more dimensions are more gooder. This is an important concept. Dimensions are not physical realities; they are mental constructs used for understanding physical reality.
Everyone wants to understand something about the world. That’s how we figure out how to live the best way we can. We can’t plan our days without at least a little bit of thinking and a little bit of predicting how we expect things to work. Everyone is a philosopher, at least regarding one’s own life. Many of us want to include scientific knowledge in our thought process, so we try to fit physics into our philosophy. According to my friend Phil, a philanthropic philatalist who frequently photographs the phantom photons that flit across phytoplankton by filtering the frequencies, people might only try to link physics with philosophy because there seems to be a linguistic connection. He doesn’t really explain what he means by that.
The point is that we all choose our ways of understanding the world we live in. Part of my own way is to put things into words. That helps me get a grasp on some of the thoughts that seem too big to be completely contained within the confines of my tiny head.
So now that we’re a little more or less certain about the dimensions of uncertainty, we can move on to matter and energy.
Albert Einstein came up with a theory that made it seem as though matter and energy are the same. They are not. Matter can be converted to energy. If we think of matter and energy as interchangeable, we tend to forget about the all-important conversion of one to the other. Lest we forget, Einstein’s famous equations and theories were used very sucessfully to convert unstable metallic isotopes into huge explosions. E=mc^2 was used to make atomic bombs. That is what happens when we neglect to see the importance of matter/energy conversions.
No matter (pun intended, but maybe not acheived) how you like to think of matter becoming energy, try to always include the term “potential”. That word will serve to remind you to consider the way the conversion is being done. Ancient rain forest mulch became crude oil that gets refined into petroleum that gets refined into gasoline that gets exploded under controlled conditions in our automobile engines so that we can drive to our events to show our support for our worthy causes. If matter=energy=matter, there would be no problems other than entropy. Since the conversions of matter to energy are a factor, we have to consider the waste by-products of our conversions and whether the material resources we use to make energy are renewable. We can burn million-year-old rain forest mulch, but can we grow new million-year-old rain forests? We can dine on Chilean sea bass to fuel up for the big dance, but will there continue to be enough new sea basses growing to adulthood to continue feeding us this way? I sure hope so. Chilean sea bass is yummy!
Anyway…matter is stuff. It’s not just ANY stuff; it’s stuff that matters! That’s why we call it that. Anti-matter, on the other hand, is stuff that doesn’t matter. When a particle of stuff that matters collides with a particle of stuff that doesn’t matter, both particles vanish! Choose your battles wisely. Don’t sacrifice stuff that matters for stuff that doesn’t matter.
Dark matter is another thing entirely. Cosmologists (despite the similarity in the name, they don’t actually do makeup) theorize that the universe contains a whole lot of dark matter…and maybe some dark anti-matter too. Just like their “light” cousins, the dark versions of matter are either stuff that matters or doesn’t. The difference is that in the dark, we can’t see why it does or doesn’t matter.
Astrophysicists want dark matter to exist because it would explain their caculations better. Dark matter would add enough mass to the universe to keep it in a pattern of decelerating expansion virtually forever. Without dark matter, a universe that started with a Big Bang would eventually reach the limits of its expasion and then begin to contract. They aren’t sure what that would do to the laws of physics that we know in an expanding universe, so they are hoping that the contraction doesn’t happen. Well, AND it would end in a Big Splat…in billions of years.
Physics is actually all about predicting the movements of things by using numbers. The main competetion for the confidence of the public-at-large comes from numerology. We can use numbers to understand the world. That much is agreed upon. We can use numbers for careful measurements and complex calculations or we could just pick out numbers that we like because of their resonance.
Some people like to say that “all is one”. I think this kind of insults numbers in general. It’s like saying that we don’t need any other numbers; just ONE. I think maybe the all-is-one people are perhaps a bit self-centered: I is me and me is all that is and everything that appears to be non-me is an illusion, for all is me. Three Dog Night was right. One IS the loneliest number.
And two is only 100% better. Two-ism does lead to pair-bonding–since 2 means that now it isn’t just me but me AND you– but it also brings in the idea of opposites, which is the most rudimentary way of understanding the world. Two-ism (okay “duality”. We can handle the word “duality”, right?) leads to the idea that everything is either this or that, which sometimes leads to ideas of good or evil and all the nasty connotations that go along with that sort of thinking. It’s an easy philosophical trap to fall into. As a culture, we do LOTS of communication in dualities and in two dimensions. Pieces of paper are often considered highly valuable in our society and everything on pieces of paper is necessarily two dimensional. But imagine having to live your entire life in only two dimensions. That would suck.
Thank goodness for 3. With 3 there is you, me AND something else. Food perhaps…Threeness makes depth possible, in addition to length and width. And 3 implies that other numbers are possible. Once you have 3, you can open the door to 4. 5 can come alive. As long as there’s a 3, you can’t tell 6 to hit the bricks or send 7 up to heaven. 8 and 9 can be great and fine. Get to 10 and you can start again!
Numbers can be your friends if you treat them as such. They don’t want your awe. They just want to be worked with. That’s what physics is about: a real use for numbers that helps us understand the world we live in.
Unlike some fake uses of numbers, such as 2012. Let’s face it: the world ended for the Mayans over a thousand years ago. And NO ONE can predict any future event with any certainty anyway. We can only predict in terms of probabilities and even then, only when we have some significant experience with the sort of event we are trying to predict. The end of the world could only be accurately predicted by a team of persons who had already experienced an end of the world.
Um.
Should have quit while I was ahead…
Have a glorious day!
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