Tuesday - I've fallen behind. A brief comment on cosmology and quantum mechanics.

I’m thinking too hard about cosmology. There is no reason for me to be interested in this subject. I am not a physicist, I am not a mathematician, I am not a philosopher. Those are professions whose practitioners have an excuse to study the subject. But I don’t want to stop thinking about this. Perhaps its to keep my mind off the bullshit politics that surround us.

The problem of the very large and the very small, and creating a theory that works for both, is very interesting to me. At the scale of the large classical physics works, Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and his field equations have been tested again and again, and they make predictions that experiments and experience confirm. Even the wildly exotic, black holes for instance, are first predicted and then discovered. It’s astounding.

At the scale of the very small, the things that make up the atom, and the things that make up the pieces of the atom, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Field Theory and Quantum Mechanics also work, even if their implications seem completely counter-intuitive to our senses. And they are, but being counter-intuitive doesn’t mean wrong. And if the Copenhagen Interpretation fails to explain why Quantum Mechanics works, allowing predictions to be made that tests consistently show work, that’s a gap, not a fatal flaw. There are very smart people working on closing this gap, and though some of their conjectures are quite outlandish, proving any of them will be difficult.
One thought I had that I didn’t follow far, but nags at the edge of my thinking, is how well the math works. There are theorists who are exploring why the physics and the math work so well together.

The photos were taken at the cemetery where many of my family members are buried. The morning I was there, a person I am friendly with was doing an unveiling for the monument over his son's grave.

 If you were to search back to the photos I took at Sharon Gardens in the spring, you will see these cemeteries look very different.

 

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