Chapter 16 Sorry

The role of the observer in biological research is complex, but not surprising.He or she just observes, describes, explains, and maybe occasionally yells hoarsely, that's all.The very act of observing does not change fundamental aspects of the object of observation, or arguably should not change any fundamental aspects. In modern physics the situation is quite different.The uncertainty principle does not mean that the observer must destroy the exact momentum upon observation, or change the observed particle, although these things do exist.Actually, the effect is deeper.The observer and his instrument create the observed reality.Without him, a single particle has all kinds of possibilities, manifests itself in all kinds of waveforms.The reality to be studied by his instruments does not merely exist; that reality is laboratory-born.

I thought about this, but couldn't concentrate for long.Words are always a hindrance.The vocabulary of physics is confusing enough: "charm" (nuclear physics), "singularity," "strong" and "weak" forces, and "quarks." The word "matter" itself is dreamlike, grown from an Indo-European root ma based on baby talk.This root later became mater, and later differentiated into several words such as maternal (mother's, maternal), material (material), and matrix (womb, substrate).Demeter (Demeter) name comes from this root, she is the god of the whole earth.

Speaking of this, I suddenly remembered that I have been making some kind of physical observations myself.Without formal training, the instrument of observation is a pencil point, and may inadvertently cause trouble.I didn't want to change anything, and, I wanted to say, I'm sorry for the interruption. Since about last year, several times, I sat in a high-rise room facing north on East Sixty-ninth Street. The apartment building, look at the reflection of the sun on one of the windows up there.The sun appears from noon, and the location of the appearance changes slowly with the seasons.You can also think of this.But the location of the sun can change much more rapidly throughout the day.If I look long enough, my eyes can carry as many as eight afterimages of yellow and green suns, move them anywhere on the wall of the room, move them up and down, all eight suns, Feel free to move around.

Now, I have to talk about what I've been doing. Occasionally, I put a piece of paper (I use a legal pad with a yellow grid) in the center of my desk, and a pencil point (preferably a sharpened one) in the center of the paper, Note the building between 72nd Street and 3rd Avenue, and hold the pen point there. At times like this, what I do is change the way that system works.Instead of turning the earth once every twenty-four hours, I held my pen steady and let the sun slowly circle East Sixty-ninth Street.Anyone can do this.It takes a bit of effort to get started, but after a few minutes of contemplation, you can center East Sixty-ninth Street in motion, and then you feel the sun rising behind you to your right, slowly making a great circle ; once you activate the sun, it is not difficult to organize the rest of the solar system so that the whole system revolves around a stationary earth, or more precisely, around a central point east of Manhattan.Of course there is some eccentricity and asymmetry to deal with, and events are not in order, but it goes on and on.

What I didn't realize when I started doing this, though, was that it was bound to touch a larger scale than the solar system. You have to make the whole galaxy spin.The entire galaxy rotates once in twenty-four hours.But then, there are all the other galaxies, which can't just be hung up and brushed aside.They also had to start at the same time, spin up, and move in exact sync with our local sun.They had to be allowed to do their own frictionless, rhythmic dance around each other, each with its own parts inside, as they were set into motion, whistling through the turbulence of the solar wind.It's a huge job, and you have to get a firm grip on the point of the pencil to do it right.You've got to do the whole thing, totally, or you'll shake that structure to pieces.

If you wanted the sun to make a full revolution every twenty-four hours, you'd have to take the whole universe, all the galaxies, everything in space, off that curved edge. The hardest part of this thing is that you have to rotate the outermost galaxies at such a rate that everything turns around in twenty-four hours.This means that you need to run at very high speeds, far faster than the speed of light, otherwise, some parts will lag behind the periphery.That does not work.The universe needs to revolve around a fixed Earth in twenty-four hours, but you have to be willing to put in that much time and hold on to your pencil.

What bothers me now is what effect this activity will have on cosmologists.They might be in Pasadena, or Puerto Rico, or Paloma, or Pittsburgh, or somewhere else, watching something.As I spin the universe, it's probably all right, imagine, that I'm doing it consistently, and that, in fact, no membrane attached to the edge has ever been inadvertently torn by me.But what happens when I get tired of playing—and sometimes I do—and put down my pencil and think about something else?I figured there was going to be some kind of tilt, some kind of jolt, right up to the edge, and then things would adjust and go back to the old way, the earth going around the sun every twenty-four hours.

I thought I'd say a few words about that, in case my observations need to be adjusted when I'm done with that.But at the same time, I also thought that my personal operation may not be the only one.It's entirely possible that someone else, in Central Park West, a few kilometers above Eightieth Street, is out there spinning the universe around a fixed point.Or, even in Teaneck there are people doing the same thing.Or, maybe even as far away as San Francisco, someone is twisting everything in ways I don't understand.In fact, such things may appear all the time, tilting the universe in one way or another, turning it around this or that fixed point, sometimes even contradicting each other.That should be told to the astronomers before it's probably too late to realize the mess of numbers.

I'm sorry for what I did.But that doesn't mean I'm sure I can stop.Once you hold that pencil point precisely, hold it in a good place, and feel the whole thing jerk and heave, almost To lose control and fly away, but still hold it and spin - at that time, it is very difficult to stop.