I Am Certainly Destined to Not Invent a Time Machine
A Mildly Informed Treatise on Cosmology
By Joshua Estell
Lately I have been doing a lot of casual reading about the current state of the universe, as explained by the body scientific. This is a time of great ferment in the world of physics; in fact, many in the academic community are wont to call it “the golden age of cosmology”. Many amazing and yet completely unpredicted things are being uncovered. Of course, this community does not speak with one voice: you have your String Theorists, who base their particular view of the universe on a somewhat exotic and epistemological idealism; that is to say, an abiding belief in the infallibility of mathematics–and you have your Supersymmetry types, who believe that the only thing between humankind and a firm understanding of the universe as a whole is the current lack of a supercollider powerful enough to see matter as it existed at the beginning of the universe1. You may be pausing at this point to ask yourself what the hell I am talking about, or why I care. Well, I am not a particularly religious person, though I do believe in god, so chalk this up as me asking questions of my faith. All of this might seem like a layperson striking out for a bridge too far, but I have a fair grasp of the concepts that underpin General and Special Relativity, and at least a notion of what quantum physics means to me. I suppose I feel an allegiance to the geeks in labcoats looking for the face of god in a reality wholly created and cultivated by man, while at the same time having some pretty serious reservations about the lengths they choose to go.
I've spent a lot of time romanticizing the relationship between bleeding edge science and philosophy, mostly brought on by one particular book that I kept on my person for nearly a year of college. Okay, sure, I did this because I hoped it would get me laid, but funnily enough, I actually managed to read and understand some of the gnarlier bits on quantum mechanics (amazing, as this theoretical mishmash was explained by a hippy physicist tenured at the University of Vienna, who was working with English as a third language). Nowadays, however, the more I read about these new discoveries the more they seem like mere corrections, not unlike the ones you might find so unceremoniously buried on page D16 of a newspaper:
Corrections and Omissions
Last week we ran a story about State Senator John McFooenburg being held in custody after allegedly smearing himself with peanut butter and power-walking through Downtown while loudly proclaiming himself the aggrieved reincarnation of George Washington Carver. Apparently, we did not check our sources as thoroughly as we could have; the circumstances of the incident involved neither Senator McFooenburg, the aforementioned legume-based condiment, nor any sort of naked ambulatory disturbance of the peace. We apologize for any inconvenience this article might have caused.
Now–I am no authority, mind you, but there are plenty of analogs to this in modern physics, and as far as I am concerned, it is tantamount to good ol' fashioned silliness.
The LHC superconducting- supercollider is one fine example. A pretty single-minded track to take, no pun intended; perhaps these folks are all recovering adolescent pyromaniacs, as am I, but if you look at it from the point of view of a layperson, it seems like climbing down a sinkhole with no flashlight. From my studies I remember a central pillar of quantum mechanics is the inability of the observer to truly separate himself from what he is observing; particles are slippery little suckers, and one can only hope to garner one of two measurements (position or velocity) with any certainty. . . the rest is fancy mathematics based on chance, right? So explain to me again how creating a multibillion dollar sub-atomic demolition derby and feeding it enough juice to power every small appliance on the planet for 10 years is making progress?
They say that if they ever manage to generate particles that (theoretically) existed at 10-36 seconds after the beginning of time, they will have The Answers in hand. I hardly think 10-36 will be the end of it, and, as they crack the bubble chamber on that fateful day, I am almost certain they will not see some sort of sign reading “Hey! What took you skinbags so long?!”
No. . . ask as you might, no one can really explain what happened at the Big Bang–most textbooks like to sum it up by saying “See. . . right. . . umm. . . HERE is where the laws of physics break down”. What kind of shinola is that? It's rather like inventing a card game that explicitly states in the rules that the only way to begin the game is to break every rule that applies thereafter–someone is bullshitting someone here, right? I hope so, and if I learned anything from my big brothers, it was to never play the game “KnucklerapJack2” again; fool me 103 times, shame on me.
The String Theorists: Oh, boy, these cats are a riot; keeping a running total on dimensions that now extends up to 11 and in some cases 26. I get a good belly laugh going when I think about an adherent of the 11-dimensional school having an episode of effete intellectual superiority:
“26 dimensions? Are those guys f#$*ing crazy!?”
