I consulted the moderators before posting this. They said, more or less: ?Well, let?s give it a try.? So here I am, posting non-fiction as a sampler of my writing for anyone who may want my help with theirs.
I have never written fantasy fiction. It?s a while since I wrote any fiction. We old geezers who write for a living usually get our income from mainstream non-fiction outlets. During the last four decades I have been, at various times, a journalist, sub-editor, editor, writer and publisher. I?ve judged national writing competitions. For a few years I was the convener of a national competition for magazine journalism.
In my opinion I know how to write. But you have no reason to believe this because you haven?t seen my writing apart from some ramblings in the Rec Room? hence my ?Sun? piece. I chose it because it reflects one of my main interests (science, which is becoming less removed from fantasy at the deepest levels of the Universe); the way I try to lighten ?heavy? matter with lighter-than-air humour; and the sort of style-less quality of my, um, prose. I don?t write ?literature? and don?t want to. The modern key to popular and successful writing is KISS. If you?re too young to know, KISS is an acronym for ?keep it simple, stupid!?
Maybe I can help some of you who are stuck in the middle of your writing ? it?s what I?ve been doing for a living for much of my life. That?s what I can offer this super group since I don?t make gaming mods ? a limited amount of free editing instead of free NPCs.
I?ll post ?Sun? in four pieces to make it more manageable, I hope.
Why does the Sun shine?
(Content rating: G; safe for minors)
This question has been answered convincingly in at least seven different ways in the last 100,000 years. If we can come up with a few more of these convincing answers, we may start getting close to the truth
OUR species, Homo sapiens, first saw the light of day about 100,000 years ago. We quickly learnt from the other species of humans who were still lurking about, Cro Magnons and Neanderthals, borrowing their technology to make pointed sticks, flint knives and bone sewing-needles. We adapted this technology in various ways to make tools and weapons.
For the next 90,000 years we did ? well, nothing.
Of course we continued to perform our routine daily tasks. We gathered berries, poked pointy sticks at sabre-toothed cats, made cloaks of deer-hide and threw rocks at marauding bachelors from neighbouring clans of humans. On the intellectual front, however, we did absolutely nothing to advance our technology or our understanding of the way things worked. We had neither the need nor the opportunity to do so. If we weren?t trying hard not to get drowned by melting glaciers as the Earth emerged from a nasty ice age, we were running after bison or fleeing from irritable woolly mammoths. Survival wasn?t easy. And maybe Homo wasn?t as sapiens as we?d like to believe we are.
At some time during those 90,000 largely unproductive years, though, at least one of our hunter-gatherer ancestors must have paused long enough to ask the Burning Question. One of his wiser companions would have supplied him with the first Convincing Answer:
Why does the Sun shine?
?Because it?s day-time, you idiot. If it was night-time, the Sun wouldn?t shine. Haven?t you learnt anything since OgBogg hit you with a rock when he mistook you for a giant lemur??
That Convincing Answer would have sufficed for the greater part of 90,000 years. It?s the type of answer that would equally well satisfy most humans today. In essence it?s not unlike the child-mother interchanges you can hear almost anywhere:
?Why is water wet??
?Because.?
?Why did you get cross when Daddy smiled at that lady??
?Because.?
Then, as now, most people were quite happy to accept an undefined answer that contains no explanation. The reason for this is that then, as now, most people couldn?t be bothered to find out how things work as long as they do. The childhood experiment of taking apart the alarm-clock to see why it ticks soon gives way to the adult acceptance that cars go because you put petrol in them.
THEN, about 10,000 years ago, something remarkable and profound happened in the history of humankind. We invented agriculture. Or maybe we discovered it. Can?t you just picture this band of berry-pickers, led by OgBogg the Forty-Third, entering a clearing in the woods and finding a field of self-sewn corn?
?Wow, this looks good. We can camp here and eat this stuff for the next few weeks. It?ll taste good if we roast it on the cob ? because we are a highly advanced race who discovered fire long ago, even before OgBogg?s mother got eaten by a hyena.?
Some bright spark in the clan would then have had time to sit down and think about things. He didn?t have to fight off the Howling Earlobe clan because most of them had been washed away when the last glacier melted to end the ice age. The sabre-tooths and angry mammoths had mysteriously vanished from the face of the Earth. He wasn?t any good at painting antelope on the walls of caves, so he sat by the fire and pondered this self-growing food instead.
?If we could do what it does ? if we plant some of the edible bits that grow into new plants instead of eating them all ? hey, we wouldn?t ever have to be destitute nomads again!?
The clan grumbled. The hunter-gatherer urge was powerful. It would take more than the promise of more corn-on-the-cob to keep them in one place, season after season.
OgBogg the Forty-Third provided all the inducement they needed. ?Er ? guysh ? shome of thish shtuff has gone rotten and turned into a kinda foamy liquid. It?sh making my legsh all wobbly, and I wanna woman.?
Necessity, it is eternally true, is the mother of invention. Until now, the clan hadn?t needed to know how things worked as long as they could find places where berries grew ripe and deer grew fat. Now, as a few centuries quickly ticked by, it became obvious that they would need to know something about seasons and weather and crop cycles and irrigation and clay pottery to store the harvest if this new-fangled agriculture thing was to be more than a passing fad.
After 90,000 years of intermittent feast and frequent famine, our species invented one of the things that has either pleased or bothered farmers and economists ever since ? the surplus. With an excess of grown and stored food, not to mention the taming of wild chickens, buffalo, sheep and goats, came the opportunity to build towns, invent writing and give birth to civilisation.
It was vital for the continuation of civilisation that some of its inhabitants should begin studying the way the world works. Our cleverer ancestors gazed at the stars, kept records of the weather and told the less clever people when would be the best time to, um, sow their wild oats.
The cleverest and most venerated members of the civilisation meanwhile sought ever more efficient ways to turn a part of the crop into the frothy liquid that made their legsh wobble.
Civilisation began to produce scholars, merchants and philosophers. The hunter-gatherers didn?t simply fade from the scene. They were needed more than ever, in their new guise of soldiers (to fend off marauding bachelors from neighbouring clans, who now arrived with leather armour and bronze swords) or town guards (to keep tabs on the townsfolk who had either consumed too much of the frothy liquid or who had invented a new activity called ?theft?).
The dawn of civilisation handed down some important legacies to the ages that followed.
From the partially tamed hunter-gatherers who became the aggressive warriors of old, we have the modern legacy of triathlons, football and gymnasiums with saunas.
From the humble, timid scholars and merchants of ancient times, we have the recent legacies of religious persecution, political parties and thermonuclear bombs.
Another thing that civilisation produced was the second and this time much more Convincing Answer to the Burning Question:
Why does the Sun shine?
