What would you be shocked to learn?
Post your answer in the LEAVE A COMMENT section below. I’m not the boss of you, though. Don’t write anything for all I care! Frankly, I won’t be shocked to get zero comments.
. . .here are my thoughts.
What would you be shocked to learn?
Discovering a particle more than a century ago involved visualizing it streaking through the medium of a cheaply made experimental apparatus. Suzie Sheehy takes us on a journey beginning with those simpler times in her book, The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics and Improbable Experiments Changed the World. The University of Melbourne researcher proceeds to describe how a discovery in particle physics today requires computers performing statistical analysis on petabytes of data gathered over years from multi-billion-dollar mega-machines. This “proves” a statistical likelihood of the particle having existed for only a fraction of a fraction of a second. It will never be seen! The knowledge scientists garner from these experiments may positively impact future lives: potentially curing cancer, solving the dark matter and dark energy mysteries, or inventing a way to evenly heat up a frozen kangaroo burrito. Discoveries in physics will continue to get more difficult, more expensive, and more infrequent. The biggest question is whether we can someday discover the elusive “Theory of Everything”: the whole of physics condensed into a single equation. I’d be shocked to learn that the complexity of the Universe could be compressed into such simplicity.