Uncertain Principles

Now's the time to sit back and see how far we've come. This image - and the post behind it - hark across the 100 years to pass since quantum mechanics came into our realm, when a handful of minds cooked up analogies from arithmetic that would change the course of history, eventually bringing us the LHC and God Particles.

Fifty years ago Hawking and Penrose were delving into territory that many found too mystical to swallow. They were looking at black holes full of information paradox, and figuring out how a singularity could work. They wanted to know what lay at the back of physics, beyond the point where physics didn't exist any more, and using that familiar brickbat the Photon, they plunged into the event horizon to find that it might not look at all as they'd imagined. In fact looking at it in the first place needed the help of photons. ​https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54439150 

Having just won the Nobel, Penrose deserves a bit of credit. At 89, he's well worthy of the accolade, but his thoughts still meet high walls in the halls of academia, where consciousness is a dirty word and anything alluding to it is Woo. The brickbats of Light in any other context would illuminate a lot of ground, physical and metaphysical, were it to be given the time of day, which presently it's not.

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Cora is a woman who also delves into black holes. Her thoughts on the matter, while equally evocative, seem to provoke more than elucidate since a tendency of the human mind is to resist change, particularly within itself where illusions quietly incubate carbuncles of untruths.

Unknown is not untrue, it's simply unproven to be so; in time it would be natural for Nature to unburden herself of Truth; she may already have done in a quark teamed up naturally with Beauty.

What we do not know is more tantalising than what we do know, for we are explorers by nature, seeking answers of Creator while thinking for ourselves, questing for a path of sense mapped by a heart given to follow. That each of those quests is individual comes as no surprise, for we know about uniqueness of snowflakes and sand. We know that there will be asymmetry, for there is a difference, however small and imperceptible, between everything that exists in relation to everything else. Here, uncertainty comes into its own. This is a principle preventing symmetry from ordering the Universe.

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The principles of physics are on uncertain ground. Brick walls are everywhere, often in infinities, plaguing maths made of symbols that are not enough, not any more, to describe the incredible energy flux that continuously permeates the quantum world. The state of matter is under attack from waves that threaten to be everything, looped in strings or turning gravity to vertigo. The Uncertainty Principle needs another visit. But it's not in any rush, even if we are.

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