?We?ve worked that one out at last. The Sun clearly has an interest in us. It shines to make our crops grow. But the Sun isn?t just a clever ball of heat in the sky. Do you know that it?s been shining every day since long, long before OgBogg the Twenty-Seventh was born? That means that the Sun is maybe as old as the world! We think it?s always been there, and it never dies. It?s like a spirit. No, even more than that ? it?s a god!
?Haven?t you learnt anything since OgBogg hit you with a bronze mace when you took advantage of the fact that his woman?s legsh had gone wobbly after the last feast?
?The Sun isn?t a very even-tempered god, unfortunately. Have you noticed how it shines extra-long in some years and burns the fields into dust, and in some other years it sulks behind the clouds and washes the palace away? We think it would be a good idea if we all show the Sun some tender, caring respect. Bring me a virgin and we?ll rip her guts out to show the Sun that we?re nice people.?
That answer would suffice for millennia. The Sun was a God. So, by an extension of obvious logic, were the Moon and the strange stars that wandered erratically through the heavens (Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter, we would call them much later). Other things which sometimes behaved inexplicably must also be gods ? lightning, rivers and skinny cats with slanting eyes.
The notion that celestial bodies were gods sat comfortably with many people for thousands of years. Even today there are people who endow the Sun and the planets with god-like powers. These people are known as astrologers.
[ ENDS PART 1/4 ]
Why does the Sun shine?
Started by Scipio, Feb 17 2008 07:42 AM
3 replies to this topic
#1
Scipio
-
- Member
- 1790 posts
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
Posted 17 February 2008 - 07:42 AM
I did battle with monsters, and they became me, and when I gazed into the abyss, the abyss looked away shyly.
See, it helps not to believe all the stuff that philosophers spout.
See, it helps not to believe all the stuff that philosophers spout.
#2
Scipio
-
- Member
- 1790 posts
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
Posted 17 February 2008 - 08:03 AM
[ STARTS PART 2/4 ]
AS civilisation advanced, people developed a progressively more sophisticated philosophy of life, the known Universe (which extended well beyond the territory of the Howling Earlobe clan) and everything else. It was no more than a thousand years or so before the intelligentsia in some highly developed centres began to pour scorn on the naïve beliefs of the Sun-worshippers. The new scholar-priests, the brightest of the bright in all the land, threw away the second Convincing Answer and presented the people with a third, still more Convincing Answer:
Why does the Sun shine?
?The Sun, a god? Pah! Tosh and nonsense! The Sun is no more than a big ball of fire going around the Earth by day and sleeping below the horizon at night.
?No, my friend, if we know one thing beyond the slightest measure of a doubt, it is that the Sun is controlled by a god who is much, much more powerful than any silly old ball of fire. This god is even stronger than the god who makes yeast, hops and barley. Haven?t you learnt anything since OgBogg the Greatest sacrificed your sister to the god of onion-pickling??
The sage elder pointed at the brilliant night sky. ?See that constellation, Ursa Major? It?s not a god, even though it does seem to affect rheumatic joints. And that one, Morris Minor? It?s not a god either, although it appears to influence low-cost transport. Nope, they only behave like gods because the real gods project their power through them.?
[ Technical note: The second of the constellations mentioned above lent its name to the Morris Minor, one of those dreadful, low-cost, underpowered vehicles which the British built in the 1950s because no one had any money to buy real cars in the economic slump after World War Two. Some veteran car enthusiasts buy and restore old Morris Minors; though why they should actually want to do so is a mystery almost as perplexing as ?Why does the Sun shine?? ]
Gods have played a vital role in human psychology since before the beginning of recorded history. Maybe they will always be integral to our attitudes, unless we evolve into beings who may be either more or less than human but would have to be less spiritual than we are. Or think we are.
Either through invention or revelation, depending on which religion you?re considering, some spiritual leaders declared that the notion of a different god for every phenomenon was primitive and pagan. There was only one god in control of everything.
As we know, the trend towards monotheism wasn?t global or inevitable. Even so, by the time our history had advanced to a time which we can date at less than two thousand years ago, all of the current major religions had emerged.
Regardless of which religion we?re considering, its adherents came to believe some or other variation of the third Convincing Answer, which goes like this: The sun shines because a god made it and us. In Western culture, it was heresy to believe anything other than the old Greek ?scientific? division of everything into the four elements of earth, air, water and fire. Logically, therefore, the Sun was indeed a great ball of fire ? nothing more, nothing less.
By the 15th or 16th century it was no longer fashionable to disembowel virgins or rip their hearts out to appease the Sun or the god that made it shine. Well, it was frowned upon in Europe, Africa and Asia, although some central American cultures found it expedient to offer the hearts of captured enemies to the Sun. Even in the Americas this practice stopped when the Conquistadors eradicated paganism left, right and centre and replaced it with the much more civilised practice of burning at the stake for believing heresy.
SCIENTIFIC progress was inevitable, however, because of the unquenchable human thirst for knowledge. It happened in the world of Islam during what the Europeans would call their Dark Ages. Unlike Western religion, Islam taught that science was good because it helped people to gain a deeper understanding of the mysteries, wonders and miracles of creation.
Three ingredients went into the birth of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, which would become the centre of the scientific universe. First, new knowledge of mathematics and science begin to filter through from the Arabs. Western scholars and philosophers greedily assimilated the revolutionary new ideas in algebra and optics, among other things. Second, northern Europe broke away from papism and allowed its philosophers more freedom of thought. Third, the Inquisition began to relax its strangling grip on society.
Sure, there were some hiccups along the way, such as the house imprisonment for life which was imposed on Galileo for telling people that the Sun, not the Earth, was the centre of the Universe. There were bigger hiccups, such as the literally violent rejection of Christianity and Islam by each other and their shared disgust at anything connected with Judaism. If the religious divisions could have come together in harmony instead of Crusades and Pogroms, science might be five hundred or a thousand years more advanced than it is today, and Star Trek might be a history lesson, not science fiction ? but that?s another story.
[ Another technical note: There are worlds and suns and galaxies and maybe even many universes. It?s convention to talk about our ones as the Earth, Sun, Galaxy and Universe, all with initial upper-case letters. It?s the same in computers ? many businesses have internets, but the world is served by one global Internet with a capital ?I?. Most of the time it serves the entire upper-case Earth, which is our lower-case world. It stops working when the e-mail server crashes. Now I know that human sacrifices are no longer encouraged, but I wonder ? maybe just the heart of a chicken, or even the gizzard of a grasshopper, to the god of service providers? ]
People called scientists (and people called managing directors, publishers, chief accountants or company directors) don?t call themselves Scientists (or Managing Directors, Publishers, Chief Accountants or Company Directors) unless they?re vain, ignorant or the victims of public relations consultants (who prefer to call themselves Public Relations Consultants). In centuries past, scientists were called natural philosophers. They contemplated the nature of Nature in a philosophical sort of way, which meant they either found out how to understand Nature or they made up jolly good explanations why nobody, including themselves, could.
