I have
found the answer.
At least, an
answer.
And, truth
be told, I have heard this elsewhere in other iterations.
Ever since
a little boy I was fascinated with atomic and subatomic particles. My dad and
my brother would be watching the Mets on TV, and I’d be curled up on the rug memorizing
the periodic table in my physics book. As I grew older, and before other interests
took me, I wondered – what exactly is an electron made of? What makes up an
elementary particle of matter?
I spent
two years in my twenties studying physics at Seton Hall but never got up to the
classes where such topics might be addressed. True, I knew about the wave-particle
duality, how the electron acts as a particle when observed and a wave when not.
True, I knew how electrons were categorized a fundamental unit called leptons
and protons and neutrons were made up of fundamental particles called quarks.
But what were they? If I could shrink my hands down to something like ten-to-the-negative-twentieth
their size now and grab an electron like a snowball in my hand and squeezed,
what would happen?
I’m finishing up Cosmos by Carl Sagan (a read about forty years overdue) and came across this:
There is an
idea – strange, haunting, evocative – one of the most exquisite conjectures in
science or religion. It is entirely undemonstrated; it may never be proved. But
it stirs the blood. There is, we are told, an infinite hierarchy of universes,
so that an elementary particle, such as an electron, in our universe would, if
penetrated, reveal itself to be an entire closed universe. Within it, organized
into the local equivalent of galaxies and smaller structures, are an immense
number of other, much tinier elementary particles, which are themselves
universes at the next level and so on forever – an infinite downward
regression, universes within universes, endlessly. And upward as well. Our
familiar universe of galaxies and stars, planets and people, would be a single
elementary particle in the next universe up, the first step of another infinite
regress.
- Cosmos,
by Carl Sagan, page 221 of my paperback edition.
How neat
does that sound? It gets the Hopper Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
My own semi-ignorant
musings, however, tell me that somehow nanoscopic black holes are involved
(thus the need to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics) and
photons need to be tossed in (something I think physicist Roger Penrose writes
extensively about).
However, I
am probably wrong.
But it’s
still fun to muse on.
No comments:
Post a Comment