The Joy of Physics

How does the physical world work? Even more interesting: how does the physical universe work? How did the universe leap into creation? What is its ultimate fate – cold nothingness, or will it shrink back into itself, heat up, explode and begin all over, oscillating like some god’s accordion? What is dark matter, and does it play any part in creating massive galaxies, like invisible channels guiding ancient rivers on Mars? Or is it more like the veins and arteries in our bodies directing blood where its needed? Is it related, as most think, to the miniscule building blocks of everything, the particle soup that is defiant to neat categorization?

Stars, the massive furnaces that create the matter that was used in our creation. Look at your hand, at your fingernails. The carbon and nitrogen that makes us those complex carbohydrates in every cell in your body was created in a star. Ingenious, isn’t it? And stars not only create the compounds that build our physical bodies. Their gravity wells channel and direct intergalactic dust to form planets where life takes root. Or at least, that’s our present understanding.

Matter, and its behavior. Energy, and the laws it obeys. Galileo’s kinematic laws. Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. Maxwell’s laws governing electrodynamics. The quantum theories that changed our understanding of the physical ninety years ago. All a part of the great search, the unlocking of the mysteries of existence. From the infinitesimally small (quarks, leptons, whatever they are), to the tremendously vast, and how it all interacts (see Einstein, General Relativity): that is the amazing part of physics.

When you consider a small metal ball rolling down a ramp and how that can be translated into a numeric relation, that, too is the amazing part of physics.

But the most amazing part of all? That the three-and-a-half pound organ behind our eyes can comprehend any of this at all. But it can, and does, and it does it best when it does it with joy.

When I was a boy, about eight or nine years old, my mother worked as a librarian. One day she brought home an illustrated physics book for me. It wasn’t complicated, it was geared to someone my age, but I ate it up. It was my favorite book that summer; it seemed I read it every day and every night. The sixties-style illustrations, the colors, the charts, the ideas, the implications … it all jumped off the page and into my imagination. I was in love with a science. Unless you’ve been there yourself, you probably can’t understand. Your nerd alert detectors may be flashing spastically right now.

Adulthood and the real world tempered my enthusiasm for the grand scheme to unlock the secrets of the cosmos. I studied physics at Seton Hall from the summer of 1992 to the spring of 1994 and burned myself out. Living on my own at the time, I had to work full-time as I went to school full-time. Important relationships suffered irrevocable damage. I was also forced, as every college student is, to take courses in which I had no interest in, which wasted my time, energy, and money. Eventually, I flunked an important course (Calc III), and decided to drop all my other distracting classes and retake it (I aced it the second time around). Bitter and disillusioned, as they say, I dropped out to reevaluate where I wanted to take my life, which in hindsight, was a mistake.

I failed to take into account something very important about myself earlier on, however. I am generally bookish, and when it comes to the real world, I’m all thumbs. I can paint a wall, but can barely hang a picture. Physics at the college level is kind of a split personality. I suppose ‘they’ don’t know whether you’re a theoretician or an experimenter. Both are valued; both have produced their fair share of Nobel Prize winners. In fact, they chase one another in a game of tag-you’re-it! in ground-breaking discoveries. Sometimes the theoreticians think up something strange and beautiful and it’s up to the experimenters to supply real-life confirmation; sometimes the experimenters provide the data that results in the creation-discovery of a new theorem. So, college physics basically is half ivory-tower dreaming, and half hands-on break-out-the-tools construction. Both involve imagination and number crunching, but they appeal to different sides of the brain. I was no experimenter, and barely passed Electronics 101. Electronics 102 frightened me so much I dropped it after the first two classes.

The joy of physics naturally leads to the love of SF. What is SF but the extrapolation of where known physics leaves off? And who knows how much SF has inspired the discovery-creation of new physics? Einstein famously credits his insights into relativity as the results of daydreaming what it would be like to ride on a ray of light. What an awesome science fiction image!