Pushing the Boundaries of Science Like Pushing a Vacuum

As far as division of labour around the house goes, my wife and I each have our own respective duties, and one of mine is vacuuming the house.  I kind of enjoy mindless activities like this one, because it allows me to shut off my brain for the better part of thirty minutes.  But with the mind unfocused, it is at once free to wander; I find that I do some of my deepest thinking while under the hypnotic trance of the vacuum's purr.

Once, while seeking out lose dirt and dust-bunnies with my trusty dust-sucker, my mind began to wander even further than normal.  I began to see clear parallels between my search for dust around the house and humanity's pursuit of science in general.  Before I go any further, let me assure you that I realize that only one of these two endeavours is of great importance, and it is not the one that involves me pulling out the couch, cleaning behind it, and pushing it back.

Dust around the house tends to accumulate in the places we encounter the least.  Sections of the home in plain sight are relatively free of such particles, as these areas are well-travelled.  The dust gets displaced to a new spot due to the relative motion of air around it.  If this new spot also sees regular activity, the dust will inevitably move yet again.  It will only settle permanently in a quiet, unused spot within the room (usually behind something heavy, to the vacuumer's chagrin).  The phenomenon is much like snow on a high-traffic ski slope, which tends to build up on the two outer edges.

How then is vacuuming like scientific advancement?  Imagine that each piece of dust to be collected is like a scientific mystery to be solved.  Much like the loose dirt that we wish to suck up, the vast majority of the mysteries associated with the physical world are well-hidden - that is, unless we search for them explicitly, we will not even know that they exist.

Each room within the house may be thought of as a scientific pillar, each with its own particular sort of unsolved mysteries waiting to be uncovered.  We could have physics in the family room, chemistry in the kitchen, biology in the bathroom, and so on.

In the early going of modern science, the house was a complete mess throughout.  As almost no one was taking part in scientific research, dirt was evenly distributed.  When Isaac Newton decided to begin to clean the house, he began with what he interacted with most on a daily basis - that which was the most visible.  In the late seventeenth century, he uncovered the basic principles of mechanics (the motion of bodies) and geometric optics (the behaviour of visible light).

As the study of physics moved along, research in other fields of science began.  Before long, each room in the house was being cleaned in parallel.  The science research landscape was a busy one indeed during the twentieth century. 

As the dust settles, and the twenty-first century soldiers on, we may look at the house and conclude that it is clean.  Scientific principles may be invoked to explain just about everything we typically interact with.  That which was most obvious, that which presented itself, has been sucked up by the scientific research community.  All that remains to be discovered in the present science landscape is that which is not in plain sight.

What is Time?

Most people are aware that we live in a Universe in which we observe four dimensions.

The three dimensions of space allow us to see three-dimensional shapes, like cubes and spheres.  If we lived in a world of two-dimensional space, we would instead see squares and circles with zero thickness.  Stephen Hawking explained long ago that such a two-dimensional space could not support life, as a two-dimensional being could not both eat and defecate.  A shape with two openings could not hold itself together, and would fall apart or bleed to death (try to draw it and you will get the point).

Of course, the fourth dimension of our Universe is time.  Time is an essential ingredient in the space-time continuum.  Without the dimension of time, the 3D shapes we see would not change.  Everything would be steady state, and there would be no need for the word transient.  Put simply, what is time, but the entity preventing everything from occurring at once? 

The Relativity of Religion

On June 30, 1905, Albert Einstein proposed that the Universe worked much different than the way anyone alive had supposed it did.  In short, Einstein’s theory of special relativity claims that space and time are not absolute quantities, but are rather malleable, relative scales of measurement.  This astonishing statement, which has not been disproven in the 105 years that have passed since its inception, should boggle your mind unless you have been aware of it for some time.  As I tell my Modern Physics students, if special relativity does not disturb you to the core the first time you hear it, it is because you did not really hear it.  The theory, which has attained law status, goes against everything we observe in our day to day lives.  For this reason, special relativity, which shows that classical physics only applies perfectly to relatively stationary objects, went unnoticed for so long. 

It should be noted that Einstein did not notice that time dilates for two objects moving at relative speeds, he just had a strange intuition that light was special, and wished to understand it better.  His journey towards this understanding required a certain leap of faith.  When Einstein was on this historic path of discovery, he told his friends that he wanted to get inside the head of God, to which they replied, “Could you tell him to pick my 6/49 numbers?"