From: "Sidney Keith" <sidkeith@hotmail.com>
To: pinhole@exploratorium.edu
Subject: Square Laws
Date: Wed, 02 Jun 1999 09:12:58 PDT
Many pinholers seem to agree that science students "have not to reason why;
theirs is only to do or die." But Ron Wong gives an excellent reason for why
gravity works -- it's the bending of space-time proposed by Einstein, which
makes much more sense to me than Newton's magical action at a distance.
That's the replacement of a pure mystery with a reason, even though that
reason contains many other mysteries, of course.
Similarly, inertia has a wonderful explanation in particle physics --
there's something called a Higgs field, in which the interactions between
particles are so frequent and dense that it resembles molasses when
particles move through it. This creates what we perceive as inertia.
Interaction between particles makes more sense to me than a "propensity to
conserve motion."
Eric makes an important point in the argument for a purely phenomenological
science -- so much of physics (the relative strength of the forces, for
example) seems to be the arbitrary product of the Big Bang, the breaking of
symmetry in a necessarily random way. But that only makes me long to find
physical principles that are independent of our local Big Bang, that would
be true in any possible universe. Einstein said he wanted to know "whether
God had any choice when he created the universe," and that longing gave him
the energy to produce his difficult, logically beautiful theories.
The principle that I would nominate for this fundamental role, an airtight
logical truth that has to operate in any universe, is Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle. It underlies so much of quantum mechanics, and is
able to call up energy out of a pure vacuum, even whole universes according
to some theories. We find it in mathematics in the wonderful new field of
wavelets.
For me it has a pleasant metaphysical meaning -- that nothing is really
something, since we can predict that out of nothing nothing comes. Since
Heisenberg forbids predictability to any physical system, nothing is too
definite, too much of a something, to exist. Physics reveals to us that
chaos is a simpler, more profound type of existence than nothingness itself.
Surprise and creation are a necessary part of things. There will always be
things out there, bizarre creatures like ourselves wondering how we got
there. I would never do anything to quench or limit that sense of wonder in
any way.
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