Paradoxes in Physics
With the caveat that this article simplifies the plights and tremendous discoveries of physicists, I would like to seek the shared circles of past scientific luminaries.
What patterns exist behind the theories of the greatest minds of the previous centuries, if any?
By examining several cases, it seems to be that resolving a paradox offers the greatest insight into our natural world. If this is so, what does this explain about knowledge in our larger world?
The way I view paradoxes is that there seemed to be two truths that clashed with each other.
In Albert Einstein’s case — the paradox he resolved floated around a curious observation he made at the age of 16. To frame it as if it was a race, imagine Albert was at the start line and he was running against his competitor, a beam of light. If Albert would be running at the same speed as the light beam, then looking over his shoulder, the light beam would appear stationary. This is seen when you are driving down the road matching the speed of the car next to you. One could observe as if the ground is the one moving, not the cars.
Could light be stationary? What would that look like? A light beam is oscillating magnetic and electric fields that travel at the speed of light. For it to be stationary would mean that there is a paradox with the laws of James Maxwell.
The paradox would be resolved by Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Herein, the relative motion of the observer (Albert running the race) would experience time differently than the light beam. But to directly answer Einstein’s thought paradox, light could not be stationary as light always travels at the speed of light in all places (to which I mean references frames, or relative spot of one place to another).
“it’s perfectly possible for two events to happen simultaneously from the perspective of one observer, yet happen at different times from the perspective of the other. And both observers would be right”
In Stephen Hawking’s case — one of his most notable scientific discussion is the black hole information paradox.
What Stephen Hawking posited was that if, for example, we were in space and had a book with information in it — and we threw that book into a black hole, he asked what would happen to the information when it entered the black hole? Would it disappear? And if it did, wouldn’t this run contrary to the conservation of information central to quantum mechanics? Thus, a paradox is created: according to quantum mechanics, no information is created or destroyed, however, wouldn’t the information be destroyed in some sense? As a result to clarify this paradox, Hawking suggested that the information in the book would be radiated out of the black hole as a value known as “Hawking Radiation”: even though the book may be destroyed, it’s information is retained and conserved.
Finally, an observation about a paradox is seen in our early universe. Each time a particle is produced, there is an equal amount of anti-particle that is produced. When the Big Bang produced the universe 13.7 Billion Years ago, there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe. But everything: from my dog to my bike to our galaxy consists of matter, not anti-matter. Something must have changed the scales. Thus a paradox was created.
As a fun fact, when cosmic rays (which follow a Stochastic Differential Equation in their movement!) hit Earth’s atmosphere, they produce small amounts of antimatter in particle jets and are immediately annihalted by contact with nearby matter.
But in the early universe, in a process called Baryogenesis, massive numbers of particles and antiparticles were created and annihilated each other. The resulting energy produced is seen in the footprint of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
James Cronin and Val Fitch in the 1960s put evidence and theory forward to rectify this paradox. They worked on a particle called the Kaon, and demonstrated that particles and their antiparticles are not in fact total opposites.
They turned over the charge party invariance which said that same laws of physics work everywhere if the charge of particles are reversed. And resounding this paradox is what led to the stars, planets, and us!
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