Weekend musing-edge of knowledge, except of EC of course-lol:
I am an uneducated amature, so this sort of thing really rings my bell as I had no idea! I seached the world, all my life for the miraculous. I found nothing, as Bertrand Russel said; and only in physics have I ever found real magic, and it is all magic which is why it facinates me so much.
Once one gets past existentialism, phisosophy gets tedious with sequential logic. But physics is full of magic. It is all magic. Something out of nothing type of magic.
From Quantum Zoo: "However--and this is the key thing noticed by the 16 year old Einsteine--Maxwells equations have something important to say about a frozen electromagnetic wave, one in which the electric and magnetic fields never grow or fade but remain motionless forever. No such thing exists. A staionary electromagnetic wave is an impossibility.
Einstein, with his precocious question, had put his finger on a paradox, or inconsistency, in the laws of physics. If you were able to catch up with a beam of light, you would see a stationary electromagnetic wave, which is impossible. Since seeing imossible things is, well, impossible, you can never catch up with a light beam! In other words, the thing that is uncatchable-the thing that plays the role of infinite speed in our universe---is light.
This is why my younger daughter called light "like god"; and why my son in law said he mused for days when he discoverd this. |
