Musings from Jay (blog site permanently frozen 11/05/2024 morning)

  In previous essays, we established a few foundational rules governing our universe. It is helpful to keep these core principles in mind as a quick refresh before diving deeper: Four Fundamental Forces: Gravity (or is this just spacetime curvature?), Electromagnetic force (electricity and magnetism), Strong Nuclear force (binding the atomic nucleus and its constituent quarks), and the Weak Nuclear force. Four Fundamental Matter Particles: The ordinary matter we interact with daily is built from just four particles: the electron, electron neutrino, up quark, and down quark. (The Standard Model also accounts for exotic particles and antimatter , which annihilate with normal matter upon contact, converting entirely into energy). Equivalence and Transformation: Energy and matter are convertible ( $E=mc^2$ ). Energy also readily converts from one form to another. Four Conservation Laws: Energy, momentum, angular momentum, and charge are always conserved in any interaction. Four Sta...

Finished some blogsite refactoring work lately for better usability. Over 100 of my essays/blogs can be accessed directly or indirectly through these favorite bundles. Many of these essays are connected, interlinked, and flow together to tell a story. Main Hub: Essay Bundles Link Note: By default, essays are hosted on jaykasi.blogspot.com. Topics like Politics, Economics, Government, Finance, Local, India, History, Travel, Technology, Career, and Personal (except for a few specific ones) are not in these bundles and are not accessible from this menu. FOUNDATIONAL ESSAYS (OBJECTIVE) Primarily derived directly from science and occasionally philosophy. 1. Physics / Astro Physics: Deep Dive 2. Earth Sciences (including Climate Change): Interesting Earth Sciences Topics 3. Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth 4. Biology / BioChemistry: How Our Body Works 5. Synthetic Biology: Synthetic Biology Series EXTENSION ESSAYS (SUBJECTIVE) ...

  Here is a set of interesting Earth Sciences Topics: Planetary Scales & Time Keeping These essays look at how we measure time and conceptualize the vast history of our planet. Three fascinating Calendars : How different human cultures have mapped time against cosmic cycles. Geological Time of Earth : Diving into deep time and the immense eras that define our planet's history. Deep Earth Dynamics & Landscapes A look at the colossal physical forces churning beneath our feet and how they puncture the surface to create unique geography. Happening Deep inside the Earth : The inner mechanics, mantle convection, and magnetic shields of our planet. How did the Hawaiian Islands Form? : A perfect case study of hotspot volcanism, mantle plumes, and the birth of an island chain over millions of years. Oceans, Borders, and Global Shifts The intersection of physical Earth systems with human geopolitics and the modern global climate. Continental Shelves and Country Boundries : How u...

Something being quantized means there is a smallest unit of that something which cannot be divided further. Einstein thought space and time were intertwined in an infinite "fabric" like an outstretched blanket. A massive object such as the sun bends the spacetime blanket with its gravity, such that light no longer travels in a straight line as it passe s the sun. In general relativity, matter and energy tells space how to curve while curved spacetime tells matter and energy how to move. This classical view postulates spacetime is continuous. The equations of general relativity (that defines gravity) are in a continuous spacetime. Energy and all other forces except gravity (defined by relativity) are quantized. All verified quantum mechanical theories (that describe the fundamental particles and forces excluding gravity and quantizes things) to date also assumes space and time are continuous. In a leading theory of quantum gravity that tries to unify quantum mechanics and rela...

On April 8, 2024, the scientific community lost a giant. Professor Peter Higgs passed away at the age of 94. While many of us did not know him personally, we live in a reality fundamentally illuminated by his mind. This is a celebration of his life, his quiet humility, and his monumental contributions to human knowledge. From the Highlands to the Frontier of Physics Born on May 29, 1929, in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, Peter Higgs was a British theoretical physicist whose career became inextricably linked with the University of Edinburgh. He first fell in love with the city in 1949 while hitchhiking to the Western Highlands as a student. By 1960, he settled there permanently, taking up a post as a Lecturer at the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics. Over the decades, his quiet brilliance earned him the highest academic honors: 1974: Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE). 1980: Promoted to a Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics. 1983: Elected a Fellow of the ...

The Physics of the very large and the physics of the very small are at loggerheads.  Can both of these along with the standard Model and puzzles like dark matter and dark energy be unified into a theory of everything – the fundamental foundation on which all other higher knowledges rest? Is everything interconnected? Science continues in its inexorable march to explain all the universe with one theory. This, and the current state towards this is the focus of this essay. But at this level, I can no longer explain anything at all in terms or analogies that falls within your experience. We can also start exploring the deep philosophical questions that arise from science, but that part must wait for another essay. In the birth of a universe, I talk about the universe starting from a singularity with a big bang with a plank density of energy. If all matter came from energy, where did this energy come from? If it came from something else, where did that come from? Something cannot come f...

You may not understand the physics in this essay but the scientific method in theoretical physics stitched into the essay may be illuminating. Also paradigm shifts can shake loose major advancement in a field.  Physicists’ best theory of matter is quantum mechanics, which describes the discrete (quantized) behavior of microscopic particles via wave equations. Their best theory of gravity is general relativity, which describes the continuous (classical) motion of massive bodies via space-time curvature. These two highly successful theories appear fundamentally at odds over the nature of space-time: quantum wave equations are defined on a fixed space-time, but general relativity says that space-time is dynamic - curving in response to the distribution of matter.  For the past 70 years one of the most important problems in fundamental physics has been to reconcile quantum physics with general relativity.   I had discussed in previous essays about both quantum mechanics and r...