Adam's Peace

Newton teaches us that objects are attracted to other objects, and more importantly, that those attractions can be measured and predicted.

Einstein teaches us that space and time are the same thing, that the reason why objects attract each other, is because these objects bend space.

Heisenberg and Schrödinger teach that, sometimes, it’s more important to know what is probable, not just what is, and the very ability to act within an environment has far greater reaching consequences than imaginable.

Hawking teaches that we don’t even have to stand up to understand the universe.

And my personal hero, Sagan, teaches that it isn’t enough to know something to be able to teach others, but you have to be excited as well, and that excitement will spread that knowledge and understanding.

Some Big Thoughts on Little Things

I’m excited about the universe… the entire cosmos, and our parallel cosmos, and the cosmos found when traveling through another spacial dimension.

Yet, I’m lacking some understanding.

What is space?

Space is something. Yet, space is the… space between things. We can change the density of space, displacing it with a lot of matter… This bending of space creates gravity; where space is more dense than in surrounding areas, that is where we (as matter) are drawn. We can drag space along with us, twisting it around in an effect called “Frame Dragging.” We’ve observed this with satellites, which seem to creep more East in their orbits than they should be… even satellites completely outside of the atmosphere, and the effect is more pronounced the closer to the Earth the satellites are… We know that it isn’t the atmosphere slowing the satellites down, because air resistance would bring them closer in their orbits, but the altitude of their orbits remain unchanged.

It is space itself which defines an area… One cubic inch of space contains the same amount of space, no matter how “dense” that space is (density being measured by gravity.) Yes, objects within the space would be pushed together more densely, the more gravity there is, but the amount of space in a cubic inch just doesn’t change.

So space is nothing… that is gravity… that is moved by matter… that is moved by energy… that changes density without becoming more or less dense.

Space is an empty something, and a filled nothing.

Time Again

Space becomes dense… without its density changing. It moves, yet by definition, we are what moves inside of it.

So what gives? Something seems broken here.

Einstein blamed it all on Time. When Space is bent, Time is what pays the price, what gets changed.

We all know the speed of time… one second per second. Yet, we live in a place ruled by time as equally powerfully as it is ruled by space.

As space gets denser (and we can’t see this density, since we’re in space, and all of our measurement tools are space based, including our eyes, which use light, which always travels at a constant speed through space) time slows down.

Yet, we can’t measure this directly. We can’t just send a clock into a gravity void and watch it tick away quickly, since for that clock, one second still lasts a whole second. We can, however, send a clock up, let it tick away for a while, then compare it with a clock that has been on the Earth for a while. (We have done this; the clock sent to outer space did indeed have a later time on it than the duplicate clock that stayed on Earth, when it was brought back.)

So, time isn’t a constant… Neither is space. When space is dense, so is time.

Okay, fine. That describes what space does. It still doesn’t say what it is.

Down to the Small

Let’s back off for a minute, and look at the world of the very small; of chances and split personalities.

So far, we think of light as a particle. We shoot it out of a light bulb, and it travels in straight lines. It bounces off of surfaces like a ball bounces off of a wall, and it is effected by gravity (though you’d need a very dense part of space to see this directly, such as around stars and black holes).

Well, keep that in the back of your mind for a bit, but don’t dwell on it.

Imagine that you have a long rectangular pan, half full of water. On one side, you have a motor that can cause regular ripples in the water. When you turn the motor on, those ripples travel out across the pan, bouncing on the sides and the far end in a fairly regular, predictable pattern.

Now, put a wall of sorts in the middle of the pan, with a 1 inch vertical slit in the middle for the water to get through. When you turn the motor back on, you notice that the waves spread out from the machine, and as the waves hit the slit, they travel away on the other side in all directions at the same speed… You have two half-circles of waves now, one at the end of the pan with the machine, and another at the middle of the pan on the other end of the slit.

Next, cut another slit in the wall and turn on the motor on. As the waves hit the two slits, they each create their own half-circles of waves… When a low point of a wave hits the low point of another wave, that point is doubly-deep, and when the peaks of two waves meet, those points are doubly-high. This is called an interference pattern. Wait for the waves to spread across the entire pan, and take a mental picture of the end of the pan, opposite of the machine. You’ll see a line of alternating bands of wave heights… from doubly low where the dips are meeting, to doubly high where the peaks are meeting, up and down and up and down, all along the far wall of the pan. This is called an interference pattern… keep it in mind.

