Summer Reading

 

Quick thoughts on a couple of books read last week in Greece.

Picked up Ian Rankin's Doors Open,  which I finished but didn't feel like it shed much light on the human condition, and had neither a compelling heist nor compelling characters.  But I finished it, and I usually just quit a book once I tire of it.

Of more interest was the Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's book, Why Does E=MC2?

Definitely one of the more accessible books on Einstein's work.  What follows are some half-baked ideas that the book helped me think through.  

For starters, I've never really liked the notion that there's always been mass. In my view, in the beginning, there was no mass and no time.  Stuff that travels at light speed has neither.  In a way, there was just light.

And so, what if the universe started with massless, timeless stuff (think of photons).  These collided which changed their relative speed, which knocked them into different space time, and gave them what we call mass. It took 2 massless things and gave them a mass which was just their respective deltas from C.  There wasn't a Big Bang just a nearly impossibly small one.

• Mass, then would merely be a function of a rate of speed less than lightspeed.  Something that sits in different space-time.

• When this new stuff that had "mass" collided with other stuff with "mass" in the same space-time, the "mass" grew.

• Mass is merely a collection  "stuff" that is moving at nearly the exact same rate of "less than light-speed" and so sits in nearly the same space time. The nearly is important since there would be bundlings of things in different space times.

• One could think of the amount of energy that it would take to restore this stuff to C as to help think about the E.  When an item is at C it's M which is it's delta from C would be 0. 

• Gravity would be a function of time.

I could go on, but it's probably best just to stop.

Bill

@williamfischer

Comments

[monika hardy]

thanks man. now i can't wait to finish it.