I had an opportunity to attend a lecture last evening given by noted physicist Brian Greene, author of "The Elegant Universe," where he walked the packed audience through the basic challenges of physics from Newton to Einstein to Quantum froth and beyond. When Einstein's breakthrough ideas proved Newton's notion of absolute space and time wrong, the quantum physics crowd came along and found a problem. Space, they asserted, was a chaotic broiling stew in the realm of the very small, so how could Einstein's ideas of smoothly curved space transmitting gravity work in such an environment? Greene's answer, and that of the string theorists, was that there were tiny filaments of energy at the heart of the very smallest quantum particles, and their vibration rate determined what kind of particle resulted. They also served to dilute and smooth out space, solving the conflict between Einstein and Quantum Mechanics. Elegant indeed, if it is correct.
Have I lost you yet? Find it hard to worry about the bumpiness or smoothness of space-time at the scale of 10 to the -35? I feel your pain. Most of us are too busy worrying about the bumpiness of our monthly budgets, the stock markets, or diminishing assets to think too much about these arcane subjects. But Greene asserted that any validation of the string theorist's ideas would constitute one of the most profound breakthroughs our species has ever made. The clan is eagerly awaiting the restart of the CERN super collider later this year, which will hurl particles against one another and attempt to observe the results. The mathematics of string theory hold that there must be ten dimensions in our universe, not just the four we are familiar with now, (Lenth, breadth, depth and duration). The theory posits that if there is less energy after a collision than before, then perhaps some of the particles got pushed into one of those other unseen six dimensions--a little like the bad assets held off balance sheet in the strange "Level three" dimension the bank string theorists have created with their own fuzzy math.
Gee... it all makes sense now! Run the housing and lending market through the credit collider and see if the amount of equity remaining is less after the crash. If so, the securitized loans must have been pushed into the dimension called "Level Three!" Newton's assertion that a property must be marked in accordance with its current market value has been stricken down! The Einsteins of Wall Street have clearly shown us that you can loose billions of dollars, receive billions more in government subsidies, and still claim you made a profit that funds billions in bonus money and ehxorbitant salaries! Quantum banking has been saved!
There I go again...
Well...the evening provided a fascinating excursion into the realms of speculative physics, with everything from the Newton's Laws of Motion to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle coming up in the 90 minute lecture. A good time was had by all.
All the talk about Heisenberg called to mind my own science fiction time travel novels dealing with the principle. Quantum mechanics couldn't even say, with any certainty, where a given particle in the universe was! One of my characters mused: "Dust in the wind... We want permanence, we reach for it, hope for it. Lord, isn’t that what heaven’s all about? But it doesn’t work that way—at least not in this realm. Nothing stays put for long. It’s all process; all change. We’re just surfing the wave now, that’s all. I don’t see what else could be done. I know how you must feel. It’s going to be lonely here—in the heart of it all. We’re sitting at infinity’s bedside now, and she’s quietly dreaming. At least we’ve got each other, if that’s any consolation."
So as I listened to Greene expound on the mysteries of string theory, wondering about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, I felt a bit like that--sitting at infinity's bedside while the strange elegant universe kept on dreaming. And I was that dream as well. Was I even here, quantumly speaking, that is? I just put my hand on my companion's shoulder and thought: At least we've got each other.
Have I lost you yet? Find it hard to worry about the bumpiness or smoothness of space-time at the scale of 10 to the -35? I feel your pain. Most of us are too busy worrying about the bumpiness of our monthly budgets, the stock markets, or diminishing assets to think too much about these arcane subjects. But Greene asserted that any validation of the string theorist's ideas would constitute one of the most profound breakthroughs our species has ever made. The clan is eagerly awaiting the restart of the CERN super collider later this year, which will hurl particles against one another and attempt to observe the results. The mathematics of string theory hold that there must be ten dimensions in our universe, not just the four we are familiar with now, (Lenth, breadth, depth and duration). The theory posits that if there is less energy after a collision than before, then perhaps some of the particles got pushed into one of those other unseen six dimensions--a little like the bad assets held off balance sheet in the strange "Level three" dimension the bank string theorists have created with their own fuzzy math.
Gee... it all makes sense now! Run the housing and lending market through the credit collider and see if the amount of equity remaining is less after the crash. If so, the securitized loans must have been pushed into the dimension called "Level Three!" Newton's assertion that a property must be marked in accordance with its current market value has been stricken down! The Einsteins of Wall Street have clearly shown us that you can loose billions of dollars, receive billions more in government subsidies, and still claim you made a profit that funds billions in bonus money and ehxorbitant salaries! Quantum banking has been saved!
There I go again...
Well...the evening provided a fascinating excursion into the realms of speculative physics, with everything from the Newton's Laws of Motion to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle coming up in the 90 minute lecture. A good time was had by all.
All the talk about Heisenberg called to mind my own science fiction time travel novels dealing with the principle. Quantum mechanics couldn't even say, with any certainty, where a given particle in the universe was! One of my characters mused: "Dust in the wind... We want permanence, we reach for it, hope for it. Lord, isn’t that what heaven’s all about? But it doesn’t work that way—at least not in this realm. Nothing stays put for long. It’s all process; all change. We’re just surfing the wave now, that’s all. I don’t see what else could be done. I know how you must feel. It’s going to be lonely here—in the heart of it all. We’re sitting at infinity’s bedside now, and she’s quietly dreaming. At least we’ve got each other, if that’s any consolation."
So as I listened to Greene expound on the mysteries of string theory, wondering about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, I felt a bit like that--sitting at infinity's bedside while the strange elegant universe kept on dreaming. And I was that dream as well. Was I even here, quantumly speaking, that is? I just put my hand on my companion's shoulder and thought: At least we've got each other.
