Physics Week 2

I'm still having trouble fulling accepting/understanding the concepts of Uncertainty. It says that until a subatomic particle is measured or observed, the likelihood that its location is in any particular place is equal to the likelihood it is anywhere else in the universe, and therfore we can't know where it is? And that it is essentially everywhere at once? But how does this work if we understand electrons to be orbiting around the nucleus of an atom? Don't they occupy a pretty small orbit? If we are discussing an atom that's part of an object that's right in fron of us, ins't the likelihood that that atom's protons are also right in front of us higher than the likelihood that they are currntly spinning out towards Pluto?

I find the concept of unbroken wholeness and connectedness very interesting. I would not say I definitely believe this, but I think the concept that just one small change or action in the world could produce effects that ripple out across the entire planet. Like if I decide to eat my breakfast at the kitchen table vs at my desk, that that could somehow effect things that happen later in the day, that have effects outside of my life that continue out like waves that I never know about. I'm not so arrogant to think that every mundane thing I do in my life has profound effects on everyone on the planet, but I do think its interesting to think about. I also think this is somehow related to what i was discussing in my first week's blog post about how after the Big Bang maybe everything that was going to happen throughout the timeline of the Universe was already fated to happen because everything was caused by a series of chemical and physical reactions that were all triggered by the Big Bang.

I also wonder about how this can interconnectedness can be applied to objects with empty space between them, ie planets in space or galaxies across the universe from each other. Is there something connecting them too? Gravity? Space-time? Dark energy/matter?

 The question of if the universe is weird is very subjective and really about what the observe think is weird. I would say no, its not weird, but more accurately "profound," "cool," "trippy," and "far-out." I would also say that the universe is completely mundane, because while all of the things we talk about in physics and astronomy are very cool, they are also things that happen all the time all around us, all over the universe. The only reason they seem exceptional is because we put a lot of time and energy into observing them, measuring them, figuring out how they work.


On Gravity:
This is from my comment on Ben's blog:
What I find most interesting in reading about the four fundamental forces is Einstein redefining gravity from a force that draws two objects together to a a distortion in space-time. If space -time is a plane, then gravity causes a warping of the plane around a massive object so that smaller objects roll down the warped surface of the plane towards the largest object. After thinking about this a little more, I understand the image of the earth and satellite in the reading for today.