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Not Crazy Enough?

Entry 2314, on 2024-01-11 at 20:38:52 (Rating 1, Science)

The great physicist Niels Bohr once (allegedly) commented: "Your theory is crazy, but not crazy enough to be true". There are many great theories which superficially seem crazy: Relativity and Quantum Theory being the most obvious, but are they true? In fact, what does "true" even mean?

For example, does it make sense that as you travel faster you get heaver (technically, more massive) and that your time runs slower? I don't mean anything superficial here, like a clock malfunctioning and showing the wrong time. It's not the indicator of time which is the issue, it is time itself.

So, if you travel quickly, then return to your original location, two exactly correct clocks with show different times. And you will have aged more slowly. Actually, even that isn't true, because you will have aged at exactly the correct rate, along with the people who didn't travel quickly but aged differently. Travel fast enough and far enough and you can take a trip which lasts a few years only to return to your starting point after a million years there has passed.

And this effect isn't "just" a theory either. GPS systems have to use a correction for a similar effect to operate correctly, and a particular type of subatomic particle which bombards the Earth from space lasts long enough to get to ground level even though it decays in less time than that journey takes, because it is travelling fast enough that its time is slower than it is at ground level. And light arrives at its destination at the same time as it leaves, even though it "only" travels at 300,000 kilometers per second.

And in quantum theory, particles are waves, and waves are particles, depending on how you look at them. And particles (or waves) can be in two places at the same time.

Does any of this make sense? Well, no, not according to our everyday understanding of how the world works. We evolved our way of understanding reality by interacting with the real world on "everyday" scales and moderate time periods. If we could see atoms, or observe phenomena over nanosecond time periods, or if our planet orbited a black hole, maybe these theories would make perfect sense.

By adding technology to the mix we can now observe these things, but it still doesn't feel intuitive.

Another relevant quote I think is apropos of this is this one: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine" (JBS Haldane). After all, why would we expect that we can understand the whole universe?

Clearly, we can get very good approximations to the truth, and calculations using quantum physics are astonishingly accurate. For example, quantum electrodynamics accurately predicts experimental results to within one part in 100 million. That's like measuring the width of the Earth accurate to a few centimeters.

So my message is that the universe is weird, but we understand this weirdness to some extent by being able to measure it using mathematical theories. But we don't really know what these theories represent in the real universe, although there are a few ideas about this.

So in the near future I will present my interpretation of some of these ideas (they're not really theories yet). This is the "outrageous theory" I talked about last year. What could be more outrageous than a crazy idea about the underlying truths about the whole universe?

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