The Space so wide So large the World: From the search of the elementary in the smallest and largest

Von Christian Hermenau

Are there really black holes, why do galaxies rotate so fast, is it because of dark matter or have we misunderstood something? Is the theory of the big bang really the only conceivable way to build a universe? What is the space and what the time? Can they be bent and curved, or does this idea lead us into a dead end? Physics today is more unchallenged than ever before. It seems to have sovereign answers to every fundamental question of nature. But in fact the decisive questions remain unsolved. Perhaps only a few, but decisive changes are needed to bring movement back into the whole. Here the author takes a critical look at the fundamental theories of physics and seeks ideas and ways to understand the world at large and small.

• Sprache: Deutsch
• Herausgeber: neobooks
• Erscheinungsdatum: 11. Aug. 2020
• ISBN: 9783752911930

Buchvorschau

Introduction

A little boy sat in the sand, away from the other children on playground, raked, arranged the grains into lines and leveled the heaps of sand which are so chaotic for him, these many small irregular hills to a flat even field. The rake and the shovel drove back and forth until everything met his requirements. Then he took his beloved massive wooden tractor and slowly moved the heavy vehicle through the flat, just so laboriously worked sand. His uncle had built the tractor for him. With a lot of love he had patiently made it out of sheet metal and wood for his nephew. Now the nephew lay on the side in the sand, fought his way deeper and deeper into the raked surface with the tractor and hummed contentedly. He was far away with his thoughts, watched the movement with concentration and felt the power that opposed him.

In the background the other children on the playground laughed and screamed, fought their battles, conquered parts of the playground, divided into good and evil, defended the slide, fired sticks at their attackers, yelled and screamed and had their fun. Not so our boy with the tractor. Playing war was not his thing and the many other children made him nervous rather than he wants to be with them. Just as the others loved their loud togetherness, playing with their peers, he enjoyed the cool sand beneath him, the quiet noises the tractor made, was so alone satisfied with himself. He had his peace, no tasks, no obligations, had to think of nothing, he felt free and secure.

He was a pretty child with a too angular back of the head, as his mother found. Unfortunately, he spoke only late, only little and when, he immediately formulated complete, well-formed sentences, which he first of all quietly recited to himself for safety's sake, before he pronounced them out loud. In addition, he often took quite a long time for actually simple considerations, so that his parents were already worried that their son might be somewhat retarded. Albert! Your teacher is there, called his mother, a very caring, disciplined woman, full of great expectations regarding her dreaming little darling. He was to be taught by a house teacher before he went to school. He was her eye star, but she also had a clear idea of what would become of him later, and that included a good education. He should become an educated man, he should also study and she did not want to leave that to chance. Fortunately there were his father and his uncle, who did not take life quite so seriously. Both knew about the latest developments in electrical engineering and loved to take the child into the mysterious world of electricity. They patiently explained the phenomena of voltage and current to him for hours. That was, in the eyes of the little boy, the really exciting world. At a time when the streets were still used by carts, electricity and magnetism were the most exciting things a boy could discover. For him it was the modern big wide world. It was burning in him to observe and understand the secrets of electricity and magnetism.

The Einsteins - a liberal, loving, small community. Father Hermann was a freethinker who expressed little respect for dogmas and rituals. Hermann and Pauline Einstein were foreign to rigid authority thinking. They thought progressively, cultivated communal conversation at table, promoted reading and music. In this harmonious, secure family environment, little Albert could develop freely or simply feel at ease. His excessive imagination found new food in the family again and again and his brain was constantly stimulated until his spirit slowly developed into the later genius. It was not the hated school that made him what he later became. On the contrary, it must almost be said that despite school he kept his unconventional way of thinking. The school in the 19th century was brutal from the point of view of a small, sensitive boy. It tried to produce small obedient subjects rather than to encourage creative and critical people. Discipline and order were also the highest commandment here. The state needed citizens who would go to war with zeal if the fatherland was threatened and so it is not surprising that little Einstein hated authoritarian severity and violence and lost all interest in teaching. He dropped out of school at the age of 15 and followed his parents to Milan, where he lived for a year without any education or training.

Albert Einstein was an extraordinary man who became so famous not only for his great achievements, but also for his originality. He embodied, like hardly anyone else, the dream of independence and freedom in spirit, which serves as a model for many. To this day, Einstein still shapes the image of the dispersed physicist who looks at the world in a spiritual way.

In his early childhood such a development did not appear at first. And when he left grammar school as a teenager, he would probably have been predicted the end of his career.

His father and uncle may have laid the foundation for his technical and scientific interest, and his mother gave him the ambition to achieve great things and a love of music. But is that enough to explain his genius? In Einstein's case, no one would have been able to predict that he would become the most famous physicist of the 20th century.

The beginnings of physics

With his general theory of relativity and his work on quantum theory, Einstein is on the threshold of modern physics. Classical physics before Einstein was influenced by many important physicists such as Galilei, Newton or Maxwell. The number of great personalities who helped to erect the building of classical physics is long, too long to list them all. The origins of physics, in its scientifically strict form, lie with Galileo Galilei, who worked only about 250 years before Einstein.

