How it all began fully explained for people who don't take reality seriously
Part 1: Getting Started
Part 2: Getting Up to Speed
PART 3: GETTING BACK TO BASICS
Meanwhile the Quantum Mechanics were busy working out the details. Their solutions were not as simple as the Newtonian Principals' were. Mainly because it's very hard working with particles too small to see and so full of energy that once you corral one it splits or makes a quantum jump or something equally disruptive. They took the opposite tack of the Newtonian Principals, instead of merging things ever bigger, they kept dividing things up ever smaller. They came up with the atom. Atom is Greek for indivisible, which they ignored dividing atoms up into neutrons, protons, and electrons anyway. They tossed in a weak force, a strong force, and electro-magnetism to give it some kick.
All this was managed with a set of work rules that take entire books and rooms full of physicists to explain. And even then you probably won't understand them. Well, I don't anyway. And if they're anything like the Newtonian Principals the authors don't understand them either.
They arranged the atoms with the electrons orbiting like mad, placing the protons and neutrons together in the center, called the nucleus. In the nucleus the protons have all the power, the neutrons just add weight, like ballast. Without this ballast people wouldn't weigh enough and would go floating off into space, which is not a people friendly environment. Neutrons are like protons which have been neutered, and hence the name. The protons and neutrons love each other and stick together like white on rice. Never try to break up a nucleus or you've got big trouble on your hands. The kind of trouble atomic bombs are made for.
The real action takes place with the electrons even though they are runts compared to the nucleus. But what they lack in size they make up in boundless energy, whizzing about constantly hooking up with electrons from other atoms making bonds and dates for week-ends on the town. They're players. Most nuclei don't mind sharing electrons with other nuclei as long as they share back. For atoms it's all one big swinging scene. While some share eagerly, others must be forced into it with heated pressure, or persuaded with bribes brokered by outsider atoms called catalysts. Catalysts pay a price in electrons to see other atoms bond without getting in on the action. They're like voyeurs or silent partners or just plain suckers, also known as investors.
All this bonding and sharing means you can combine atoms together, like Lego blocks, to build things atoms can't manage on their own. For instance, you can combine two hydrogens and an oxygen into water. These combinations are called molecules, the old greek term for Lego blocks. Combining various molecules together makes more complex things like DNA, bakalite, or a house made of Lego blocks, which takes a whole lot of molecules so you wouldn't want to put them together one at a time.
There are also anti-protons, anti-neutrons and anti-electrons. They're against everything the other atomic bits are for. They're like anarchists and should one of the anti-particles catch a pro-particle they blow themselves up taking the pro-particles with them. The last time something like that happened it started World War I.* If you see an anti-particle coming your way, run.
*Also called The Great War, but what was so great about it is hard to discern. It seemed rather unpleasant all around. And just to confuse me even more, World War II is sometimes called The Good War. Go figure.
In addition there are other oddly named particles like positrons, photons, leptons, muons and morons. The positrons are very clever and can be assembled to make a positronic brain. Photons are handy for making torpedoes to blow up Klingon raiders and other pesky, and usually unsightly aliens. The leptons and muons are fairly useless as far as I know. But it only takes one moron to break a positronic brain, so by all means never loan one your laptop.
Just to make it more complicated the Quantum Mechanics came up with quarks, which I have no clue what they do. Not one type, but six quarks which they dubbed: up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charmed. The up quarks go north and south, the down quarks travel east and west, which unfortunately doesn't much explain the name. Top quarks take the high road and bottom quarks take the low road. The strange quarks travel in waves like a surfer. If you've ever met a surfer you know where these quarks get their name. The charmed quarks lead a charmed half-life living off the conserved energy amassed by the Space-Time Continuum. This trust fund eventually runs out by a process called entropy, which is a kind-of scientific overspending. When this happens they lose their charm and are exiled into the vacuum of space. Nature abhors a vacuum and so do quarks, but they have only themselves to blame.
Not to be outdone by the Newtonian Principals, the Quantum Mechanics decided they needed some impossible physics of their own. They invented the God particle, which sounds suspiciously more like religion than science. They also claim things like exotic particles with no mass, not unlike undetectable dark matter which seems like gravity with no mass. Then there's cases of particles said to move forward in space and backward in time. A statement which, like the Dada exquisite corpse, makes syntactical sense but no real sense. A sentence like, "Furious, green sleep aged diagonally."
The topper at the bottom of all this, to mix a metaphor, is the idea recently floated that quarks are made of even smaller bits of differently shaped vibrating strings with as many as 26 dimensions. These dimensions are: over, under, sideways, down, backwards, forwards, spin around, happy, sneezy, grumpy, dopey, bashful, eeny, meeny, miney, moe, larry, curly, shemp, et al. This idea is called String Theory of which there are a half dozen flavors. It's the Quantum Mechanics attempt to simplify everything into a neat little package, tied together with vibrating strings apparently. How it all works or how many strings can vibrate on the head of a pin is anyone's guess. The thing about String Theory is, because the strings are so micro-nano, itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny it is impossible to prove or disprove, but the math all works out on paper. Paper is made of atoms and molecules, so that must mean something.
It's hard to explain how all the above fits together, either because I have no idea or it actually doesn't. Still you may find it all hard to fathom, but that's OK. It just takes some special training in understanding the unintelligible. This is available at your institutes of higher learning. Or simply follow the advice of the Queen of Hearts in Through the Looking Glass.
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said "One can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Nevertheless, what we wind up with is thermo-dynamics, electro-magnetism, gravity and whatnot. The bottom line is you can heat your house and run a blender to make yourself a nice daiquiri to sip on as you sit in your lawn chair beneath the night sky pondering the wonder of it all without floating off into space. Or maybe wonder what the heck it is I'm talking about. In any case, even in the unlikely event you do understand it the way I tell it, it's of little help paying your heating, electric, and liquor bills. Unless you're a physicist or astronomer making the tall dollars from government grants to explain the inexplicable. In which case, never mind.
Part 1: Getting Started
Part 2: Getting Up to Speed
copyright Terry Colon, 2010