The universe is big. Also very old. Current estimates are about 13.7 billion years. The question is, of course, what happened all those billions of years ago? The leading theory is that it started from a big bang, but still no one knows how all the matter and energy for the big bang got there in the first place. Did it just appear out of nowhere? That makes as much sense as any other explanation.
The universe is a crazy place. It has some crazy laws that humans have only recently determined. Quantum mechanics, for example. When a photon has two possible paths, the path it takes isn’t determined until it’s observed. So until someone detects it, it went down both paths and none at the same time. It’s almost like, there’s random to the universe, but the universe doesn’t like things being random, so it’s just like, “I’ll wait to see if I actually need to determine which way this photon went. Right now it doesn’t matter.” The universe is lazy, really. But who could blame it; it has a lot of work to do. You, know, making sure the forces work at the same strength, keeping the speed of light constant; that sort of thing.
Speaking of which, the fundemental forces: what’s up with that? So there are four, right? Gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But for some reason, gravity is a lot weaker than the other three. Like, a lot weaker. For example, take a small magnent, and lift another magnent with it: the magnetism of that one small magnent just overcame the gravitational force of the entire Earth!
And another thing: physics right now is, and has been for a while, at a bit of a standstill. There are two leading theories of the universe: Relitivity and Quantum Mechanics. Basically quantum mechanics explains the behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles, and relitivity explains everything bigger than that. And of course, the two theories can’t be reconciled with each other. So people are making up new theories to try to explain this. Some of these theories involve extra demensions in order to work.
Okay, think about that for a second: we’re famillar with three dimensions in everyday life. Okay, four if you want to include time, but some of the string theories out there call for ten or even more dimensions of space. That’s seven more than we’re aware of! For that to work, the dimesions would have to be curled up on themselves, so small that only subatomic particles can move through them. It’s like those old video games where when you walk off one side of the screen, you appear on the other side. It’d be like that. One superstring theory I read calls for the existance of an extra temporal dimesion! That’s right, two dimensions of time. Don’t ask me how that works.
I for one, think these theories are kind of ineligant. Why add extra dimensions if you can’t even detect them? We have no idea if those exist at the moment. The musician in me, however, likes the idea of the universe being made out of tiny strings that vibrate at different frequencies to make up everything. I’ll have some more on some of this stuff later. The crazy thing about the universe right now, though, really, is that we think we know so much about it, but any day now, some new theory could come along to blow all this out of the water. It’s happened many times before.