Sure, it is pretty cool to stretch the boundaries of your imagination with that kind of thing, but as far as surplus dimensions and String Theorists go, I would have to assume that leaving them to their own devices is something akin to giving a spendthrift a license to print money.
I am reaching here, sure; after all, I am an unqualified commentator. I am positive that if I could be coached through the mathematics, I would probably drink the Kool-aid too, but there is something comfortable about being naïve in this regard. The questions seem far too large for man to ever really grasp–and do we really want to know? What stuff will that stuff leave unanswered? The day the scientific community announces success–that the Theory of Everything is complete, We might have to celebrate not only that tremendous accomplishment, but the beginning of another chapter in the search for our place in the Universe. Sure, We'll have in hand the blueprints for the building, but isn't in already built?
The other day I had an idea for a time machine. I was really worked up about it for about ten minutes, but then I realized it was doomed to fail. If I had succeeded, I reckoned, why did I not appear to myself at that very instant? Being big on labor-savings (read that as lazy), I am fairly certain I would be the type of guy to immediately come back from the future and give myself directions.
My bottom line is this: Everyone has their own cosmological constant–There's no sense in waiting for the Strings and the Higgs Bosons and the Quarks to explain themselves. I am reminded of the beginning lines of a book that is quite impossible to finish, but fun to keep around:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You're very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it's turtles all the way down.”3 ?
- The current supercolliders are only powerful enough to “create” massive particles that resemble the ones hanging around at 10-12 seconds, or one trillionth of a second after the beginning of the universe–The LHC at CERN is really gonna bring home the bacon–creating particles that might have existed in the range of 10-18 seconds, or lesser–while running up Switzerland's power bill in the process.
- apocryphal. The game of choice for my brothers and me (I never had a choice, really) was knee football, a game that usually ended when I could no longer walk, or the threat of visible bruising (and subsequent parental intervention) was too great.
- A Brief History Of Time, Stephen Hawking. Bantam Books.
7 Missives So Far
01 Mad said on Wed Dec 31 23:00:01 EST
Josh, what an erudite treatise. I too have my scientific leanings but I was ever the Biologist, Physics was the subject that I did because it supported my main interests but really there was a bit too much maths hanging around in it for me to really groove on it.
Brief aside -- The US Uni's must be very different from British ones if carrying esoteric books improved ones chances of getting laid. No one on my course was even mildly impressed that I'd read Aristotle's Poetics even though it was on the reading list and they were all meant to have read it (turns out I was the only schmuck who did... still, I rather enjoyed it). On my campus my ability to drink a yard of ale caused more of a stir with the female population than any intellectual abilities I pretended. --
So I used to look in from time to time to see what those mad cats in the physics arena were thinking about (I haven't for years now) and boggle over their weird ideas. I've long been of the opinion that there most definitely is a discernible God and my explorations of Biology reinforced this. I've always been puzzled by those who can look at the intricacies of life on this planet and not see the face of a creator staring back. And this is kind of how I feel about the Physicists. Take the Big Bang, it seems to me that the boys with the particle accelerators found the universe's "on switch", hell I can almost see the fingerprint on it! But no one shouted about it.
You know, I've actually forgotten the point I was going to make when I started this comment... My memory sucks.
I think you should build the time machine Josh, your future self didn't come back to tell you what to do because he knew you'd figure it out and he's having far to much fun to be bothered...
02 Gone Away said on Wed Dec 31 23:00:01 EST
I find the scientist's delving into the origins of the universe quite interesting, not that I necessarily understand what they're on about. But it does seem to me that they're overlooking something fairly obvious. They use the idea of cause and effect to get wherever they are at the moment: this caused that which caused the other which caused something else and, blooey, we have a universe. But, using that system there must always be a cause behind whatever they regard as the starting point - so there must be a cause behind the big bang in the first place. Using the cause and effect method, one must always run into God sooner or later. So it puzzles me why none of them ever say, "The thing's always been here - it's infinite in time as well as space." They could even afford the luxury of what I call the bangbangbang theory then - forever expanding then contracting until bang and expanding then contracting until bang and so on. Even that wouldn't give me a problem as far as God is concerned. God stands outside time and infinity since He made them. Okay, so we can't understand that. Would He be God if we could understand Him?
