Comparatively Speaking
Pooped from museum training again; I just wanted to pop in to share with you some of the metaphors and analogies that Brian Greene has used recently in the book on physics that I’ve been listening to. I think the following list reflects quite well how strange some of our modern ideas about the ways of the universe are (when compared to our everyday experience), how bizarre it is to learn about them, and also how extraordinarily difficult it must be for scientists, particularly theoretical physicists, to convey a true sense of their work to people outside the field. But boy do they try hard. Really hard.
1) The entirety of spacetime is like a gigantic loaf of bread; a single slice of bread represents the events taking place in all of space at a given moment in time. People who are traveling through space relative to each other slice the loaf at different angles. (He talks about this one a lot. I think I almost understand it now.)
2) The jumping about, and subsequent coming to rest, of a frog in a hot metal bowl — which has a bump in the middle of it — on which bump is sitting a large quantity of worms — somehow represents the motion and energy present in the ocean of particles making up something called the Higgs field, which physicists think suffuses the entire universe and is responsible for giving elementary particles their mass (see #3). Yes, a frog. Sliding down the sides of a hot metal bowl. With worms. And don’t forget the bump.
3) Think of particles moving through the Higgs field (see #2) as more or less screaming hot celebrities trying to pass through a crowd of urgently picture-taking paparazzi. Minor luminaries like the Up Quark pass through the sea of reporters/Higgs field without much fuss, having a relatively small mass. They are like tiny little versions of the has-been actor Andrew Shue from Melrose Place. But the Top Quark, see, it’s a comparative heavy-weight. The Top Quark is Beyoncé. It just can’t pass through that damned Higgs field without being stopped to pose for 12 million photographs and autograph 8 billion sweaty pieces of paper.
Told you physicists were loopy. But it’s kind of cute how they try to make things easier for us mere mortals by bringing things down to the level of food products, animals, and pop culture. Sometimes it even sort of works.
(Except the frog analogy — which is actually, I suspect, even more confusing than the technical explanation. I mean, I hope it is.)