Tag: physics

What Reality Ought To Be

Posted on by jabittan
The universe is filled with paradoxes, but often times those paradoxes seem to be the result of how our brains and thinking work. Amanda Gefter addresses this in her book, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. In the book Gefter describes how she found her way to a career as a science journalist, something she never set out to do directly, and at many points never believed would be possible for her. Her descriptions of science and physics are as much a description about the progression of human life that we all share, and it is a perfect opportunity to reflect on paradoxes within our personal lives and within areas like science.

 

Gefter describes the challenges of quantum mechanics and the reality that we can measure some parts of the universe one way, but get a different result if we measure them a different way or at a different time. Also, with quantum particles, we seem to be a able to measure with incredible precision a particle’s position or its momentum, but not both. We can accurately look at where a particle is, but in doing so we can’t describe where it is going. Alternatively, we can look at where a particle is going and how it is moving through space, but we can’t actually then pinpoint where in space it is. This measurement paradox is challenging and creates a lot of problems and further questions for scientists. Describing the way we are challenged by measurements and observations and our inability to separate ourselves from the measurements and observations we make, Gefter writes the following:

 

“There’s no normal reality lurking behind the quantum scene, no objective Einsteinian world that sits idly by regardless of who’s looking. There’s just the stuff we measure. The whole thing reeked of paradox, but as Feynman said, ‘The ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ‘ought to be.’”

 

I think this idea extends well beyond physics throughout our lives. A paradox is something that sounds like it would be correct and obvious, but leads to a conclusion or reality that could not possibly exist. Paradoxes are contradictions that break our expectations and are outcomes that run counter to our intentions. With this framework, we can begin to see that Feynman’s description of paradoxes extends beyond the world of science into any aspect of our lives today.

 

The physical universe and the ever confusing and challenging world of particle physics is under no obligation to act in ways that our limited brains and current extent of mathematical and scientific understanding would expect. We make predictions based on observations, but we are never playing with all the data and never have a complete set of all possible observations when we make our predictions. Our ideas of what should and should not be possible are shaped by our experiences and by all the information we can hold in our head, and that information is astoundingly limited compared to the vastness of possibilities within the universe.

 

Looking at our actual day-to-day lives, we can see that this concept translates into the expectations, generalizations, and predictions we make about our futures and desires. I live in Reno, Nevada, and at the moment housing prices in Reno have increased dramatically as the number of homes and quality apartments has remained level while economic development and population growth have occurred. One result of a stronger economy and a lagging housing infrastructure is increased home costs, and fewer living accommodations for those who want to live on their own. I was recently running with a friend of mine who stated that an individual graduating from college should be able to afford a starter home if they are in an introductory position and have a solid and stable job. My friend is not wrong to say this, but his statement is simply a value judgement based on the experiences of his family and expectations that have been shaped by where he has lived and what he has been told he should do to be successful. Whenever we begin talking in terms of how things should be, we need to recognize that we are making value judgements, and that we are expressing only our ideas of what reality ought to be. The conflicts this creates and the paradoxes it leads us to are not paradoxes that actually exist in the universe, they are just situations where the real world does not align with the way that our brains comprehend our experiences.

 

The set of possibilities within the universe is virtually infinite as far as the human mind is concerned, and thinking that we know how things should be is to some extent arrogant and irrational. The world and universe in physical terms and in terms of our social ordering can have many forms, and if we try to force the universe to be the way that makes sense from our perspective, we will simply be frustrated and confused in a spiral of paradox. When we take away our opinion and think through our expectations, we can begin to see the world more clearly and better react to and adjust to the actual realities of our world. When we take away the expectations of how the world ought to be, we can live in the world we actually have and learn and adapt with greater skill.

Measuring the Universe from the Inside

Posted on by jabittan
The human mind is an amazing tool, but it does go astray from time to time and some of our logical fallacies trip us up. The world of physics, particularly the physicists who are pushing the edge of physics knowledge, run into a lot of challenges that clash with the way we typically think about and understand the universe. Our physics today shows us where our logical fallacies lie and how we must tread the line of reason and nonsense to understand what is truly taking place in the universe.

 

One of the challenges that modern physics presents us with is the need to abandon the idea of objective observers outside the system. Everything in the universe is within the universe. That sounds obvious enough, but it means that everything that is, all matter, all energy, and any observer is in the universe itself. This is important because it means you cannot step outside the universe and look in to see what is happening to make observations and measurements. From the moment the universe began, it has been all there ever is, and there was never anything outside the universe as best as we can understand it.