Hundreds of years ago, natural philosophers like Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton discovered clever things by experiment and worked out other clever things with new tricks in mathematics. Newton, being extra-clever, even invented a branch of mathematics called calculus so that he could work out things which had been impossible to calculate until he came along. By the way, don?t tell this to a German because he?ll say, ?Ach! Schweinhund!? or something like that, then tell you that it was actually a German named Liebnitz who invented calculus, but Newton stole his ideas.
So it was that the natural philosophers of a few hundred years ago were at last able to probe the nature of the Universe in some more depth and provide the fourth Convincing Answer to the Burning Question:
Why does the Sun shine?
?Obviously, it?s not just a ball of fire. Even a fireball as large as we know the Sun to be would flare briefly, then fade away as dissipating heat. It would be here today, gone next century.
?Kepler and Newton told us how massive the Sun is. We know how far away it is. To burn as hot as it does, it?s clearly a huge ball of flaming coal. Haven?t you learnt anything since Earl Egbert blinded your left eye by making you look at the Sun through that lens arrangement he bought in Holland??
(Earl Egbert was ripped off, by the way. He thought he was paying top price for a telescope by Christian Huygens, the master of optical instruments. What his envoy bought was however a cheap pass-off manufactured by a crafty merchant from Cathay. The earl punished the envoy by demoting him from Chief Accountant to chief accountant.)
?How long can it burn? Well, a lump of anthracite that size could easily burn for 10,000 years. We know from Genesis that the Earth was created about 6,000 years ago. We should still be able to tan at Majorca for another 4,000 years. No, wait, we won?t, because sunbathing partly unclothed is still considered immoral, and Majorca doesn?t have any Holiday Inns yet.?
For a while this fourth answer satisfied most people. It was logical and the mathematics of the day bore out the supposition. Nobody was quite ready yet to question how the Sun and the Earth came into being in the first place. Everything was Scripture and not to be questioned too deeply. This is not my attempt to mock or belittle religion. That?s how it was a few centuries ago. Not even Isaac Newton, generally regarded as the greatest scientist in history, would have begun to think about accepting any theory that contradicted the teachings of the church. Religion, philosophy and nascent science were intermeshed.
The world view of the Sun, if you?ll pardon this pathetic expression, changed during the 19th century. Two startling new developments ensured that the Sun could no longer be thought of as a big coal-furnace smouldering away in the heavens.
[ ENDS PART 2/4 ]
AS civilisation advanced, people developed a progressively more sophisticated philosophy of life, the known Universe (which extended well beyond the territory of the Howling Earlobe clan) and everything else. It was no more than a thousand years or so before the intelligentsia in some highly developed centres began to pour scorn on the naïve beliefs of the Sun-worshippers. The new scholar-priests, the brightest of the bright in all the land, threw away the second Convincing Answer and presented the people with a third, still more Convincing Answer:
Why does the Sun shine?
?The Sun, a god? Pah! Tosh and nonsense! The Sun is no more than a big ball of fire going around the Earth by day and sleeping below the horizon at night.
?No, my friend, if we know one thing beyond the slightest measure of a doubt, it is that the Sun is controlled by a god who is much, much more powerful than any silly old ball of fire. This god is even stronger than the god who makes yeast, hops and barley. Haven?t you learnt anything since OgBogg the Greatest sacrificed your sister to the god of onion-pickling??
The sage elder pointed at the brilliant night sky. ?See that constellation, Ursa Major? It?s not a god, even though it does seem to affect rheumatic joints. And that one, Morris Minor? It?s not a god either, although it appears to influence low-cost transport. Nope, they only behave like gods because the real gods project their power through them.?
[ Technical note: The second of the constellations mentioned above lent its name to the Morris Minor, one of those dreadful, low-cost, underpowered vehicles which the British built in the 1950s because no one had any money to buy real cars in the economic slump after World War Two. Some veteran car enthusiasts buy and restore old Morris Minors; though why they should actually want to do so is a mystery almost as perplexing as ?Why does the Sun shine?? ]
Gods have played a vital role in human psychology since before the beginning of recorded history. Maybe they will always be integral to our attitudes, unless we evolve into beings who may be either more or less than human but would have to be less spiritual than we are. Or think we are.
Either through invention or revelation, depending on which religion you?re considering, some spiritual leaders declared that the notion of a different god for every phenomenon was primitive and pagan. There was only one god in control of everything.
As we know, the trend towards monotheism wasn?t global or inevitable. Even so, by the time our history had advanced to a time which we can date at less than two thousand years ago, all of the current major religions had emerged.
Regardless of which religion we?re considering, its adherents came to believe some or other variation of the third Convincing Answer, which goes like this: The sun shines because a god made it and us. In Western culture, it was heresy to believe anything other than the old Greek ?scientific? division of everything into the four elements of earth, air, water and fire. Logically, therefore, the Sun was indeed a great ball of fire ? nothing more, nothing less.
By the 15th or 16th century it was no longer fashionable to disembowel virgins or rip their hearts out to appease the Sun or the god that made it shine. Well, it was frowned upon in Europe, Africa and Asia, although some central American cultures found it expedient to offer the hearts of captured enemies to the Sun. Even in the Americas this practice stopped when the Conquistadors eradicated paganism left, right and centre and replaced it with the much more civilised practice of burning at the stake for believing heresy.
SCIENTIFIC progress was inevitable, however, because of the unquenchable human thirst for knowledge. It happened in the world of Islam during what the Europeans would call their Dark Ages. Unlike Western religion, Islam taught that science was good because it helped people to gain a deeper understanding of the mysteries, wonders and miracles of creation.
Three ingredients went into the birth of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, which would become the centre of the scientific universe. First, new knowledge of mathematics and science begin to filter through from the Arabs. Western scholars and philosophers greedily assimilated the revolutionary new ideas in algebra and optics, among other things. Second, northern Europe broke away from papism and allowed its philosophers more freedom of thought. Third, the Inquisition began to relax its strangling grip on society.
Sure, there were some hiccups along the way, such as the house imprisonment for life which was imposed on Galileo for telling people that the Sun, not the Earth, was the centre of the Universe. There were bigger hiccups, such as the literally violent rejection of Christianity and Islam by each other and their shared disgust at anything connected with Judaism. If the religious divisions could have come together in harmony instead of Crusades and Pogroms, science might be five hundred or a thousand years more advanced than it is today, and Star Trek might be a history lesson, not science fiction ? but that?s another story.
[ Another technical note: There are worlds and suns and galaxies and maybe even many universes. It?s convention to talk about our ones as the Earth, Sun, Galaxy and Universe, all with initial upper-case letters. It?s the same in computers ? many businesses have internets, but the world is served by one global Internet with a capital ?I?. Most of the time it serves the entire upper-case Earth, which is our lower-case world. It stops working when the e-mail server crashes. Now I know that human sacrifices are no longer encouraged, but I wonder ? maybe just the heart of a chicken, or even the gizzard of a grasshopper, to the god of service providers? ]
People called scientists (and people called managing directors, publishers, chief accountants or company directors) don?t call themselves Scientists (or Managing Directors, Publishers, Chief Accountants or Company Directors) unless they?re vain, ignorant or the victims of public relations consultants (who prefer to call themselves Public Relations Consultants). In centuries past, scientists were called natural philosophers. They contemplated the nature of Nature in a philosophical sort of way, which meant they either found out how to understand Nature or they made up jolly good explanations why nobody, including themselves, could.