Even in ancient times, there were numerous scholars who dealt with natural phenomena, some of whom also formulated them mathematically, but ancient physics was still mainly a physics describing nature. Good knowledge was available, for example about air density, the rise of warm air and magnetic attraction. The law of buoyancy, according to Archimedes, is learned in the same way even today in school. Especially the idea of light as a geometric phenomenon at reflection and refraction was well known and fuelled the suspicion that mathematical rules in nature are in their ideal form. Aristotle, born 384 years BC, simply called his work physics. He thus coined the name physics, even though his description of nature did not yet correspond to today's scientific form. Nevertheless, his findings were decisive for the scientific world until early modern times. Even in the late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, the natural sciences had to deal with Aristotelian natural science. Over a period of 2000 years, the Aristotelian philosophy of nature helped to shape people's view of the world.

The current form of the physical view of the world is completed by the all decisive instrument of physics, the experiment. All ideas, every assumption, every hypothesis and theory must be empirically tested. Thus physics differs from philosophy and theology, but also from all metaphysical teachings. The decisive points of the assertion must be worked out precisely and examined in an experiment that is as ideal as possible, repeatable at any time and universally valid. This is the only difference between a physical theory and a fiction. For thousands of years this was by no means a matter of course. Unlike our technological, rationally enlightened society, knowledge and imagination were blurred. Everyday life was determined by imaginative, sensible descriptions. Probably people would have reacted with incomprehension to question facts that were self-evident or even to check them at great expense. The thinking did not foresee this option at all. This reformed itself fundamentally only in the modern age. With the discovery of new countries and the rapid increase in knowledge through printing, the world knowledge of each individual changed. More and more personalities questioned the old order and opened themselves to the new discoveries with devotion.

In this context it is not surprising that even a man like Galilei began to systematically test the previous knowledge, the physics of the ancients, in experiments and thus came to completely new evaluations and assessments of nature. Creation and the laws of nature were no longer regarded as a world intended by God, designed and realized in an act of creation, which was undoubtedly accepted, but measurements and analyses were carried out, from which equations and axioms resulted. The freedom of the fantastic, the many possibilities, which our brain also shows us as realistic possibilities, was reduced to a verifiable finiteness and an ordered regularity of nature, by means of formulas and equations.

At first our world became much smaller and narrower, but as we know, new, completely unimagined worlds developed out of this methodology and ultimately such an incredible technique that it far exceeded the imagination of the ancients of what could be accomplished.

Galilei had firmly installed the experiment in physics, with his authority, thus completing the physics of Aristoteles and Socrates with empiricism. Thus it became a true modern natural science. Every idea, every hypothesis and every theory had to be repeatedly tested at nature, and suddenly more and more secrets came to light, which slumbered in the natural phenomena and were only discovered through the experiment. Thus a separate branch of physics developed, experimental physics, which either tried to confirm the theories, determined known quantities and constants more and more precisely or even researched or developed something new, i.e. carried out real basic research. The findings of experimental physics were then again the reason for theoretical physics to improve the hypotheses and theories or to completely redesign them.

Galileo Galilei can thus perhaps be described as the father of physics today, if one wants to make a classification at all. It is astonishing that his universally valid laws, in comparison to Aristoteles, resulted from inaccurate generalizations. Aristoteles could elevate the circle to the most perfect form of motion and build the movements of the stars on it. If one relies on experiments, these are always imperfect, especially with the means of the time. If one nevertheless wants to derive universal laws from them, one must idealize them in thought. In thought experiments, for example, one imagines space as void of air or frictionless and incorporates this into one's experiments. In this way one arrives at connections which, although they apply only to the ideal case, nevertheless contain the essence of nature in the form of a law. 

Of course, Galilei also had the personality and the recognition of the professional world behind him, in order to completely detach the knowledge of nature from philosophy and thus put it on a new level. Despite his difficulties with the authorities, he enjoyed a high reputation among experts,

especially outside Italy, and the path of physics began with his work on mechanics.

In the meantime, the social image of physics and its significance for society, as well as for philosophy, has completely changed. As far as the question of the origin of all being is concerned, it is no longer theology that is the only authority, apart from philosophy, that answers the fundamental questions that are recognized. So far, physics has always stood in the shadow of mathematics and philosophy and had to stay out of the overriding questions of creation. Theology laid the foundations. Man had to stick to it. In philosophy academic questions about thinking, also concerning natural events, were discussed theoretically and attempts were made to incorporate the clarity of mathematics and logic into the structure of the world. But the breakthrough of physics as an exact science only came when the thinking of each individual became more critical and rational. Only after people began to recognize themselves, to become aware of their individuality, was it possible for them to question the biblical creation. From then on, they could understand the laws of nature analytically, objectively and soberly.

While the Italian still had to fight for the reputation of his person as a physicist in general society, a physics professor now enjoys great prestige, even if he remains unknown. Today, no one would mock it if someone introduced himself as a physicist.

