Surprises Await

I’m reading a book called “Physics For the Rest of Us” by Roger S. Jones. Yes, it is what you think it may be, a book that attempts to explain modern physics in language and ways the ordinary person can understand. Although the author tried very hard to do this, he didn’t succeed, at least with me. There are places in the book that are relatively easy to understand, but there are places where it just isn’t possible to mush it all down into something that the ordinary person can swallow.
I am fascinated by modern physics…relativity, the quantum theory, the big bang, and all of that. Many of the things I do understand are just jaw-dropping. The world that we think we know of as such an orderly and predictable place is, in fact, a world of organized chaos, probability, and unthinkable truth. Imagine light slowing down inside a substance to a speed of a few inches a minute. Imagine a beam of light exiting a substance before it enters into it. Imagine a particle thousands of miles away reacting to the deliberate modification of it’s “partner” particle, with no apparent connection between the two. Imagine the fact that one can know either the movement of a particle or it’s location, but not both at the same time. Imagine something that behaves either like an electromagnetic wave or like a physical particle (commonly thought to be an impossibility due to the vastly different properties of each), depending not on anything it does, but rather depending on how it is observed. Imagine an electrical current that, once induced into it, traverses a metal for hundreds of thousands of years, yet never being replenished or decaying.
I could continue, but you get the idea. The book tries to explain the above phenomena, but I couldn’t understand it all. What I do understand, and what I take from the book is the incredible complexity of this creation.
That, friend, is a gross understatement, but it’s the best I can do. This creation is just astonishingly, amazingly, unbelievably, incredibly complex. For example, why is a crystalline substance either a conductor of electricity (metallic copper) or transparent (diamond); but not both. And how does the answer to that fit in with all the rest of the creation and enable everything else to work as it should? Yet it fits together and works perfectly; astonishingly, amazingly, unbelievably, incredibly well. We don’t know so much more than we do know, but what we do know is more than enough to be able to say that something truly unique is going on here…never in quintillions of years could all of this come together on its own.
I’m about three quarters finished with the book. Many more surprises await, I’m sure.