mahiwaga

The Fool is an auspicious card, depicting potential.

**You are The Fool**

I’ve been reading Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space by Henning Genz which examines the phenomenon that we call the vacuum, which, thanks to quantum mechanics, is a much more interesting subject than you might think.

The Fool is card number zero among the major arcana, also depicting Nothingness. But because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, the vacuum cannot be considered truly empty. Some physicists depict the vacuum as a roiling, chaotic, unpredictable sea of change, poetically named the quantum foam. Ghost particles proliferate then annihilate, preserving the law of conservation of mass and energy. These so called virtual particles pop in and out of existence, usually undetectable. Space as we know it is unrecognizable in the small scale, as quantum fluctuations cause transient tears and holes in the fabric of space-time, and yet space nonetheless appears smooth at a macroscopic level. But in extreme conditions, particularly, relativistic conditions, physicists like Stephen Hawking predict very strange phenomena.

I was first introduced to the notion of the vacuum and quantum foam when I read Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy by Kip Thorne back in the senior year of high school when I had to do a physics presentation. I ended up talking about Chandrasekhar’s limit and the different fates for stars of varying mass. All of the ways a star can die are interesting: white dwarfs, novae, neutron stars—and recently I found out about the possibility of quark stars. But the fate that even non-science people are probably most aware of is the strangest way a star can die, which is to form a black hole.

The study of black holes is likely one of the avenues that will eventually lead to the holy grail of physics: quantum gravity, also known as the grand unified theory, or the theory of everything. Modern physics is a disjointed discipline of two incompatible theories: general relativity, which essentially describes the force of gravity, and quantum mechanics, which describes electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. For the last half-century or so, the most brilliant minds on the planet have struggled with trying to get these two theories to mesh, but so far a solution has proved elusive. The most ballyhooed attempt at reconciling the relativity with quantum mechanics is string theory (and it has an even trendier name: M-theory.) But in many ways, M-theory is not really a theory. So far, it’s just a framework. No testable predictions have been formulated, and as any scientist knows, if you can’t come up with an experiment to test your theory, you’re not anywhere at all.

Anyway, the event horizon of a black hole seems to be a perfect test case for any theory that aims to combine relativity with quantum mechanics. Classically speaking, the reason it’s called a black hole is because neither matter nor radiation can escape its gravitational grasp. Even light, the fastest thing in the universe, is sucked inexorably down into the ill-defined, almost nonsensical concept known as the singularity, an infinitesimal point of infinite mass that is predicted by relativity, but makes no sense whatsoever in quantum mechanics. But that is another mess entirely.

But the weird thing is that Stephen Hawking figured out that black holes should actually give off radiation. And by doing so, they eventually evaporate! The reason is because of virtual particles.

Virtual particles typically come in pairs: a particle and its anti-particle. For example, consider an electron and a positron, particles of equal mass and equal charge, but the charges are of opposite valence: electrons have negative charge, while positrons have positive charge. When these particles collide, they annihilate one another and electromagnetic radiation. These particles are theorized to come into existence and then disappear in time increments basically unmeasurable by our instruments. And no matter how many of these particle/anti-particle combinations pop out of the void, because they always cancel each other out, the laws of conservation of mass and energy are preserved.

But Hawking thought about virtual particle pairs that emerge near the event horizon of a black hole. The particles might pop out of the void with one heading away from the event horizon, and the other into the black hole. The particle heading for the black hole gets sucked into it, never to be seen again in this universe, and therefore, never able to annihilate with its virtual partner. This forces the antiparticle heading away from the black hole to become a real particle. The laws of conservation of mass and energy is preserved because the particle that ended up in the black hole causes the black hole to lose mass and energy. Hence, from the perspective of being outside the event horizon, it looks like the black hole is actually generating radiation, and that this is causing it to evaporate.

In some ways, you can get something from nothing, although in the end, the laws of conservation still hold.

But perhaps what is the most mysterious phenomenon is the origin of the universe itself, the ultimate act of getting something from nothing. It too deals with a singularity, although in reverse. As far as we can tell (and not every scientist agrees) the entire universe seems to have come from an infinitesimal point of infinite mass, expanding inexorably to the 15 billion+ light-year horizons that we can observe, with no signs of stopping.

But how did the singularity come about? (Or are black holes the seeds for baby universes? Do the singularities that are the remnants of dead stars blossom into big bangs that are forever hidden from our eyes behind the point-of-no-return that is the event horizon?)

Why is it that there is more matter than anti-matter? If the universe was the result of a random quantum fluctuation in the vacuum, how did the initial anomaly avoid simply annihilating and returning to nothingness?

Is it all just pure, unbelievable luck? Or maybe intelligent design? Yikes!

One thing I know for sure: never underestimate the power of chaos. That’s the thing that I think creationists/intelligent designers fail to take into account. Chaos can cause unbelievable complexity. That’s essentially what evolution is: random, chaotic events shaping the development of organisms.

Basically, I think that if you believe in luck, then you have to believe in evolution.

Without chaos, everything becomes sterile and predictable, deterministic and fatalistic. Complete order would mean being able to predict the future with utmost certainty. A world that, frankly, wouldn’t need an omnipotent deity to run it. And yet we know that that’s not the universe we live in. We can’t predict what’s going to happen in the next minute, much less the next week, the next year, or the next 15 billion years. Chaos reigns eternal.

From Chaos came Cosmos. From Cosmos, is eternal Chaos.

The universe came from disordered nothingness, and yet the order of the universe is permeated—and maybe even driven—by random chance quantum events like the creation and annihilation of virtual particles.

It sounds like an analog to the Yin and Yang of Taoism.

I think I was meant to be a Discordian.

All hail Eris, Goddess of Disorder.

July cometh. A new year starts.

I still haven’t figured out why academic years start and end when they do.

Today is, I suppose, the exact mid-point of the year. It is six months after January 1, 2007, and six months until January 1, 2008. Midsummer Night.

The moon is full. Since the marine layer has moved in, it’s the only thing you can see in the sky besides the thick ocean fog.

365 days and counting until I’m en route to my destination, whereever that may be. Ideally, I’ll figure that out in another six months, but knowing what I know about my procrastinating nature, I certainly can’t promise anything.

By good fortune, most of the people graduating from my class whom I know relatively well are sticking around. It hasn’t hit me that I won’t see certain people on a regular, scheduled basis.

All endings are a beginning. All beginnings herald endings.

Jörmungandr the World Serpent suddenly pops into my head.

Is it mere coincidence that he is the son of Loki, the pre-eminent trickster god, frequently equated with the Native American god Raven?

Such things seem so improbable to be merely chance. And yet, the very power of chaos is to make the improbable actual.

So who is to say?

I will start missing folks acutely when I don’t see them around anymore.

The last three years seem to have gone by so fast, although only in retrospect. (Because God only knows how many late nights I stayed awake, fretting about when the sun would come out and relieve me of my awful duties.) I expect that time will continue to seem to speed up as I get older. There must be something in the brain and the body to cause this terrible amount of pain, and frankly, I’m not all that convinced that once this happens, the person will not be subjected to neediness and resource allocation.

As Robert Heinlein once said, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.