A theory of nothing

When I was a teenager, a strange Scottish family moved into a big white house across town. Attracted by the strange cuisine and the good humor in that household, I spent many fine days tracking mud around and breaking furniture in that big colonial manse that turned out to have also been the childhood home of Edward Williams Morley.

As it turns out, here in Blogopotamia, breaking ashtrays, couches and chairs in the childhood home of a somewhat famous physicist is all the credentialling you need to publish articles about the history and nature of physics. So here it goes:

Morley, in the mid-19th century, grew up and got the hell out of West Hartford like every other sensible person raised in the fine public schools of that municipality. After some schooling in New Jersey he soon found himself in Cleveland with a fellow named Albert Michaelson conducting one of the most famous failed experiments in history. In a nutshell, the two scientists used one of the world's first interferometers to measure the speed of light as it smacked into the front and backside of our home-planet.

In very basic terms, the thinking of the day said that if light travels in waves there must be stuff that it's making waves in. Without this so called aether, light from the sun would be like a surfer in Kansas: posing gnarl-like, pumped up, yet with no curls to ride.

Along with the luminescent aether theory came the assumption that if you ran really fast into the light waves they would hit you at a higher speed than if you were running along with them. Since the earth is zipping around the sun at about 108,000 kilometers per hour those on the aether binge assumed light would hit the leading face of our orbit some 30,000 meters per second harder than on the trailing fringe.

However the readings then, as now, revealed that light travels at a constant speed. Michaelson's new tool measured it. He said it disproved the aether theory, measured the speed of light and in 1907 he won the Nobel prize. Morley said, he wasn't so sure it proved, or disproved, anything. For his part, he had an elementary school named after him in West Hartford. Morley's experiment also plays a central role in Thomas Pynchon's nutty new novel "Against the Day."

By dismissing the aether, Morley and Michaelson created a vacuum in theoretical physics that soon caused Albert Einstein to come hurtling out of a Swiss patent office where he had apparently failed kindergarten. The young Einstein grabbed his chalk and start building a new paradigm. However along with Einstein came Quantum Theorists Niels Bohr, Erwin Shroedinger, his half-dead cat, and Karl Heisenberg. The Q crowd also wanted in on the new paradigm. Einstein was relatively particular about the universe and went nuclear while the quantum theorists came at him with all their fuzzy talk about probability fields and uncertainty.

Shroedinger, shocked theoretical cat-lovers everywhere, by locking his own darling Fluffy in a sealed chamber along with a vial of hydrocyanic acid. The vial would be smashed based on the state of a particle has a 50/50 probability of decaying and setting off the device. Weird thing was, Schroedinger said, that the cat wasn't dead or alive until you observed it and thereby took it out of it's 50/50 dead or alive probability state.

This apparently hit a sore spot with Einstein, whose own theoretical cat had only recently travelled back in time and killed his own grandfather thus ending his own existence, which in turn prevented him from killing his grandfather, which restored his existence... Anyhow, Einstein was really mad so he went to consult with his close friend God who assured him that he had never played craps or Dungeons and Dragons with Illuvator or any of the personifications of the universe.

"God doesn't play dice with the cosmos," Einstein reported in 1954, which theorists of the day interpretted to mean that particles either are or aren't someplace at any given instant counter to the probablistic formulations that the QT crowd was using to deceive us into building transistors and discover DNA.

To understand Shroedinger's point of view, try to imagine where you might find me during a Red Sox game. About 85% of me is sitting on the couch, 9 percent of me was going back and forth to the refridgerator getting beers and 6% of me is mictorating a heteroscedastic stream. If you had to build my location into a formula, I would be presented as part of a wave orbiting the couch, fridge and toilet.

Einstein dismissed the equations that spread me all over the house and preferred to think of me as being in only one place following sensible laws of physics until the moment when the bullpen by committee blows a six run lead and sends me fuming off to bed. However, the wave equations that had me flowing all over the house explained my behavior during the game better for many purposes than any one snapshot of the couch despite the counterintuitive notion that I was in more than one place at the same time. If my state of being during a Red Sox game is inexorably linked to my visits to the fridge and loo, I am a particle behaving like a wave.

Intelligent Design theorists following their modus operandi interjected themselves into this debate several decades later by completely misunderstood the point and hijacking Einstein's statement about God not playing dice as evidence of his support for their own crackpot theory.

Einstein's rhetorical flourish invoking God on his side of the argument was a pretty cheap trick, but it did reveal his fundamental belief in orderly, discrete materialism where events occur in order according to universal laws. Bohr's reaction "Einstein, don't tell God what to do," was equally petulant.

Each side manages to explain a lot of things that Newton's physics couldn't. Einstein connected mass, speed, time and energy, allowed us to destroy two cities in Japan, and to explain all sorts of interstellar phenomemenae. Shroedinger explained how atoms work well enough that we can now build microprocessors that are networked sufficiently to allow me to publish this ridiculous blog. Intelligent Designers, for their part, 60 years later would use their theory to prove that they had a theory, and that it was theirs.

