The Space so wide So large the World E-Book

Christian Hermenau

• Herausgeber: neobooks
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 330

Beschreibung

Are there really black holes, why do galaxies rotate so fast, is it because of dark matter or have we misunderstood something? Is the theory of the big bang really the only conceivable way to build a universe? What is the space and what the time? Can they be bent and curved, or does this idea lead us into a dead end? Physics today is more unchallenged than ever before. It seems to have sovereign answers to every fundamental question of nature. But in fact the decisive questions remain unsolved. Perhaps only a few, but decisive changes are needed to bring movement back into the whole. Here the author takes a critical look at the fundamental theories of physics and seeks ideas and ways to understand the world at large and small.

Leseprobe

The Space so wide

So large the World

From the search of the elementary in the smallest and largest

Christian Hermenau

Contents

Introduction

The beginnings of physics

Galilei, Newton, Einstein

Keppler, Gutenberg, Luther

Physics today

The Big Bang

Space, time

Mass

Space and field

Light

A growing universe

Finiteness in an Infinity

A closed universe

Changes in the Structure of the Universe

The stability of the spheres

Redshift

The line element

Electric pressure

The edge of the world

The uncertainty

Vacuum

Movement

Eigen-Time

Inertia

Time

The Centre

The spin

Complex Life

Black Holes

Fusion

Small back-accelerations

Connections

Dark matter

Oversized mass accumulations

Gravitational lenses

The strong interaction force

Color charges

Quarks and Planes

Electrical point-charges

Simple connections

Layers and Strings

Conclusion

Introduction

A little boy sat in the sand, away from the other children on playground, raked, arranged the grains into lines and leveled the heaps of sand which are so chaotic for him, these many small irregular hills to a flat even field. The rake and the shovel drove back and forth until everything met his requirements. Then he took his beloved massive wooden tractor and slowly moved the heavy vehicle through the flat, just so laboriously worked sand. His uncle had built the tractor for him. With a lot of love he had patiently made it out of sheet metal and wood for his nephew. Now the nephew lay on the side in the sand, fought his way deeper and deeper into the raked surface with the tractor and hummed contentedly. He was far away with his thoughts, watched the movement with concentration and felt the power that opposed him.

In the background the other children on the playground laughed and screamed, fought their battles, conquered parts of the playground, divided into good and evil, defended the slide, fired sticks at their attackers, yelled and screamed and had their fun. Not so our boy with the tractor. Playing war was not his thing and the many other children made him nervous rather than he wants to be with them. Just as the others loved their loud togetherness, playing with their peers, he enjoyed the cool sand beneath him, the quiet noises the tractor made, was so alone satisfied with himself. He had his peace, no tasks, no obligations, had to think of nothing, he felt free and secure.

He was a pretty child with a too angular back of the head, as his mother found. Unfortunately, he spoke only late, only little and when, he immediately formulated complete, well-formed sentences, which he first of all quietly recited to himself for safety's sake, before he pronounced them out loud. In addition, he often took quite a long time for actually simple considerations, so that his parents were already worried that their son might be somewhat retarded. "Albert! Your teacher is there," called his mother, a very caring, disciplined woman, full of great expectations regarding her dreaming little darling. He was to be taught by a house teacher before he went to school. He was her eye star, but she also had a clear idea of what would become of him later, and that included a good education. He should become an educated man, he should also study and she did not want to leave that to chance. Fortunately there were his father and his uncle, who did not take life quite so seriously. Both knew about the latest developments in electrical engineering and loved to take the child into the mysterious world of electricity. They patiently explained the phenomena of voltage and current to him for hours. That was, in the eyes of the little boy, the really exciting world. At a time when the streets were still used by carts, electricity and magnetism were the most exciting things a boy could discover. For him it was the modern big wide world. It was burning in him to observe and understand the secrets of electricity and magnetism.

