Time 3

Why do I know this? Well, believe it or not I’ve worked on a physics experiment before, not cosmology but still. It was a particle physics experiment. And I chiefly worked on electronics. But we had a problem (well we had a lot of problems but this was a big one). The timing was off. We were trying to synchronize the computer and the electronics, but they were off by a couple of milliseconds. We can’t (at least I can) imagine what a millisecond feels like. But it was a big problem. We were getting different amounts of data in different sets. This threw the whole experiment off. And it was just a matter of milliseconds. That is way all this crazy timing stuff in important, it’s really important. And I know for a fact that there are other experiments where the timing counts even more and even smaller. Nanoseconds matter, they really do!

Time 2

I say it is arbitrary because, like all other forms of measurement we define it. We say, ok here, this is a second. For a long time (far beyond what my lifetime should have been) everybody knew time was arbitrary. Only in big cities did anybody have any right to say their time was right. Most of us, myself included had no way of measuring the time outside of the church bells. I once knew a man who claimed that the Babylonians were far more intelligent about their time system and so he followed theirs. Instead of 24 parts he divided the day up into 60 and I daresay he was never on time for anything (even his own funeral, but don’t ask how that happened). But we had absolutely NO concept of what a second was. Now everybody knows what a second is. Oh don’t worry I’m not going to start lecturing; I’m old enough to know that nobody ever listens. In fact I do see a need for things to speed up. The definition of a second (and you know, I keep waiting for somebody to change the second and make time run on intervals of 10 just like meters and liters) may be arbitrary, but it is also very necessary. Physics, at very least, needs it.

Time 1

Hey! I’m not dead (yet). But like I said our internet got messed up and then we had more snow and it got even more messed up. But this time it took a while to fix it. Yes, I could have gone to the library, but hey what can I say, I’m old. Anyway my posting should be regular again. And I think I’ve found a new topic. That tangent I went on during the Randall series got me thinking about time again. It’s always been something I’d hoped to study so I checked out a book about it. It’s a book called “Faster” by James Gleick. It was in with the other science books but from what I’ve read there’s a lot besides science in it. For example in the first chapter he records his visit to the Directorate of Time. Yes, there is such a place and it’s part of the United States Government under the Department of Defense. They make time. Well, I should say they set it. They, along with the time input from other nations set the global time. They have this system of atomic clocks (don’t they have those in watches now?), and they consult each other and form a consensus and send that time to the global time … place, just outside of pairs, and then the input from other places comes in and they form a consensus and that’s the time. It’s amazingly arbitrary.

GOD! ?

sorry i didn't post yesterday there was a lot of snow the internet was in and out. well i'm done with Randall's maze so now you guys have got to tell me what you want me to talk about any suggestions. anybody? anybody at all???? in the meantime here are some more pictures. have fun!

Randall's maze rapup

Ok so after that pathetic excuse for a post yesterday let’s see if I can come up with something more intelligent to say today. And today’s topic is superstring theory. Oh boy. Ok so instead of particles looking like little pool balls we say they are tiny strings. And let’s say they can oscillate in different ways, just like a guitar (or for a more accurate analogy and a way cooler interment, the one stringed Chinese Duxianqin) to make different notes. Each of these notes turns into a different fundamental particle such as a quark or an electron. So superstring theory says that the whole world is made out of nothing but strings. If you think about it this way all the issues with bringing together quantum mechanics and general relativity, which is notoriously hard to do. Extra dimensions come in when you look at the math. The theory doesn’t really make sense if you only have 3 spatial dimensions but the math works out perfectly if you have for example, 10. This may sound like a crackpot theory but only time and some more investigation will be able to say.

Randall's maze rapup

And now for our second set of applications, Large extra dimensions and the Randall–Sundrum model. Both of these theories attempt to explain the weakness of gravity in comparison with the other forces, but I think I shall summarize them separately. So first let’s look at Large extra dimensions, which is apparently also known as the ADD model. It goes something like this: all the normal laws of the weak force, the strong force and electromagnetism only work in the normal 3 spatial dimensions. But gravity works in more than that I’m not sure how many but more. As for the Randall–Sundrum model, I haven’t the faintest clue what any of this means so I think I shall take the cheap way out and just quote Wikipedia. "In physics, Randall–Sundrum models (also called 5-dimensional warped geometry theory) imagine that the real world is a higher-dimensional Universe described by warped geometry. More concretely, our Universe is a five-dimensional anti de Sitter space and the elementary particles except for the graviton are localized on a (3 + 1)-dimensional brane or branes.” Yeah…I’ve got no clue what that means, but there you have it.

Randall's maze rapup

First Kaluza-Klein theory. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand at all but I will try to explain it best I can. It’s a theoretical model that Theodor Kaluza came up with in the early 20th century. It was meant to take the new model of gravity (Einstein’s general relativity rather than Newton’s model) and combine it with electromagnetism (electronic fields and magnetic fields and light and the like). Kaluza, who was German, figure that if you have 4 spatial dimensions you combine gravity and electromagnetism by looking at electric fields and magnetic fields differently. Just like gravity is curved in the 3 normal spatial dimensions, the fields are a result of curving in the extra dimension. I have no idea how this allows one to combine gravity and electromagnetism but whatever. People had some problems with this extra dimensions stuff and so along came the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein who said that we hadn’t know about the extra dimension was because it was very small and curled up really tight. This (then very ) weird theory fell out of favor but of course when string theory came along it was looked at again and is now seen as a sort of predecessor of string theory.