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Earth weighs about six billion trillion tons, is moving around the sun at roughly sixty-six thousand miles an hour, and is doing this while rotating at the equator at a little over a thousand miles an hour. So when you feel like your head is spinning, it is. Paris is, after all, going six hundred miles an hour.
Earth’s surface is made up of about ten big plates and twenty smaller ones that never stop slipping and sliding, like Greenland, which moves half an inch a year. The general estimate is that this current configuration of continents that we know to be Africa, Asia, Europe, etc. has been like this about a tenth of 1 percent of history. The world, as we know it, is a relatively new arrangement.
Every day there are on average two earthquakes somewhere in the world that measure 2 or greater on the Richter scale, every second about one hundred lightning bolts hit the ground, and every nineteen seconds someone sitting in a restaurant somewhere hears Lionel Richie’s song “Dancing on the Ceiling” one. more. Time.
Speaking of time, here on Earth we travel around the sun every 365 days, which we call a year, and we spin once around every twenty-four hours, which we call a day. Our concepts of time, then, are shaped by large, physical, planetary objects moving around each other while turning themselves. Time is determined by physical space.
No planets, which are things,
no time.
We have calendars that divide time up into predictable, segmented, uniform units—hours and days and months and years. This organization into regular, sequential intervals that unfold with precise predictability has deeply shaped our thinking about time. These constructs are good and helpful in many ways—they help us get to our dentist appointments and remember each other’s birthdays, but they also protect us from how elastic and stretchy time actually is.
If you place a clock on the ground and then you place a second clock on a tower, the hands of the clock on the tower will move faster than on the clock on the ground, because closer to the ground gravity is stronger, slowing down the hands of the clock.
If you stand outside on a starry night, the light you see from the stars is the stars as they were when the light left them. You are not seeing how those stars are now; you in the present are seeing how those stars were years and years and years in the past.
If you stand outside on a sunny day, you are enjoying the sun as it was eight minutes ago.
If you found yourself riding on a train that was traveling at the speed of light and you looked out the window, you would not see things ahead, things beside you, and things you had just passed. You would see everything all at once. You would lose your sense of past, present, and future because linear, sequential time would collapse into one giant NOW.
Time is not consistent:
it bends and warps and curves;
it speeds up and slows down;
it shifts and changes.
Time is relative, its consistency a persistent illusion.
It’s an expanding,
shifting,
spinning,
turning,
rotating,
slipping and sliding universe we’re living in.
There is no universal up;
there is no ultimate down;
there is no objective, stationary, unmoving place of rest where you can observe all that ceaseless movement.
Sitting still, after all, is no different than maintaining a uniform approximate constant state of motion.
There is no absolute viewpoint; there are only views from a point.
Bendy, curvy, relative—the past, present, and future are illusions as space-time warps and distorts in a stunning variety of ways, leading us to another matter: matter.
The sun is both a star that we orbit,
and our primary source of energy.
It is a physical object,
and it is the engine of life for our planet.
The sun is made of matter,
and the sun is energy.
At the same time.
Albert Einstein was the first to name this, showing that matter is actually locked-up energy. And energy is liberated matter.
Perhaps you’ve seen posters of the Swiss patent clerk sticking his tongue out, with the wild hair and the rumors of how he was supposedly such a genius that he would forget to put his pants on in the morning. And then there’s his famous E = mc
formula, which many of us could confidently write out on a chalkboard even if we couldn’t begin to explain it.
Beyond all that, though, what exactly was it that he did?
What Einstein did, through his theories of general and special relativity, was show that the universe is way, way weirder than anyone had thought. I realize that weirder isn’t the most scientific of terms, but Einstein’s work took him from the bigness of the universe to the smallness of the universe, and that’s when a string of truly stunning discoveries were made, discoveries that challenge our most basic ideas about the world we’re living in.
II. Who Ordered That?
For thousands of years people have wondered what the universe is made of, assuming that there must be some kind of building block, a particle, a basic element, a cosmic Lego of sorts—something really small and stable that makes up everything we know to be everything. The possibilities are fascinating, because if you could discover this primal building material, you could answer countless questions about how we got here and what we’re made of and where it’s all headed . . .
You could, ideally, make sense of things.
Greek philosophers—among them Democritus, who lived twenty-five hundred years ago—speculated about this elemental building block, using a particular word for it. The Greeks had a word tomos, which referred to cutting or dividing something. Out of this they developed the concept of something that was a-tomos, something “indivisible, uncuttable,” something that everything else was made of. Something really small, of which there is nothing smaller. Something atomos, from which we get the word atom.
Imagine what we’d learn if we could actually discover one of these atoms! That was the quest that compelled scientists and philosophers and thinkers for thousands of years until the late 1800s, when atoms were eventually discovered.