The Einsteins - a liberal, loving, small community. Father Hermann was a freethinker who expressed little respect for dogmas and rituals. Hermann and Pauline Einstein were foreign to rigid authority thinking. They thought progressively, cultivated communal conversation at table, promoted reading and music. In this harmonious, secure family environment, little Albert could develop freely or simply feel at ease. His excessive imagination found new food in the family again and again and his brain was constantly stimulated until his spirit slowly developed into the later genius. It was not the hated school that made him what he later became. On the contrary, it must almost be said that despite school he kept his unconventional way of thinking. The school in the 19th century was brutal from the point of view of a small, sensitive boy. It tried to produce small obedient subjects rather than to encourage creative and critical people. Discipline and order were also the highest commandment here. The state needed citizens who would go to war with zeal if the fatherland was threatened and so it is not surprising that little Einstein hated authoritarian severity and violence and lost all interest in teaching. He dropped out of school at the age of 15 and followed his parents to Milan, where he lived for a year without any education or training.

Albert Einstein was an extraordinary man who became so famous not only for his great achievements, but also for his originality. He embodied, like hardly anyone else, the dream of independence and freedom in spirit, which serves as a model for many. To this day, Einstein still shapes the image of the dispersed physicist who looks at the world in a spiritual way.

In his early childhood such a development did not appear at first. And when he left grammar school as a teenager, he would probably have been predicted the end of his career.

His father and uncle may have laid the foundation for his technical and scientific interest, and his mother gave him the ambition to achieve great things and a love of music. But is that enough to explain his genius? In Einstein's case, no one would have been able to predict that he would become the most famous physicist of the 20th century.

The beginnings of physics

With his general theory of relativity and his work on quantum theory, Einstein is on the threshold of modern physics. Classical physics before Einstein was influenced by many important physicists such as Galilei, Newton or Maxwell. The number of great personalities who helped to erect the building of classical physics is long, too long to list them all. The origins of physics, in its scientifically strict form, lie with Galileo Galilei, who worked only about 250 years before Einstein.

Even in ancient times, there were numerous scholars who dealt with natural phenomena, some of whom also formulated them mathematically, but ancient physics was still mainly a physics describing nature. Good knowledge was available, for example about air density, the rise of warm air and magnetic attraction. The law of buoyancy, according to Archimedes, is learned in the same way even today in school. Especially the idea of light as a geometric phenomenon at reflection and refraction was well known and fuelled the suspicion that mathematical rules in nature are in their ideal form. Aristotle, born 384 years BC, simply called his work "physics". He thus coined the name physics, even though his description of nature did not yet correspond to today's scientific form. Nevertheless, his findings were decisive for the scientific world until early modern times. Even in the late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, the natural sciences had to deal with Aristotelian natural science. Over a period of 2000 years, the Aristotelian philosophy of nature helped to shape people's view of the world.

The current form of the physical view of the world is completed by the all decisive instrument of physics, the experiment. All ideas, every assumption, every hypothesis and theory must be empirically tested. Thus physics differs from philosophy and theology, but also from all metaphysical teachings. The decisive points of the assertion must be worked out precisely and examined in an experiment that is as ideal as possible, repeatable at any time and universally valid. This is the only difference between a physical theory and a fiction. For thousands of years this was by no means a matter of course. Unlike our technological, rationally enlightened society, knowledge and imagination were blurred. Everyday life was determined by imaginative, sensible descriptions. Probably people would have reacted with incomprehension to question facts that were self-evident or even to check them at great expense. The thinking did not foresee this option at all. This reformed itself fundamentally only in the modern age. With the discovery of new countries and the rapid increase in knowledge through printing, the world knowledge of each individual changed. More and more personalities questioned the old order and opened themselves to the new discoveries with devotion.

In this context it is not surprising that even a man like Galilei began to systematically test the previous knowledge, the physics of the ancients, in experiments and thus came to completely new evaluations and assessments of nature. Creation and the laws of nature were no longer regarded as a world intended by God, designed and realized in an act of creation, which was undoubtedly accepted, but measurements and analyses were carried out, from which equations and axioms resulted. The freedom of the fantastic, the many possibilities, which our brain also shows us as realistic possibilities, was reduced to a verifiable finiteness and an ordered regularity of nature, by means of formulas and equations.

At first our world became much smaller and narrower, but as we know, new, completely unimagined worlds developed out of this methodology and ultimately such an incredible technique that it far exceeded the imagination of the ancients of what could be accomplished.

Galilei had firmly installed the experiment in physics, with his authority, thus completing the physics of Aristoteles and Socrates with empiricism. Thus it became a true modern natural science. Every idea, every hypothesis and every theory had to be repeatedly tested at nature, and suddenly more and more secrets came to light, which slumbered in the natural phenomena and were only discovered through the experiment. Thus a separate branch of physics developed, experimental physics, which either tried to confirm the theories, determined known quantities and constants more and more precisely or even researched or developed something new, i.e. carried out real basic research. The findings of experimental physics were then again the reason for theoretical physics to improve the hypotheses and theories or to completely redesign them.