Physicists stand for intelligence and wisdom. It is said that physicists can understand complex facts and find solutions for them. They are the ones who today think about the origin of the universe, about the big questions of the world and decide what is approved as accepted opinion and what is not. It is no longer theology and philosophy that find so much respect and hearing in the social discussion about the where from and where to, as physics. Whether rightly or wrongly and whether one really should take every physicist seriously is another question. The confusing, strange formulas and equations alone, with their many abstract signs, have something to be respected. Equations that take up an entire panel length and transformations, proofs and calculations that extend over many large panels in a lecture are tedious and difficult to follow even for physicists, but have a respectful effect.

The path to becoming a physicist is long and arduous, and the really exciting topics are often treated only briefly or disappear again from the vividness of mathematics. Studying physics offers little space for philosophical considerations. In most cases, the training remains very objective and sober, with a high degree of specialization.

Physics is a basic science. The advanced natural sciences and technology build on their findings. The focus is neither on application nor on whether it is important for people to benefit from it in any way. It deals with the fundamental phenomena in nature and tries to explain their properties and behavior in models and laws. If one reads about the great discoveries in modern physics, one is encouraged to think about elementary things such as matter or space. If one later studies physics, one notices how little the sublime plays a role in the study and how objectively the teaching deals with the mysterious, the unknown. Even in the later field of activity of a physicist, there is no more discussion about the big, open questions than in other areas of society.  The really big, speculative questions of physics were later dealt with professionally only by an extremely small, almost elitist circle at the large basics laboratories and in the important universities. Many physicists, but also people from other disciplines, who think about the structure of the world, are usually denied this access. Only those who have access to the all-dominant academic journals of physics will be listened to. This requires a reputation. A respected institute or a large research laboratory must stand behind him. Outsiders don't stand a chance. It's not about developing wrong ideas and creative thoughts, making mistakes, trying something out and learning from it, but about who has access, who is at the top, who leads the way, who determines what is right and what is wrong. But even within the circles of experts, criticisms or discovered mistakes are not seen as enrichment on the way to new knowledge, but they are evaluated as an attack on one's own person. Comrades-in-arms are regarded as competitors for the few career positions.

The seemingly so objective physics is determined in the big, speculative questions by a few and even if the increasing inconsistencies weigh heavily on it, the careers within physics continue to build on the proven standard models that are firmly in the hands of the old order.

Galilei was still arguing with the authority of the Church, which had determined everything for centuries, and with the theologians, who were held in high esteem by society - he, as a little Mathematicus, against the Cardinals of Rome. Today it is the mechanisms of physics itself that have undoubtedly produced the highest standards, but now, because of the quality of their results and the establishment, have frozen in motionlessness.

As in all areas of human coexistence, physics is not only about the truth, even if it has to serve as an alibi for people who think scientifically, but also about influence and power, careers, reputation and money. The physics of the 21st century is not free from this either, and we should continue to be critical of the accepted teachings.

Galilei, Newton, Einstein

In Galilei's time, the world looked much simpler from today's point of view. He only had to convince the authorities that the earth rotated around its own axis and not the universe around the earth. But is it really that easy to explain? Why don't we notice anything of the movement of the earth, although it reclines its entire circumference in only 24 hours, at the equator. Wouldn't we have to be slung away? Why don't we get dizzy at these high rotational speeds?

So or so the critics argued and were quite sure that they were right. We have to feel it somehow when the earth moves under your feet. We wouldn't have to check something like that either - it would simply be clear!

In search of an irrefutable proof that the earth rotates and we still don't fly away or feel the movement, Galilei discovered the inertia of bodies. He observed exactly how masses behave when they are moved evenly, over and over again. Then he generalized his observations to the ideal case and developed from it a law for all bodies which move uniformly, which he called inertia. Thus he noticed, through the study of motion, that physical laws are independent of the state of motion of the reference system. So he defined on the one hand, the inertial system as a reference system, which is force-free and on the other hand, the relativity principle, which all inertial systems are equivalent. In addition, he developed a coordinate transformation in order to be able to transfer the different reference systems into each other. Galilei geometrized the world. Yes, he himself went so far in his euphoria as to regard the world itself as geometry and was extremely successful with this basic idea.

Only a few generations later, Isaac Newton, one of the most important physicists in England, based his universal law of gravity on Galilei's knowledge of the relative systems, the laws of gravity, the accelerations and the planetary movements of Nicolaus Copernicus.  Newton was the first to recognize the connection between the fact that a stone always falls down because the mass of the earth and the small stone attract each other and the fact that the moon and the earth attract each other. The moon always falls around the earth. He succeeded in finding a law for it that applies to all masses and apparently has universal validity. Together with the laws of motion, Newton laid the foundation for classical mechanics.

In 1686 Newton published his work, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he presented his law of gravity for the first time. Since then it has determined the course of stars, comets and all other celestial bodies. It became the undisputed law to which all physics and especially celestial mechanics submitted. Only two hundred years later did certain weaknesses of gravitational theory become apparent in detail. Einstein was just seven years old, but had already discovered natural science and technology and was particularly fascinated by physical natural phenomena. But until he was old enough to take on an Isaac Newton, he still had a long and arduous path of