Ever since I was a child, from the first time I gazed up at the moon and wondered how big it was, how far away it was and what made it stay up there in the sky without scaffolding or wires, I have had a love affair with science. Science lessons in primary school were a thrill, learning weights and measures, about volume and displacement, friction, reciprocating springs and gravity. Later, in secondary school (or “High” School, as it is now known), our science lessons were broken down into Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Chemistry I always found intriguing, Biology seemed to involve too much dissecting of potatoes, but I was always drawn to Physics.
Without Physics there is no Chemistry or Biology. Physics lays down the fundamental laws that determine how Chemistry and, by extension, Biology works. Furthermore, whereas Chemistry is concerned with the, often complex, behaviour of atoms and molecules, and Biology is such a broad field that draws together all living things under one roof, Physics is surprisingly straightforward. Using an amazingly few basic principles it explains how pretty much everything works.
What I found even more interesting was the fact that all physics can be described mathematically. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that physics is the use of maths to explain the universe. Although I had always rather enjoyed maths, suddenly physics took it out of the realm of the abstract and made these cold, featureless numbers into something tangible. At school, algebra seemed to have been invented for the sole purpose of complicating things – maths is all about numbers, so why use something that takes all the numbers out of maths? But then physics explained why algebra was so important.
Want to know what the force is on a certain object? Multiply its mass by its acceleration.
Want to know the kinetic energy of a certain object? Multiply one half by the object’s mass and the square of its velocity.
Or if you want to kick it up a notch there’s always the classic, “Want to know how much intrinsic energy is tied up in an object? Multiply its mass by the square of the speed of light.”
Suddenly we see that algebra can be used to give us specific answers to specific questions. There is an actual point to it! Algebra sent man to the moon. That, to me, is pretty impressive.
So where most people read a novel in bed before they go to sleep, I read science books. I particularly recommend the books of John Gribbin, Brian Greene and Richard Feynman. And if you’re in the mood for some serious science then you can do what I did recently and purchase the Feynman Lectures on Physics, a three-volume set of textbooks that cover pretty much everything you could want to know about physics (plus some bonus content covering aspects of Chemistry and Biology, too). These books are essentially transcripts of a series of lectures that Feynman gave in the early 1960s to undergraduate students at Caltech and, as such, are quite a bit above and beyond the Physics I learned in high school, or even in college. There’s also a hell of a lot of maths in it, which is hardly surprising given that you kind of need the maths to explain the physics. But, if you’re willing to put the effort into them then you can get a lot out of them. (I’m not going to claim that I have grasped everything in the books, but that’s what re-reading is for…)
Reading all of these books, from the basic beginners’ guides up to the Feynman lectures, I find myself spending many hours of the day pondering the nature of the universe. I can’t help it – somewhere in my mind there is always this part of me thinking about it. I wonder about how the universe really began, what time actually is (and space, too, for that matter), why do waves sometimes act like particles and particles sometimes act like waves? In the absence of specific answers to these questions I have formulated my own solutions, some of them maybe a bit wacky, some of them, no doubt, plain wrong (but I am always open to alternative solutions).
Actually, reading back over that last sentence makes me sound like one of those internet whack-jobs who post articles “proving” that Einstein was wrong, or showing the world that they’ve stumbled upon some ultimate truth or unified field theory using nothing more than a calculator, a pen and a magic code-wheel from a Crackerjack box, thus showing that they are better than the greatest minds in the world today and – hey! – if Einstein could upset the foundations of physics when he was just working in a patent office then why can’t I?
So let me put it another way: I am not suggesting that these “solutions” are correct, or that I have stumbled onto something that has eluded scientists for generations. In order to make some sense of the world and the universe to myself I have come up with some answers that seem solid. You’ll probably find that some of these answers have already been proposed by people much smarter than I am – perhaps I’ve read them somewhere and, either consciously or unconsciously, adopted them as “my” answers. Others are probably just me talking out of my bottom which, if you’ve read this far, you’ll know that I do quite a lot. Regardless, over the course of the next few months I shall share some of my thoughts with you, the lovely people of the internet, here on my blog, tagged “Physics”.
Coming up you will find such musings as “What is time, why does it always move forward and why can’t it go backward?”; “What are little girls made of, or everything else for that matter?”; and the ever-popular “What is the true nature of the universe?”
And don’t worry – all this excitement will be interspersed with non-science-related stuff, too.
You have my word on it.
The Daily Heretic 