| | Oh look, it's absurdly late and I'm blogging instead of sleeping.
Again.
We really need to stop meeting this way.
But since I'm up and you will be in a few hours, I'll just keep writing and while I'm doing my final final, ya'll can catch up on what I've been doing.
Which is nothing.
Well, there has been a little bit of studying and an even littler bit of writing. And I've been catching up with an old friend I haven't talked to in a few months (HI BIBEKA!) and I've been reading.
It's a Neal Stephenson novel. He writes long, complex science fiction novels. I'm not sure if it's any good, but it has Ideas in it, and that's really what's important.
The book itself is about parallel worlds, a favorite playground of novelists and drunken physicists. He talks about why a particle's motions are only affected when they're observed. The theory I've heard most, in dumbed down layman terms that I can understand, is that a particle exists in two different states until it's been observed and then it settles into a single state. Stephenson's theory (which I assume he lifted from a real theory) is that the particle isn't really in flux until observation, rather that there's interference from parallel worlds in which the particle spins one way and the particle spins t'other. It's only upon observation that it can be determined which of the two potential parallel worlds that the particle is spinning in and the inteference is lifted. This makes some kind of sense to me. I've always had trouble believing that the universe awaits our keen eyes before it makes a decision and the former theory seems very humancentric.
But then, I really don't get the math involved. Undoubtedly it's infinitely more complex than that.
But like I mentioned a few (dozen) posts back. There were some scientists that said we had fixed the termination date of the Universe by OBSERVING it. I think I much prefer Stephenson's Theory. The Universe was always going to end when it was, but observation has merely determined which potential outcome the cosmos is going to be facing.
I've probably butchered the concepts something awful, but if you want to poke around the theories in their purer forms go here for a list of sources Stephenson drew on to write his book.
Time to wander away from the computer a bit.
Dylan
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| | Posted 5/2/2009 4:01 AM - 24 Views - 4 eProps - 9 comments
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