Galileo Galilei can thus perhaps be described as the father of physics today, if one wants to make a classification at all. It is astonishing that his universally valid laws, in comparison to Aristoteles, resulted from inaccurate generalizations. Aristoteles could elevate the circle to the most perfect form of motion and build the movements of the stars on it. If one relies on experiments, these are always imperfect, especially with the means of the time. If one nevertheless wants to derive universal laws from them, one must idealize them in thought. In thought experiments, for example, one imagines space as void of air or frictionless and incorporates this into one's experiments. In this way one arrives at connections which, although they apply only to the ideal case, nevertheless contain the essence of nature in the form of a law.

Of course, Galilei also had the personality and the recognition of the professional world behind him, in order to completely detach the knowledge of nature from philosophy and thus put it on a new level. Despite his difficulties with the authorities, he enjoyed a high reputation among experts,

especially outside Italy, and the path of physics began with his work on mechanics.

In the meantime, the social image of physics and its significance for society, as well as for philosophy, has completely changed. As far as the question of the origin of all being is concerned, it is no longer theology that is the only authority, apart from philosophy, that answers the fundamental questions that are recognized. So far, physics has always stood in the shadow of mathematics and philosophy and had to stay out of the overriding questions of creation. Theology laid the foundations. Man had to stick to it. In philosophy academic questions about thinking, also concerning natural events, were discussed theoretically and attempts were made to incorporate the clarity of mathematics and logic into the structure of the world. But the breakthrough of physics as an exact science only came when the thinking of each individual became more critical and rational. Only after people began to recognize themselves, to become aware of their individuality, was it possible for them to question the biblical creation. From then on, they could understand the laws of nature analytically, objectively and soberly.

While the Italian still had to fight for the reputation of his person as a physicist in general society, a physics professor now enjoys great prestige, even if he remains unknown. Today, no one would mock it if someone introduced himself as a physicist.

Physicists stand for intelligence and wisdom. It is said that physicists can understand complex facts and find solutions for them. They are the ones who today think about the origin of the universe, about the big questions of the world and decide what is approved as accepted opinion and what is not. It is no longer theology and philosophy that find so much respect and hearing in the social discussion about the where from and where to, as physics. Whether rightly or wrongly and whether one really should take every physicist seriously is another question. The confusing, strange formulas and equations alone, with their many abstract signs, have something to be respected. Equations that take up an entire panel length and transformations, proofs and calculations that extend over many large panels in a lecture are tedious and difficult to follow even for physicists, but have a respectful effect.

The path to becoming a physicist is long and arduous, and the really exciting topics are often treated only briefly or disappear again from the vividness of mathematics. Studying physics offers little space for philosophical considerations. In most cases, the training remains very objective and sober, with a high degree of specialization.

Physics is a basic science. The advanced natural sciences and technology build on their findings. The focus is neither on application nor on whether it is important for people to benefit from it in any way. It deals with the fundamental phenomena in nature and tries to explain their properties and behavior in models and laws. If one reads about the great discoveries in modern physics, one is encouraged to think about elementary things such as matter or space. If one later studies physics, one notices how little the sublime plays a role in the study and how objectively the teaching deals with the mysterious, the unknown. Even in the later field of activity of a physicist, there is no more discussion about the big, open questions than in other areas of society. The really big, speculative questions of physics were later dealt with professionally only by an extremely small, almost elitist circle at the large basics laboratories and in the important universities. Many physicists, but also people from other disciplines, who think about the structure of the world, are usually denied this access. Only those who have access to the all-dominant academic journals of physics will be listened to. This requires a reputation. A respected institute or a large research laboratory must stand behind him. Outsiders don't stand a chance. It's not about developing wrong ideas and creative thoughts, making mistakes, trying something out and learning from it, but about who has access, who is at the top, who leads the way, who determines what is right and what is wrong. But even within the circles of experts, criticisms or discovered mistakes are not seen as enrichment on the way to new knowledge, but they are evaluated as an attack on one's own person. Comrades-in-arms are regarded as competitors for the few career positions.

