God in a Jar

“Questions are more important than answers. Answers are often wrong. Questions never are.” (Statement posted in my classroom.)

I LOVE questions!

Sometimes folks get worked up over answers, especially when they contradict favored beliefs. I enjoy unusual answers. I enjoy unusual questions even more.

Why does mayonnaise act like a solid? It does have some egg which is thick and sort of acts like a glue, but in itself eggs are runny. And the other ingredients... water and oil... are even runnier, especially when mixed. So why does a glob of mayo stand tall in the spoon? It may be the iconic spread of the bland and ordinary, but it shouldn’t be a proud culinary stalagmite.

With every new space telescope more amazing vistas of the universe are displayed. Hundred of billions of stars, in billions of galaxies. The furthest ones are so far away they no longer exist (distance = time). There are so many that if it weren’t for intervening dust, the night sky would be white.

Despite the enormous amount of mass represented by all those galaxies filled with billions of stars, all the mass we can find in the universe represents just 10 percent of the total.

Cool!

The way galaxies move, individually and in strange clusters, demonstrates they are embedded within enormous masses of invisible Jello.

The two galaxies colided long ago, yet still rotate independently, held in place by dark matter.

So... invisible matter... Ten times more than what we see. Cool!

E=MC2

Matter is the flip side of energy. Just as there is much more matter in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies, there is also much more energy.

Mayonnaise doesn’t run all over the place, and paint is thick, because of the casimir effect.

Tiny, tiny, tiny particles act weird. Particles around a micron (a millionth of a meter) in size, when suspended in a liquid matrix, cling together because space itself exerts energy. The wave forms between close neutral particles can’t be large enough to exert enough counteracting energy to keep them spread apart.

Recent experiments showed showed the casimir effect shoves this 120 micron ball toward the plate.

Did you miss that? In other words, neutral particles with no reason at all to be attracted to each other, do so because the universe, space, produces energy. That energy, on the macro scale, is causing the galaxies to fly apart. Eventually the universe will expand to the point where light itself won’t be able to traverse the distances.

On the microscopic scale, when tiny things are close enough together so virtual particles tend not to have enough room to appear momentarily between them. Since more of the particles and energy are outside the space, it ends up exerting pressure from the outside, shoving them together.

The evidence continues... the effect explains many other odd effects found in our universe, from black hole evaporation (Hawkings Radiation) to quantum diffusion (it IS REALLY random way down there!).


As human engineering approaches the nano scale (billionths of a meter) this energy produces ever more obvious and odd effects. For nano technology (machines built on the molecular scale) this creates friction problems.



Experiments investigating the Casimir Effect reveal a strange universe. It is filled with “dark” energy (energy we cannot “see”), virtual particles that pop in and out of existence, and suggestions of many dimensions beyond the four we know.

Wow! Proof there are things beyond our understanding.

Somehow, within all of this, I find something within me that resonates with all of this... something spiritual. I believe, I know, that this life I live is somehow thinner than a truer reality. Perhaps it is the dream I had where my senses were more acute than my everyday senses, perhaps it is something about my inner emotional self, my soul, that recognizes deeper realities, perhaps it is a layman’s speculation about an additional eight dimensions that there is a being who resides in a realm that is by its nature, fuller than this one.

I’m not a big mayo fan, but I looked inside a jar of it the other day. The deep indentations of the last time a knife swept through the white stuff was still clearly visible. I thought about how, at the smallest possible scales, molecules of oil were vibrating within water, held in place because their size was small enough that the force of the universe, dark energy, pressed the water molecules into a matrix.

I just love that there is still so much mystery in the universe and that questions are still far more important than answers.

The universe stretches on and on beyond the fields we know.