And today’s corpse but a memory.
The basic harmonic fabric of reality (the waves) is being pried apart and visualized by our best scientists. When we can see down there, will quanta really be indivisible? Is that the limit? We conceptualize approaching infinity every day, electromagnetic theory, calculus and quantum theory demand it. But the edges are so far from us they currently aren’t measurable, so they are deemed ‘not for practical purpose.’
But they lurk. The edges of perception. We are only into the first half millenia of augmenting our senses with machines. Galileo was one of the first (not the first but he invented the best trick with it at the time – looking up) man-machine hybrids. He had a wooden eye, so to speak. Our world was considered most of infinity, with some extra shells up there where God sat around, keeping an eye. Deemed not of practical purpose. Then someone augmented their senses, looked up, and didn’t see God.
He saw the solar system. 500 years later, we walked on the moon and have sent our augmented senses out to the other planets. Infinity moved farther out.
Now we’ve pulled a reverse Galileo. Recently we’ve imaged electron orbits with laser interferometry, an adaptation of a technique used for telescopes to combat earth’s atmosphere. Furthering St. G’s hobby has advanced our eyes in the other direction, see what makes everything.
The next step is to image (sense) protons and neutrons. I know we can do it. What then? Quarks. Gotta catch ‘em all. They are next on the edges of our perception – after all, electrons are quanta – we ought to be able to measure some interacting waveforms down in the center of their orbits. Backscatter electron interferometry? There are, of course, technical details to be overcome. Novel uses of technology will bring needed breakthroughs, it’s just a matter of time and money.
If history has taught us anything, once we see a thing, we can manipulate a thing with tools (caveat: see a thing within reasonable reach of us, I’m not claiming anything extra-solar here). Sometimes we don’t even need to see a thing to manipulate it – chemical reactions take care of themselves (via rearranging electron bonds), but compared to advanced nanoscale engineering, gross chemistry is like going to the health food store for your cancer treatment. We can already “see” these particles in high-energy reactors, but this isn’t really an “in-the-wild” view of things, it’s an “in-the-explosion” of things. Not very convenient for manipulation of nucleic particles.
Some day we will pry them apart more efficiently, put them back together in interesting ways. Life is about exploration and adaptation. Eventually we will learn to adapt atoms of one time into atoms of other, more useful types, and probably discover ever more novel forms of matter.
Can there really be limits, if we are approaching infinity every new day?
Tags: nerd with a capital N, yes this is really how I amuse myself