I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention to a classical education - I tended to focus more on the quantum side of things. If there’s anything worse than a Dad joke, then a physicist’s joke must be one of the prime candidates.
Had I paid more attention to non-science stuff I might have learned about some dude called John Milton (1608 - 1674). I knew he’d written something called Paradise Lost, but I never got around to reading it.
This dead white man was ultra far-right, as we can see from his desire to know stuff and to be allowed to speak freely - both characteristics of extreme right-wing ideology
He’d be denounced today as a threat to democracy.
He’s also credited for effectively having created the phrase “tripping the light fantastic” in a poem he wrote back in 1645
Com, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastick toe
Much of my scientific career (such as it was) was, erm, focused on the study of light. In particular, its quantum features. So this phrase resonates with me.
Light has played a fundamental role in physics and science for centuries. Indeed, the person I think of as The Father of Science was Ibn Al-Haytham who was the first person I know of to properly state the scientific method back around the 10th - 11th centuries. Later scientists in Europe would describe him as the Father of Optics but I think his influence is greater than this.
Even Isaac Newton referenced Al-Haytham’s work on light
The question of what light is has fascinated scientists through the centuries - and I would say it still does. We know a lot more about it than Al-Haytham did, but it’s still pretty mysterious stuff.
Some of Al-Haytham’s work was to do with vision and perception - he correctly deduced that our sense of vision is created in the brain and is, to some extent, subjective. Although, as is often the case, ideas like this get amplified to ridiculous extents by people claiming that everything we see is an “illusion” created by our minds and that there’s no such thing as an objective reality. Which is an example of more nutty navel-gazing that’s fun after a pint or two.
The idea is that light hits our eyes and our brains interpret this to ‘construct’ a version of ‘reality’. It’s an amazingly consistent version of reality ‘subjectively’ constructed by around 8 billion people, though.
Unless there’s something gone wrong with their circuitry those 8 billion people are going to see a fork when it’s laid on a table. Even those whose brains interpret it as a feather duster are going to get a bit of a shock if they stab themselves in the eye with it - and a real shock if they stick it into some electrical outlet.
But those navel-gazers are not entirely wrong. When we delve into the quantum description of nature there’s some sense in which the stuff we see is an emergent property of a seemingly chaotic dance of potentialities that become crystallized into what we interpret as ‘reality’.
The stuff we use to see stuff, light, is very mysterious stuff - as is the stuff it bounces off before it hits our eyeball.
What is it that we’re seeing and what is this light stuff that we’re using to see it with?
The prosaic answer is that light is just a form of electromagnetic (EM) radiation; it’s the bit of the EM spectrum that our eyes interact with to create, with our brains, our sense of vision.
The bit of the EM spectrum that doesn’t wiggle so fast we use for radio - the bit of the EM spectrum that wiggles really fast (we call them gamma rays) can turn people into raging green monsters (source : Marvel Cinematic University). There’s a sweet spot in between that humans use to see stuff.
But radio waves, microwaves, light, X-rays, gamma rays etc - it’s all the same ‘stuff’.
The basic picture of what’s happening is that EM radiation hits an object. Some of this radiation is absorbed and some of it gets re-radiated or scattered. If much more blue light gets re-radiated/scattered than red light, we’ll perceive the object to be blue when the light from the object hits our eyeballs.
The object exists - and, yes, we’re seeing only a part of what it ‘looks’ like. If we could see into the infrared we’d get a different picture of the same object. The object is really there, of course, but our eyes are not capable of collecting all of the information about the EM radiation that comes off it. We need to use other measuring devices that can give us a more complete picture.
One of the most fascinating stories in science is how light (and, subsequently, EM radiation in general) has been used to tease out the properties of the ‘universe’. We see stars. The light is coming from something. But what is that something?
My favourite pop-science book that tells some of this story is The Magic Furnace by Marcus Chown which is an excellent, and accessible, book about how we pieced together what stars are made of and what happens to them. If you’re at all interested in stars, I’d recommend this as essential reading - even if you’ve already got a lot of technical background.
We’re all really tired of the word spectrum these days - and for good reason. Humans, it is said, exist on all sorts of spectrums - the main one we hear about being the gender spectrum. Curiously, though, other alleged properties, like white privilege, are definitely binary - you’ve either got it or you don’t.
Other racial properties, however, exist on a kind of spectrum. Coca-Cola telling its white employees to “be less white” implies that whiteness exists on a kind of spectrum and that the more of it you can get rid of, the better.
Unlike the spectrum of EM radiation these navelly-gazed spectra can’t be properly measured, but are assumed to exist, nevertheless. If someone could construct a measuring device to determine how much whiteness you’ve been able to lose, they’d make a fortune.
