San Simeon

San Simeon

San Simeon is nice when Southern California is just too hot. I have been up the central coast a few times, and I think the next time I go this way I am going to stop at San Simeon for a few days, and then turn around back to Morro Bay and get on the freeway there. The coast highway used to always be packed bumper to bumper. It is not that way anymore, but it is so long to drive and is so often socked in, that I don't want to go.

One thing that my writing subject reminds me of is listening to the Feynman lectures from Cal Tech. Richard Feynman was one of the mathmaticians who got involved in Manhattan project, and in the early 1960's he gave a series of lectures at Cal Tech which were tape recorded.

Now Feynman is a very interesting guy, his books are terrific, and reading his books makes science pretty enjoyable to learn about. It is all the more true when you listen to the audio tapes of his lectures. Remember that in 1961 America was still pretty aggressive about schooling of engineers and scientists. The Kennedy assassination had not happened yet, so the country still had a single mindedness about what it meant to be American.

Anyway for the recording of the crowd during Feynman's lectures I got a sense that the social expectations of the students was completely different from what I experienced or my what the older draft dodging seniors experienced. In addition to the serious and competitive students, Feynman himself is interesting to listen to, he has a Brooklyn accent, and he was not accustomed to lecturing with sound amplification equipment. So what you get is someone who sounds like Groucho Marx yelling at you about muons and atomic spin, and that kind of talk, and you just about expect him to tell a Groucho Marx joke.

But he doesn't tell the jokes, and the fact is nuclear physics is not funny, its just not funny, even though listening to Feynman you expect to be laughing any minute. What you do get from Feynman is the repeated warning that nuclear physics is simply not like anything that people have ever experienced, so when people give physical analogies from our own experience, Feynman reminds us over and over that it is really not like that. The analogy might be helpful temporarily, but in the end the analogy is likely to leave a more people confused than it actually helped.

So yesterday when I gave my analogy of nitrogen tennis balls, and oxygen windmills, that is not really what it is like, and the analogy may be helpful to some people for a while, but it is likely to be confusing to more people in the long run. Things that happen in the scale and time of nuclear particles or molecules simply are not like things we experience in every day life. And that was the most important lesson I got from listening to Feynman, that and the realization that the social expectations of American nerds was quite a bit different in 1961 than it was when I went to school.

Feynman's idea that things are not the same at the molecular atomic or nuclear scale is important. For an illustration let us take the concept of entropy and enthalpy. People will talk about entropy, how the amount of organization or energy in a system tends to run out. People talk about systems running out of energy and give examples from the physical world like erosion, or food chains, and human beings being highly organized organisms and stuff like that.

But realistically we know that the things that have the most energy are photons. These are massless things which are pure energy, in contrast to a hydrogen molecule which has a great deal of energy stored as mass. If E=MC^^2, then you have to realize that something with mass is actually a low energy thing, the energy has congealed down into mass. If it was more energetic, it would still be photons and nuetrinos, but it has experienced entropy, it is all run-down, and is now a physical thing with mass.

Similarly, with time, the photon is a thing that cruises along with Mass=neglible and speed equal to the speed of light. Time has practically stopped for the photon, time is something that is not a meaningful variable for photons. If you were a photon doing laboratory experiments time is not a part of the external environment that would interest you. You would not have to account for time, or for any method of keeping time constant - if you were a photon there would be no time. As a photon you have to lose a lot of energy to become interested in time, you have to become some low energy thing with mass before time becomes a factor.

So for this reason, in the old Star Trek, they always measured time in terms of Star Dates. Because the stars all had a large amount of mass, they had the most consistent and regular amounts of time. Measuring time in terms of the time experienced by stars makes the most sense, even when compared to time on earth, where the earth is moving pretty rapidly around its star, and has a different density. Because of this, "earth time" or "time as experienced by a planet" does not make as much sense as "Star Date"

So how should we look at the arguments people make about entropy? Well the ideal state is to be photons. The least organized, most entropy, things are heavy metals. Human beings are somewhere in between there, some improbably complicated collection of DNA proteins and amino acids that is really quite low on the cosmic scale of entropy. Like the curlicues and gnomes on Gothic Cathedrals, they are striking, but they are representive of a low state of things, even though the complex nature of the heavy atoms seems quite unexpected and interesting. Diffraction patterns of waves through a pattern of slits is also interesting for the same reasons of complexity. But low energy - high entropy!

Anyway, Star Dates are because that is the only "time" that is constant for both starships and for people on earth. And nuclear and atomic things cannot be explained using "real world" analogies, because they are not "real world" And life forms represent an oddity in the entropy enthalpy scheme of things, an interesting oddity, but an oddity none the less.