About half a year ago I wrote the Theory of Everything for Dummies. It’s been a moderate success, with dozens of views. However, it clearly hasn’t caught on. For something to be considered success online, requires an exponential growth of interest. This is only realized if people share what they read with friends and acquaintances. I think I know why it didn’t catch on: it didn’t have videos.
Part 1. What is Matter and Energy?
What’s is matter? This simple question is the most profound question of all and up to just about now, not properly answered. We’ve known, thanks to Albert Einstein, that energy and matter are connected with the equation . In this equation E is energy, whose basic unit is a joule (J), m is mass, whose basic unit is a kilogram (kg) and c is the speed of light, measured in meters per second (m/s). So, what then is energy? Wise people try to explain energy with a sentence:
In physics, energy is the quantitative property that is transferred to a body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of work and in the form of heat and light.
What I say about the above sentence is that the emperor has no clothes. The sentence is a fancy way of saying “I don’t know what energy is, but I know what it does and how it behaves”
What I discovered was something extremely simple. I discovered the elementary particle of energy. It has no fancy properties. In fact, as particles go, it’s pretty boring. At the face of it, it sounds very much like a particle of light, or a photon. It has no rest mass and it moves at the speed of light. However, wherever it goes its speed won’t slow down.
Well, light always moves at the speed of light as well, right? Not quite. For instance, in this Pink Floyd album cover a ray of white light is being refracted by a prism. When traveling in the prism, the speed of light is slowed down.
So, what is happening here? Well outside of the prism, there is almost no refraction. Here, light is a ring, made of an enormous number of spherical elementary particles of energy, or dots. In the below video, I exaggerate the size of a single dot, to show their movement. If the prism is in vacuum, each of the dots moves in a straight line.
However, when the circle of light enters the prism, it gets refracted. Refraction, as light observes it, is the squeezing the ring into a helix with a radius of the original radius, divided by the refractive index of the prism. In the case of a quartz prism, this refractive index is about 1.55.
So, if the light is slowed down, where does its speed disappear? While in vacuum each particle of energy moves in a straight line, in a refractive medium, the collision of the helix of light with this medium causes each dot in the helix to rotate in the opposite direction to the twist of the helix. This means that not all of the motion of the dots is linear. Rather, the dots rotate.
And how is it possible that the dots are able to rotate and not just collide with the material in which they move? Well, the simple answer is, that transparent materials are much less common than materials that absorb light. In fact, water is pretty much the only abundant transparent material. Most other transparent materials are man-made.
Okay, so this is light. What about matter? I started with a thought experiment: what would happen if two helices of dots were made to rotate around each other?
This kind of structure would be possible, but it would only look like the model above, if it moved in a vacuum. What would happen if there was refraction? Well, this structure cannot refract anymore. The dots in the two helices are as close as possible. How about if we refracted the helix in the opposite direction?
Almost regardless the amount of this secondary refraction, these entangled twisted dots would curve in a way that the shape knots with itself. And there will be two knots on either side of the structure. As far as I understand it, this shape depicts both the Higgs boson and a hydrogen atom. While the Higgs boson is an elementary particle of matter, the hydrogen atom is not. This means that the hydrogen atom can be split into smaller parts. However, for now, let’s look at the properties of the hydrogen atom.
The hydrogen atom can, and indeed will, bond with another hydrogen atom to form a hydrogen molecule (H2). And this bond forms, when the two knots in the hydrogen bond are tweaked just a bit so that the loops of neighboring hydrogen molecules overlap. Like this:
You might ask, what is this tweaking and how does this overlap work? The honest answer is that I had an intuition that you have to tweak the equations a bit and you can get the loops to form a knot. So, I did, and I could make a knot of the two knots of the neighboring hydrogen atoms. But this tweaking led the second knot of both atoms to sink within the spherical shell that depicts the average distance of the helix from its center.
While I cannot explain the details of why this happens, it means that a hydrogen molecule can only form a single molecular bond.
So, you might think that if a hydrogen molecule can form only a single bond, then it would not be connected to its surroundings. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong. The principles of quantum mechanics show us that molecules aren’t independent. Rather, a mystical word ‘entanglement’ is often used, even by people who don’t really understand it. The funny thing is that even I don’t know what physicists mean when they use the phrase. However, for me as a chemist, I’ve observed that molecules don’t seem to move independently. Rather, a huge number of experiments had led me to speculate that molecules are connected to a long chain, forming a supramolecular shell.
And how are the molecules connected to each other? For some time, I thought there was a thing called a supramolecular bond. A similar kind of a knot to the molecular bond that binds neighboring molecules together. However, not long ago, I realized that the above molecular knot is only reserved to molecular bonds, but this doesn’t mean that molecules cannot be knotted either.
Just with toying around with the above knot, I realized that if you make a similar kind of knot with two hydrogen molecules, you can make a supramolecular knot:
Now, this knot is a curious thing. You can’t pull it apart, without ionizing the hydrogen into a proton and an electron, but you can push the molecules together. However, to do this, you must exert pressure.
But if there is one supramolecular knot, each hydrogen molecule must form a knot on either end, ultimately forming a supramolecular loop of knotted hydrogen molecules:
As molecules move, this means that this structure must enable this movement. Up until I started thinking about this sentence, I was sure that the loops would sweep around the structure, a bit like a skipping rope. However, when I started thinking about the role of the knots, this idea no longer seemed feasible. At this moment my educated guess is either that the molecules indeed either move along the chain of knots, or that the whole knot of knots rotates as a whole.
If the chains move along the shape, then this shouldn’t be much of a problem, because in this case each molecule moves at the same speed as each other. However, if the knot of knots rotates, then it means that the “equator” of the knot rotates fast, while the pole doesn’t move at all. However, if one views the above shape, this might mean that the rotation of the shape forces the supramolecular shell into a more cylindrical shape.
Oops! I did it again! While writing something that was to be a general description of the theory, I encountered an important feature of the nature of the movement of molecules. This means that this is a good point to end part 1 of the Theory of Everything for Dummies (with videos).
Be tuned for more. I’ll let you know what I’ve learned as soon as I learn it.
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