03 Honcho said on Wed Dec 31 23:00:01 EST
Well, Mr. Mad - about the book as laying-aid -- I never said it was a particularly successful tactic.
04 josh said on Wed Dec 31 23:00:01 EST
A couple years back the astrophysics community began to espouse the theory that the universe as a whole is gradually dispersing in all directions at a constant rate. Using stuff like deep-space interferometry and Hubble's law (redshift), they reckon that the universe will eventually become so dilute that it can no longer maintain the gravitational forces to sustain even the most massive objects, like quark / neutron stars and even black holes.
The previous premise, if one was to assume a universe ruled in totality by gravity as we perceive it know it, was that the momentum of the expansion would eventually stop, and everything would begin to collapse again. No dice, apparently. The universe is headed for a cold, dark and gaseous end.
Bummer, eh? I bet it will happen on a Monday -- I hate Mondays.
05 Gone Away said on Wed Dec 31 23:00:01 EST
So it's a one-time only thing. In that case, we are still left with the problem: what started it? You cannot get something from nothing.
06 josh said on Wed Dec 31 23:00:01 EST
I dunno -- I still think it comes down to the chasm that exists between what we know and what we think whe know. Like I was saying in the post -- we built the telescopes and satellites, afterall. More than that, the science itself is a construct of our perceptions. This is what I try to explain to people who argue that science is always the correct answer -- when in fact, it is much more akin the question itself.
07 jbestell said on Wed Dec 31 23:00:01 EST
Editor: This is an addendum, posted for my benefit. Ignore unless you are an insomniac.
How Particles Acquire Mass
By Mary and Ian Butterworth, Imperial College London,
and Doris and Vigdor Teplitz, Southern Methodist University,
Dallas, Texas, USA.
The Higgs boson is a hypothesised particle which, if it exists, would give the
mechanism by which particles acquire mass.
Matter is made of molecules; molecules of atoms; atoms of a cloud of electrons
about one-hundred-millionth of a centimetre and a nucleus about
one-hundred-thousandth the size of the electron cloud. The nucleus is made of
protons and neutrons. Each proton (or neutron) has about two thousand times the
mass of an electron. We know a good deal about why the nucleus is so small. We
do not know, however, how the particles get their masses. Why are the masses
what they are? Why are the ratios of masses what they are? We can't be said to
understand the constituents of matter if we don't have a satisfactory answer to
this question.
Peter Higgs has a model in which particle masses arise in a beautiful, but
complex, progression. He starts with a particle that has only mass, and no
other characteristics, such as charge, that distinguish particles from empty
space. We can call his particle H. H interacts with other particles; for
example if H is near an electron, there is a force between the two. H is of a
class of particles called "bosons". We first attempt a more precise, but
non-mathematical statement of the point of the model; then we give explanatory
pictures.
In the mathematics of quantum mechanics describing creation and annihilation of
elementary particles, as observed at accelerators, particles at particular
points arise from "fields" spread over space and time. Higgs found that
parameters in the equations for the field associated with the particle H can be
chosen in such a way that the lowest energy state of that field (empty space)
is one with the field not zero. It is surprising that the field is not zero in
empty space, but the result, not an obvious one, is: all particles that can
interact with H gain mass from the interaction.
Thus mathematics links the existence of H to a contribution to the mass of all
particles with which H interacts. A picture that corresponds to the mathematics
is of the lowest energy state, "empty" space, having a crown of H particles
with no energy of their own. Other particles get their masses by interacting
with this collection of zero-energy H particles. The mass (or inertia or
resistance to change in motion) of a particle comes from its being "grabbed at"
by Higgs particles when we try and move it.
If particles no get their masses from interacting with the empty space Higgs
field, then the Higgs particle must exist; but we can't be certain without
finding the Higgs. We have other hints about the Higgs; for example, if it
exists, it plays a role in "unifying" different forces. However, we believe
that nature could contrive to get the results that would flow from the Higgs in
other ways. In fact, proving the Higgs particle does not exist would be
scientifically every bit as valuable as proving it does.
These questions, the mechanisms by which particles get their masses, and the
relationship amongs different forces of nature, are major ones and so basic
to having an understanding of the constituents of matter and the forces among
them, that it is hard to see how we can make significant progress in our
understanding of the stuff of which the earth is made without answering them.
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