 

Amanda Gefter tackles this in her book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn where she writes, “Of course, if that was true, you couldn’t have an observer to make the measurement in the first place. The observer’s got to live in some kind of reality. That was the problem with Bohr’s view. If measurement is the arbiter of reality, then the measuring device has to sit outside reality—which even within the bizarro universe of quantum mechanics, is downright impossible.” Gefter wrote this in response to the challenges of describing particles within quantum mechanics. There are some properties of particles that you can’t define very precisely, or at least that you can’t define simultaneously. We also look at particles within the wave function, indicating that particles follow a general probability pathway until we decide to make a measurement and determine where they are and how they behave.

 

But,  because we are inside the universe, when we make an observation we change the system. We shape the reality that we are trying to measure because we are matter and our measurement tools are made of the same building blocks as the things we are trying to measure, so everything interacts and mutually shapes and has an impact on everything else. There is no way to stand outside the universe and there is no way to observe and measure the system without interacting with it, and when you do, you influence the observations you make.

Thinking About Science Writing

Posted on by jabittan
Amanda Gefter’s book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is an enjoyable read even if you only have a slight science background because Gefter is able to transform incredibly challenging physics topics into understandable and relatable concepts and ideas. Her use of metaphor throughout the book is funny and inviting, and while I am not an expert in the cutting edge of physics after reading her book, I do have a better basic grasp of the challenges physicists face when observing and making predictions about the universe today.

Early in the book Gefter describes some of her own confusion with topics like general relativity and quantum mechanics, and she provides in depth yet accessible explanations. In addition to describing the ideas themselves, Gefter is able to describe the why the problems and challenges at the edge of science puzzle so many people in a way that is accessible. Regarding quantum gravity she writes,

“I knew that physicists needed a theory of quantum gravity because general relativity and quantum mechanics couldn’t manage to peaceable coexist in a single universe. But what made exactly made them so hopelessly incompatible? Everywhere I looked I found technicalities—the world of relativity is continuous and the quantum world discrete; relativity regards positions in spacetime as well defined, while quantum theory renders them fuzzy. They were obstacles, sure, but they struck me as mere couple’s squabbles, not deep, unbridgeable rifts. It was like relativity preferred chocolate and quantum theory vanilla—not like relativity was a Protestant and quantum theory was a duck.”

I have more or less forgotten any ideas about quantum gravity, but I have managed to retain some general relativity and some quantum mechanics knowledge after reading Gefter’s book. What I enjoy about the passage above is the humor she brings to the science. We don’t often invite people into the science because we become very technical when describing the complexities of cutting edge science. There is a place for the jargon, but when we want to excite people and get them interested in the truly fascinating work taking place, we need to make science more clear and create demonstrations that will encourage people to look further as opposed to confuse people and put them to sleep.

What I think is also important to remember is that it is good for people to hear the answers to the basics, even if we (or they) have heard the basic questions and basic answers multiple times in the past. I listen to a lot of science podcasts, and the question/answer portions of the shows often have pretty strait forward and basic questions. My reaction as a human being when someone asks a question to which I know the answer is to praise myself for being so smart and to criticize the other person for not already knowing the answer to the question. However, I try my best to acknowledge that reaction, and then put it away because it is not helpful. Undoubtedly every time a simple question is answered, the response on a podcast is unique, and my understanding is deepened or even corrected altogether. What we must remember when discussing science, and what Gefter does a great job of in her book, is that everyone in our audience will come to our writing (or podcast discussion) with a different level of understanding and we must write in a way that does not make those with less background think that we are arrogant in our use of language and description of basic concepts.

Energy and Gravity Games

Posted on by jabittan
A great challenge within physics today is understanding how the same physics is able to operate at different scales. The geometry of planets and galaxies seems to operate in the same way as the physics of airplanes and softballs, but dive a level deeper and the physics of electrons and photos does not quite seem to follow the same rules. Experiments give us photons that seem to know how we are looking at them, and behave differently depending on what experiment we choose and what method of observation we use. Once we get to the super small world of particle physics, we continue to use the same physics, but the interactions between matter and energy seems to be different. Piecing together exactly what is happening is challenging, and often requires looking at the results of experiments in new and creative ways.

