It's All Relative(ity)

   There are many things in life (and especially science) which I don't understand which is often reflected when telling my friends that I would be a poor hostage for aliens, especially if they were looking for answers to many of humanity's questions.  What do you know about things beyond your cosmos?  Uh, nothing.  What do you know about how your nerves or cells work?  Uh, nothing.  What do you know about how your cell phone or streaming services work?  Uh, nothing.  Can you fix this coffee maker?  Uh, no.  Do you know what a gathering of badgers is called?  Uh...yes (but I had only just seen it the other day so it was somewhat of a cheat).  In other words, I am drawn to those "dummy" sort of books which attempt to explain things in a simplified manner...such as working on the faucet in my sink.  It should have been a small problem, one solved by looking at one of a zillion You Tube videos on a zillion subjects, each instructional video quite well-intentioned but each with so many variants that they sometimes prove more time-consuming than just diving right into the project.  After all, my thinking went, plumbing is logical (as logical as coding, some might say).  Plus I had watched the faucet initially being installed (okay, it was about six years ago) so I sort of should remember the reverse engineering (one caveat, I am NOT good at plumbing, electrical, or construction so I likely should not have even attempted this).  For beginners, I don't really care to deal with calcified water shut-off valves, fearing that one turn too many will begin a flood and an emergency call to a plumber at what inevitably becomes a weekend night and will thus be billed at triple time rates.  But lo, I plunged into it, got the entire thing disconnected, put in the new cartridge (only then realizing that I didn't need to disassemble the entire faucet from the sink), discovered that I had put the gravity ring in backwards, disassembled it once again and gazed deer-like at a small clip and wondered why it wasn't holding the decorative cover, realized my mistake and reassembled it, rubbed my sore back from working underneath the sink to re-attach the faucet with what seeemed like three inches of room, and finally stood and stared at my successful accomplishment.  Okay, so it took me a few trips to the parts store (Moen doesn't place a model number on their faucets, I was told by the plumbing supply store) and a lot of frustration from staring and pondering and knowing that there had to be a logical way to do it all but for some reason it wasn't visible to me, and yes a plumber would have likely taken fifteen minutes instead of four hours...but that, in a nutshell, was the basis of relativity.

   So you're likely going "whaaa???" as if asking where am I going with this?  Okay, let me put it another way.  For some reason I have been seeing more and more articles with titles or subtitles such as "unexplained" or "defining the unexplainable."   The majority of them are dealing with quantum mechanics, that world of physics that seeks to tie it all together with it super string theory (more often it is just called "string theory").  As it turns out, the world of physicists is rather evenly divided in two, says author Brian Greene in his book, The Elegant Universe.  One side explores the vast and the unimaginably large such as galaxies and universes, while the other side dives into the incredibly small, the world of quarks and other particles even smaller than atoms.  As the author states, it is surprisingly quite rare for the two sides to meet.  So if we stick to just the small atomic side, let's jump back to the basics and remember that the atom was once thought to be the smallest particle that made up everything.  But if you thought that the atom held incredible energy (picture it being ripped apart or slammed together to create nuclear power), Greene tells of the hidden energy that awaits within the even smaller particles such as the muons and neutrons.

Graph: Buzzle; article ScienceStruck

    To take just one example of the power within these particles, each of which makes up just part of an atom, Greene has you imagine holding two electrons, one in each hand; since electrons are negatively charged they are drawn to the nucleus by the positively charged protons and thus create an electromagnetic force (forces are themselves quite complicated, to me anyway, but can be further grasped at sites such as the Physics Classroom which feature excellent online definitions, complete with quiz questions to gauge your retention).  Okay, I'm losing some of you but here's the question to grab you: which would you think would be stronger, gravity or electromagnetism?  Here's Greene: If your right bicep represents the strength of the gravitational force, then your left bicep would have to extend beyond the edge of the known universe to represent the strength of the electromagnetic force.  But taking the universe as a whole, if the gravitational force were even just a tad stronger or weaker, stars would burn out much faster or wouldn't form at all.  Add to all of this the neutrino which has no electric charge and is often dubbed the ghost particle because: ...it can easily pass through many trillion miles of lead without the slightest effect on its motion.  This should give you significant relief, because right now as you read this, billions of neutrinos ejected into space by the sun are passing through your body and the earth as well, as part of their lonely journey through the cosmos...The upshot is that physicists have now probed the structure of matter to scales of about a billionth of a billionth of a meter and shown that everything encountered to date --whether it occurs naturally or is produced artificially with giant atom-smashers-- consists of some combination of particles from these three families and their antimatter partners.  So the question remained...what holds it all so perfectly together?  A slight change in positive-negative, strong-weak, or up-down forces, or even a tiny increase in the size of a proton, and our cosmos would be utter chaos as in probably having NO planets or stars, anywhere.  Hmm, got that?  Me neither...

