Before I get to today's post, an administrative note. The reason Mojrim gets his comments published, even though we don't always agree, is that he is not a moron. To get your comments published, you don't have to agree with me, you need to have something intelligent and interesting to say. -- C.
I have actually never taken a single physics course, in high school or college, which I believe does not make me exceptional. But I've had a subscription to Scientific American since I was 13 and I'm curious, so I try to understand that stuff as best I can. Modern physics is completely mathematical, however, so qualitative explanations are really just a sort of shadow play of what physicists are really doing.
This is really not the case for biology, or chemistry. Yes there's math involved but you can get a pretty good intuitive grasp of biological and chemical phenomena without it. In my own discipline of sociology and public health research, we use a lot of statistics, some of it quite complex, but the purpose is mostly to test hypotheses. Once you find an association, you can explain it without the analysis of covariance equations.
What's more, findings in these fields don't completely upend our intuitions. True, evolution upended millennia of belief, but even though some people reject it, the idea is not terribly hard to understand, if you're willing to listen to an explanation. The idea of chemical bonds makes intuitive sense, and you can represent molecules with ball and stick diagrams that anyone can comprehend. We see chemistry happen in our kitchens every day so we know it's real.
Physics is different, however. The claims modern physicists make about reality are just bizarre. Light consists of particles called photons, but it is also a wave. Photons travel at light speed, which is the highest attainable speed in the universe, and nothing that has mass can ever quite get there. They are waves in what's called the electromagnetic field that permeates the universe. They are one of a group of particles called bosons that carry two other elementary forces, called the strong and weak force; plus the Higgs boson that endows particles called fermions with mass. They in turn are classified as quarks or leptons. Quarks interact with bosons called gluons and W and Z bosons. Gluons carry the strong force, a kind of attractive/repulsive force called color charge. However, unlike electrical charge, which is either positive or negative, it comes in three varieties that physicists call red, green and blue, or anti-red, anti-green and anti-blue so there are really six. For an agglomeration of quarks to be stable, it must have all three varieties and hence be white or "colorless," or consist of two quarks of a color and its anti-color. Protons and neutrons are each made of three quarks, while the two quark combinations are called mesons.
I could go on but it just gets weirder and weirder. In fact everything I've just written kind of seems like gibberish. Here's the Wikipedia into to the standard model if you're interested. Then there's Einstein's theory of gravity, which is that massive objects warp space-time. Some 13.8 billion years ago, space-time emerged from an infinitesimal point, along with its mass-energy content, and expanded until we got where we are today, with all kinds of crazy shit that went down along the way. Now, I believe all this, because a whole lot of really smart people have invested immense sums of time and money figuring it out and proving it to their satisfaction; and at least some of it is necessary to make microchips and the global positioning system, which do appear to work, although we don't need quarks for that or any other practical application, at least so far.
But why? Maybe the question makes no sense, it just is what it is, but the human mind can't help but generate that unsatisfied feeling. It all seems arbitrary and pointless. And I think that's how it seems to the average person. So people tell themselves other stories that are more satisfying, more comforting, and easier to grasp. But we need to be able to live with mystery, and no that for now at least many questions are unanswered. Just don't make up answers, accept that there is a whole lot we don't know.
3 comments:
A whole lot that we don’t know, and that we’re not meant to know. That was the perspective of my great friend, Betty Lynch. She was Catholic. Did that defineher? No. To me, every sort of Christianity is bullshit, including Catholicism. But what the hell do I know? And isn’t that the point? It’s all a mystery, and we can keep connecting dots in an asymptotic way. But we’ll never know. We are not meant to know. We just can’t help trying to find out. All the great spiritual and mystic leaders say the same thing, basically: all is well. As Anthony Demello said, look around, and you see chaos everywhere, but all is well. Quite a paradox, eh? The great spiritual leaders weren’t trying to figure out gluons, though. They knew that the secret to serenity lay in acceptance. But we come in all shapes and forms, and some are not seeking serenity, they are seeking knowledge. Others prefer to leave the knowledge to the force behind the universe, choosing instead to accept it all and let the force of that knowledge pass through them in a pure and unobstructed fashion so that they may know the wonder and beauty of what it means to be an alive human being. Still others are in neither of those two camps, instead seeking to dominate (and deny the equal worth of) others, their egos out of control and in denial of the force behind the universe, acting like God themselves despite any protestations to the contrary. But for the scientific seekers, there is always another “Why?” And the rest of us benefit from their tenacity.
The world is full of things you can never understand. Even if someone, somewhere does most of us lack the time, or capacity to do so. The function of spirituality is to reconcile that with our need to make sense of things. The problem is that we often tend to decide in favor of spirituality when it conflicts with understandable phenomena.
Human social groups are cognitively delimited to 100-250 individuals, about the upper limit of the bands and tribes in which we evolved. The function of religion is to inoculate us with morality, a set of rules and structures that permit us to interact peaceably within larger groups. The problem is that all in-groups definitionally create an out-group with whom peace will always be tenuous.
Also: thank you, estemado Cervantes. I find the level of discourse here far higher than in other places and very much enjoy cogent and thoughtful disagreement.
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