 

In her book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, author Amanda Gefter explores many of these head turning and confusing realities. She looks at the smallest scale we can reach in the universe, the point at which there simply are not more “things” to be discovered by looking for even smaller and smaller particles. At the Plank scale, gravity and energy have interactions that we would not expect based on our understandings of quantum physics. Gefter describes what physicists observe,

 

“But keep zooming in and, strangely, things start to turn around. The laws of quantum mechanics contain a loophole that allows large fluctuations of energy to burst forth from the vacuum, provided they don’t stick around too long. At increasingly shorter time scales, energy blinks in and out of existence in the form of fleeting, or ‘virtual,’ particles. The more localized the virtual particle, the greater its momentum, and the  greater its momentum, the larger its energy. Thanks to E=mc2, more energy means more mass. So as you look at smaller and smaller distances, virtual particles grow increasingly massive until, at the Plank scale, gravity grows as powerful as the other forces An energy in its own right, gravity’s crescendo generates a runaway feedback disaster of the same variety that can collapse a 1032 pound star into a black hole.”

 

Gefter describes the process above as the breaking of spacetime and refers to John Wheeler who said that this process creates “spacetime foam.” Physicists are challenged because all the forces we experience as sentient human beings exist across all scales, but their impact is different based on the mass and energy of the particle or system. Gefter’s quote above shows us that physics does not just go away at a certain point. Instead, the rules remain, but the way the rules play out changes.

What is the Ultimate “Thing” of the Universe?

Posted on by jabittan
Amanda Gefter’s book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is about her journey into the world of physics with her father. Throughout the book she and her father search for the ultimate building block of the universe. What is the smallest particle that forms the basis of all other particles? What aspect of the universe is constant among all scales and all perspectives? What constitutes reality in our universe?

 

From our perspective here on Earth, these questions seem like they should be strait-forward and easy to answer. However, once we start looking into the universe and observing more than what we can simply experience here on Earth, we begin to see that what we understand as reality is not as clear as it appears. The deeper we peer through space, the more we see strange phenomenon such as the curving of spacetime, and the more energy we put forward in the search of smaller and smaller particles, the more we find that matter seem to come and go and not behave as we expected.

 

Throughout their search, Gefter and her father look into the physics of various candidates for the ultimate building block of reality and meet many interesting scientists and physicists.  From the beginning, one of Gefter’s favorite physicists was John Wheeler, and early on in his research he took down the idea that spacetime itself was the most basic unit of the universe. “Wheeler emphasized that spacetime couldn’t be reality’s ultimate ingredient, because at its highest resolution quantum mechanics and general relativity conspire to destroy it, warping its geometry until it isn’t geometry anymore.”

 

Over the last two years a principle predicted by Albert Einstein has been proven correct as we have discovered gravitational waves. These are ripples through spacetime caused by events of massive energy. The empty space of space, according to the theory of Einstein is not actually empty but is composed of what we have confusingly named spacetime. Our planets and everything in the universe permeates across and through this spacetime according to physics that Einstein helped describe. In her book, Gefter turns back to Wheeler to describe this concept, “As wheeler put it, ‘Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move.” Our planet, our sun, our galaxy, and everything in the universe is interacting with spacetime which is everywhere and all around us. As matter interacts with what appears to be empty space it actually distorts that space, because that space is more than emptiness. Light, energy, and matter are all influenced by spacetime which itself is simultaneously shaped by the matter and energy flowing through it. Even more bizarre, across spacetime, particles seem to pop in and out of existence continuously, with particles and antiparticles appearing from nothing and then colliding on a sub-microscopic level to vanish back into nothingness.

 

Early on what Gefter demonstrated with the help of Einstein, Wheeler, and spacetime, is that our concrete understanding and experience of reality is not as concrete as it appears. We can only see, measure, and experience so much, and there is far more in the universe than what we currently know and understand. The ultimate reality of the universe is beyond our current comprehension, and what this reminds us is that we should not be too sure of our own knowledge, for we are always limited by what we can experience and observe from our perspective. The universe is more than the stories we tell ourselves about it.

The Big Bang Was Everywhere

Posted on by jabittan
Space and time are big and complicated. Like, really big, and really complicated. The enormous sizes that we use when talking about space and the incomprehensible timescales of the universe truly boggle my mind. It is hard to understand just what it means for a star to be 150 light years away from earth, or for the earth to be about 4.5 billion years old, and for the universe itself to be almost 14 billion years old. But even more challenging to understand than the incredible time and size proportions that go so far beyond what human experience can comprehend is our current understanding of how it all started.