   Okay, back to relativity...here's Greene's explanation.  You're floating in space in total darkness when you see a light coming at you.  Before long, you recognize that the light is from the spacesuit of another astronaut who waves at you as she floats by; you wave back and she soon disappears and you are again left alone in the darkness.  Then below you there appears another light, but coming from the opposite direction.  It's yet another astronaut and she also waves and you wave back, then she also disappears into the darkness.  So from your point of view, you have remained stationary while two other astronauts have floated by you in two different directions.  But from the lower astronaut's view, she has been the one remaining stationary while you floated by, much as you viewed the astronaut who floated above you.  Said Greene, you've captured the concept of relativity.  Except that according to the rather hilarious book on "understanding philosphy through cartoons," the authors note that: British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead had a competing theory of relativity.  Apparently, their differences (between Whitehead and Einstein) revolved in part around their conceptions of the nature of space.  Whitehead thought Einstein treated space as something substantive; for example, Einstein had said that space is curved.  But in Whitehead's metaphysics, space isn't that sort of thing that's a thing.  Whitehead said the universe is better described in terms of processes rather than things.  Double hmmm...
  
   So along comes a piece in Scientific American on the spectal gap and how so much of trying to solve that problem leads to a German mathematician who is "often regarded as the greatest figure of the past 100 years in the field"...David Hilbert.  Wait...who??  The article was titled The Un(solv)able Problem and how there might be mathematical proof that certain problems could NOT be solved (don't worry, I still have no idea what the spectral gap is although the article says that it is "of central importance in physics").  So, back to trying to figure out what ties the sub-atomic together with the multi-dimensional universe...was there a unified theory that brought it all together?  Einstein devoted the last 30 years of his life attempting to answer the question (he couldn't do it), and thus emerged string theory...which, as it turns out, may be unsolvable. Greene's book was written over 15 years ago (NOVA made an excellent 3-part presentation of it).

   So here's something else...LIBOR.  Okay bringing Libor into the picture is totally unrelated but one has to ask, how much of it do you really understand?  What is it, you ask? Barron's terms it "the global interest benchmark...the daily London interbank offered rate."  So here are three things which I didn't know about Libor: 1) roughly $200 trillion depend on it; 2) most global regulators want to get rid of it (possible after Brexit); 3) the rate is determined by a poll (only 30% of the recent rate was based on actual data).  Did I mention that the average investor probably cares little about this?

   My goodness (or perhaps with this subject, a philosopher might better use the term, my godness), Libor is about as understandable as relativity; and we may as well throw in philosophy with that grouping.  Big questions and perhaps many if not all are unsolvable, even as we continue to ponder them.  Our place in this planet, in this concept of time, is likely there with answers but maybe our minds are just far too young or undeveloped enough to understand.  Or perhaps we aren't meant to understand but rather just to keep asking and keep staring...at the stars, at ourselves, and at the tiniest things.  We are all just one...of something.  Stardust?  After all, our lifeforce of carbon cannot be made on earth and only comes from the death of other stars; and as The Big Picture said: Fundamentally, without carbon, life on Earth would not be possible.  Perhaps it is far easier to use the puiblisher's description of the recent book from the Dalai Lama: After forty years of study with some of the greatest scientific minds, as well as a lifetime of meditative, spiritual, and philosophic study, the Dalai Lama presents a brilliant analysis of why all avenues of inquiry --scientific as well as spiritual-- must be pursued in order to arrive at a complete picture of the truth.  Through an examination of Darwinism and karma, quantum mechanics and philosophical insight into the nature of reality, neurobiology and the study of consciousness, the Dalai Lama draws significant parallels between contemplative and scientific examinations of reality.  His book is titled, The Universe in a Single Atom.