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... Understanding is a journey that might start here.
My aim in the articles that follow is to explain in plain language some of the observations we might make about the world around us. Already I am in trouble because people have quite different ideas about what “plain language” is. The language scientists use in their specialties takes many words in common usage and restricts their meaning to something very specific. Perhaps the best I can hope for is to make these articles understandable to most people who are curious about the world around them – especially I hope to excite the curiosity of young people who might be interested in pursuing higher education in science. If the language I use is not clear, I assure you it is unintentional. I am hoping to produce an explanation of common observations that is accurate as far as it goes but avoids the thicket of mathematical details that underlies that accuracy.
Science tells us the universe it is made up of tiny bits of matter that have mass and radiation that has no mass, existing together in a weird blend of space and time. The interactions of these things account for everything that we observe in the universe. This view has been amazingly productive in explaining how the universe works and making predictions that later observations verify with great precision. To come to even a partial understanding of this view of the universe requires a lot of study and some intuition that is very rare among humans. God bless those folks who work in this realm for they have on average made life quite comfortable and interesting for many of the rest of us. They also have contributed some things that are quite threatening and alarming, but perhaps we should not blame them for the harmful application of their gifts.
The scientific view excels in getting to the details of inanimate objects and their interactions. The vast majority of the universe follows the rules discovered by science. One area yet to be explained is the action of animate matter that apparently makes willful changes in the universe. For instance my sitting in my easy chair on this Sunday morning and poking at the keys on my laptop. Science has at present no way to predict or even explain that. Still I suspect many scientists, based on the success of the scientific method to date, believe that explanation will be coming along any day now, or certainly someday. Be that as it may, neither science nor the practical explanation of the nature of things I will propose shortly can currently explain the behavior of thinking animate objects.
My inspiration to attempt this came from the introduction to the famous Feynman Lecture series of physics books. Richard Feynman began with the one scientific discovery that he would pass on if all others were lost, the notion that all material objects are made of atoms. I think in writing about this I will try to build from small to large things. With that in mind we will try to build an atom, the building blocks of all the things we see in the world.
I am going to try to avoid complicated mathematical expressions but we are going to looking at some very large and very small number in the articles that follow. To keep the numbers from taking up whole lines of text with zeros I will adopt the following convention. The number 1,500,000.0 for example would be written 1.5e6, meaning shift the decimal point six places to the right filling in zeros as necessary. The number 0.000001.5 would be written 1.5e-6, meaning shift the decimal point six places to the left, filling in zeros as necessary.
James D. Jones, March 12, 2015
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