Given my 'druthers, I'da been a theoretical physicist - ala Einstein and Feynman (way dumber than them, but concerned with the same stuff) I've studied physics for my entire life as a hobby - as deeply as I've had the math. At this point I am on speaking terms with 3rd order tensors and have flirted with a couple 5d spinors while fraternizing with tesseracts. I'd been keeping up pretty well with the lay physicist fellas: I had more math than most: I had the universe 60% grokked.
...and now... Not so much.
The ether is back. We thought Michaelson/Morely killed it in 1887. Turns out... it was only mostly dead. Now, the ether is called the Grid. And it has mass. Space has mass now folks - incestuous as that may sound - this big brained Nobel prize winner is quite sure of it. Particles are persistent(ish) disturbances to the Grid. Energy moving through the grid causes mass. The grid is a superconductor that gives gluons (and thus protons and neutrons) mass. Did you know that photons have mass inside a superconductor??? - shocking, I know - but this is the analogy that led physicists to Quantum Chromodynamics and that has led the author to posit space (the grid) as a hyperdimensional superconductor. In the process he shows how it explains gravity and mass... and ... well, damned near everything.
So most of what I knew turns out now to be... well... different.
Based upon what was nothing a few years ago (the ether), he has constructed an all encompassing mountain, and from the peak of it he gives us a glimpse of unification. It's not so far off in the distance now, in fact, it's so close that those with their noses in the winds of physics can smell it, can taste it.
It's a terrific time to be a geek.
There is a rule in popular science book publishing that says that every equation you include in a book will cut your sales in half. If this is true I may own one of only a half dozen copies of this book: No shortage of equations here. But they manage somehow to not get in the way.
I absolutely loved this book. It had me grinning and wowing and no-waying, sort of singing to myself and rocking in my chair. It shook up just about all of my stable datums and layed a new foundation beneath my understanding of physics.
But honestly...I don't know anyone to actually reccomend this book to. I don't know anyone that would hear the same music or appreciate this grand new view. Which is a little sad. 'Cuz it's really a great book.
Update: I discovered this while I was poking around doing research for mylater posts on the Large Hadron Collider. It is a lecture by the Books author about LHC and many of the other concepts in the book. I am patting myself on the back a bit as This nobel prize winning physicist decided to include the same rap song as an educational instrument in his LHC description that I discovered and included in my article on the LHC. (so. pat pat pat, yay me!)
here is the link to MIT's site with his lecture: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/618
-j
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment