Neils Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, said long ago, “those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” And we could say a similar thing about special relativity theory, because Einstein has taken matter out of the physics and reduced the separation between the perceiver and the perceived to zero.

Richard Feynman once pointed out that every statement in quantum mechanics is a restatement of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which simply says that the product of our uncertainty in where something is and our uncertainty in its momentum cannot fall to zero, and that likewise the product of our uncertainty in when something happens and our uncertainty in the energy of the happening cannot fall to zero.

And Einstein’s famous equation simply says that there is no such thing as matter, and that what we thought was matter is just potential energy. And that one gram of energy is enough to vaporize a town. The c² is just how many ergs are equal to a gram. It’s about 900,000,000,000,000,000,000. But Einstein’s geometry is even more exciting. It puts space and time in as a pair of opposites so that if a light beam can get from one event to another, the space-time separation between them is zero. That rules out photons and gravitons.

What all this tells us is that the world which we see is a mistake-world, a make believe-world made of energy and that energy is the wind-up against the mistake. Gravity is the wind-up against dispersion, the electrical repulsion is the wind-up against smallness, and inertia is the wind-up against change.

Now if, as the equations suggest, the world which we see in space and time is a mistake then, necessarily, it will be smitten by uncertainty and frustration.

Stars convert gravitational energy to radiation and drive the cosmological expansion because the radiation loses its energy to redshifting in the expansion.

The redshifting drives the cosmic microwave background radiation because radiation gets thermalized to 3°K by going through the field of low mass particles near the observational border.

Through Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle the redshifting also drives the recycling of the hydrogen and the negative entropy from the border, because as the uncertainty in the momentum goes down, the uncertainty in where the particles are goes up.

Don’t you see: If the Universe is a mistake-world, smitten by uncertainty and frustration, it can go on like this indefinitely. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal frustrates the collapse of the electrical duality of the electron and the proton in the hydrogen atom. Pauli’s exclusion principle frustrates the collapse of the gravitational plurality. And the recycling at the border frustrates the collapse of the negative entropy.

And the Universe sails on.

John L. Dobson

18^th of April, 2007