Mightn't it be Quite Simple?

I'm currently reading The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch. OK, some of you may know, I've been on it for two months, but I've got a bad habit of reading more than one book at a time. There are six by the bedside as we speak.

Anyway, back to Mr Deutsch.



He remains confident that the answers to the last big theoretical questions are in reach.
Soon we will know all the Hows and Whys. From then on, it will be just be about us finding better and cleverer ways to apply this knowledge.
Though of course, discoveries will still be made. Understanding evolution didn't stop us finding undiscovered life forms.

I think he's right.
I don't think there is much mysterious any more.

In fact I am prepared to a hazard a guess as to how simple- and close- the answers might be.

How to finally reconcile Quantum Mechanics and Einsteins Gravitional theory is one problem.

Now a physicist will tell you that one of the unsatisfactory parts of our current worldview, is the plethora of sub atomic particles.
There are about five hundred in theory. It's too complicated a model. Complication is rarely reality.
We are at the same point chemists were a hundred years ago. A hundred elements. What made them different?
The answer was in the way they were built. They all actually consisted of electrons, protons, and neutrons in differing numbers.

In some way, surely, the same must be true of sub atomic partcles. But how?

I would say simply, that we look at the great division in them. Half are massless and travel at 186,000 miles a second. The rest are massed and don't.

Now massed particles have a wave function, just as light particles do. But the frequency is infinitely higher, if we use that term here. It seems reasonable to assume that a particle's form is entirely a product of it's wave function, if you think about it. Maybe above a certain wave function, a particle warps the space around it, as the sun does at a bigger level. This warp, of a particle travelling round in a circle at lightspeed, creates mass.
This is just my musing here, I add.



Looking wider, Stephen Hawking's recent calculations about black hole decay, are a breath of relief for anyone who hoped for reassurance of understanding the universe.
For it meant that the laws of thermodynamics still reign supreme, unchallengeable even a black hole.
These state;
1. In any process, the total energy of the universe remains constant.
2. There is no process that, operating in a cycle, produces no other effect than the subtraction of a positive amount of heat from a reservoir and the production of an equal amount of work
3. As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant


And you know what this means, don't you?

It means that the laws of thermodynamics operate even in a singularity.
It means they operated even in the instant of the Big Bang, and would operate identically in ANY universe you chose to postulate.
Alone amongst all the laws of physics.
The rest, as they stand, MIGHT simply be properties of our own.

So, in the instant of creation, we are left with a quanta of energy, and the laws of thermodynamics.

Which means we can confidently say that everything else, the strength of gravity, the strength of nuclear forces, the evolution of life, are all the result of that one variable appearing at a mathematical point, plus the laws of thermodynamics.

And it all eventually leads to heat death.

It does really look that simple.