W O R D S 1

Ten years ago, if you would have told me that in ten years I would be reading books about math and science purely for enjoyment, I would not have beleived it. It still seems strange to me as a reality. I've never been much of science person other than pretending to be a mad scientist as a child and mixing household cleaners together. And since high school, following year after year of progressively worse grades in my math courses (algebra I = "A"; Geometry = "B"; Algebra II/Trig = C and D second semester; even without math as a strong suit, I could see a mathematical pattern) I shied away from anything to do with math until relatively recently. I think I lack the basic desire to grasp minutae that is required by math. Anyway, here I am, regardless of reasoning.

Right now I am reading Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and another book called Imaginary Numbers: An Anthology of Marvelous Mathematical Stories, Diversions, Poems and Musings, which is a collection that is pretty good. Interestingly, I read one of the short stories by the famous Phillip K. Dick, called "The Golden Man" and didn't fully grasp the mathematical meaning of the story until I read about particle physics in The Elegant Universe. In Dick's story, we see our world in the possible near-future. In this world, there are beings not unlike the mutants in Marvel comics' X-Men, evolutionary upstarts who have strange and fantastic powers. The governments of the world, out of fear, have systematically destroyed all such creattures, out of fear for humanity's survival. In the story, almost all of these creatures have been wiped out. The protagonist finds one, however, and cannot figure out its power. It turns out that it can tell the future, in a manner of speaking.

In particle physics, subatomic particles, such as electrons, exist not in actual locations, but actually exist in many locations at once and are only ever some "place" that is "probable" at any given moment. Electrons sort of theoretically traverse infinite different paths simultaneously, but only ever actually are at any given point sort of after they've already been there. I'm sure I'm not explaining this the best I can, but what's interesting is that Dick explains it by anthropomorphing probability field particle physics into this evolutionarily advanced creature in such a way that I sort of "got" probability theory. The creature was a sort of precognitive being that would "live out" several possible futures in his head in order to choose what his next best option for self-preservation would be. And that's somewhat how probability fields work, in that sometimes particles can behave in extraordinary ways because they "choose" to do something very unlikely, but at the same time, "probable."

I talked about what was giving me trouble about this book in my last post, which was the nature of light and its speed and how even if you're going REALLY fast in a spaceship, indeed, no matter how fast you go, light will always be coming to you at the speed of light. This is still pretty hard to fathom and what's the most important thing is that physics, as it works in our worldspace, is not the same physics as it is either at subatomic levels or at high speed OR even at points of extremely high mass. Another thing to remember is that time, energy and speed are all very relative. In fact, at any given point, one's speed or mass actually dicates it's relationship with time. In other words, someone moving very very very fast experiences time very differently from someone who is moving at the rate at which we normally (or even occasionally abnormaly, say, at the speed of sound, even) move. And similarly, if something were to be extremely massive, like if there were a black hole two and a half million times as 165 of our sons squeezed into the area of Manhattan (which is not unheard of), time would also act differently. Pretty weird huh? Does any of this make sense? It's a really good book, I promise, but it IS a little dry if you're not interested in how the universe "works."

Brian posted at 10:54 AM.