Apparently the interactions of #particles that made us who we are also dictate everything about us, including how we behave, think, feel, say or do things.
I happened to stumble upon an NPR podcast featuring Brian Green, a theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist, talking about an array of fascinating subjects like what precedes the big bang, entropy and evolution, and how the universe will end.
Let's hold on for a sec... What exactly is string or #superstring Theory?
In a nutshell, string theory describes the universe by replacing all matter and force particles with just one-dimensional objects: Tiny vibrating point-like particles called strings.These strings propagate through space and interact with each other.
Similarly, superstring theory, according to ScienceDaily.com, is the idea that minuscule strands of energy vibrating in a higher dimensional space-time create every particle and force in the universe.
So What Made Me, "Me"?
According to Green, everything about who we are are simply a collective of matter and tiny vibrating particle strings that are interacting together to form our thoughts, speech, emotion, and all that make us uniquely different from one another.
He thinks that the reasons why he does certain things aren't the result of having a state of consciousness, but more due to the particles' interactions.
Particles are atomic components such as electrons, protons, and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are actually composite particles, made up of quarks. other types of particles are photons, neutrinos, and muons, and many others.
Both Matter and particles are essentially the same. Matter is something that has mass and occupy space in space-time coordinate and particle is the smallest possible matter.
Unlike what some people might think of "living" things as having an external energy or life force injected into particles, he believes that particles themselves may have consciousness of their own. He made a comparison between himself and a table, whereas a table is made up of particles just like us, it's just do happened that the particles interact differently.
He believes that in a millennium or so from now, people are going to look back at our theory on what constitutes life and giggle at our naiveté.
Human's Perception of Time Will Change Dramatically
Visionary Brian Green talked further about our perception of time. The way we perceive time today is fairly constant because nothing is moving very fast. However, once we are able to achieve light speed travels, our idea of time will be very different.
Einstein's theory of spatial relativity says that time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move relative to something else. Approaching the speed of light, a person inside a spacecraft would age much slower than someone of the same age at home. Also, under Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity can bend time.
Picture a four-dimensional fabric called space-time. When anything that has mass sits on that piece of fabric, it creates a dimple or a bending of space-time. The bending of space-time causes objects to move on a curved path and that curvature of space is what we know as gravity. (Courtesy of the article from Space.com)
So How Will It All End?
Brian Green gave an analogy of a person walking to the North Pole, which is the as far north as you can go, or is it? After all, he/she can keep going but just ends up on the other side of the hemisphere. He compares that to the birth and the end of the universe. Additionally, he thinks that the universe may not have started with the Big Bang, but could have restarted from a pre-existing universe that died or as another universe that was being created.
He talked about Entropy - from order to disorder, and evolution - from disorder to order. However, in the end, disorder will win. Like having free will, everything will eventually become random, disorganized which leads to chaos, thus the chaos theory. This is what makes everything so unpredictable and fascinating; giving rise to ends and beginnings.
Final Note
I don't pretend to understand much about physics or how things work in the world but I was captivated by his talk. It gave me much food for thought.
"Edwin Hubble was once an Lawyer who became an Astronomer," said Brian Green said. "So there's hope for us yet."
Now that's pretty funny, and quite witty I might add.
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