There have been some interesting weeks intersecting the personal timeline recently, during which I've had cause to look at a few things from a fresh perspective and one of those perspective-reflecting moments found me in front of YouTube watching this: The God Particle: the Higgs Boson, which is a three-minute introduction to the Standard Model, and how the Higgs fits into the equation. Higgs isn't just a (theoretical) particle, it's also a Field in its own right, proposed by Peter Higgs among others and leading to the existence of the Large Hadron Collider. And when I'd had a look at this three-minute animation which was lightly eye-opening to my non-scientific mind, I went on to find this: Stargazers Nation video, which is longer but has an interesting concept it repeats through the programme, which again is fairly simplistic, and having forgiven the authors for not being able to spell Neutrino properly, you can skip to 9 minutes 36 seconds to get the complete framework of quark systems and relationships, after which the Intro is repeated and you can go round the cycle again. When you've watched these, I suggest a strong coffee and a reflection on how your own relationships work.
Behind the pic is a lecture by Dr Don Lincoln (Fermilab) on Quark-Gluon plasma (with a neat 47 second intro) lasting 6 minutes 35 seconds.
When I first saw the animation of gluons flicking between quarks to change their colours, I thought about the kind of resonances that have been setting themselves up in my own relationships recently. A lot more synchronous activity has been occurring in the past few months than I've ever noticed before, and there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that our DNA, far from being fixed at birth, is subject to continuous changes as we go through life. So when your partner or relative or friend fires something at you, like a look or a few words or even something virtual like a text, you change colour. You might have been feeling a bit blue before they fired that interaction at you, or you might unexpectedly get a flash of their red rage. Whatever the transition, it's a transition, and this led me back to thinking about what I learned a while ago about transformers. The only really important thing I learned about transformers a while ago was that they're important.
Yesterday I went into a bit more detail, to learn about something called 'induction'. Essentially, a transformer makes energy just by existing. 'Source' current enters the first set of windings wrapped around a core (often shaped like an E) and as the current whizzes around, it gets passed electromagnetically to the second set of windings around the other core (there are always two cores that fit together). Electronics Tutorials gives the basic principle with pictures and everything. My picture, selected from Google Images, is where these magical objects are made.
Now it seems to me that wherever I look, anything to do with electro-magnetism or quantum mechanisms has some kind of in-your-face obvious correlation with human relationships. Once I'd had a peek at what transformers were from the inside, it wasn't long before a discussion ran up against the possibility that the heart acts just as a transformer does, in taking energy from source surroundings and transforming it into the energy we put out to the world from within ourselves. This might seem obvious on reflection, especially given that strong coffee, but in the scientific world, nobody really seems to be thinking like this just yet.
Now it seems to me that wherever I look, anything to do with electro-magnetism or quantum mechanisms has some kind of in-your-face obvious correlation with human relationships. Once I'd had a peek at what transformers were from the inside, it wasn't long before a discussion ran up against the possibility that the heart acts just as a transformer does, in taking energy from source surroundings and transforming it into the energy we put out to the world from within ourselves. This might seem obvious on reflection, especially given that strong coffee, but in the scientific world, nobody really seems to be thinking like this just yet.
Thinking about quark interactions via gauge boson carriers is along the same kind of lines, looking at an analogy of how human relationships work and why there is a constant flux in our interactions that changes seemingly without any choice of our own being involved. Could the gauge boson be responsible for the choices we make in our communicative processes? Could the entity we like to think of as 'God' be the Higgs Field, after all?
On more occasions than any of us would like to count, we've come across (or been involved in) discussions where science and religion create a kind of murky water where both sides agree on the reluctant agreement that there are differences to be agreed upon, and this kind of quasi-political soup is hotting up like quark-gluon plasma all the time. I'm neither religious nor a qualified scientist, so I can look at this queasy picture from an objective point of view. All we're really waiting for is for someone to look past the Standard Model and find the correlation we're all waiting for, the one that quantifies the quantum nature of our very existence, and leaves us free to look at those Laws as they apply to us, and to figure out how much there really is to gain from being a quantum unit.
On more occasions than any of us would like to count, we've come across (or been involved in) discussions where science and religion create a kind of murky water where both sides agree on the reluctant agreement that there are differences to be agreed upon, and this kind of quasi-political soup is hotting up like quark-gluon plasma all the time. I'm neither religious nor a qualified scientist, so I can look at this queasy picture from an objective point of view. All we're really waiting for is for someone to look past the Standard Model and find the correlation we're all waiting for, the one that quantifies the quantum nature of our very existence, and leaves us free to look at those Laws as they apply to us, and to figure out how much there really is to gain from being a quantum unit.
UPDATE - SUMMER 2020
Please join us at Quantumology for live discussion on Monday 10th August at 6.00pm GMT.
Please join us at Quantumology for live discussion on Monday 10th August at 6.00pm GMT.
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