I have a work colleague who has twice the age, life experience and knowledge I have. I know him for about a couple of years, but in this time, I never found a common knowledge topic that he doesn’t know massive details about. Chemistry, physics, mechanics, biology, anatomy etc, apparently nothing escaped his interest. I often see him as a sponge absorbing every bit of information (not only) around him, and I ask myself „how can one be enough interested in so many areas in order to be able to retain so much information?” Someone said that nobody could be expert in two domains. He can be good in both, but not very good. I think this guy missed his chance to beat that. The point is he inspired and he continuously inspires me, somehow wakes up my hunger to know more. And it’s like a drug, once you start, you go for more and the word „enough” is automatically deleted from your dictionary.
I am no physicist; I like software programming, that’s what I do for living. Physics did not attract me too much in school, in fact I hate it when I had to learn some (useless, I thought) concepts for the exams. I guess I was too eager to learn what I like, and the physics (among others, of course) was kind of holding me down, wasting my time.
A while ago I found an article on a website, something like „Did you know that...”, a little more detailed though. This one was presenting the
quarks as elementary particles of the matter. The physics I learned in school never told me anything about quarks. Well, it never told me anything about many other interesting stuff, like the true nature of gravity or light for example, but the quarks as being elementary particles like the electrons was something that worth mentioning. Since that moment, I find myself surprisingly interested in physics. Steven Hawking, a genius mind trapped into an almost complete paralyzed body, has shown to the public in his bestseller „A brief history of time” that the Universe’s mechanics can be explained using common language and no equation, he proved that you don’t have to be a genius to understand it. I was interested in the Universe since I was a child, but at that time and many years later, I thought that the laws that govern it are too complicated for me, so I didn’t bother to understand it, I was just enjoying it. I still think so, but that doesn’t stop me now to bind piece by piece like in a puzzle game and see the bigger picture, just like one uses the computer doing amazing stuff like playing games or movies, but not knowing that ALL the data that a computer knows and works with is a pair of numbers, 0 and 1, absolutely nothing more. Everything else is code, complex instructions wrote by humans on how the computer has to juggle with 0 and 1 in order to show nice images on the screen. About the same way I see the Universe showing amazing stuff, see it at work juggling with matter and energy in frozen-in-time images taken billions years ago, but not knowing the details, the mathematical equations that explain everything. Almost everything. I do not expect to get to know even half of what the scientists do, no way, I just constantly think and feel that there is always room for more.
I managed to write two articles on
HubPages in this area, one about
the true nature of gravity and another one about
quarks, antimatter, dark matter and dark energy. I write because I have noone to talk to about such things, and it turned out to by quite pleasurable :)
Moreover, the today’s discoveries have the same impact as the discoveries made hundreds of years ago have had. History faced lots of discoveries, many of them forcing the scientists to rethink all the theories that they thought to be accurate, and the fact that in the twenty-first century we are witnesses of this kind of breakthroughs only tells us how limited we still are and how much we still are to discover. Maybe this is what triggered my interest in physics.