Hundreds of years ago, natural philosophers like Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton discovered clever things by experiment and worked out other clever things with new tricks in mathematics. Newton, being extra-clever, even invented a branch of mathematics called calculus so that he could work out things which had been impossible to calculate until he came along. By the way, don?t tell this to a German because he?ll say, ?Ach! Schweinhund!? or something like that, then tell you that it was actually a German named Liebnitz who invented calculus, but Newton stole his ideas.
So it was that the natural philosophers of a few hundred years ago were at last able to probe the nature of the Universe in some more depth and provide the fourth Convincing Answer to the Burning Question:
Why does the Sun shine?
?Obviously, it?s not just a ball of fire. Even a fireball as large as we know the Sun to be would flare briefly, then fade away as dissipating heat. It would be here today, gone next century.
?Kepler and Newton told us how massive the Sun is. We know how far away it is. To burn as hot as it does, it?s clearly a huge ball of flaming coal. Haven?t you learnt anything since Earl Egbert blinded your left eye by making you look at the Sun through that lens arrangement he bought in Holland??
(Earl Egbert was ripped off, by the way. He thought he was paying top price for a telescope by Christian Huygens, the master of optical instruments. What his envoy bought was however a cheap pass-off manufactured by a crafty merchant from Cathay. The earl punished the envoy by demoting him from Chief Accountant to chief accountant.)
?How long can it burn? Well, a lump of anthracite that size could easily burn for 10,000 years. We know from Genesis that the Earth was created about 6,000 years ago. We should still be able to tan at Majorca for another 4,000 years. No, wait, we won?t, because sunbathing partly unclothed is still considered immoral, and Majorca doesn?t have any Holiday Inns yet.?
For a while this fourth answer satisfied most people. It was logical and the mathematics of the day bore out the supposition. Nobody was quite ready yet to question how the Sun and the Earth came into being in the first place. Everything was Scripture and not to be questioned too deeply. This is not my attempt to mock or belittle religion. That?s how it was a few centuries ago. Not even Isaac Newton, generally regarded as the greatest scientist in history, would have begun to think about accepting any theory that contradicted the teachings of the church. Religion, philosophy and nascent science were intermeshed.
The world view of the Sun, if you?ll pardon this pathetic expression, changed during the 19th century. Two startling new developments ensured that the Sun could no longer be thought of as a big coal-furnace smouldering away in the heavens.
[ ENDS PART 2/4 ]
I did battle with monsters, and they became me, and when I gazed into the abyss, the abyss looked away shyly.
See, it helps not to believe all the stuff that philosophers spout.
See, it helps not to believe all the stuff that philosophers spout.
#3
Scipio
-
- Member
- 1790 posts
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
Posted 17 February 2008 - 08:21 AM
[ STARTS PART 3/4 ]
FIRST to shake up the notions of all mankind (yes, and womankind, if you want me to be PC) were the men (sorry, women weren?t involved yet) who studied the new fields of geology and paleontology. The Earth, they said, must be much older than 6,000 years. It was at least millions of years old. Charles Darwin came along with his theory of evolution which appeared to demonstrate, at least indirectly, that humans must have evolved from much more ancient life forms way back when. How far back? Ages. Aeons.
At more or less the same time, on a scale of decades, scientists invented a device which they called a spectrometer. It was given this slightly ponderous name because scientists like to make new words with ancient Greek or Latin roots, and they like even more to invent words which other people don?t immediately understand so that they?ll think the scientists are very clever. If the spectrometer was invented today, it might be called a ?Heaviside step function radiation separator? to confuse us even more because many scientists think they?re cleverer now than their predecessors were a couple of centuries back. The device would retain this more complicated name until the public relations consultants got hold of it. Then we would come to know it as the ?Whizzo Lightsplitter?.
The whizzo thing about spectrometers is that they can tell you what an object is made of simply by looking at the spectrum of light it emits. All right, so it?s not that simple. Physics students who first use a spectrometer to look at the light emitted by hot sodium are quite likely to tell you that they?re examining a sample of Cadbury?s Lunch Bar. It takes practice and skill to look at the little bars of light from the spectrometer and match them up to certain elements.
Astronomers looked at sunlight with their whizzos (not ?Sunlight? with a capital ?S?, that?s a brand of soap). ?Hey,? said one of them, ?the Sun isn?t made of coal at all. It?s mostly hydrogen with a fair dollop of helium. No carbon. And no oxygen in the atmosphere for the coal to burn in. In fact I don?t detect anything solid up there at all. The Sun looks like it?s made of nothing except atmosphere!?
They had no choice. They had to ask the Burning Question again and deliver a fifth Convincing Answer:
Why does the Sun shine?
?Let?s go back in time. Before Isaac Newton there was a scientist called Robert Boyle. He gave us the laws that every school kid learns in science class. If you compress a gas, it gets hotter.
?When you have a colossally huge volume of hydrogen and helium like there is in the Sun, its own gravity will easily compress the gas so much that it?ll glow white-hot. Well, almost white. There is some yellow in sunlight because the Sun isn?t hot enough to look pure white.
?Quod erat demonstrandum.? (Scientists had stopped writing everything in Latin but they all had classical educations in the 19th century.) ?Cogito ergo sum. Qantas ex Australia.
?Haven?t you learnt anything since Professor Egbert stopped your heart by making you grab the sparkling end of his electricity experiment? Hey, that was quite funny! Your legsh went wobbly.?
Here was a more satisfying explanation than the ball-of-coal idea. It married older, well-known science with new measurements made with a Whizzo. The mathematics worked out. In all of modern science, if you can develop an inspired hypothesis into a credible theory, back it up with mathematical models and, most importantly, substantiate it by experiment or observation, that?s ?good science?.
This ?good science? has worked to the benefit of everyone who enjoys internal combustion engines, Cadbury?s Lunch Bars, Atomic Kittens videos or vitamin-enriched shampoo. None of these things would have been invented if there hadn?t been ?good science? from which to grow the corresponding technology. If we?d stayed with the ancient Greek philosophy of ?science?, where experiment and observation were branded as vulgar and everything should be deduced by pure thought alone, we?d still be watching plays by Aristophanes instead of sitting down for televised episodes of The Bold And The Beautiful. Isn?t science wonderful?
?Good science? unfortunately can have bad consequences. Yes, napalm is one of them if you want to look at it that way. For the Burning Question saga, however, the bad consequence was that it turned knowledge upside-down again.