But back on planet Earth there’s stuff we can measure, and the airy-fairy philosophical derangements of social justice activists, which we can’t. Thankfully, the EM spectrum is one of those real spectra we can actually measure.
Roughly speaking, if you shine light that has all frequency components (known as white light) through some element and look at the light that ‘passes through’, what you’ll see is a spectrum that has ‘holes’ in it - it looks a bit like a barcode. You’ll see dark lines at specific places. This is known as an absorption spectrum - the idea being that certain specific wavelengths of light are absorbed. Each element (or molecule) has its own unique barcode. When you look at the absorption spectra for stars you can, therefore, figure out what elements make that star.
This is how we know the universe is made up of the same stuff we see on earth - the elements. We can also figure out how much of one element there is relative to another. So we can use starlight to figure out what these stars from many light years away are made of. From that we can begin to piece together some ideas about why they shine.
The question of why we get a unique spectra for an element, with these absorption lines, was a puzzle for a long time. Even when we’d figured out that an atom consisted of a core dense blob of positively charged stuff surrounded by ‘orbiting’ electrons, we couldn’t figure out why we had spectra like this - and nor could we figure out why atoms were stable. The so-called ‘classical’ theories of Newton (mechanics) and Maxwell (EM), which had explained so much and worked for everything else so far, weren’t working for atoms.
It required the discovery of quantum mechanics before we finally had a theoretical framework that could explain it all.
Couple that with Einstein’s work which showed that light acted as some kind of cosmic speed limit and you end up with light being something of a celebrity in physics.
What you end up with is a description of the world (the universe) which is, on the surface, a bit bonkers.
You thought ‘woke’ was batshit crazy - well, hold a physicist’s beer because you ain’t seen nothing.
But this fundamental idea we had that we could theorize about the world, and test those theories to see if they were correct1, eventually unleashed an extraordinary era of discovery and understanding. I would maintain that the scientific method is mankind’s greatest discovery.
This is why, in my view, the whole ‘woke’ agenda, underpinned by such cretinous garbage as this notion of “my truth”, is so destructive. I really have to chuckle when these earnest eejits describe rationality as “rooted in white supremacy”, or an example of whiteness. What, you mean people of colour just make up shit as they go along?
That’s a nice view of people with different (non-white) skin shades you have there.
Why, one could ask, would you eschew the tools of rationality? The typical answer one might hear would be that nasty people used those tools to oppress and colonize less nasty people in the past. OK - so what? The ‘therefore’ bit is the thing that is silly. Because bad people used X to do bad stuff, we need to stop using X, is the level of their ‘thinking’ on the issue.
Actually, it’s worse than even this. They say that because bad people did bad stuff with X, then X is a product, a result, of badness.
Alternatively, one could speculate that it’s really rather useful to denigrate rationality if your ideas are batshit bonkers. If you don’t make any kind of rational sense, then just do away with rationality altogether!
We have echoes of trial data being hidden for 75 years, here. If your data doesn’t tell the story you want - just hide it for three quarters of a century.
The woke may well be tripping - just not with the light fantastic.
Strictly speaking, we don’t test this - we test the ‘wrongness’ of an idea. If an idea fails some test (an experiment) we know it to be not correct. We can’t say the opposite, however, that if the idea passes the test it is, therefore, ‘correct’ - only that it has passed this test.
I loathe that use of "spectrum" - it's artifice, sleight of hand and nonsense the way it is used. /Anything/ can be placed on a spectrum, yes?
Yes, because the act of choosing a spectrum as the model of description makes it so - that's the subjective reality of it. You can just as easily choose to use a binary model, or variations of Venn diagrams, or a yard-stick - the method chosen for making measurements, cut-offs and definitions decides what you're going to find.
And the method of measuring doesn't prove anything - it's a tool, nothing more. I can measure the outdoors temperature by the speed my eyeballs ice over, or how gay someone is by dint of the number of nostril hairs they have or some other inanity; doesn't prove anything in its own right.
Except that the one insisting on measuring things that way is a tool, a fool and thinks of methods of measuring as cookie-cutters so reality can be made to fit the form they want it to have.
"Everything is on a spectrum" is simply the "Everything is relative" of our day, and just as stupid.
By the by, if you haven't read it, do try to find the time for "Paradise Lost", it's a blast - especially if read out loud as intended: reading quietly to oneself is a rather new thing, historically speaking and pre-18th century works were intended to be read out loud, partly because the rules for spelling were still very much "write it the way it sounds".
My local library doesn’t own The Magic Furnace, but it offered me as an alternate The Magic School Bus books, which might be more on my level.