Knowledge Collision

Aristotle was opposed to the idea of a vacuum. He argues both sides of the issue with some amusement in book 4 of his Physics, noting at one point that 'many a little makes a mickle' and that

The Pythagoreans, too, held that void exists and that it enters the heaven itself, which as it were inhales it, from the infinite air. Further it is the void which distinguishes the natures of things, as if it were like what separates and distinguishes the terms of a series. This holds primarily in the numbers, for the void distinguishes their nature.

There's some after math - a frothing vacuum you can slurp from an infinite slurpy.

The big news today included the revving up of the Large Hadron Collider and the sins of the Pope. These I will attempt to connect with Dostoevsky glue.

Galileo delegated the vacuum problem to his able assistant, Torricelli: In suction pumps water will not rise more than 10 meters. Why not more? Galileo and others had posited that a vacuum force produced my pups propelled the water upward. Torricelli figured out that that the governing force was the air pressure pushing up. His experiments proved him right and thus the barometer was born.

Democritus said, "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." But Aristotle rejected empty space and the Catholic Church persisted in the "nature abhors a vacuum" meme, even through the Renaissance.

It was Faraday, without any mathematical training or skills, to speak of, who posited the concept of field: the ability of space to be disturbed because of a source somewhere. A magnetic field acts on iron filings, the action is propagated through a vacuum creating the appearance of action at a distance. Maxwell (his papers published during the American civil war) set the theory to math and showed everything happens at the speed of light (a new concept in those days.) Nobody believed him until Hertz demonstrated the validity of the theory through experiment.

Maxwell's equations were ungainly so Hertz prettied them up to look like this:

E and B represent electric and magnetic fields respectively and the other squiggles represent how the fields flow and swirl. The constant c represents the speed of light.

But the action at a distance must take time to pass through the vacuum via the field. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the experiment of choice for exploring these ideas was the cathode ray tube. Glass blowers would form long tubes and seal metal electrodes into the glass at opposite ends. The air would pumped out (as much as possible) and high voltages would be applied across the electrodes to awe the experimenters with strange glows within the tubes. After painstaking analysis of these experiments under myriad variations all that could be ascertained was the ratio of charge per mass (e/m) of the particles in the cathode rays. It was the cloud chamber that resolved the issue: the particles were tiny parts of atoms...electrons.

Enter the quantum world, where probability governs. In experiments involving quantum mechanics we can replicate everything perfectly...except the result. Because of the central limit theorem, this unpredictability smooths out and looks normal at the human scale. What looks to you like smooth and silky milk flowing from the jug is actually a very fine granular flow of discrete molecules separated by yawning chasms of void. The spooky tunnel effect cannot penetrate the Pauli exclusion principle, making matter impenetrable. To be (un)sure, Bell's Theorem proves that there really is no place to be void in the first place.

The Large Hadron Accelerator (LHA) is a machine designed to penetrate a structure as tiny as the theorized Higgs Boson (about 10-20 meters), a feat requiring 10 Terra electron Volts (TeVs.) The smaller a thing is, the shorter the wavelength of the observing wave and the higher its energy. To see something really small you need to bombard it with a very high frequency particle.

The Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) bombarded protons with electrons and found quarks running around inside. The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) then bombarded the protons with higher energy muons and neutrinos to probe the elusive weak force structure and articulated the interactions of three quarks inside the proton and detected the existence of gluons, carriers of the strong force.

What are the quarks made of? That remains unknown.

A curious phenomenon of the void is that particles pop in and out of existence there. The only rule is that the quantum numbers of these particles must sum to zero.

Hello

First metaphysics. What's that? I don't know, but my daughter took a course in it last term, so I'll ask her. Or, I did ask her, but I forgot what she said. I remember she said that it's probably not what you think it is. It's not physics, for instance. It's where you go after physics is over. And after math too. So we need some room for remediation on those subjects before bounding on into the oblivious.

The modern American is oblivious. He lacks a remembrance of things past and, worse, fails to perceive the truth about what's going on in the first place. I am one of these Americans and, as such, I believe in self-reliance, pulling myself up by my bootstraps and self remediating in all those areas where I fall short - in short, all areas.

Thus, this blog, wherein I will attempt to remediate all that's gone wrong and proclaim righteous natural truths from the library of my flat, which is not so much a flat as it is a ranch house on the flat, low perch of the Coachella Valley, such as it is - a damnable spot from which I will some day out. But, until then, I will amuse myself with ramblings on the metaphysical terrain of remedial polymathy. So there you have it. Cheers.