- #1
MattRob
- 208
- 29
So, yeah.
Here I am, a fledgling Undergraduate Freshman at Brigham Young University. I've been reading Brian Greene's books, and darn, do I love physics. This was the semester I decided to change my major from Mechanical Engineering to Physics-Astronomy.
Well, one night, as some of this stuff was going through my head, and me and my roommate had gone to sleep at an unusually early time (that is, about 4am), something came to mind.
Something that I had always been fascinated by was Inflationary Cosmology's insight on how a pocket of space could drop Higgs field value and creating an expanding volume of space with dropping Higgs value, resulting in a pocket of space with limited spatial extent from outside, but expanding eternally, that could have infinite volume from inside (Heh, has it ever occurred to anyone that this bears some striking resemblance to the TARDIS?).
I had wondered what these pockets of space could look like should such a situation occur in our own universe. I wondered about black holes. That's when I made the realization - that the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to match up.
I literally sprang up in bed and showered my roommate with my excitement, frantically jotting down notes. Everything that ever fell in would, from the inside, appear to suddenly appear at the beginning - like the big bang, I wrote. Time's arrow would be towards the center of the black hole from outside, and that our universe is a black hole would be the basis behind the whole holographic affair (where the amount of information in a volume of space is related to the area of that region, not its volume), and how a certain matric works out so a trajectory of imaginary dt and dx result in the two (space and time) swapping roles, Etc, etc, etc (not suggesting these ideas here, merely stating that these are the things I was thinking of and writing down at the time).
I was afraid to mention it to my physics 123 professor, though. So I hesitantly kinda sneakily asked about how these pockets would appear from outside, and kinda tried to steer the conversation in that direction. Thing is, who am I, to come up with something great? I'm just a college freshman. I was really scared to say something as audacious as "I have a groundbreaking idea," I was sure that if I did, it would be met with a great deal of - well deserved - skepticism of a very condescending variety.
That was a few months ago. I'd decided to wait until I have more mathematical tools to explore such ideas. But funny thing, I've just been reading that apparently I'm not the first to make these connections. And apparently some of these realizations that just kinda happened for me, are actually things that scientists have already discovered .
It leaves me in a really funny position, though.
On one hand, it's "Holy guacamole, I really am brilliant!" so it's kinda cool. But on the other, it's: "Well. So much for my hopes of becoming renowned in the field for making an amazing connection and discovery far above my academic level," which is kind of a killjoy. Kind of, as in a lot of, haha.
In the end, though, I'm left with: "Well, I can come up with things, so maybe next time I come up with something that I bounce on the bed at 5am for, it'll be something someone else hasn't beat me to."
I'm really posting it here, though, saying it's left me with an odd mix of emotions.
How often does this kind of thing happen in the professional field, where you're left simultaneously thrilled and completely shut down?
Perhaps this mix of emotions is proof of the Many Worlds interpretation, since both exist simultaneously yet seem mutually exclusive, haha
Here I am, a fledgling Undergraduate Freshman at Brigham Young University. I've been reading Brian Greene's books, and darn, do I love physics. This was the semester I decided to change my major from Mechanical Engineering to Physics-Astronomy.
Well, one night, as some of this stuff was going through my head, and me and my roommate had gone to sleep at an unusually early time (that is, about 4am), something came to mind.
Something that I had always been fascinated by was Inflationary Cosmology's insight on how a pocket of space could drop Higgs field value and creating an expanding volume of space with dropping Higgs value, resulting in a pocket of space with limited spatial extent from outside, but expanding eternally, that could have infinite volume from inside (Heh, has it ever occurred to anyone that this bears some striking resemblance to the TARDIS?).
I had wondered what these pockets of space could look like should such a situation occur in our own universe. I wondered about black holes. That's when I made the realization - that the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to match up.
I literally sprang up in bed and showered my roommate with my excitement, frantically jotting down notes. Everything that ever fell in would, from the inside, appear to suddenly appear at the beginning - like the big bang, I wrote. Time's arrow would be towards the center of the black hole from outside, and that our universe is a black hole would be the basis behind the whole holographic affair (where the amount of information in a volume of space is related to the area of that region, not its volume), and how a certain matric works out so a trajectory of imaginary dt and dx result in the two (space and time) swapping roles, Etc, etc, etc (not suggesting these ideas here, merely stating that these are the things I was thinking of and writing down at the time).
I was afraid to mention it to my physics 123 professor, though. So I hesitantly kinda sneakily asked about how these pockets would appear from outside, and kinda tried to steer the conversation in that direction. Thing is, who am I, to come up with something great? I'm just a college freshman. I was really scared to say something as audacious as "I have a groundbreaking idea," I was sure that if I did, it would be met with a great deal of - well deserved - skepticism of a very condescending variety.
That was a few months ago. I'd decided to wait until I have more mathematical tools to explore such ideas. But funny thing, I've just been reading that apparently I'm not the first to make these connections. And apparently some of these realizations that just kinda happened for me, are actually things that scientists have already discovered .
It leaves me in a really funny position, though.
On one hand, it's "Holy guacamole, I really am brilliant!" so it's kinda cool. But on the other, it's: "Well. So much for my hopes of becoming renowned in the field for making an amazing connection and discovery far above my academic level," which is kind of a killjoy. Kind of, as in a lot of, haha.
In the end, though, I'm left with: "Well, I can come up with things, so maybe next time I come up with something that I bounce on the bed at 5am for, it'll be something someone else hasn't beat me to."
I'm really posting it here, though, saying it's left me with an odd mix of emotions.
How often does this kind of thing happen in the professional field, where you're left simultaneously thrilled and completely shut down?
Perhaps this mix of emotions is proof of the Many Worlds interpretation, since both exist simultaneously yet seem mutually exclusive, haha
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