So the Sun shines because its gravity warms up hydrogen and helium gas? Great. And the world, we?re pretty well convinced unless we insist on Creationism, is not just millions but billions of years old. Cool. So what?s the problem?
It?s this ? if you take all of the gravitational energy in the Sun and convert it to heat energy, the Sun gets cold in a few thousand years. It?s no more use to us than a big ball of coal which turns into charcoal after a few thousand years. Spectrometers, even the Whizzo brand, show that all stars are made of the same basic stuff as the Sun, so they would all have been cold balls of gas millions or even billions of years ago.
ALMOST as quickly as the fifth Convincing Answer arrived, it became imperative to find a better answer.
The provider of the better answer was a seemingly nondescript patents clerk working in Switzerland at the beginning of the 20th century. He?d been none too bright at university, although he did apparently attract nice-looking women by exercising the same kind of sex appeal that Woody Allen exudes. Being a nerd can be cool if your intellect is bigger than the known Universe. At that time, the known Universe was our Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers estimated it to be many millions of light years in diameter. A light year is the distance a beam of light will travel through a vacuum in one year.
This clerical guy with the bad haircut was, you guessed it ?
Groucho Marx!
No, of course it wasn?t! Haven?t you learnt anything since you found out there was an imaginary scientist named Professor Egbert?
Albert Einstein, the patents clerk who would later become unfairly known as ?the father of the atom bomb?, was terribly bored in his job. He didn?t have Baldur?s Gate or Quake to keep him occupied because he?d forgotten how to start Windows on his laptop. Or something. Anyway, he decided to fiddle away the empty hours by seeing what he could do with the known laws of electromagnetism and the recently confirmed knowledge that the speed of light is constant to every observer, no matter whether the observer is stationary or moving at close to the speed of light itself.
The outcome of his scribblings, supported by technical contributions from friends who?d concentrated better than he had done on the mathematics lectures at university, was his famous Special Theory of Relativity. It gave us the sixth Convincing Answer to the Burning Question:
Why does the Sun shine?
?What?s the most famous equation in the world, the only one that anybody would dare to write in a non-technical article? Yes, it?s E equals mc squared. Thank Einstein for that.
?What does it mean? In simple terms, you can convert matter into energy. Surely we don?t have to go through all the build-up ? I presume you know that time contracts and mass increases as a body accelerates closer and closer to the speed of light. Haven?t you learnt anything since Doctor Egbert accidentally sterilised you during his experiments with uranium??
The world was agog at Einstein?s revelations. Not only the scientific community but the population in general made him a folk hero. He had given us a dazzlingly new insight into the way the Universe works. It was unlike anything ever imagined. Nothing as startling had come from science since the 17th century, when Newton gave us the laws of physics that Einstein so profoundly modified.
There were amazing facts and apparent paradoxes to be digested as an understanding of Special Relativity percolated into the popular press and after-dinner conversations. The twins paradox ? send one twin away from Earth in a space ship at close to the speed of light, bring him back a century later in our time, and only ten years of his time would have passed. He would be younger than his grandchildren. The length and mass relation ? an object moving very, very fast becomes shorter and heavier. The destruction of believability in just about every space-fiction saga written in the last hundred years ? it?s impossible to generate enough energy to propel anything faster than the speed of light, so it would take just about forever to travel any significant distance through our Galaxy, never mind the entire Universe.
?Warp Five, Scotty. We need to out-run those Howling Earlobe aliens.?
?No can do, Captain Jim, Einstein?s watching this episode.?
Hand in hand with everything else in Special Relativity came the hard mathematics that showed how mass could be turned into light and heat, which is just one of many forms of energy.
There was no more need to argue about the age of the Earth, the Universe and the time it would take for the Sun to burn itself out. The new ?nuclear energy? which Einstein had described would be sufficient to keep the Sun shining, not for mere millions of years, but for ten billion years.
Astronomers were meanwhile probing ever deeper into Space (the capital ?S? is optional; I?ve used it here because there are enough small s?s in this article already). They concluded that the Universe, now visible to a distance of 10 or 20 billion light years in any direction, must be somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years old. This would splice neatly with the calculated life-span of the Sun, which couldn?t be just a few thousand years old but also couldn?t be older than the Universe itself.
The interpretation of Einstein?s theory was all we needed. Except for one thing ? it was wrong.
NOT really wrong, just incomplete. It would take a totally new science to point us in the direction of the ?correct? Convincing Answer.
Why wasn?t all of the E equals mc squared stuff complete as far as the shining Sun is concerned? It took another 20 years to answer this one, but the problem was apparent before then.
As nuclear science developed, physicists could calculate that hydrogen would fuse into helium at a temperature of about 40 million degrees Celsius. The protons inside hydrogen atoms repel each other because they are positively charged. It takes a great amount of energy to slam them together in spite of their mutual repulsion. To make them into a couple of happy protons living inside a helium atom would be almost as difficult as forcing Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush to go on holiday together in Afghanistan.
Heat the hydrogen up to 40 million degrees, though, and the protons will be racing around fast enough to collide before their positive charges can shove them apart. Nuclear fusion will happen, and, voila! ? Bikini Atoll.
But astronomers who had been studying the Sun and other stars concluded that the temperature in the heart of our Sun is only 15 million degrees. In short, our Sun is too cool for nuclear fusion to occur.
The Sun should be no more than a big old blob of warm gas, compressed nicely but not enough to glow yellow-whitish-hot. Either that, or it should have compressed itself so mightily and hotly that it would have exploded, leaving nothing but a tenuous, expanding haze in Space.
Aargh! We needed ANOTHER Convincing Answer!
[ ENDS PART 3/4 ]
FIRST to shake up the notions of all mankind (yes, and womankind, if you want me to be PC) were the men (sorry, women weren?t involved yet) who studied the new fields of geology and paleontology. The Earth, they said, must be much older than 6,000 years. It was at least millions of years old. Charles Darwin came along with his theory of evolution which appeared to demonstrate, at least indirectly, that humans must have evolved from much more ancient life forms way back when. How far back? Ages. Aeons.
At more or less the same time, on a scale of decades, scientists invented a device which they called a spectrometer. It was given this slightly ponderous name because scientists like to make new words with ancient Greek or Latin roots, and they like even more to invent words which other people don?t immediately understand so that they?ll think the scientists are very clever. If the spectrometer was invented today, it might be called a ?Heaviside step function radiation separator? to confuse us even more because many scientists think they?re cleverer now than their predecessors were a couple of centuries back. The device would retain this more complicated name until the public relations consultants got hold of it. Then we would come to know it as the ?Whizzo Lightsplitter?.
The whizzo thing about spectrometers is that they can tell you what an object is made of simply by looking at the spectrum of light it emits. All right, so it?s not that simple. Physics students who first use a spectrometer to look at the light emitted by hot sodium are quite likely to tell you that they?re examining a sample of Cadbury?s Lunch Bar. It takes practice and skill to look at the little bars of light from the spectrometer and match them up to certain elements.
