What happens to a white rock when you throw it into the Red Sea?

It gets wet.

Classical Physics

Well, it was funny when I was eleven years old. But it got me to thinking about rocks (actually, it was the other way around, but this makes a better intro) ...

You see, most of my career, I worked in the mental health field. Much of it was in direct service to folks dealing with debilitating illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, problems specific to their brains. At different times, I worked in a state hospital and in a community mental health center where I witnessed all manner of effects of these conditions.

Quantum Mechanics

After some years, I became intrigued by so-called normal thought processes, as opposed to the troubled thought processes of those with whom I worked in Mental Health. Finally, I came to realize that there really was no such thing as pure rational thought, in that all thinking was heavily influenced by emotions.

Relativity

Truth be told, I pretty much suspect that thinking and feeling are companion functions of the same brain-based mental systems; one doesn't really occur without the other. But I've ranted about that elsewhere in my blogs, so I won't get into it again here.

Let's just say that these photos represent my approach to thinking about physics without actually ... uh, how to say this? ... without actually thinking about physics, I guess. Maybe I'll call it quantum thinking because ... well, just because. If you have to ask, then maybe you shouldn't.

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Photo credits, from top: Ajith on flickr; publicdomainpictures.net; ibid.

String theory in a nutshell

In acknowledging my Second Grade-level comprehension of particle physics, I was awestruck with the string theory explanation provided in a Kurzgesagt video on YouTube.

Kurzgesagt combines the German terms kurz (koorts) and gesagt (gay-SAHGT), literally, "briefly said," into a compound word which translates handily into the English idiom, "in a nutshell."

As a YouTube channel, Kurzgesagt examines a very wide range 

of science-related topics in a generally elemental, simplified, and brief format, often with tongue-in-cheek humor. That jocularity includes their penchant to "try to destroy the universe at least once every few months," as stated (at 05:50) in their video, The Most Efficient Way to Destroy the Universe – False Vacuum, one of several blackly gleeful videos in their series on universal annihilation.

More on topic, in their video, String Theory Explained – What is The True Nature of Reality?, Kurzgesagt laid out what was, for me, at least, the clearest explanation of the literal minutiae of particle physics. It was probably beneficial that I had also viewed their video on the makeup of elementary particles, What is Something?, the day before.

I might just be ready for Third Grade.

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Outing myself: I am a time traveler.

I am from the past.

DeLorean Time Machine

But then, so is everyone else. We are all from the past. Yesterday. Last Thursday. A year ago. Or maybe 1949, my personal time travel limit. Possibly 1948, depending on your views of fetal development. Or perhaps much, much earlier, depending on the likelihood of reincarnation.

H. G. Wellsian Time Machine

In any event, we are all literally (and I mean literally in the literal sense) traveling through time. Even more, we're doing it the hard way: we're traveling through space-time. So, not only are we having to move along a linear time line at a sixty seconds to the minute clip 24/7, but we're also covering vast distances on a spinning globe while orbiting on a ninety-three million mile radius, and at the same time whirling around the outer reaches of a stellar spiral arm of a galaxy which, itself, is traveling at an ever-accelerating cosmic velocity! Just accounting for the earth's rotation and our orbit around the sun, you're moving at over 67,000 miles per hour and at 3,600 seconds per hour, even if you're sitting in your recliner at home.

My Time Machine

We're not only time travelers, we're space travelers, to boot.

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I get it!

Again! It's happened again! I just figured out something that's had me stumped for years: the difference between wattage and amperes and voltage. (Hey, I didn't say it was a difficult concept, just that I'd always had trouble with it.)

Volts are like, uh ... you know, like how much. And amps are like, well, sort'a like how much, too. And if you, um ... take pi times the square root of the hypotenuse ... or something ... you get watts, I think. (I didn't say I could explain it, just that I figured it out. For myself. It's personal. Very private. I'm sure you understand)

OK, let's look at it like this; it's more familiar territory - -

Take two bottles of the same kind of booze. Just to avoid confusion, we'll say it's rye whiskey. One bottle is 80 proof (meaning 40% alcohol), the other is 100 proof (50% alcohol).

- Volts -

The proof amount is the voltage.

- Amps - 

How hard you're slugging
it down is the amperage.

- Watts -

And the effect it has

on you is the wattage.

Works for me.

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Breakthrough

Were I in the midst of a religious meditation, I might have referred to it as a revelation or an epiphany. But I wasn't.

I was watching a PBS Digital Studios video on YouTube entitled, The Speed of Light is NOT About Light. And, at about 03:37 in that vid, triggered by the comment, "We don't measure magnetic field, we measure its effect," some very elementary physics concepts clicked into place for me; I actually felt a wave of relief wash over me. It was eerily similar to an experience I once had in a graduate statistics class when the prof, during his lecture, reformulated a hypothesis which instantly resolved what had been, for me, a week of confusion and growing desperation.

Look at it this way ....

But, as usual, I'm not really writing about physics. Rather I'm writing about how I experience its esoterica. In fact, I'm not sure I could even define what concepts I found to be suddenly more clear. All I know is that, over the course of a few seconds, what the presenter was talking about began to make more sense and some terminology took on new meaning—at least for me. And all because of a unicorn pony on rollerblades.

In any event, I highly recommend the PBS Digital Studios channels for your consideration.

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