But the fact is: none of the contestants in this cat-fight have a good explanation for why gravity sucks, which is why we've been stuck in the same f$%@#ing paradigm since before Thomas Kuhn came along and invented the term.

In the meantime, we seem to be surrounded by forms of energy that appear to behave at times, and in certain equations, like particles; and at others like waves, which can be both proven and disproven by watching light waves cancel each other out in a two slit experiment. One particularly bizarre observation is that coupled particles influence the state of their partner subatoms even when they have been separated. (Or so it seems when you blast objects into subatomic bits in particle accellerators.)

In trying to find a good explanation of this weirdness, scientists for the past 30 years have been tying themselves in knots with string theories that, though unproven, have left amateur historians of science in a very strange quantum philosophical state.

As I see it from the sidelines here in Blogopotamia, there is a growing consensus that there is a fabric to the universe. But what that fabric is woven out of - whether, one-to-two dimensional strings (or membranes) that are about 10 exp -35 meters long - or some other substrate is the big question.

Just to be clear: The fabric is everywhere, Not just where there's matter like air, earth or or energy it's the stuff of everything including nothing. In other words: we're about to go on another aether binge.

To hear the string theorists, it all began with the big bang when a one dimensional singularity exploded with energies in the 10 exp 35 range spewing strings all over the universe spinning wildly. When they spin, rotate, or both they take on three dimensional properties that affect other strings over time (the fourth dimension.)

The two dimensional strings manage to occupy three dimensions by swirling around like a jumprope at something close to the speed of light apparently. And with all that wriggling around the strings are influencing other nearby and far off strings. The "influence" is measured, in our experience as strong nuclear forces (the stuff that holds atomic particles like quarks together in patterns that we describe as atoms), weak nuclear forces are like cosmic rays, electomagnetism keeps the electrons in orbit around the nucleus of the atoms and is involved in all molecular bonds. Gravity, as we know, sucks things that have mass together toward each other.

Gravity is about 40 orders of magnitude less powerful than the energy (generally described as gluons by particle freaks) that hold nuclei together and about 38 orders of magnitude less powerful than a photon. Particle freaks also anticipate that we will someday discover gravitons as the basic unit of gravity although wave freaks suspect we will not. In either case if we discover the graviton it will be entirely on a theoretical basis because just can't look at anything that's 38 orders of magnitude smaller than a photon. It would be like trying to "see" Dick Cheney using a machine that bounces the sun off things at a million miles per hour.

Even trillions of Dick Cheneys would be imperceptible to such a measuring device. Although I suppose a quadrillion Dick Cheneys might cause a small wobble in the path of the sun it would be hard to understand much about the vice president's nature with such a device.

Which brings us back to those wicked small strings that may or may not compose the fabric of the universe. The thing that's really strange about them is that the theorists who imagine them only do so because they fit a mathematical solution to that harmonoizes space time and the equations behind the 4 fundamental forces of physics. The really, really strange thing about string theory is that the solution also implies the existence of 6 additional extremely small dimensions.

I'm not convinced that anybody has been able to wrap their brain around what those microdimensions are like, or if they have it is impossible to explain in our language or that some mysterious force ascends from them and obscures the words just as someone begins to reveal their true location. I am also beginning to suspect that the six additional small dimensions

But the cool thing about all the grand unifying theories is that they do seem bring us full circle to where we were during the last paradigm when nothing was something. It's just now we call it spacetime. Whether spacetime contains particles or not depends on whether energy is passing through it. All of the 300 or so elementary particles are made up of nothing behaving in one of 300 different ways. Spin a bunch of strings one way and they are an electron. Spin them another way and they are a positron. Annihilate the two together and you spit out a neutrino moving backwards.

So spacetime is a busy place. And when a region spacetime is full of lots of particles with the characteristic we describe as mass it appears to warp toward other mass bearing particles.

As Einstein predicted light is also bent when it travels around massive regions of spacetime like Mercury where it was first observed. If you are struggling with the idea of a universal medium with no substance realize that photons have no mass and yet can be pulled into black holes because gravity appears to be a distortion of the fabric.

A photon is a packet of energy released when an electron moves from one orbit to another in its travel around an atom like when you run electrons through a tungsten wire in a lightbulb or neon gas in a sign.

Other packets of energy like the 50 trillion "neutrinos" that pass through us every day seem capable of passing through spacetime without causing a stir. Seems likely that these are just ripples in the spacetime continuum and that though we live in the spacetime continuum we are also made up of spacetime so the ripples go through us as if we were nothing. Perhaps because we are nothing twisted by inertia of a tremendous explosion and at rest as we are. If Einstein were around, I'd ask him to ask his friend God if that were true.