Monday, 17^th July 2006

 

:: Physics is fun ::

 

Counting to three, etcetera.

 

Start by imagining that nothing exists. (Including “language” and “time”.) Contain it in a circular symbol, e.g. O

 

Next, imagine yourself, with all its complexity. Is it different from the nothing you imagined previously? Of course it is: you are on the ‘outside’ of the nothing symbol and existence happens over discrete periods of time. There was a time before you existed and time will march on regardless of your mortal coil. Time is a real property (it is now later than when you began to read, in reality) but is conjectured (S. Hawking, 1974) to be of the same complexity as the space it is conjoined with in the Riemannian geometry of General Relativity theory (Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski, et al 1900s). Contain yourself in the “dot” or “full-stop” symbol .

 

Now imagine the existence of someone else* (tricky, I know.) That existence appears ‘shifted’ with respect to your own so let’s symbolise it with another dot that cannot overlay the original precisely (like Pauli’s exclusion principle for fermions**) but include asymmetric interaction betwixt _.

 

The three symbols O . _. conformally map,  =>

 

O . _. =>  =>  => La Gioconda, Holography, Orchids, Solar eclipses, Stellar billiards, Accelerated cosmological expansion, M-theory, F-theory, SU(n -> ∞)***

 

 

*The limit of philosophical reason. (Bertrand Russell, “Imagine a teaspoon…” becomes absurd at three, explained mathematically by Kurt Gödel’s, “Incompleteness theorem”. A recent philosopher’s question to myself: “Is that ashtray green?” Followed by ouroborotic arguments about “perception”.)

 

**The limit of 20^th century physical reason (Quantum Electrodynamics. Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, for which Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga received the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.).

 

***Special Unitary group in n dimensions where n tends to infinity. Its configuration space (Sir Roger Penrose, 2004) is infinitely greater than ∞^∞.