Site icon Vern Bender

Physics can’t explain the growth of complexity in the Universe

  • In quantum mechanics, events produced by the interaction of subatomic particles happen in jumps (yes, quantum leaps), with probabilistic rather than definite outcomes. In general relativity, events are continuous and deterministic. 
  • Dark Energy is the mystery is that no one still knows what dark energy is (or if it even exists). It accounts for +/- 70% of the known universe. Dark energy is a property of space. Dark matter slows down the expansion of the universe, while dark energy speeds it up. Dark matter works like an attractive force, a kind of cosmic cement that holds our universe together.
  • The sky is dark at night partly because the distant cosmic background radiation gets red-shifted away from the visible spectrum because of the expansion of the universe.
  • The four known fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear) are all relatively simple. But, it is almost always impossible to directly predict the behavior of complex systems.
  • Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. Examples of complex systems are Earth’s global climate, organisms, the human brain. Physics can’t explain the growth of complexity.
  • The Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry violation. Antimatter should have annihilated all the matter in the universe after the big bang, but it did not.
  • When the particles annihilate each other, only energy remains. Why did matter win? Some of the leftover particles produced our mass.
  • Matter and anti-matter have opposite charges and spin. When they meet up, mutually assured destruction happens. Why anti-matter is very rare in the universe today is anybody’s guess. Antimatter particles share the same mass as their matter counterparts, but qualities such as electric charge are opposite.
  • Neutrinos are nearly massless particles that rarely interact with matter. They have no charge.
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