Hello Friends,
I read an interesting article about gravity this week (if you can believe that). Gravity, the one fundamental force we take for granted (no one talks about how things just don't randomly float up).
Gravity is so pervasive that it holds our universe together. We exist, because the Sun and the Earth dance to the tune of gravity. The moon is in the sky inspiring millennia of romantics and mediocre poets because of gravity. Lying in bed feels so good at the end of a day because of gravity.
Well, this article I read this week pointed to the fact that, in theoretical physicals, gravity is a pain in the ass.
It doesn't fit in with our standard model of reality. It's an exception. It's an old school force. It's analog.
Newton's Second Law tells us that F=MA and the force of gravity between 2 objects is based on their distance. Basically, if a thing has more mass, the force of gravity it experiences depends on its size, what it's made of, and how far away it is from something else. That is why the moon orbits the Earth and not the Sun.
If you were to consider the other fundamental forces (electromagnetism and the weak and strong quantum forces), you would find that these all are not analog. They are discrete. They act on each other's quantum elements—individual subatomic particles stick together because of these forces.
In other words, gravity does not hold an atom together. If it did, we'd all simply disassemble into subatomic particles and fly into the sun. The force that keeps Pluto as part of our solar system just ain't strong enough to keep other things together—your refrigerator door holds magnets off the floor, because of magnetism. You can't walk through a wall because of the strong and weak force.
When quantum physicists try to figure out how gravity does what it does, they fail.
Since gravity is so weak (comparatively), it's hard to measure. We've searched unsuccessfully for years for a hypothetical particle that they call the graviton. I know, it could be a Marvel villain. Finding evidence of a graviton, a discrete particle that imparts gravity to things, would be similar to finding what the Higgs Boson does for mass (remember all that hoopla in 2012?).
Except it's way harder and more expensive. It was estimated that the cost of discovering the Higgs Boson was about $13 billion. They can’t even guess what it would cost to find a graviton. (No judgement. I prefer to spend money on science. Some people like to buy expensive cars.)
Now, the reason I'm bringing up this essential (and confounding) understanding of our reality is kind of wistful.
Take gravity. It follows a nice linear equation. If you mapped out the force of gravity (using F=MA) on a graph, it would be a single continuous line. As I said, it's analog, like a recording of music on a vinyl album or an 8-track tape coming out of a speaker in your living room—remember sine waves from high school? Or, a taking pictures with a 35mm film camera?
Quantum forces are discrete. They are like digital music on a CD or am mp3. To capture analog music onto a digital medium, something has to digitize it. Rather than a smooth wave, digitization collects information at some rate (like once every 24,000th of a second), converting a continuous analog signal into a stream of numbers.
The cool thing about this is that once you digitize something, you can store it on a computer’s hard-drive and create software to manipulate it. You can easily write programs to do things to this data without ever having to engage with the original subject again. Working with analog stuff is harder and more difficult to do well—remember all those rolls of film that you picked up at Fotomat only to find just one decent picture.
Old photos fade. A digital image's data remains forever (as long as the medium it's stored on remains functioning and the original information remains static).
When CDs first came out and were widely available, audiophiles complained that digital music lacked the subtle nuances of analog recordings. That is true. Presence and honesty were missing. They said they could feel it.
There is an infinite amount of data between one second and two seconds in an analog recording of music and there is a precise number of data points (something like 386,000 with today's equipment) between 1 second and the next in digital music.
What's the difference between 386,000 and infinity? How much are we really missing?
With regards to the standard model of physics, everything: the complete understanding of reality.
With regards to the rest of us, perhaps hidden agendas in a 1000+ page piece of legislation.
Happy Independence Day 2025,
David