About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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In Search of the Higgs Bisonor,
A Lesson in Relevance
Today I thought I'd expend the extra effort to talk about something that's actually relevant to your everyday life and happiness: Dark energy and dark matter.
"Shit. Physics. He's doing physics this week," I hear you mutter as you scramble for your helmets and armored codpieces.
Your fanboy Storm Trooper® gear will avail you naught. Get ready for a skull-pounding headache.
Or not. Odds are this essay will go right through you, leaving you untouched. Like most of the crap I fling out into the digital neverlands.
There's a parable I keep using in circumstances like these. I have no idea where I read it, and that really sucks. Because it illustrates a fundamental point of human existence perfectly. And if I ever find out who originally wrote it, I'll give him or her a significant percentage of the money I've earned from every article or essay I've ever used it in.
As it stands though, it might be useful to realize that even as much as 100% of zero is zero.
Anyway, the parable:
A handful of young fish were down at the cement lot playing two-on-two b-ball. And old fish swims by the raggedy chainlink fence and calls out to them while they pause for a few gasps. "How's the water today?" he asks.
One of them dribble-passes the ball to his chum and looks at the old man in curious irritation. "What the fuck is water, old man?"
Indeed.
We don't much see air because it's more important to us to see other stuff that air covers. You know. Like sharp-cornered furniture. Predators. Oncoming Buicks. You know.
When we were growing up as a species, the breeze was a largely ignorable phenomenon. It carried away some heat, stuffed dust in our lungs, and tugged at tethered flags. It was always there, yet it was never really important. Wave your hand as hard as you want. You'll never affect it in any significant way.
A couple hundred thousand years later, we figure out that enough of it harnesses in cloth sacks can turn a five-hundred-pound millstone or drag a ship across an ocean. Or so we hear. That technology stuff we can leave for the professionals.
In the meanwhile, we breathe in and breathe out, and say, "What the fuck is air, old man?"
Evolutionarily speaking though, it's just not very important for us to be able to see air. If you've ever been in a pretty thick fog, you know it's actually a pretty bad idea for air to be visible given how much we depend on our distance-vision.
In order to keep us from seeing air (water too, since it was also important for us to be able to see through water once upon a time), our eyes developed to be able to respond to a narrow band of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum. The photons involved are energetic enough to plow through most gases but not so energetic as to kick apart our delicate little lacework molecules once they make it to our flesh. That ends up not being a very big window to peek out of, but we manage.
In fact, our tiny little world is filled with colors—enormous numbers of fine gradations of hues and shades, important in helping us determine things like the ripeness of fruit and causing no end of relationship-destroying arguments when it's time to repaint the dining room.
And the entire rest of the electromagnetic spectrum is screened out from our awareness as irrelevant. Except we hear that radio and X-rays are kind of useful to the techies and gear-heads. But we can leave all that for the professionals.
The reason that X-rays (for instance) are invisible is that they, for all the energy they contain, interact so weakly with atoms and molecules with low atomic weights—which is most of 'em. A useful analogy: Bison just go charging overhead if you're a blade of grass, but the story is significantly different if you're a tree. Or directly underhoof. We live down here among the grasses and bison, largely, are someone else's problem.
Off in the distance we can hear cracking tree trunks—but what is that to us?
Our vision doesn't just have gaps in the spectra that we can see. Our retinas have spatial gaps, too. Compared to the size of photons, the rods and cones—the structures in our retinas that respond to light and make electronic signals when they register a hit from a photon—are huge and very widely spaced. Those structures are made from cells that are in turn made from millions of atoms. To correct for the scale, we have one tree per couple hundred million bison, and we see by listening carefully over the vast distances for the thump of solidly-hit tree trunks.
And from this we experience the illusion of contiguousness. Most of the bison go sleeting past, but the pictures from our eyes don't have big holes in them to represent all the photons we must have missed. Our brains screen out all the empty space as ... irrelevant.
In fact, we're composed mostly of space. And that space is filled to the fucking brim with all the energy and matter that is too energetic, not energetic enough, or too strange to interact with us in any meaningful, immediately relevant fashion.
We call space empty because the hammer and anvil of evolution has designed us not to see any of it—so we can focus on predators and Buicks and whether to paint the dining room "moth", "ivory", "ecru", or "bone". The photons we depend on to show us these things have to cross through a hundred million miles of "empty" space, so it's a good thing for us that these photons make it through the ultradense muck of the "void" relatively unscathed, isn't it?
"Back up a sec," you say. "Too strange? What do you mean by that?"
Forgive me. It's hard to talk about things we don't have words for yet. So put up with another analogy.
Most electrically neutral molecules aren't attracted to each other more than gravitically, which, at the atomic scale, is a force so weak that it can be ignored ... as irrelevant. Yet some clump up is a way that we think of as strange,—except magnetism has been pretty thoroughly studied and every kid in Western culture has played with magnets. But to get back on the topic, ferromagnetic atoms and molecules are attracted together because of, well, because of abstract properties concerning spin-aligned and non-spin-aligned electron pairs in the outer shells ... and the eyes glaze over. Nevermind. Just know that there is a special property that attracts spin-aligned atoms and molecules together, and not every atom experiences those forces. In fact, only a tiny percentage of all the atoms in the universe are capable, in their normal states, of experiencing ferromagnetic forces.
By analogy then, the entire universe of matter and energy that we can sense is a tiny swirling clump of mostly gaseous ferromagnetic-esque atoms, and everything else is ... everything else. It doesn't interact with us—or if it does, it's difficult to detect at our scale—and we don't interact much with it.
We are the irrelevant, intangible ghosts in someone else's real world. Hugely giant or microscopically tiny, too. It hardly matters which. Maybe both.
Except.
Imagine for a minute that this ultradense, viscous, invisible, and intangible soup that our lace-like, diaphanous selves are soaking in does interact with us, but only very weakly on our scale. Say it's capable of nudging every quark in all of our weird little ferromagnetic-esque atoms a tiny, tiny amount—but they all get nudged the same amount in the same direction simultaneously, like a leaf in a stream. If all you can see are other leaves in the stream, then it looks like nothing much is going on ... until you see something whip past on the shore.
To shift analogies again, we're tiny as fleas and we're riding on the bison's back. If we feel like we need to make long-range plans, then we ought to figure out where the bison is headed.
Or perhaps we should leave that to the professionals.
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Vidicon was the buddha but the pay was lousy . |
