God Awful Things

Over at The New Scientist (which has just about made it to my browser bookmarks), they have an article called “Seven questions that keep physicists u[ at night.” Which is just another one of those lists of things we shouldn’t think about as it will make our brain hurt.

It just reminds me of young kids who just keep asking “why?” after every question.. and now I’m looking for that xkcd comic that is so appropriate but, sadly, I can’t find it.

Maybe that should be a question, why can’t I ever find what I’m looking for? Why is it I only know where things are that I’m not looking for… man.. Whoa, I can make riddles too!

Anyway, here are my favorites..

Why this universe?

In their pursuit of nature’s fundamental laws, physicists have essentially been working under a long standing paradigm: demonstrating why the universe must be as we see it. But if other laws can be thought of, why can’t the universes they describe exist in some other place? “Maybe we’ll find there’s no other alternative to the universe we know,” says Sean Carroll of Caltech. “But I suspect that’s not right.” Carroll finds it easy to imagine that nature allows for different kinds of universes with different laws. “So in our universe, the question becomes why these laws and not some other laws?”

With this kind of question I always feel like I’m right on the cusp of a brilliant observation, but one that ultimately escapes my view. That and it’s not based in any education, just the notion that I’d like to imagine we exist in all universes at the same time, whether we’re aware of it or not, of course, this isn’t the case, but people believe in a invisible man in the clouds who created a whole universe in 6 days and was then so exhausted he had to take a day off.

What is everything made of?

It’s now clear that ordinary matter – atoms, stars and galaxies – accounts for a paltry 4 per cent of the universe’s total energy budget. It’s the other 96 per cent that keeps University of Michigan physicist Katherine Freese engaged. Freese is excited that one part of the problem, the nature of dark matter, may be nearing resolution. She points to new data from experiments like NASA’s Fermi satellite that are consistent with the notion that dark matter particles in our own galaxy are annihilating with one another at a measurable rate, which in turn could reveal their properties. But the discovery of dark energy, which appears to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, has created a vast new set of puzzles for which there are no immediate answers in sight. This includes the nature of the dark energy itself and the question of why it has a value that is so extraordinarily small, allowing for the formation of galaxies, stars and the emergence of life.

The romantic in me likes to think of this sort of thing.  Everything you or I can see, touch, feel (well, not emotions, but like physical stuff) is made up of exploding stars, we’re just stardust.. and when we’re gone, we’ll still just be stardust.. far out. Of course, our consciousness isn’t stardust, but thats another riddle in itself.

And finally my favorite..

What is reality really?

The material world may, at some level, lie beyond comprehension, but Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna, is profoundly hopeful that physicists have merely scratched the surface of something much bigger. Zeilinger specialises in quantum experiments that demonstrate the apparent influence of observers in the shaping of reality. “Maybe the real breakthrough will come when we start to realise the connections between reality, knowledge and our actions,” he says. The concept is mind-bending, but it is well established in practice. Zeilinger and others have shown that particles that are widely separated can somehow have quantum states that are linked, so that observing one affects the outcome of the other. No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched.

Hooray! It’s been far too long since we had some good ol’ entanglement news.  My favorite subject, for those of you not in the know.  It’s the old brain teaser of something not being in any place until it is looked at, and only then does it exist where it is.

Anyway, the article is kind of neat.