Playing Literary Critic with the Laws of the Universe

Sure, why stop being a little bitch just because it's physics, right?

Back when I was in high school and in advanced everything, I was considered to have a good head for science. I won the school award for highest G.P.A. in biology (and English and math and Latin).

But this was before I had discovered how to bypass the blood-brain barrier, and the wonders of substances that could take us on those magical journeys, and say "fuck off biotch!" to the blood-brain barrier (BBB, if you are on as familiar terms as we are).

But I guess I was nostalgiac, because I was reading a book which recapitulated the most important ideas of physics.

And I found myself arguing with some of the principles and ideas.

I thought I would share my thoughts on a few of these ideas I've been revisiting, as if they were books of poetry to say "yay" or "nay" to like a gay congressman or a gay Amish man.


THE DOPPLER EFFECT.

Big thumbs up on this one, because it is such an easy concept to understand. You can draw pictures of what's actually happening that even a third grader would probably understand. Poor Christian Doppler (1803-53). He died young and he only discovered this because he was too constitutionally weak to be a stonemason like everyone else hale and hearty in his Salzburg family. Probably they played Mozart really loud and ignored him when he tried to explain this principle. Because that's what most of "legitimate science" did. And he was so right. The thought is that he fudged some experimental "results" he couldn't possibly achieve in his time. But he knew he was right. Red-shift, blue-shift, one fish, two fish. He saw it all. And he's the reason we know almost everything we know about those impossible distances. Planets cause disturbances and wobbles that red-shift or blue-shift the spectra of stars. And that's how we "see" those planets. Cosmological redshift is properly speaking due to the expansion of space, but some people mistakenly classify that as another Doppler effect. That's not a true Doppler effect, though, and if you're calling cosmological redshift a Doppler effect stop doing that. Even at cocktail parties. Cuz you're lying.


SUPERCONDUCTIVITY.

This is awesome. If you freeze mercury down to a few degrees above absolute zero and pass a current through, you will have no resistance whatsoever. Throw Ohm's Law (V=IR) out the window, dude.
It's the closest thing to perpetual motion we've achieved on earth. The Ancients would be like so jealous. It's all about the Cooper pairs. Metals are latticeworks. Did you know that at ultracold temps (like 170 billionths of a Kelvin) many bosons can all inhabit the same quantum state? Bose-Einstein condenstates are cool. I was drawing pictures of this phenom yesterday in the tub and feeling strangely exhilarated. The problem is we need WARM superconductors...we have compounds of lanthanum, barium, copper, and oxygen (cuprates) which are ok to go at 30 kelvins. Then one came that could work at 90 kelvins. We don't know why "high temperature superconductivity" even happens. There are no theories. Yet.


THE BIG BANG.

An awesome idea. But did you know for the first 300,000 years of the universe's existence atoms didn't even exist? It was the temperature. It was insane. At 10,000 years of age, the universe was still at 12,000 K! But by 380,000 years, recombination can finally occur: hydrogn gas cools down enough to form molecules. "ONLY 3000 K," I say ironically. Compare that to the universe's temperature today: 2.726 K. Chilly willy. Nobody knows what happened before 10 picoseconds becuase the temperature was so high the laws of physics were just kablooey. Even at 10 picoseconds, the temp was 1-2 QUADRILLION K!!!!


THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE.

Okay, this one I argue with constantly. It's so fuckin Bishop Berkeley. I understand Michio Kaku probably agrees with this totally with his parallel universes, but I'm old skool. Without data to back it up, it's just more bullshit philosophy. Hypothesis floating there. It might as well be the flying spaghetti monster.


BROWNIAN MOTION.

Another easy one. People often read this too quickly and think they understand it when they don't. It's random yes, but why does it produce in fractals? That's sort of weird and I haven't seen a good accounting of why that randomness ends up being as fractalline as coastline or a snowflake?


ABSOLUTE ZERO.

Another one of those limits you might approach asymptotically in nature, but you're probably never gonna get there. An elegant innovation. No wonder we use that scale. I mean scientists do. Go, Lord Kelvin!


HUYGENS' PRINCIPLE.

Simple. Elegant. And he discovered Saturn's rings. And Titan. How proud he would be of the probe bearing his name landing there. Mr. Kaku got very upset about the HUYGENS launch. Because of the plutonium. He felt that could have been a terrible disaster had anything gone wrong. NASA probably hates him. But he critiques them on a lot more than that.

SCHRODINGER'S WAVE EQUATION.

Here is where I got really mad at physics. In ninth grade. Because all the elegance went out of the equations and scientists began talking out of their asses, I felt. It wasn't elegant like Einstein anymore. This is messy. Because you are and you aren't. You're a wave. Then you're a particle. I hate that. Something is not clicking in the human brain. Maybe something we aren't designed to understand or maybe the math is just still over-ornate.


PAULI'S EXCLUSION PRINCIPLE.

This one is awesome and perfectly structurally sound. Why can't two objects go through each other since they are mostly empty space? Because of how fermions have to behave. Quantum energy states cannot be shared so rigidity occurs. Bosons, as mentioned above, are exceptions to this rule. Bosons are not fermions.


DARK MATTER. Read all about MACHOS and WIMPS. Who said physicists don't have a sense of humor? This is, though, a big dumbness (lacuna) in current knowledge. This is where scientists are talking out their butts and have no clue. We know it exists by deformations and gravity but we have no clue what it is. Look for this to be revised. Bigtime. Into several factors probably. Not one.


THE FERMI PARADOX.

The Drake Equation and all that. Mathematically, there probably is no paradox at all. I mean if you crunch the numbers. There's just not been enough time. And this puppy is expanding everywhere into an isotropic lounge chair view of distance.