by Beta » Fri Jun 25, 2010 2:45 am
I've sometimes compared atoms to bells. A bell has a characteristic set of frequencies, and will resonate if hit with sound of a frequency close to one of its own. A loud crash will make a bell hum a little, at its own pitch. So the sun hits the atmosphere with a big loud chord of WHITE! and oxygen atoms all over the sky go *blue* *blue* *blue*.
Reading about the "center of the universe"question, it occurs to me that the trunk of a tree might be a good analogy. The bark of the tree is the present-day universe. The wood inside represents the past, where the bark used to be. The tree (and the bark) began long ago, when the bark was somehow all at the center. The bark is getting bigger with time, scars and marks are getting farther apart, but where is the center of the bark?
Richard Feynman had a beautiful analogy to describe physics: imagine the gods are playing chess and every now and then we get to see part of the board, and we're trying to learn the rules just from that. We notice the basic patterns first, like the tendency of the number of pieces to diminish over the course of a game. Later we notice more subtle patterns; for example, if at one point in a game there's only one black bishop on the board, and it's on a black square, then if we see the board later we will see either no black bishop or a black bishop on a black square. This may lead us to a theory of how a bishop moves around. Then after seeing glimpses of millions of games, we see the impossible: there was only one black bishop, it was on a black square, then later in the same game we see that there's one black bishop on the board and it's on a white square. So no matter how much we loved our theory about bishops, it was wrong (or at least incomplete) and we have to accept that fact and try again to figure out what's going on.
I've sometimes compared atoms to bells. A bell has a characteristic set of frequencies, and will resonate if hit with sound of a frequency close to one of its own. A loud crash will make a bell hum a little, at its own pitch. So the sun hits the atmosphere with a big loud chord of [size=150]WHITE![/size] and oxygen atoms all over the sky go [size=50]*blue* *blue* *blue*[/size].
Reading about the "center of the universe"question, it occurs to me that the trunk of a tree might be a good analogy. The bark of the tree is the present-day universe. The wood inside represents the past, where the bark used to be. The tree (and the bark) began long ago, when the bark was somehow all at the center. The bark is getting bigger with time, scars and marks are getting farther apart, but where is the center of the bark?
Richard Feynman had a beautiful analogy to describe physics: imagine the gods are playing chess and every now and then we get to see part of the board, and we're trying to learn the rules just from that. We notice the basic patterns first, like the tendency of the number of pieces to diminish over the course of a game. Later we notice more subtle patterns; for example, if at one point in a game there's only one black bishop on the board, and it's on a black square, then if we see the board later we will see either no black bishop or a black bishop on a black square. This may lead us to a theory of how a bishop moves around. Then after seeing glimpses of millions of games, we see the impossible: there was only one black bishop, it was on a black square, then later in the same game we see that there's one black bishop on the board and [i]it's on a white square[/i]. So no matter how much we loved our theory about bishops, it was wrong (or at least incomplete) and we have to accept that fact and try again to figure out what's going on.