Right from the very beginnings of our education, we're bombarded with facts about the world and the Universe which stay the same. Where the other planets in the solar system are in relation to us. How far away the moon is. What things are made of. And so on. The closest we get to perceiving change is in understanding how things grow, like flowers and kittens.
As we get older, therefore, the subjects of our research tend to focus on things which will reliably conform to experiment in the same way now as they did a hundred years ago. Constants are the core of reason, many would have us believe. So new theories come about to shatter old theories and it's assumed that the old theory was wrong. Einstein's Relativity has stood the test of time, but it gets battered now and then by a young newbie waving a wand of quantum mechanics at it and shouting loudly about paradox.
As we get older, therefore, the subjects of our research tend to focus on things which will reliably conform to experiment in the same way now as they did a hundred years ago. Constants are the core of reason, many would have us believe. So new theories come about to shatter old theories and it's assumed that the old theory was wrong. Einstein's Relativity has stood the test of time, but it gets battered now and then by a young newbie waving a wand of quantum mechanics at it and shouting loudly about paradox.
Conforming to experiment is something quantum particles are fond of resisting, and when they do conform to experiment they often provide some rather weird results. Double slit created a lot of consternation almost a century ago. These days particle colliders are frequently unearthing strange new propositions about superpositional states, whether squarks are likely to threaten supersymmetry, and pondering on neutrinos being lighter than photons which were thought to be massless but now clearly cannot be so. All super, like supermarkets, filled with options and variants on themes sharing values as common as sugar and salt.
The squabbling that accompanies particle physics is nothing new, and it'll be the same I daresay for a long time to come. I don't really care whether they get round to discovering strawberry squarks or toffee tachyons. The point I'm making here is that we are travelling through the Universe at a rate of 2.7 million miles an hour, or thereabouts, and that fact alone puts us in a different spacetime - a very different spacetime - to the one we were in, say, seven years ago. Okay, go back thirty years - the world has made thirty revolutions round the Sun, spun on its own axis 10,950 times, and changed the position of its orbit a little bit more. Not to mention the shift in the solar system relative to other solar systems. The trouble is, we don't perceive any of this. We see the stars shining in pretty much the same place as they did a hundred years ago, the Sun rises and sets as it has all our lives, east to west, and the seasons go round with mild variations on a theme we are familiar with, past the point of contempt.
I was thinking this evening about my primary school in North London, and what it would be like to visit it. They had a white billy goat penned in the grounds - now I'm old enough to wonder what for, but as a child I just used to visit him at playtime. There were blackboards, and the smell of school - daps and dinners and disinfectant. All gone now, since blackboards are outlawed on the grounds of political correctness, odours must pass health and safety directives and school dinners have to be vetted by Jamie Oliver. So if I went back tomorrow, assuming the school is still there, I'd find a place I'd probably hardly recognise. It wouldn't, in fact, be the same place at all, for it would have moved on to a different spacetime in 40 years, just as I have. As we all have.
If only we had more of a handle on change, and how to use it to advantage. Going through my papers tonight I found some notes I took last year at an NHS Trust meeting. The complaints then are still echoed everywhere - too much reliance on paperwork, not enough time for patient care, the 'urgent' need to provide good experiences; the list goes on. It hasn't changed. It hasn't changed, like a lot of things, because we are force-fed a belief system built on constants, and constants don't cut the mustard when it comes to evolution. Why society and science are still relying on them so heavily is as much of a mystery as the whodunnit affair over Dark Matter candidacy. Einstein would have wished, I'm sure, for mankind's baptism of fire to have passed by long ago.
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