janie's got a gun

c = 299,792,458 meters per second

I think what draws me to astrophysics is the look into the past. When you look up you see the stars twinkling in the night sky. It might be December 7, 2006 when you look up, but that piece of light your seeing has been moving for a million years! It's been moving long before we were walking upright.

So when I read this article, I thought Wow. This event that happened 4 billion light years away also happened 4 billion years ago. We're just now observing it. It's ancient history. By now it's probably all gone but we won't know for another 4 billion years, that's a long term project.

The physics of it all is in our every day lives. It's a 4.2 mile drive from my apartment to work, but what makes it 4.2 miles? How exact is that measurement anyway? What if I'm really driving 4.21 miles? Or if some crackhead did the work in my odometer and I'm really driving 50 miles? Well, it's used to gauge distance, 1 meter is 1/299,792,458 of a second that light travels in a vacuum. When you call your friend with a cell phone there's a 0.01 second or more delay from when you speak and when your friend hears your voice. You can tell when you're both in the same room, that's physics being imposed upon you.

God does not play dice

A quote from Albert Einstein circa 1927. This was Einstein's famous reply to quantum physics which I whole-heartly agree with. The current theory of quantum physics goes against classic physics. You know, the whole 'throw a ball up in the air and it'll come back down.' Yes, I understand that quantum physics deals with the unseen but it's just theories put together and all tied together with a flimsy premise, all designed to allow scientists to be lazy.
Just because we don't understand it doesn't make it unknown. As smart as we are, you'd think we would've realized this. Like saying a magician's tricks are really magic when they are slight-of-hand or optical illusions.
I wish I had stayed in school, because I wouldn't be stuck with trying to teach myself higher mathematics to prove my own theory. It is based around Quantum Time, because everything in this universe is subject to time. Everyone experiences time relative to their own position, a proven theory and also good excuse for being late. Neutrons, electrons and protons should still all be subject to that same principle. The best way I can explain it is like watching a tape of a guy running around on screen, but instead of watching it in "normal" speed (or time) we're watching it in fast-forward mode. If we don't know that the VCR is stuck in fast-forward it would appear as though he would jump from one side of the screen to the other, all of your calculations in trying to determine his speed would be off and you would couldn't tell exactly where he started and where he ended.
Now play it in "normal" time and we see that he takes a specific path to get from point A to point B at a certain speed average. Not magic people, just better understanding. If I could only prove this then I would rule!
I realized that I hadn't made any advancement in the physics rants. I've been focused a lot on 'work' and other things. I should spend a little more time on physics, it's fun stuff once you get past the math of the whole thing.

half dead cat

According to the theory of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite amount of universes. For every left that you have taken, there is a universe where you took a right. Well, maybe infinite is too much but I’m sure it’s up there. So that means that right now in some alternate universe there’s an alternate me writing an alternate blog about an alternate universe where he’s writing an alternate blog too.
There’s a famous thought experiment, Schrödinger's Cat, where a scientist places a cat into a closed box where he can’t observe the cat. Inside the box is a gun pointed at the cat, the gun is set to go off if a radioactive isotope decays. So when the gun goes off, there are only two possibilities; either the cat is dead or the cat is alive. Right? Well, that’s the world according to ‘normal’ physics, but according to quantum mechanics the cat is both alive and dead. How can that be? You can’t be half dead or half pregnant, either you are or you aren’t so which is it?
Well, quantum physicists like to explain this by saying that everything maintains all possibilities until observed. So the cat isn’t dead or alive until you open the box to see if it is alive. This example is the best explanation of light. Is it a particle or a wave? Both? But how? Until next time.