Complex Numbers

Matter of Speculation

Write about something mysterious. Is the mystery ongoing, or has it been resolved?

There is always mystery, and there will always be mystery.

This is a good thing. I'd hate to think that, at some point, we humans will have figured everything out.

You know, at one point, just around 120 years ago, we thought we had. Physics, so the story went, was this close to being all sorted, with everything knowable about to be known.

Yeah... that worked out.

Thing is, the more you know, the more you realize what you don't know. Around the time I'm talking about - the turn of the last century, give or take a few years; I don't remember the exact timeline and can't be arsed to look it up - the prevailing thought about light was that a) it's a wave; b) waves have to propagate through something; c) let's call that something the "luminiferous ether." A lot of smart people studied this awesomely-named substance, which was presumed to infuse the universe.

The reasoning went something like this: They knew (or, well, thought they knew) that Newton's Laws applied to orbital dynamics, which predicted the motions of the planets to within the precision possible at the time. But if the planets had to move through some material, like a gas for instance, the predicted orbits wouldn't match up with observations. And yet, like I said, they reasoned that waves had to travel through some medium: like water, for ocean waves, or air for sound waves, or a Slinky for Slinky waves. Okay, Slinkies hadn't been invented yet, but you get the idea. So this... luminiferous ether (still an awesome name)... had to present no resistance to matter passing through it and yet allow for the propagation of light waves. Basically, they didn't know what it was but they had a good idea what some of its properties must be.

I might be getting some of the details wrong. I just got back from the midnight showing of Spider-Man and want to get to bed. But bear with me here; I'm pretty sure I've got the basic idea right.

Anyway, so a bunch of really smart people, including Einstein, did some experiments, made some calculations, and observed that behold! Photons were both particles AND waves; and, moreover, they didn't need to propagate "through" anything. Problem solved, and goodbye, awesomely-named substance that never really existed in the first place.

But.

(There's always a "but" in science.)

This raised more questions than it answered, and led to fun things that no one understands like general relativity, the photoelectric effect, and quantum mechanics. Okay, well, some people understand the first two, but they're still going back and forth on that last one - and probably will be until the heat death of the universe makes it all moot, or we find a way to blow each other up using, presumably, another of Einstein's discoveries.

What I'm really getting at here, though, is that we have our own "luminiferous ether," though it's not quite as awesomely named: scientists call it "dark matter" and "dark energy," because they don't fucking understand it. All they know is what properties these things would need to have in order to reconcile certain observations. Things like, in the case of DM, being massive and thus having gravity, but not interacting very much with everyday matter in other ways (such as electrical charge, the Pauli exclusion principle, and whatnot). As with the Luminous Ether Hypothesis, they know what some of its properties must be but have no real idea what it is.

With LE, they figured out what it was by changing the entire notion of what space and time are and, in the process, made it go away entirely as a concept. And I'm no expert - I'm just an observer, same as I can watch the Spider-Man movie but not make one - but it seems to me to be very possible that the answer will be something completely unexpected and definitely mind-blowing.

It's a mystery. It hasn't been resolved. When it is, even more questions will crop up.

I just hope I'm still around when it happens.

(roll credits)

Oh, and go see Spider-Man.