Some (most?) people may not care what I think, and that’s fine. But I think the physical universe doesn’t care what any of us thinks. In attempting to explain the universe or the part we experience, just about any theory we throw at it, has limitations that make the theory inaccurate under certain conditions. The experimental results and theories from physics can be different enough from our everyday experience, to make it seem presumptuous to expect the universe to behave the way we normally perceive it or to understand why it does what it does. Relativity and quantum physics come to mind.
One example from quantum physics is the so-called wave-particle duality of things at the subatomic scale.[1] Something that small can behave like a particle or a wave, depending on certain conditions. Most of us would really rather be able to call something a particle or a wave as we see fit and be done with it. Of course the universe does things its own way and makes something behave like a particle some of the time and a wave some of the time. We have experiments to support this. The wave-particle duality even applies to something as familiar as light. Light can travel as waves in an optic fiber for telecommunications, or it can act like particles and knock electrons out of atoms in a photovoltaic solar cell to generate electricity.
While our concepts of wave and particle are convenient for things we can see, neither tells the whole story at the quantum scale. Reality is simply not that convenient. I don’t think the universe cares about our models and chooses to use one or the other; instead it simply behaves in a way that our models don’t fully explain. I suspect we can find a model that’s relatively easy to understand and still explains both aspects of the duality. We may even find that items from everyday experience do in fact show that same duality, if we know where and how to look. So we may yet introduce a more unified analogy for the wave-particle duality into our everyday culture.
Another example from quantum physics is the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg.[2] According to this principle, the more accurately you know the position of a subatomic particle at a given point in time, the less accurately you can know its velocity, and vice versa. This is quite different from our typical experience that we can measure both the location and velocity of at least some things from our everyday experience, as long as we have the right instruments and the right conditions. Often we can gain greater accuracy of position or velocity (or both) at a more familiar scale, simply by using better technology. That’s theoretically not the case at the quantum scale.
Supposedly the difficulty is that knowledge so complete is not permitted by the math itself. Admittedly, I have not looked into this in great detail yet (it’s on my to-do list), but part of me thinks there’s simply something wrong with our model of this. I don’t think the universe cares about how much we know about one aspect or another and attempts to prevent great accuracy for both aspects. I suspect the real difficulty (if it truly exists) has more to do with limitations in energy, velocity, force, distance, or something similar. In other words, I think the limitation is physical instead of being related to math or keeping secrets. Granted, expressing the uncertainty principle in the current way could be a convenience to shield less-expert people like myself from overly complex math. Then the physical model I’m suggesting may already exist but could be too complex for me to understand (yet). Nevertheless, the universe is not trying to prevent the possession of detailed knowledge.
Not to neglect relativity, many people by now are familiar with the idea that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. This rule comes from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.[3] The difficulty of accelerating matter (anything with mass) to the speed of light is shown by the relativistic mass formula:
The variable m represents the current mass of the object, m0 the rest mass, v the current velocity, and c the speed of light. If v = 0, then m = m0, and there is no change in mass. At everyday speeds we don’t notice any increase in mass. As v approaches c, the factor multiplied by m0 increases, approaching infinity. This causes the current mass m to approach infinity, and the ever-increasing mass makes the object that much harder to accelerate. Since the universe probably does not allow for an infinite mass (or an infinite force required to change its motion), the speed v cannot equal the speed of light c.
We generally don’t think of objects weighing more when they are moving at a faster speed, possibly because familiar objects with mass going near the speed of light is not part of everyday experience. In fact, over a century or so ago, this increase in mass was not even expected according to our theories of the time. But the increase in mass with velocity does happen, and we have experimental evidence to prove it. Again, the universe does not try to mold itself to our expectations.
This has been just a small sampling of how what we think does not necessarily match the physical universe. Millennia had gone by before anyone had probed anything smaller than an atom or knew that universe had a speed limit. Even after Einstein introduced relativity, it was still theoretically impossible to fly through the air faster than sound.[4] For all our formalisms and expectations, the universe does not have to obey anyone’s mathematical rules. All our theories, hypotheses, and so-called “laws” of physics are just our best guess about how the universe works. The universe is of course free to behave in a way that disagrees with what we think.
References
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/wave-particle-duality-2699037
[2] https://scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/quantum-science-explained/uncertainty-principle
[3] https://www.britannica.com/science/relativistic-mass
[4] https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/mach.html
(c) Copyright 2022 by Mike Ferrell
Odd STEM 