Light and energy, gravity and inertia; these are material mysteries. We cannot explain them. A mystery is not the same as a puzzle. A puzzle can be figured out. A mystery, in the religious sense, cannot. A mystery cannot be figured out, because it defies figuring. We have literally taken lightening out of the sky and made it to sing, yet in a very real sense, we have no real knowledge of it all.
Words Fail
Sometimes when I am having trouble visualizing something, I find that it is the words themselves that fail me. Perhaps a word is too embedded in a concept that just doesn’t fit. This is especially true of words we use very frequently, but whose concepts are anything but well-understood. “Light”, “energy”, “force”, and “gravity” are [more …]
In the Words of Feynman
Richard Feynman is a great popularizer of physics. He mastered the mathematics of light and wrote the QED, which is the most accurate and detailed description of the behavior of light, which is accessible to a lay audience. The following links are to a series of videos on You Tube. Similar to Six Easy Pieces, [more …]
Albert Einstein and Quantum Physics
Everyone knows Albert Einstein’s famous equation, but do you know why he was awarded the Nobel Prize? It was not for Relativity, but for giving birth to the Quantum Universe, which is in direct conflict with the Relative Universe! … Thanks to QED we know that all known physical phenomena in the universe from the [more …]