 

In her book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, Amanda Gefter walks us through her journey to try to understand the Universe and the Big Bang. At the start of the Universe, 13.75 billion years ago, everything in the universe existed as nothing. Everything was everywhere around us, as Gefter and her father would come to call and undifferentiated homogenous state. And  then something changed, and the Universe as we can see and measure it today began to take shape. That event has been called the Big Bang, and since that event the universe has been expanding and changing. The origin of the Big Bang is called a singularity in physics, and Gefter explains a little about that starting point of the universe:

 

“It was tempting to think of a singularity as small, but, as my father and I quickly learned, that’s a rookie mistake. It only seems small because you picture it as a point in space, as if you’re looking at it from the outside. But the singularity has no outside. It’s not a point in space because it is space. It’s the universe, it’s everything. We’re in the point. Besides, a point isn’t small—it’s sizeless. I had learned that in geometry class, in spite of my protests. You can just as well think of a point as infinitely big. The Big Bang happened everywhere, I scribbled in my notebook. Even in the suburbs.”

 

Thinking about space, time, and universe requires that we change what we understand nature and reality to be. The way that physics and nature work on planet Earth appear to be different from the way reality and physics operate in other parts of the universe, but the reality is that the physics is working the same and we are observing the same reality, just at different scales and with different things experiencing different forces. If we force everything to be understood as we experience reality with our limited set of senses and limited time scales here on Earth, we won’t fully understand what is happening throughout space and time. What Gefter explains throughout her book, and what must be accepted for all the physics of the universe to work, is that there is no gods-eye-view of the universe. You cannot take a viewpoint from outside the universe, because everything is within the universe. Whether the universe is a single dense point of all matter, or an ever expanding infinite expanse of galaxies, planets, and dust, every view point is within the universe. The Big Bang happened everywhere because it was everything. We cannot be a god and stand outside the Big Bang and watch it happen. We are inside the universe, and must look at the Big Bang from the inside.

The Right and Wrong Perspective

Posted on by jabittan
“The difference between the right and wrong perspective is everything,” Ryan Holiday writes in his book, The Obstacle is The Way. “Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.” In the two quotes above Holiday lays out his thoughts for the importance of the systems we build for looking at the world. Stepping beyond our initial view of the world and learning to adjust our perception is incredibly important in the world today. Limiting our views and entrenching ourselves in our single perspective creates a reality for us that is not shareable nor understandable beyond ourselves to those with different experiences, beliefs, and views.

 

Holiday’s quotes feel very timely for me given the recent election. Our country has become increasingly polarized and there seems to be a great disconnect between those living in rural and urban areas. I’m afraid not that we have different opinions, but that we are not cultivating the ability to see the world from multiple perspectives, and that we are not striving to to better understand the other half of the country that does not live the way we do. When we limit our perspective and don’t seek a greater understanding of what others believe, we cut ourselves off from a large number of people. It becomes easy to hide behind those who share our views and we fail to even talk to those who are different from us.

 

In his writing, Holiday approaches our ability to change our perception as a tool for adapting to life’s many challenges. We can become more productive by thinking about the work we do from a different angle, and we can learn to better appreciate any given situation when we can focus on the present moment. For Holiday there are two parts of perception that shape the way we experience the world. We have the context of our lives that connects our view with the larger world, and we have our individual framing which is our determination of the meaning of a given event. We decide what something means according to our world view, and our entrenched perspectives on the specifics determine how that thing fits in with our daily actions and individual reactions.

 

Expanding on the idea of perspective as discussed in our daily lives makes me think about Amanda Gefter and her quest for ultimate reality in her book that I recently read, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. Gefter is a science journalist and author, and she explains how she built a career for herself reporting on physics. What she and her father have spent their life focusing on as a hobby is the search for ultimate reality, the search for the truest building block of the universe that may be the foundation for all of physics.  Ultimately, what she and her father found is that to the best of our understanding right now, there is no ultimate reality. Our perspective truly is everything. Where we are in the universe, how we choose to view the universe, and what we choose to look at determines the reality of the physics around us. Stepping outside the universe and taking a god’s-eye view of everything causes physics to break down, and ruptures reality. Change your frame and you lose gravity, divide atomic and subatomic particles far enough and you reach a possible eleven dimensional field of vibrations where there is no actual physical thing, accelerate yourself to the speed of light and time ceases to exist.  The physics and reality of our world only seem to work from our single perspective where we view the world and assemble our own information. There is no ultimate reality that can be agreed upon by everything, and there is no gods-eye view that can help us find “truth”. If this is true in the world of physics then it can be applied to our lives, and we can begin to understand that we never have an answer to the right way of doing things, we only have our perspective and how we choose to understand the world given the framework and understandings that we have built and adopted from our slice of the universe.