Physics? - it's the Devil's work

I've been reading quite a bit of physics lately - specifically Profs Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's rather lovely "Why Does E=mc2?".  It's an admirable and ambitious undertaking, this, by the Britain's foremost chalk-and-board-worriers.  They propose to take a lay reader (Hello!) and bring him or her up to speed with modern physics over the course of 250 pages or so of easy-to-digest prose and maths.  The maths, the geek Ant 'n' Dec are keen to point out, never gets any harder or more abstract than Pythagoras' Theorem.  And this is true.  But, then, that's not really the issue with modern physics, is it?  It's not the maths; it's the mind-bending implications of that/those/them maths that send the noggin into a tailspin in the small hours and cause nosebleeds.

For example, Pythagoras gets dragged into matters to explain Minkowski space-time.  I won't go into the nuts and bolts of MST here because to do so would go well beyond the scope of this blog and indeed my brain.  Suffice to say, Minkowski space-time is a model of the universe that allows us to agree on an objective definition of distances between objects and events in space-time.  These distances are the same of all observers of the two events or objects, so they are useful to physicists.  But, crucially, the Minkowski space-time model does this without rupturing the law of cause and effect.  Actually, it's not P's classical theorem, which *would* upset cause and effect; it's a small variation on it: it's the difference twixt the square's the other two sides, not their sum. 

Any fool can follow the logic of the distances in space-time, then, but this is only half the battle.  The implications of space-time are shattering to the jobbing liberal arts graduate.  Time and distance are relative, and the nothing can outgun the cosmic speed limit, "c".  That's not the speed of light, incidentally; it's the speed of any massless particle.

Don't let all this demi-ranting put you off, however.  It's a wonderfully accessible book.  You just need to read it like a textbook, which is what it is after all.  I find that the more intractable passages and chapters need at least 8 re-readings, and one should leave 10 hours or more between each re-reading to allow the ideas to percolate and fester.  You're not going to tear through this over the weekend then, but when you consider it took the finest minds in history nigh-on three thousand years to concoct all this bullsh1t, then you least you can do is spend a month or two staring at their findings, with your tongue stuck out and your eyes crossed.  No mental pain - no mental gain, and all that.