The seemingly so objective physics is determined in the big, speculative questions by a few and even if the increasing inconsistencies weigh heavily on it, the careers within physics continue to build on the proven standard models that are firmly in the hands of the old order.

Galilei was still arguing with the authority of the Church, which had determined everything for centuries, and with the theologians, who were held in high esteem by society - he, as a little Mathematicus, against the Cardinals of Rome. Today it is the mechanisms of physics itself that have undoubtedly produced the highest standards, but now, because of the quality of their results and the establishment, have frozen in motionlessness.

As in all areas of human coexistence, physics is not only about the truth, even if it has to serve as an alibi for people who think scientifically, but also about influence and power, careers, reputation and money. The physics of the 21st century is not free from this either, and we should continue to be critical of the accepted teachings.

Galilei, Newton, Einstein

In Galilei's time, the world looked much simpler from today's point of view. He only had to convince the authorities that the earth rotated around its own axis and not the universe around the earth. But is it really that easy to explain? Why don't we notice anything of the movement of the earth, although it reclines its entire circumference in only 24 hours, at the equator. Wouldn't we have to be slung away? Why don't we get dizzy at these high rotational speeds?

So or so the critics argued and were quite sure that they were right. We have to feel it somehow when the earth moves under your feet. We wouldn't have to check something like that either - it would simply be clear!

In search of an irrefutable proof that the earth rotates and we still don't fly away or feel the movement, Galilei discovered the inertia of bodies. He observed exactly how masses behave when they are moved evenly, over and over again. Then he generalized his observations to the ideal case and developed from it a law for all bodies which move uniformly, which he called inertia. Thus he noticed, through the study of motion, that physical laws are independent of the state of motion of the reference system. So he defined on the one hand, the inertial system as a reference system, which is force-free and on the other hand, the relativity principle, which all inertial systems are equivalent. In addition, he developed a coordinate transformation in order to be able to transfer the different reference systems into each other. Galilei geometrized the world. Yes, he himself went so far in his euphoria as to regard the world itself as geometry and was extremely successful with this basic idea.

Only a few generations later, Isaac Newton, one of the most important physicists in England, based his universal law of gravity on Galilei's knowledge of the relative systems, the laws of gravity, the accelerations and the planetary movements of Nicolaus Copernicus. Newton was the first to recognize the connection between the fact that a stone always falls down because the mass of the earth and the small stone attract each other and the fact that the moon and the earth attract each other. The moon always falls around the earth. He succeeded in finding a law for it that applies to all masses and apparently has universal validity. Together with the laws of motion, Newton laid the foundation for classical mechanics.

In 1686 Newton published his work, the "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica", in which he presented his law of gravity for the first time. Since then it has determined the course of stars, comets and all other celestial bodies. It became the undisputed law to which all physics and especially celestial mechanics submitted. Only two hundred years later did certain weaknesses of gravitational theory become apparent in detail. Einstein was just seven years old, but had already discovered natural science and technology and was particularly fascinated by physical natural phenomena. But until he was old enough to take on an Isaac Newton, he still had a long and arduous path of knowledge ahead of him. Nearly 30 years later, he not only belonged to the elite of physicists, but he also succeeded in expanding Newton's gravity by a more precise, even more comprehensive theory of gravity, which included not only masses, but also space and time.

As early as 1905, when he was still a nobody, he summarized his findings on moving reference systems in the "Annals of Physics". On the relativity of moving reference systems according to Galilei, Einstein found the relativity of space and time. Two basic quantities of all philosophical and physical thought, which in their absolute and constant form were always unchallenged. Precise experiments have shown that the speed of light seems to be a speed limit that cannot be exceeded. Einstein generalized this assumption to all bodies and movements and postulated that on the one hand no information can be transmitted faster than with the vacuum speed of light and on the other hand that space and time are not absolute, but only the speed of light. In every moving reference system, only the speed of light is equal. Only at it one can orientate oneself.

