What is real? With the problems I’ve had with cognitive function and visual migraines, I’ve been wondering a lot about what is real. Add to that last Thanksgiving when I began to wonder about time too because Carlo Rovelli whispered in my ear as I tried to make lemon meringue pie before the turkey came out of the oven. Actually, it was Benedict Cumberbatch who whispered in my ear with Rovelli’s words about physics and time. That makes total sense, because, hey, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Am I right?
With Cumberbatch’s help, I learned from Rovelli’s book The Order of Time that on a very small scale, there is no time, just an exchange of warmth. Wait, what?
I should have listened more as a philosopher in the back of my thermodynamics class. It turns out that, though that professor tried to ruin the class by making it the flunk-out class for the engineering department, I actually like thermodynamics. (Yes, in case you were wondering, I passed the class.) Like the dance between an electric and a magnetic field, there’s a harmony playing between pressure, flow, volume, and time. And now, I’m trying to imagine what it looks like in miniature, when pieces of particles play keep-away with the observer. Most of what we think is solid is really vast empty space. So, what is real?
Is it true that science, at its most basic, is more about statistics than about calculus and trigonometry? Damn. I love trig. (Don’t mock me. It goes back to when I was nine and my dad hooked up a microphone to his oscilloscope so I could try to sing a sine wave for him.) I’ll just have to keep reading and closing my eyes to imagine how a particle might be there and might not, depending on whether or not you’re looking for it. If that’s true, what then, is reality? Now, I’m going to have to read something by Brian Greene.
Thank you for listening, jules