This post is part of the online exhibition Netherlands in ideas, in which 93 scientists, entrepreneurs and artists answer one question from Paulien Cornelisse:
What insight from your field can help others in everyday life?
The exhibition is spread over 93 websites. [Here] you will find the answer of Gerard ‘t Hooft.
Albert Einstein was surprised here about: What is it surprising that literally all natural phenomena can be explained. We do not mean of course that you can predict anything or provided, but we still use it to mean is that you can figure out which physical laws underlying. Sometimes you can calculate the exact phenomena, like how the planets, the moon and the sun to revolve around one another, and that is nowadays with stunning accuracy.
Now, one hundred years after Einstein’s great discoveries, this applies to much more than his time in business. Everything, from the smallest subatomic particles to the largest galaxies in the universe, and everything in between, behaves according to the laws of nature. Another thing that determines their behavior is not.
Physics is not finished with figuring out how everything works, but we have come a lot further than most people can imagine.
Many other sciences also achieved great heights such as biology which the laws according to which evolution has taken place now describe beautifully due to the DNA molecules that have genetic characteristics of all living organisms, including ourselves, stored in it. Furthermore, geologists and astronomers to the properties of the planet Earth unravel, and large parts of its history could be mapped. Medical science has been able to eliminate many uncertainties concerning our own body.
Therefore, it is so sad to note that still the vast majority of humanity is completely irrational when thinking about our place on Earth and in our society. A low point in our civilization is achieved by religious extremists, who give more credence to divine laws than those of science and technology, while still happily use automobiles, television and mobile phones -to just to name a few.
We must realize that the laws of nature, but also that they are not made by and for us. They are just there, and sometimes work in our favor and sometimes against us. We humans also are themselves a product of the same nature. Who realizes, understands the world we live much better.
The words “good” and “evil” are not. In the laws of nature Well, ‘big’ and ‘small’, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. Also: ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’. But what is good for one may be bad for another.
There is an aspect of our current knowledge on the laws of nature, so you can still ask questions about that. What I stated above It is so that the laws of the smallest particles, atoms and molecules, seem to quantum mechanics, an apparent element of randomness to add to all those immutable natural laws. As a result, some physicists think that there would still be room for anything other than pure rationalism in our view of nature and its laws.
Again, I do not believe in. Even that quantum mechanics is very well compatible with a completely rational interpretation of what is happening. What you have to determine is that our world so gigantic many atoms and other particles is constructed, all together behave chaotically to some degree, simply because they are so small and with so many. But there you can use the laws of statistics, and then you discover yet again a high degree of predictability and fully explicable behavior.
You could to the unpredictability at the atomic level hang a religion, but you better believe that those atoms not know what they send out; we need the concepts of ‘happiness’ and ‘bad luck’ to connect here. Every man may have luck or bad luck, but do not think this can be influenced by your religious beliefs.
I fear that misunderstandings can this explain why so many people participate in lotteries and go even suffer from gambling addiction. This will also be the reason why the public lottery system for admission to a university can accept. It is believed in his own good fortune.” I would say do not do that, that faith is unfounded.
You better spend your time to delve into those particular laws that exist in nature. No one can see and understand everything, but understand that many things to understand, often helps though.
Was recently asked to give me about the course ‘Astronomy’. Colleges It was lovely to me delve back into the cosmos around us, and to note that natural laws that we have unraveled on earth are still valid in the whole universe, even with breathtaking precision.
Gerard ‘t Hooft, Theoretical physicist; winner Nobel Prize in Physics (1999); author of Building Blocks of Creation (2013), co-author of Time in powers of ten (2011)
Source: Netherlands in idea 2015
Translated with Google Translate