Astronomers looked at sunlight with their whizzos (not ?Sunlight? with a capital ?S?, that?s a brand of soap). ?Hey,? said one of them, ?the Sun isn?t made of coal at all. It?s mostly hydrogen with a fair dollop of helium. No carbon. And no oxygen in the atmosphere for the coal to burn in. In fact I don?t detect anything solid up there at all. The Sun looks like it?s made of nothing except atmosphere!?
They had no choice. They had to ask the Burning Question again and deliver a fifth Convincing Answer:
Why does the Sun shine?
?Let?s go back in time. Before Isaac Newton there was a scientist called Robert Boyle. He gave us the laws that every school kid learns in science class. If you compress a gas, it gets hotter.
?When you have a colossally huge volume of hydrogen and helium like there is in the Sun, its own gravity will easily compress the gas so much that it?ll glow white-hot. Well, almost white. There is some yellow in sunlight because the Sun isn?t hot enough to look pure white.
?Quod erat demonstrandum.? (Scientists had stopped writing everything in Latin but they all had classical educations in the 19th century.) ?Cogito ergo sum. Qantas ex Australia.
?Haven?t you learnt anything since Professor Egbert stopped your heart by making you grab the sparkling end of his electricity experiment? Hey, that was quite funny! Your legsh went wobbly.?
Here was a more satisfying explanation than the ball-of-coal idea. It married older, well-known science with new measurements made with a Whizzo. The mathematics worked out. In all of modern science, if you can develop an inspired hypothesis into a credible theory, back it up with mathematical models and, most importantly, substantiate it by experiment or observation, that?s ?good science?.
This ?good science? has worked to the benefit of everyone who enjoys internal combustion engines, Cadbury?s Lunch Bars, Atomic Kittens videos or vitamin-enriched shampoo. None of these things would have been invented if there hadn?t been ?good science? from which to grow the corresponding technology. If we?d stayed with the ancient Greek philosophy of ?science?, where experiment and observation were branded as vulgar and everything should be deduced by pure thought alone, we?d still be watching plays by Aristophanes instead of sitting down for televised episodes of The Bold And The Beautiful. Isn?t science wonderful?
?Good science? unfortunately can have bad consequences. Yes, napalm is one of them if you want to look at it that way. For the Burning Question saga, however, the bad consequence was that it turned knowledge upside-down again.
So the Sun shines because its gravity warms up hydrogen and helium gas? Great. And the world, we?re pretty well convinced unless we insist on Creationism, is not just millions but billions of years old. Cool. So what?s the problem?
It?s this ? if you take all of the gravitational energy in the Sun and convert it to heat energy, the Sun gets cold in a few thousand years. It?s no more use to us than a big ball of coal which turns into charcoal after a few thousand years. Spectrometers, even the Whizzo brand, show that all stars are made of the same basic stuff as the Sun, so they would all have been cold balls of gas millions or even billions of years ago.
ALMOST as quickly as the fifth Convincing Answer arrived, it became imperative to find a better answer.
The provider of the better answer was a seemingly nondescript patents clerk working in Switzerland at the beginning of the 20th century. He?d been none too bright at university, although he did apparently attract nice-looking women by exercising the same kind of sex appeal that Woody Allen exudes. Being a nerd can be cool if your intellect is bigger than the known Universe. At that time, the known Universe was our Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers estimated it to be many millions of light years in diameter. A light year is the distance a beam of light will travel through a vacuum in one year.
This clerical guy with the bad haircut was, you guessed it ?
Groucho Marx!
No, of course it wasn?t! Haven?t you learnt anything since you found out there was an imaginary scientist named Professor Egbert?
Albert Einstein, the patents clerk who would later become unfairly known as ?the father of the atom bomb?, was terribly bored in his job. He didn?t have Baldur?s Gate or Quake to keep him occupied because he?d forgotten how to start Windows on his laptop. Or something. Anyway, he decided to fiddle away the empty hours by seeing what he could do with the known laws of electromagnetism and the recently confirmed knowledge that the speed of light is constant to every observer, no matter whether the observer is stationary or moving at close to the speed of light itself.
The outcome of his scribblings, supported by technical contributions from friends who?d concentrated better than he had done on the mathematics lectures at university, was his famous Special Theory of Relativity. It gave us the sixth Convincing Answer to the Burning Question:
Why does the Sun shine?
?What?s the most famous equation in the world, the only one that anybody would dare to write in a non-technical article? Yes, it?s E equals mc squared. Thank Einstein for that.
?What does it mean? In simple terms, you can convert matter into energy. Surely we don?t have to go through all the build-up ? I presume you know that time contracts and mass increases as a body accelerates closer and closer to the speed of light. Haven?t you learnt anything since Doctor Egbert accidentally sterilised you during his experiments with uranium??
The world was agog at Einstein?s revelations. Not only the scientific community but the population in general made him a folk hero. He had given us a dazzlingly new insight into the way the Universe works. It was unlike anything ever imagined. Nothing as startling had come from science since the 17th century, when Newton gave us the laws of physics that Einstein so profoundly modified.
There were amazing facts and apparent paradoxes to be digested as an understanding of Special Relativity percolated into the popular press and after-dinner conversations. The twins paradox ? send one twin away from Earth in a space ship at close to the speed of light, bring him back a century later in our time, and only ten years of his time would have passed. He would be younger than his grandchildren. The length and mass relation ? an object moving very, very fast becomes shorter and heavier. The destruction of believability in just about every space-fiction saga written in the last hundred years ? it?s impossible to generate enough energy to propel anything faster than the speed of light, so it would take just about forever to travel any significant distance through our Galaxy, never mind the entire Universe.
?Warp Five, Scotty. We need to out-run those Howling Earlobe aliens.?
?No can do, Captain Jim, Einstein?s watching this episode.?
Hand in hand with everything else in Special Relativity came the hard mathematics that showed how mass could be turned into light and heat, which is just one of many forms of energy.
There was no more need to argue about the age of the Earth, the Universe and the time it would take for the Sun to burn itself out. The new ?nuclear energy? which Einstein had described would be sufficient to keep the Sun shining, not for mere millions of years, but for ten billion years.
Astronomers were meanwhile probing ever deeper into Space (the capital ?S? is optional; I?ve used it here because there are enough small s?s in this article already). They concluded that the Universe, now visible to a distance of 10 or 20 billion light years in any direction, must be somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years old. This would splice neatly with the calculated life-span of the Sun, which couldn?t be just a few thousand years old but also couldn?t be older than the Universe itself.
The interpretation of Einstein?s theory was all we needed. Except for one thing ? it was wrong.
NOT really wrong, just incomplete. It would take a totally new science to point us in the direction of the ?correct? Convincing Answer.