Now, let’s move this thought experiment out of water, and into light. (If you have a laser, you can do this in real life… I did.)

Shine a laser beam at a wall… It makes a dot, correct? All of the photons are traveling in a straight line, like bullets fired from a rifle. (Bullets that are so fast, and so lightweight, that we can’t notice the effects of gravity)

Now, take a piece of paper, and cut a vertical slit in it… a skinny slit, just enough for a little bit of the laser beam to get through. Shine the laser at the wall, through the slit…

And not much changes.

The light is still going in straight lines. Yes, there is a little bit of bouncing around, the light is a little more spread out, but that is because paper isn’t perfect; some light still passes through the paper itself, and no matter how precisely you make the cut, the laser is still going to find stray edges to bounce around off of.

Now… carefully cut a second slit in the paper, very close to the first slit. Make sure that the slits are close enough so that they are both hit by the laser beam at the same time.

The results?

Well, what do you think? Light is a particle, right? Like little tiny bullets that always travels in straight lines, right?

Here’s what happens… You’ll see band of dark and light and dark and light and dark and light stretching across the wall. When you rotate the paper, these bands rotate too, but not when you rotate the laser.

Now, where did we see bands of high intensity and low intensity before?

That’s right, our interference pattern in the pan of water.

But we were observing waves of water conducting wave-energy through the slits, not what happens when we squirt water through the slits… Light is particles, right? Always?

Not really, kinda-sorta, maybe.

It’s still the same light. Shine the laser at the wall, and you see the single beam again. Shine it through one slit, and you see the same beam… but shine it through two slits at once, and the light stops acting like particles, and starts acting like waves.

And that’s the experiment that sparked off quantum physics. Why is light sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave? What if we only sent one single photon through the slits at a time? (They found that the single photon would travel through both slits at the same time.) What other particles behave like this? (Electrons and quarks; (quarks are the most elementary building blocks of protons and neutrons that we can observe. In other words, all of the small parts of an atom.)) What does this mean about the nature of the universe?

Strings

I hate the term “String Theory.”

But, while smashing atoms to figure out what they’re made of (kind of like throwing two watches at each other, and examining how the parts fly away, to discover the sizes of the gears and how they’re arranged), scientists recorded some strange data. While examining that data in hopes of finding a new particle that they could name after their dog or girlfriend or parakeet, some scientists noticed that some of the particles seem to be bound to each other… They could get close… very close… but they couldn’t get too far from their paired particle. It was as is those particles were tied together with some cosmic string.

Well, that didn’t fly over well; the other scientists laughed.

So, they used these strings to explain the weak nuclear force… the strongest known force in the universe, that also happens to have the shortest range.

Again, the other scientists laughed.

So, they added 2 spacial dimensions to the universe, and used the strings to explain the strong nuclear force, what binds protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom.

Again, the other scientists laughed.

So, they added 2 more spacial dimensions to the universe, and use the strings to explain magnetism.

That convinced some of the scientists… the rest chuckled nervously.

Then, realizing that they were on to something, they added 2 more dimensions and used the strings to explain gravity, in the process unlocking the secrets of time before the big bang.

Most of the scientists looked up, did a double-take, reviewed the math, and realized that it was time to take strings seriously… because the string theories had done two things that had eluded everyone since Einstein; they had explained all four known forces (strong and weak nuclear, magnetic, and gravity) using the same theory, AND had explained how the big bang started.

HOWEVER

String Theory can not be tested… There are no experiments to run that can verify whether string theory is accurate or not…

So, instead, it should really be named String Hypothesis… but that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well.

Still… 11 spacial dimensions, a mirror cosmos that looks exactly the same as ours, but just happens to be on the “other side” of an 11 dimension super-cosmic membrane larger than all of our individual cosmos… countless alternate realities… Quite an ambitious and far-fetched hypothesis, but much of the physics community says the math checks out, despite all of its mind bending oddities… They might be on to something.

But I still want to know what space is.