The Contemporary Mad Scientist
The blog where I talk a lot about the state of society and post some of my work.

Where Science Breaks Down

I recently spotted a book titled “The Trouble with Physics” and it reminded me of some trouble with physics of my own. Our physics has come a long way since the days of Newtonian mechanics – we’re now working on “string theory” and the book (seems to) analyze string theory and poke holes in it. I was never a big fan of string theory. I’m still learning the Newtonian stuff, but plenty comes downwind from the theoretical physicists.

I have my own point to add: what if the next big step is the hardest? My thought involves the supernatural. My musings about my fictional universe have come about and started affecting the way I view the real one. I realize that many things belong in fantasy, but I hope that the following is a rational point.

There’s been some talk recently about dark energy and matter, things which are “hidden” but still fundamentally “tied” to the universe. I’m not too sure about dark energy and matter, but one thing that interests me is the possibility of said unseen but coexistent energies. What I mean by these terms is that there could be types of energy and matter which do not obviously interact with the ones we’re familiar with, hence “unseen,” but still interact. If they didn’t interact with our world, they would not be relevant. So to be “tied” requires that they affect us. And by affecting us, I am referring to the changing of unseen energy to a seen one – events in the tangible consist of one energy changing into another, and it obeys conservation of mass and energy. Here, “energy” is very generic, something else might happen but it would be even stranger. But an unseen energy only rarely naturally transfers and in strange ways – like lightning vs. electricity. It takes a long time to discover what is truly at work.

If there is no way to control the energy, unlike electricity, it is not useful to us. More importantly, it is far more difficult to explain how it works. But suppose in order to control such etheric transfers, we need existing etheric transfers! And here’s where the magic comes in. A working “spell” is needed to create other spells. Their rarity makes it difficult to find them, and also difficult to learn about them. Also, the exact transfer probability may be different depending on location but it may not be obvious why. There may be physical setups which increase the likelihood, but we’re not looking for them. The “dark energy” events could be such transfers, which are more likely to occur outside of galaxies (and the presence of matter). This could also mean that the minor details of physics might be slightly different in other star systems – we would never notice. This means that we cannot assume that the laws we observe here correlate 100% with the rest of the universe.

I used to think astronomy was cool, but again I was never really a believer. The problem I see now is that everything about the night sky has to be collected from light. Gravity waves are still on hold (could indicate that our solar system turns them into ether). The properties about outer space are extrapolated from physics on the ground, such as redshift, and black body radiation. But anything could be affecting the image on its way here! Imagine that we live in a giant, ellipsoidal red filter which forces us to conclude that only red light comes from space and that space is warped according to the ellipsoid’s distortion properties. But we have no immediate way of knowing that the filter exists. Obviously we see much more than red light. But if that’s all we see, how can we know we’re missing something? Light exists in a range of frequencies which we can generate on earth, and we can figure out what the range is. But we can only see light. My theory is applied similarly, but there are things other than light.

These ideas really throw a spanner in the works. But in order to advance science, we have to acknowledge that we may not be able to see everything. We have to acknowledge that the really important phenomena might be the rarest. For everyone else – we have to acknowledge that we cannot push our ideas onto the universe and expect them to be true, like what the string theory’s turned in to. We have to listen to the subtle hints the universe gives us, and what I’m saying is that the universe yells the obvious and whispers the important.

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