Just listened to an audio of an interview with Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He is also a best selling author of The Elegant Universe and other books. I don't remember who coined the widely quoted phrase, "the universe is not only stranger that we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose", but it's spot on. I read this stuff when I run across it so it's not new to me but it still blows my mind.
The deeply weird and counter-intuitive quantum physics, seething and chaotic, with virtual particles flickering in and out of existence and underpinning the larger reality we live in and doing ridiculously impossible things like allowing those particles to be in more than one place at the same time. Good thing, too, since apparently our computers, cell phones, and other devices wouldn't work without doing those ridiculously impossible things.
So much we don't know... Are there really 10 ^500 universes? Perhaps with different laws of physics in each one? What's it like to have the grasp of mathematics and theoretical physics that allows one to see these wonders.What is the dark energy that has that weird antigravity effect pushing the galaxies apart at ever-increasing speeds? Could this universe really be infinite, with infinite variations of me asking an infinite number of questions for infinity? (Does that thought send a little chill down your spine?) Will the Large Hadron Collider finally allow some of these far-out speculations to be tested? I want answers!
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