Physics is really pushing the boundaries these days, regarding how we understand what reality is “really like”. It seems increasingly possible that reality is not entirely like what we think it is, from our day-to-day experiences as human animals roaming the planet earth. First, there’s the quantum world and all its Alice in Wonderland weirdness. Then there is Einstein’s relativity, with all its time-space distortions and gravity warps. Today there is even more weirdness in the offing, questioning the existence of space and time itself. Perhaps what we thought were the minute and fundamental building blocks of our world aren’t really real at all. Relativity and quantum theory made time, space and sub-atomic particles fuzzy or rubbery, and new ideas melt them even further.

E.g., a recent experiment hints that time, space, and the motion of things within them may just be an “internal illusion”. Quantum entanglement may be responsible for a holographic process that is grounded in pure information. From the outside of this entangled system, the overall bundle would appear to be unchanging; no time, no motion through space, nothing changing, everything still. From the inside, when you are entangled in the system, the hologram of space, time, particles and motion becomes real, and you experience a world of things moving, and space and time for them to move in. Pretty weird. It’s the holographic relationship between all the information that is real (or “realer”) than electrons, quarks, photons, etc.

And as to the origins of everything, many physicists are now speculating way beyond the big bang. They say that there are “multiverses“, such that entirely new  »  continue reading …

As I’ve discussed before on this blog, my little digital homestead within the greater “social network” of cyberspace, I really like science. As a kid, my parents gave me chemistry sets and How-And-Why Wonder books and electrical training boards that you could make into a low-power radio transmitter (and I did, but only under my father’s close supervision; pirate radio stations would not be condoned in his house!). I had a telescope to watch the heavens, and I was glued to the TV whenever a manned rocket was launched (back in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days; the Space Shuttle got boring quite quickly). I went to Newark College of Engineering after high school and learned a lot of math, chemistry, physics and material sciences before turning to management courses.

And so, even though my career direction eventually veered away from science (which I sometimes regret), I never lost my interest in it. I still read Scientific American from cover to cover each month, I have a poster explaining the Standard Particle Model on the wall of my office (which no one else there understands), and I watch Teaching Company videos on things like dark matter and dark energy (which I’ve been going through lately, after finishing other courses on Chaos Theory and Einstein’s Relativity). I definitely think that science is one of the best things that the human race has come up with.

And yet . . . I know that science is not the whole story. There’s a lot more to our lives and to our existence than science can define and understand. But science is a seductive mistress, and  »  continue reading …