I'm going to take a quick break from my France posts (while it's still fresh in my mind) to write a blog about a couple of highlights that I got out of the book we read for my reading group this month. The book was called
The God Particle- If the universe is the answer, what is the question? by Leon Lederman.
I have to say that it was a bit of a tough read for me. Not because it was poorly written, but because my mind does not function like that of a mathematician or physicist. (I hear E=mc ___? and I think Hammer, the 1990's, and balloon pants, not the speed of light squared.) That being said I actually got more out of it than any physics textbook I have ever read. But it was still slow going. And I should also note (for honesty sake:) that as of this moment, I've only read half of it. I intend to finish it, but like I said, it might take a while.
Anyway, the book is basically a history of particle physics beginning with the ancient Greeks all the way up to the super colliders of today. There is too much information to do a summary, but there were a couple points I wanted to...well, point out because I thought they were interesting.
1.)The first has to do with one Michael Faraday. He was a self taught physicist, who came from "nothing" and went on to make huge contributions to physics (here is the good part) and he was
completely math illiterate! That's right, instead of long complicated equations, he just did experiments (mostly involving magnets and electrical fields), and then described in words what was going on. That's my kind of guy! Schrodinger and Maxwell, and later guys did the math that went along with Faraday's ideas. I just thought that was pretty cool since I too am fairly uninclined toward math. Faraday's biography is a pretty neat one (although a bit over religious for my blood), and a quick look up on Wikipedia will give you a nice summary if you are interested in learning more.
2.)Most of physics, when you move into the 19th century and beyond is crazier sounding than the wackiest science fiction you have ever read. It's beyond mind blowing, because much of it somehow exists in a way or form that our brains don't have the ability to comprehend it. For example, physics tells us that
everything has what is called a wave/particle duality, which means that in some ways it acts like a particle of matter, and in some ways it acts like a wave (like ripples on the water or radio wave). Even we are since we are made out of particles of matter! I believe the reason we say it is a combination of these two things, is because it is impossible for us to imagine it as a single state of being that has both the properties of a matter and energy at the same time. It's too "far out" to comprehend. Here are a few other things that are apparently real, but I can't twist my brain around: there are "mathematical points" that actually exist as a real thing in the real world, there are particles that manage to have mass, but no size, or radius. Einstein says that mass is really just the curvature of space/time, so on a certain level everything including our bodies and brains and eyeballs are just a warped area of space and time. Then you have to wonder what is time exactly? And since time started after the Big Bang, then how can you have a time before time? Kooky stuff isn't it? That's why it was so hard to read. I'd go over the text several times thinking I misunderstood, but then I realized no, I'd gotten it right, it was really saying what I thought it was saying. It just made no sense to my macroscopic thinking brain.
3.)Another other thing that really stood out to me (FINALLY!) is why math is so essential to physics. Not the individual long crazy equations themselves, but what those equations, which are basically tools, allow scientists to do, how equations allow scientists to "see" things that they cannot detect by experamentation alone. It's something I'd never thought about before, and it's....totally
amazing!
I'll give one example (because it's the only one I fully understood...ha ha). It has to do with electrons , and I'm really going to make it simple (not for you, but for me:). Here it goes.This physicist named Paul Dirac noticed that the equation he did to figure out the "electron-wave solution" (whatever that is) had two answers, in the same way that 2 x 2 = 4 but -2 x -2 = 4 does as well. The one solution matched the data he had for the electron. But the the other was a mystery. Basically the math was saying that for every particle there had to be another identical particle but with the opposite charge. The thing to note is, at the time when this equation was proved, physicists didn't have ANY physical evidence of an "antiparticle", or a reason to think one existed. Dirac wasn't quite sure what to do with the second solution. But jump ahead a little in time and lo-and-behold! the positron was discovered, which basically is an electron with a + charge!
The point I'm trying to get at is the
math itself is what uncovered the possibility of a positron. It had nothing to do with the scientists, or any direct observation. The math knew it was there before people did! When you do the math, and you plug in values for this or that, the resulting equations tells you if you are right or wrong, on the right track, close but missing something, ignoring an important factor, or whatever. That's how physicists know that there are particles that haven't been discovered yet, and why they are forever hunting for things like Higgs bosons, and dark matter.! It's because when they add up everything we can observe in the universe, the mathematics don't balance out. The
math tells them something is missing! Isn't that....pretty freaking cool? And math doesn't lie and it's dependable (well,
my math does, but that's because I never do it right (sad face)). More dependable than our senses (as demonstrated by the positron)! But moving on.
4.)I want to take a minute or two to talk about a couple of the implications of Einstein's famous E=mc2 (it should be a "squared" 2, but I don't know how to do a post script in this program) and the Big Bang. E=mc2 (Energy=mass x speed of light squared) says that energy can
create matter, and the more energy you have (and the closer to the speed of light you get) the more matter you can create. Have you ever wondered how all the stuff in the universe (including you and I) was suddenly created during the Big Bang out of "nothing"? Well, there was SO much energy in the explosion that a LOT of matter was made almost instantaneously. That's how the super colliders work. They channel a bunch of eVolts into one particle and see what flies out when the energy, converted into new matter, is almost simultaneously smashed apart. Cool stuff hu? And they've found all kinds of interesting things. Quarks, and leptons, and weak and strong forces, and several other things, none of which I can explain or describe.
Well, I think that about exhausts my understanding of physics and
The God Particle. Sorry this blog is a little disjointed. My brain kind of jumps and starts when I delve into math and physics, and so it appears in my writing. If you are interested in reading the book, I absolutely recommend it. The advice I would give is just try to get through it. Don't stop at every single detail that eludes you. If you just read it and understand what you can along the way, the story and the important concepts take shape despite the difficulties and you can still get a lot out of it.