Atoms, it turns out, are small.
About one million atoms lined up side by side are as thick as a human hair.
A single grain of sand contains 22 quintillion atoms (that’s 22 with 18 zeroes).
An atom is in size to a golf ball as a golf ball is in size to Earth.
That small.
But atoms, it was discovered, are made up of even smaller parts called protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are in the center of the atom, called the nucleus, which is one-millionth of a billionth of the volume of the atom.
If an atom were blown up to the size of a stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a grain of rice, but it would weigh more than the stadium.
The discoveries continued as technology was developed to split those particles, which led to the discovery that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles and it was discovered that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles . . .
Down and down it went,
smaller and smaller,
further and further into the subatomic world.
The British physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, which led to the discovery of an astonishing number of new particles over the next few
years, from
bosons and
hadrons and
baryons and
neutrinos
to
mesons and
leptons and
pions and
hyperons and
taus.
Gluons were discovered, which hold particles together, along with quarks, which come in a variety of types—
there are up quarks
and down quarks
and top quarks
and bottom quarks
and charmed quarks
and, of course,
strange quarks.
When an inconceivably small particle called a muon was identified, the legendary physicist Isaac Rabi is known for saying, “Who ordered that?”
By now somewhere around 150 subatomic particles have been identified, with new technology and research constantly emerging, the most impressive example of this happening at a facility known by the acronym CERN, which is near the Swiss–French border. Workers at CERN, an international collaboration of almost eight thousand scientists and several thousand employees, have built a sixteen-mile circular tunnel one hundred meters below earth’s surface called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). At the LHC they fire two beams at each other, each with 3.5 trillion volts, hoping that in the ensuing collision particles will emerge that haven’t been studied yet.
Physicists have talked with straight faces for years about how with this unprecedented level of energy and equipment and billions of dollars and the brightest scientific minds in the world working together they might be able to finally discover that incredibly important, terribly elusive particle called the . . .
Higgs Boson.
(Which they did. Go ahead, Google it. It’s incredible. Even if it sounds like the name of a southern politician.)
Now, the staggeringly tiny size of atoms and subatomic particles is hard to get one’s mind around, but it’s what these particles do that forces us to confront our most basic assumptions about the universe.
Many popular images of an atom lead us to think that it’s like a solar system, with the protons and neutrons in the center like the sun and the electrons orbiting in a path around the center as our planet orbits the sun.
But those early pioneering scientists learned that this is not how things actually are. What they learned is that electrons don’t orbit the nucleus in a continuous and consistent manner; what they do is
disappear in one place and then appear in another place without traveling the distance in between.
Particles vanish and then show up somewhere else, leaping from one location to another, with no way to predict when or where they will come or go.
Niels Bohr was one of the first to come to terms with this strange new world that was being uncovered, calling these movements quantum leaps. Pioneering quantum physicists realized that particles are constantly in motion, exploring all of the possible paths from point A to point B at the same time. They’re simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.
A given electron not only travels all of the possible routes from A to B, but it reveals which path it took only when it’s observed. Electrons exist in what are called ghost states, exploring all of the possible routes they could take, until they are observed, at which point all of those possibilities collapse into the one they actually take.
Ever stood on a sidewalk in front of a store window and seen your reflection in the glass? You could see the items in the display window, but you could also see yourself, as if in a fuzzy mirror. Some of the light particles from the sun (called photons) went through the glass, illuminating whatever it was that caught your eye. Some of the particles from the sun didn’t pass through the glass but essentially bounced off it, allowing you to see your reflection. Why did a certain particle go through the glass, and a certain other particle not?
It can’t be predicted.
Some particles pass through the glass;
Some don’t.
You can determine possibilities,
you can list all kinds of potential outcomes,
but in the end, that’s the best that can be done.
The physicist Werner Heisenberg was the first to name this disturbing truth about the quantum world: you can measure a particle’s location, or you can measure its speed, but you can’t measure both. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, along with breakthroughs from Max Planck and many others, raised countless questions about the unpredictability of the universe on a small scale.
As more and more physicists spent more and more time observing the universe on this incredibly small scale, more truths began to emerge that we simply don’t have categories for, an excellent example of this being the nature of light.
Light is the only constant, unchanging reality—all that curving and bending and shifting happens in contrast to light, which keeps its unflappable, steady course regardless of the conditions. But that doesn’t mean it’s free from some truly mind-bending behavior. Because things in nature are either waves or particles. There are dust particles and sound waves, waves in the ocean and particles of food caught in your friend’s beard. That’s been conventional wisdom for a number of years.
Particles and waves.
One or the other.
