I have repeatedly ranted on these pages that we are making things more complicated than need be... and nowhere is this more evident than in the scientific field!
Although my thoughts at the end are not meant to be taken literally there is non-the-less a certain amount of underlying truth into the nature of being and the reality that scientists may have overlooked or ignored!
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In the 4th century B.C., the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, formulated the idea that the universe was composed of five building blocks of matter: earth, water, air, fire, and the heavenly "aether."
This idea persisted for more than 2,000 years.
So! For 2000 years the status-quo was 'de riguere' as far as the state of the Universe was concerned, but then the human penchant to make things needlessly complicated took over in spite of Occam's best efforts and the further we drilled down into the nature of matter and the firmament... the more complicated things became.
THEN:
Robert Boyle, the famed “father” of chemistry, abandoned the classic elements in favor of the idea that all matter was composed of particles. This revolutionary idea led to one of the most explosive periods in the history of science, including Sir Isaac Newton's formulation of classical mechanics.
Together, particles and waves became the known building blocks of all matter. Particles served as the individual bricks, as matter existing at a single point in space. Electromagnetic waves made up the mortar holding it all together, as energy dissipating everywhere in space as waves.
Together, particles and waves became the known building blocks of all matter. Particles served as the individual bricks, as matter existing at a single point in space. Electromagnetic waves made up the mortar holding it all together, as energy dissipating everywhere in space as waves.
Separating matter into both particles and waves made predictions easier for physicists because they could easily describe the behaviour of particles and waves. But nothing comes easy in physics, and the theory was quickly flipped on its head.
Early in the 20th century, the famous double-slit experiment showed that particles and waves weren't nearly as distinct as we previously thought. The experiment revealed that particles, at times, could act like waves, and light could sometimes act like particles.
This is where we started to go down the rabbit-hole kids!
We got to the point where conjecture was required to establish further equations and these, in turn, required further conjecture to advance the thread we wove for ourselves in the name of scientific advancement.
Things got to the point where nature no longer held a simplistic beauty but rather was comprised of a series of squiggles and exclamation marks on a blackboard (or a white-board for the politically correct) that did little to explain the workings of the world around us!
These fancy equations that scientists rely on for their raison d'etre have currently taken over the academic community who have now gone even further down the rabbit hole:
Around the same time minds were exploding over the wave-particle duality of matter, Albert Einstein was formulating his theory of general relativity, which describes how warping the fabric of space and time causes gravity. Together, the discoveries shaped the course of modern physics, but the connections between the two phenomena remain unclear.
“Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and I have demonstrated a new theory that may accurately describe the universe. Instead of basing the theory on the warping of space and time, we considered that there could be a building block that is more fundamental than the particle and the wave,” scientists Larry Silverberg writes.
He and Jeffrey Eischen looked for a solution that had features of both particles and waves. They wanted to find a building block that was both concentrated like a particle and spread out like a wave. Their answer is what they call a fragment of energy.
The fragment of energy is a lot like stars in a distant galaxy. From afar, a galaxy looks like a bright glow of light radiating outwards. But on closer inspection, astronomers can resolve individual stars making up the galaxy. In the same sense, the fragment of energy represents a concentration of energy that flows and dissipates outward, away from the center.
With their new building block, the scientists formulated a new set of equations to solve physics problems. They tested their theory on two problems solved by Einstein more than a century ago.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity was confirmed by two observations made by astronomers. The first was a tiny annual shift in the orbit of Mercury. Einstein accurately predicted that the curvature of spacetime caused by the mass of the sun would cause Mercury's orbit to wobble over time. The second was the bending of light as it passes across warped space and time near to the sun.
“If our new theory was to have a chance at replacing the particle and the wave with the presumably more fundamental fragment, we would have to be able to solve these problems with our theory, too,” Silverberg writes.
To solve the Mercury problem, Silverberg and Eischen modeled the sun as a massive fragment of energy, with Mercury as a smaller fragment of energy orbiting around it. In the bending of light problem, the sun was modeled identically, but the light was modeled as a massless point traveling at the speed of light (a photon). After calculating the paths of the moving fragments of energy, the researchers got the same answers as Einstein.
Tim Childers
And here we sit: The solutions show how effective their new building blocks can be at modelling the behaviour of matter from the micro to macroscopic scale. Although their formulation may not exactly change physics like the discoveries of Maxwell and Einstein, the theory could make the wave-particle duality of matter more intuitive, and give a new way of thinking about the universe.
Of course if you prefer to think of things as being fire, air, earth and water (with a bit of 'aether' thrown in) as I do... then by all means give your head a rest!
The way I see it anyway!