Why wasn?t all of the E equals mc squared stuff complete as far as the shining Sun is concerned? It took another 20 years to answer this one, but the problem was apparent before then.
As nuclear science developed, physicists could calculate that hydrogen would fuse into helium at a temperature of about 40 million degrees Celsius. The protons inside hydrogen atoms repel each other because they are positively charged. It takes a great amount of energy to slam them together in spite of their mutual repulsion. To make them into a couple of happy protons living inside a helium atom would be almost as difficult as forcing Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush to go on holiday together in Afghanistan.
Heat the hydrogen up to 40 million degrees, though, and the protons will be racing around fast enough to collide before their positive charges can shove them apart. Nuclear fusion will happen, and, voila! ? Bikini Atoll.
But astronomers who had been studying the Sun and other stars concluded that the temperature in the heart of our Sun is only 15 million degrees. In short, our Sun is too cool for nuclear fusion to occur.
The Sun should be no more than a big old blob of warm gas, compressed nicely but not enough to glow yellow-whitish-hot. Either that, or it should have compressed itself so mightily and hotly that it would have exploded, leaving nothing but a tenuous, expanding haze in Space.
Aargh! We needed ANOTHER Convincing Answer!
[ ENDS PART 3/4 ]
I did battle with monsters, and they became me, and when I gazed into the abyss, the abyss looked away shyly.
See, it helps not to believe all the stuff that philosophers spout.
See, it helps not to believe all the stuff that philosophers spout.
#4
Scipio
-
- Member
- 1790 posts
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
Posted 17 February 2008 - 08:36 AM
[ STARTS PART 4/4 ]
ENTER the truly weird science of quantum mechanics. This is such a bizarre branch of physics, so different from everything else that had gone before, that it led to the division of physics into ?classical? physics and ?modern? physics.
Classical physics covers everything in physics over a span of two-and-a-half thousand years. It includes the work by Archimedes on specific gravity and floating bodies; Isaac Newton?s laws of gravity and motion; and Einstein?s Special and General Relativity. Modern physics describes the body of knowledge contained in quantum mechanics.
[ Yet another technical note: One, the difference between Special Relativity and General Relativity is that Special Relativity considers bodies moving at near-light speeds; General Relativity expands on Special Relativity by including gravity, acceleration and the strange but demonstrated phenomenon of curved space. Two, Einstein wasn?t really the father of the atom bomb. That honour belongs more to Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project. He and others built on Einstein?s earlier work. To call Einstein the father of the atom bomb is not unlike calling Shakespeare the father of Big Brother. ]
Einstein was misquoted as stating that only twelve people in the world fully understood Relativity. This was nonsense even in the 1920s. There were thousands of new physics graduates in the world by then and all of them understood Einstein?s work. They might have struggled with some of the mathematics but the concepts were clear to them. Newspapers of the day misquoted Einstein because the journalists who wrote the articles didn?t understand his theories. In common with their modern counterparts, journalists of the ?20s didn?t understand much of anything but were very good at misreporting it.
Also not too long ago, the most acclaimed physicist of recent times, Richard Feynman, wrote that nobody understands quantum mechanics even if they can do the mathematics. This is true. Quantum physics can be used to calculate how certain things happen at the atomic level, but nobody knows why.
Here?s a weird example. Put a billiard ball in a box, then seal the lid. Shake the box around ? you can impress your friends if you do this to the beat of a song by Christina Aguilera, although she isn?t crucial to the exercise. After a few seconds (or minutes, if you?re an Aguilera fan), put the box down and let the billiard ball come to rest. Now ? where is the billiard ball?
Congratulations, you?ve just met the Uncertainty Principle, which is one of the annoying core ingredients of quantum physics. You can?t know where the ball is inside the box. It may be resting against one of the sides of the box or sitting in the middle of the base. All you can know for sure is that the ball is somewhere inside the box.
It?s the same at the atomic level, isn?t it?
Nope.
Test two ? put an electron inside a very small box, jiggle the electron around by exciting it with electricity (electrons are seldom excited by Christina Aguilera so you?ll have to resort to something less shapely), then put the tiny box on a table. Let everything stabilise. Now, where?s that electron?
As with the billiard ball, you can?t tell exactly where the electron may be inside its box.
But you also can?t tell if it?s inside the box at all! There is a probability, which can be calculated with a fair degree of precision, that the electron may be outside the box in which you sealed it with no chance of its escaping.
And this gave science the seventh Convincing Answer to the Burning Question:
Why does the Sun shine?
?It?s obvious, now that Werner Heisenberg has given us the Uncertainty Principle. He told us we can never know both the momentum and the position of a sub-atomic particle with any precision. We can only work with probabilities.
?We can work out how much momentum a proton inside a hydrogen atom will have if you heat up the hydrogen to 15 million degrees, which is the temperature at the centre of the Sun. Actually, there aren?t really atoms any more at that temperature, just a super-hot plasma, a soup of free protons and electrons stripped out of the hydrogen.
?Protons repel each other because they have positive charges. According to classical physics, not even at 15 million degrees will a proton have enough momentum to break through the electromagnetic repulsion and sneak into bed with its neighbour from the Howling Earlobe clan of protons.
?Quantum physics, however, lets us calculate the probability that a proton will be where it isn?t. If it?s nearby another proton, there is some probabilily that it?s not really there at all. Instead, it could be snuggled up to the other proton. It?s like the electron being outside the box that it can?t get out of. And instead of 40 million degrees, a trifling 15 million degrees is hot enough for fusion to happen, and some of the protons will lock together to form helium nuclei.
?Haven?t you learnt anything since your post-grad tutor, Egbert, lost his car keys in a mini black hole??
THIS is about where we are right now. This is the best explanation we have for why the Sun shines. Those probability functions in quantum mechanics confirm that the Sun has been shining for five billion years and will shine for another five billion more before it enters its cataclysmic death throes.
We?ve had companion Convincing Answers to related questions. Why do protons stick together when electromagnetic repulsion should force them apart? Because an even stronger but very short-range force ties them together. What is this force? Well, it could be a field. Or it could be an exchange of force particles. Maybe it?s neither. If it isn?t a field or a particle, come over here and we?ll show you that matter and force could both be nothing more than vibrations in the fabric of space-time. If we use the appropriate mathematics to suit our interpretation of quantum physics, we can convince you in any number of ways.
That?s where the trouble lies. We?ve reached only the seventh Convincing Answer. We need more, with or without the assistance of blonde pop stars to sing while we jiggle.
If force and matter are particles, what are these particles themselves made of? Are there particles at all, or are there collections of somethings called superstrings which are trillions of times smaller than an atom but somehow succeed in presenting themselves to the larger Universe as ?matter??
Perhaps the penultimate Convincing Answer ? and it could be answer number 15, 16 or 49, and it could arrive this century or in 500 years? time ? will tell us, at last, what makes up the most fundamental structure of the Universe.
