proud-atheist:

Something my friend sent me, this morning.
http://proud-atheist.tumblr.com

I met a girl in the last few hours of 2012. She inspires me to smile. But she makes me nervous, but as do most pretty girls. I’m trying though. And worse case, she thinks I’m weird and sops talking to me, but at least I get to practice having a normal conversation with a girl. But shit, she hasn’t stopped yet, so let’s get to jammin’.  

What I am thinking has me reeling. I can’t be stopped before I finish with this revolution. An uprooting of the past will illuminate new theory.

The trouble is in its expression. I feel severe emption when confronted with the the unknowns of the physical world. Even what we do “know” I can perceive as nothing more than a mere model yielding an approximate truth. Do fields truly pervade space? Or is it our macroscopic desire for locality that guides our thinking along such lines?  But I fell a truth of understanding inside of me, It is a burning drive to see the universe in its entirety and understand, fundamentally and actually, the geometric workings of physical law. What I can believe in is symmetry. From which springs our most successful physical models based on the concepts of invariance over physical or temporal transformations. Could it be I am just lacking some common revolution in studying physics? I understand an electric field as a condition of space set up by electrically charged matter contained within it. But we ascribe attributes to the quantities arising from a  mathematical manipulation of the quantifiable field. Integration of an electric field — the sum of infinitesimal descritizations — apparently tells us something of electric potential (voltage). I wish to understand the relation of our mathematical procedures to underlying truths of the physical world. In this regard I also wish to understand quantum mechanics. In the case of QM, I know I am not missing out on the correct physical interpretation in my physics education because no one can say for sure what it is! The copenhagen interoperation is satisfying in the mathematical study of QM. The collapse of the wave function from a space of states to a state of well defined “whatever” is plainly seen in Dirac notation. The trouble I have with such a physical interpretation is the notion of information lost in the wave function collapse, a notion flying in the face of the second law of thermodynamics, which, to our best understanding, underpins our conception of time. More specifically the passage of time as a comparison of events  (I will be at this address…when the large and small hand of my watch coincide on 12 and 9 respectively) the second law demands (by statistics) a general change of our universe; that is entropy increases. Trouble (seemingly) arises when our physical models lose information, such as in the collapse of the wave function, because such a loss translates into unreversible laws of physics, which, at least from the scale of our perception, is not reality. So we are moved to a many worlds interpretation in which wave functions don’t collapse but rather decohere, leaving the information of possible states within some larger reality unobservable to us. As such, schrodinger’s cat continues to be dead and alive after observation, but in two separate, decohered realties. This interpretation is unsettling because we begin to introduce ideas that are beyond the scope of experimental verification, a sort of multiverse. We know not how to enter an alternate reality with an eigenstate of some event different from our own.

General relativity next. A model in which we describe a dynamical metric of spacetime  in terms of its energy content. My descriptions are becoming vague because in truth I haven’t had a course in QM or GR, I am just very curious and very uneasy about the physical validity of the theories. Physics is make believe. A story book dreamt up by some incredible thinkers that models our universe very precisely but not perfectly. It is the imperfections (not to mention the absence of our theories to come near ideas like infinity or singularities) that leave the door of physics open for every generation to come, including my own. The poet Dan Smith said of perspective “that’s not reality it’s just point of view” but in truth point of view is reality, and our point of view is a mash up of 5 senses interpreted by a mysterious lump of fat safely locked in a cranium. It’s true there may be a physical limit to our brain itself to understand these ideas, but that doesn’t take away from the realness of our point of view, even if our existence is a statistical fluctuation of space into that of boltzman brains.  

I can’t show you the universe, but I can tell you what I know about it. 

Though, I think I’d rather hear what you know.

Blond with dark eyebrows and a fragile face. Protruding hips and pale skin. Dresses and hats and filled notebooks.

or just be female. That’s actually the extent of my standards.

I’ll try to write for you.