Cool Sciency Stuff That I Don’t Get

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of stuff on Youtube. While my desire to play games is dulled, I need to do something with my free time. Something that isn’t writing. So yeah, Youtube time it is. But I’ve not been sitting here, watching any old bollocks. I’ve been watching sciency things. And I’d be lying if I said I understood it all.

So what sciency things have I been watching?

Mostly quantum stuff. You know, the building blocks of the universe. But damn is this stuff confusing. I mean, it’s what the universe is made of, of course it’s not going to be easy to follow. There’s so much weird, cool stuff. And it all conflicts with the science we already have.

Yeah, we basically have two types of reality. Stuff that is super big and stuff that is super tiny. We’re in the type of reality that is macroscopic. We already have plenty of nice, universal laws and all that. But things break down completely once you scale down to beyond atoms. Things like gravity kinda stop working. Or, at least, they are mismatched or something. What we need is something to bridge the gap between macroscopic and microscopic things, and scientists are still working on it. The biggest thing blocking our way is gravity, which simply doesn’t work like it should when shrunk down to tiny, tiny sizes.

What I’ve also learned is that the Double Slit Experiment fucks with physics as we know it. Basically, the double slit experiment shines light towards a wall with two slits in it, and because of the light waves interfering with each other, you get this nice, stripy pattern, 50% of the stripes are lit and the other half are dark. But the weird thing is, even if you send light one photon at a time, you get the exact same pattern. As if the photon knows where it’s supposed to land. You can repeat the experiment with all sorts of molecules and quantum thingies and the same thing happens.

As to how this happens? No one is really sure. But two of the potential ideas about the experiment involve multiple universes. The idea is that all possibilities occur until one possibility is observed and the other timelines disappear. Or there’s an infinite number of different universes and we’re just in one where a photon went through a specific slit.

Another thing that I think is insane is, well, quarks. They’re the things that make electrons, protons and neutrons, the things that make up atoms.And they come in six flavours: up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange; and they are held together by gluons. We normally don’t really see these, and they are insanely small. Apparently there is the possibility that a Strange Star exists, a star which has crushed down so much thanks to gravity, that all the neutrons in the star break down and turn into strange quarks.

But quarks, as insanely small as they are, aren’t the smallest things in existence. In fact, there’s a minimum length in the universe. The Planck Length, alongside Planck Time, are absolute minimums, while Planck Temperature is an absolute maximum. The numbers these names represent are so insanely small/large that nothing even gets close to them. Past these minuscule values, physics breaks down pretty much entirely, and we can’t know what happens past them.

Oh and there’s one last thing. A false vacuum. Something that can annihilate a universe. And doesn’t have much to do with vacuums that suck. The basic idea is that the universe is somewhat stable currently, and things are in their lowest energy states. But it’s potentially possible to reach an even lower energy state, and that would cause the universe to start being destroyed as reality breaks down. Or something like that. At least we don’t need to be scared of it.

I think I need to take a nap now. Too much science for me.