Ideas about the Universe I’ll Die Not
Understanding (Or: Why a Little Knowledge Is a Stupid Thing)

I’ve read a lot of books that try to explain
modern physics to laypeople (i.e., morons like me who can’t
do the math). As a result, I am in the position of a
goldfish stumped by the concept
of glass.
Here are some of the questions I will never
understand. I mean never. So please don’t write to
me thinking that with one more explanation I’ll
finally get it. I won’t. I started down this path
when I was about 13 by reading a book Einstein wrote
for laypeople. (Anyone know the book I have in mind?
I can’t find it at Amazon.) As with every book I’ve
read, I understood it paragraph by paragraph and
came out with a set of concepts I could mouth but
not really make sense of. So, unless you think you
can do better than Einstein, don’t try. (Nah, I know
this won’t stop you.)
And, yes, I do know that the big
misunderstandings I’m about to reveal betray my
ignorance. No need to remind me of that. This is all
part of the process of preemptive self-embarrassment
that is the aim of my working life and, indeed, of most of my
waking life.
Here goes:
1. We all know that if we were to send a twin
into space in a space ship, less time would have
passed for her than for her twin on earth; if she
traveled sufficiently close to the speed of light,
she would find that her twin had aged many years
more than she had. But, since Einsteinian space has
no privileged frame of reference, we could just as
well describe the event as the twin in the space
ship staying still while the earth (and the rest of
the universe) zoomed out from under her. Under this
description, the twin in the space ship should age
more. Wazzup?
2. Is Indeterminacy an ontological or
epistemological statement? Or is it really not a problem with observation
but a problem with thinking that there are such
things as particular moments of time? That is, an
observation has to be an observation of something at
a particular moment. But if there is no quantum of
time, no atom of time, then indeterminacy isn’t
caused by observation but by our assumption that
there are moments. For example, if you ask me the exact position of a car on the highway between any two seconds, the answer will be a short strretch of road with the car somewhere in between. As you decrease the specified amount of time, the length of road gets shorter by the answer is still a mushy “Somewhere between A and B.” We never get to a precise answer unless we can name not a stretch of time but a precise moment. No moments, no precision. Discuss amongst yourselves.
[Note: A famous astrophysicist at MIT tells me that
this idea is crap. Obviously, he just can’t keep up
with my breathtaking insights.]
3. Do strings actually have shape? Or is that
just a convenient way to describe them because it
allows us to talk in terms of vibrations? Do they
actually vibrate or is that merely a way of talking
about properties describable only in mathematics?
Please confine yourself to a Yes or No. Thank you.
4. If the light is on in your closet and the door is closed, when you turn off the light the closet gets dark because the light inside
bounces around until it finds the crack and
“escapes.” That’s my understanding, anyway. So, if I
had a dark room with no openings, would it stay lit?
Further, if I’m in the darkened closet with the slit
at the bottom, why doesn’t an equal amount of light
come bouncing in as comes bouncing out?

5. Won’t someone please feed Schroedinger’s cat?

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