“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
Today’s “Insomnia File” episode offers two stories of cosmic insight. The first is about ”An Accident More Complex than the Universe” from former astrophysicist and hard science-fiction author Alastair Reynolds, who’s epiphany is found in his novel , Blue Remembered Earth — first of a trilogy which follows humanity’s development over many centuries and Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine.
The detection of the “Higgs” in 2012 -described by Caltech physicist Sean Carroll as “the particle at the end of the universe” –was the physics equivalent of the discovery of DNA. Higgs bosons have the capacity to share space because they are more like a force than a thing in the way we normally think of “things” or “particles”. It’s a vibration in the Higgs field, just as a photon of light is a vibration in the electromagnetic field. Bosons are entities that have effects; they carry the forces (strong, weak, gravitational or electromagnetic) described by the Standard Model in physics, making them what physicists call force-carrying particles.
“In the end, the most improbable and hence the most puzzling aspect of space is its very existence. The simple fact that we live in an apparently smooth and regular three dimensional world represents one of the greatest challenges to the developing quantum theory of gravity,” wrote physicist Lee Smolin in Three Roads To Quantum Gravity. “If you look around at the world seeking mystery, you may reflect that one of the biggest mysteries is that we live in a world in which it is possible to look around, and see as far as we like. The great triumph of the quantum theory of gravity may be that it will explain to us why this is so.”
“Not only does God play dice but… he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen,” said Stephen Hawking about the paradoxical physics of black Holes. Welcome to the bizarre quantum world of “strange metals” –a new state of matter.
“Imagination is everything,” observed Albert Einstein. “It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”