That?ll leave us with the final Convincing Answer ? and the greatest scientific minds of our age doubt if we?ll ever get it. Once we know how everything in the Universe works and what everything is made of at the deepest level, we?ll still want to know:
Why does the Sun shine?
?I truly wish it was obvious after all these millennia since Newton and Einstein stunned the world and gave us science. We?d like to think we know everything now. Unfortunately, one thing people understood right at the birth of science was that it?s impossible to know everything.
?Go and ask that robot, Egbert, and he?ll confirm that we can never, ever know why we?re here at all or why the Universe is the way it is. It?s nice to know how things work. But we can only wonder why they work.
?Hey, I?ve just had a great idea! Let?s reinvent religion?.?
[ ENDS ]
ENTER the truly weird science of quantum mechanics. This is such a bizarre branch of physics, so different from everything else that had gone before, that it led to the division of physics into ?classical? physics and ?modern? physics.
Classical physics covers everything in physics over a span of two-and-a-half thousand years. It includes the work by Archimedes on specific gravity and floating bodies; Isaac Newton?s laws of gravity and motion; and Einstein?s Special and General Relativity. Modern physics describes the body of knowledge contained in quantum mechanics.
[ Yet another technical note: One, the difference between Special Relativity and General Relativity is that Special Relativity considers bodies moving at near-light speeds; General Relativity expands on Special Relativity by including gravity, acceleration and the strange but demonstrated phenomenon of curved space. Two, Einstein wasn?t really the father of the atom bomb. That honour belongs more to Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project. He and others built on Einstein?s earlier work. To call Einstein the father of the atom bomb is not unlike calling Shakespeare the father of Big Brother. ]
Einstein was misquoted as stating that only twelve people in the world fully understood Relativity. This was nonsense even in the 1920s. There were thousands of new physics graduates in the world by then and all of them understood Einstein?s work. They might have struggled with some of the mathematics but the concepts were clear to them. Newspapers of the day misquoted Einstein because the journalists who wrote the articles didn?t understand his theories. In common with their modern counterparts, journalists of the ?20s didn?t understand much of anything but were very good at misreporting it.
Also not too long ago, the most acclaimed physicist of recent times, Richard Feynman, wrote that nobody understands quantum mechanics even if they can do the mathematics. This is true. Quantum physics can be used to calculate how certain things happen at the atomic level, but nobody knows why.
Here?s a weird example. Put a billiard ball in a box, then seal the lid. Shake the box around ? you can impress your friends if you do this to the beat of a song by Christina Aguilera, although she isn?t crucial to the exercise. After a few seconds (or minutes, if you?re an Aguilera fan), put the box down and let the billiard ball come to rest. Now ? where is the billiard ball?
Congratulations, you?ve just met the Uncertainty Principle, which is one of the annoying core ingredients of quantum physics. You can?t know where the ball is inside the box. It may be resting against one of the sides of the box or sitting in the middle of the base. All you can know for sure is that the ball is somewhere inside the box.
It?s the same at the atomic level, isn?t it?
Nope.
Test two ? put an electron inside a very small box, jiggle the electron around by exciting it with electricity (electrons are seldom excited by Christina Aguilera so you?ll have to resort to something less shapely), then put the tiny box on a table. Let everything stabilise. Now, where?s that electron?
As with the billiard ball, you can?t tell exactly where the electron may be inside its box.
But you also can?t tell if it?s inside the box at all! There is a probability, which can be calculated with a fair degree of precision, that the electron may be outside the box in which you sealed it with no chance of its escaping.
And this gave science the seventh Convincing Answer to the Burning Question:
Why does the Sun shine?
?It?s obvious, now that Werner Heisenberg has given us the Uncertainty Principle. He told us we can never know both the momentum and the position of a sub-atomic particle with any precision. We can only work with probabilities.
?We can work out how much momentum a proton inside a hydrogen atom will have if you heat up the hydrogen to 15 million degrees, which is the temperature at the centre of the Sun. Actually, there aren?t really atoms any more at that temperature, just a super-hot plasma, a soup of free protons and electrons stripped out of the hydrogen.
?Protons repel each other because they have positive charges. According to classical physics, not even at 15 million degrees will a proton have enough momentum to break through the electromagnetic repulsion and sneak into bed with its neighbour from the Howling Earlobe clan of protons.
?Quantum physics, however, lets us calculate the probability that a proton will be where it isn?t. If it?s nearby another proton, there is some probabilily that it?s not really there at all. Instead, it could be snuggled up to the other proton. It?s like the electron being outside the box that it can?t get out of. And instead of 40 million degrees, a trifling 15 million degrees is hot enough for fusion to happen, and some of the protons will lock together to form helium nuclei.
?Haven?t you learnt anything since your post-grad tutor, Egbert, lost his car keys in a mini black hole??
THIS is about where we are right now. This is the best explanation we have for why the Sun shines. Those probability functions in quantum mechanics confirm that the Sun has been shining for five billion years and will shine for another five billion more before it enters its cataclysmic death throes.
We?ve had companion Convincing Answers to related questions. Why do protons stick together when electromagnetic repulsion should force them apart? Because an even stronger but very short-range force ties them together. What is this force? Well, it could be a field. Or it could be an exchange of force particles. Maybe it?s neither. If it isn?t a field or a particle, come over here and we?ll show you that matter and force could both be nothing more than vibrations in the fabric of space-time. If we use the appropriate mathematics to suit our interpretation of quantum physics, we can convince you in any number of ways.
That?s where the trouble lies. We?ve reached only the seventh Convincing Answer. We need more, with or without the assistance of blonde pop stars to sing while we jiggle.
If force and matter are particles, what are these particles themselves made of? Are there particles at all, or are there collections of somethings called superstrings which are trillions of times smaller than an atom but somehow succeed in presenting themselves to the larger Universe as ?matter??
Perhaps the penultimate Convincing Answer ? and it could be answer number 15, 16 or 49, and it could arrive this century or in 500 years? time ? will tell us, at last, what makes up the most fundamental structure of the Universe.
That?ll leave us with the final Convincing Answer ? and the greatest scientific minds of our age doubt if we?ll ever get it. Once we know how everything in the Universe works and what everything is made of at the deepest level, we?ll still want to know:
Why does the Sun shine?
?I truly wish it was obvious after all these millennia since Newton and Einstein stunned the world and gave us science. We?d like to think we know everything now. Unfortunately, one thing people understood right at the birth of science was that it?s impossible to know everything.
?Go and ask that robot, Egbert, and he?ll confirm that we can never, ever know why we?re here at all or why the Universe is the way it is. It?s nice to know how things work. But we can only wonder why they work.
?Hey, I?ve just had a great idea! Let?s reinvent religion?.?
[ ENDS ]
I did battle with monsters, and they became me, and when I gazed into the abyss, the abyss looked away shyly.
See, it helps not to believe all the stuff that philosophers spout.
See, it helps not to believe all the stuff that philosophers spout.