The special theory of relativity was only valid for relative systems, which move with uniform speed and so the wish arose immediately in Einstein to generalize the change of space and time also to accelerated systems. Especially here on earth we seem to be accelerated continuously towards the ground, even when we rest. We are pressed to the ground, just as if we were in a rocket accelerated at 10 m/s². In an elevator we could hardly tell the difference. With this he put his finger on the deeper connections between accelerated inertial systems and stationary gravity systems. Masses and movements in space could be connected with each other. Galilei still believed the world, the space in it is geometry. Einstein now geometrized time as the fourth dimension of space to Galilei's space. Then he generalized the relative systems to accelerated inertial systems. He geometricized space and time and allowed space and time curvatures as a climax to these generalized geometric coordinates. This resulted in a completely new approach to Newton's law of gravity. Now it is no longer the masses alone that attract, but the masses change the space and time around them, and this leads indirectly to matter moving towards each other in a curved space.

Einstein used a form of mathematics that had previously had no particular significance among mathematicians and was introduced in 1840 by the great mathematician William Hamilton - tensor calculus. It was not until 1900 that Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, this calculation method, in his book "Calcolo differenziale assoluto", made it accessible to a larger specialist audience. The book was translated into various languages, including German, and Einstein was thus able to acquire his knowledge of it. He used this new calculation for his general theory of relativity and it was through him that this type of mathematics became so important. It was an elaborated mathematical methodology for analytically describing multidimensional spaces that were not necessarily Euclidean, i.e. rectangular. For Einstein, the origin of such space and time curvatures was mass. Newton's gravitational masses curved Einstein's space-time and led to what we perceive as attraction. Whether it is an apple falling Newton on his head, or the moon falling around the Earth in a curved four-dimensional space, here the connections of celestial movements were found in the course of the small things of everyday life.

Galilei had not invented physics, but he gave it the foundation for a solid modern science. His work fell into a time of upheaval.

Keppler, Gutenberg, Luther

Thus the German astronomer and mathematician, Johannes Keppler, also tried to discover mathematical regularities in the movements of the stars. Keppler met the 25 years older Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe exactly in the year 1600. Tycho Brahe, had spent years observing the fixed stars and planetary motions precisely and noting their position, all this without a telescope. Tycho Brahe was impressed by Keppler's works and hoped that he would discover regularity in his many collected data. Brahe still firmly believed in the old Ptolemaic geocentric view of the world and had corresponding difficulties in explaining his planetary orbits, some of which were clearly looped. He now met the much younger, very sensitive Johannes Kepler, who despite his deep religiosity considered the heliocentric world view to be the right one. Keppler was a Pythagorean mystic. He also believed that nature is built on mathematical foundations and that everything results in a coherent whole. Here, then, the irascible Brahe of the old world, visited the sensitive young Keppler, a follower of the modern zeitgeist. Brahe, armed with endless data series and tables, which he did not know how to interpret, but defended suspiciously, met Keppler, who had the right knowledge to solve the riddles in the number series. It was not an easy encounter, but it led to Keppler getting some of the data and even a few years later inheriting all the position values collected by Tycho Brahe. And indeed Johannes Keppler, after 20 years of patient work, succeeded in writing down the correct legal connections of the planetary movements with the appropriate basic assumption. Keppler firmly believed that the celestial bodies influence the earthly concerns. For him not everything had to revolve around the earth, but the whole great universe had been created for the earth alone. So indirectly everything revolved around us humans. With the help of Tycho Brahe's measurements, he was able to prove that the Earth and all other planets were moving in elliptical orbits around the Sun. He degraded the movement of the Earth from the center and that of the planets to imperfect ellipses. In his main work, he describes in great detail how the Earth rotates around its own axis and even developed its precessional motion. Keppler thus became the founder of modern astronomy. But still the earth was with man on it, the center of the world. Keppler did not yet give up our central divinity, our uniqueness, but he belonged to those who contributed to the great change in thinking. Keppler moved the earth out of the center and put man into it.

Among other things, a completely new kind of world view began with him, in which the individual human being, even the ordinary one, gained more and more importance. The change of thinking was initiated by a machine about 150 years before Keppler. Johannes Gutenberg from Mainz developed a way to print books with movable type and revolutionized book production with this seemingly simple change. He succeeded in matching the individual components in book printing so perfectly that the production of books became much more efficient, so that mass production could be considered.

He thus triggered a media revolution in Europe. Perhaps the invention of mass printing was the most significant invention of the second millennium.

The knowledge of the world was no longer reserved to a small elitist circle, which had the power and the money, but it could potentially spread wider and further and faster. It began to communicate. This led to the fact that also increasingly the simple people learned about the changes in the world. But it was only with Martin Luther that people were freed from the bondage of religion, a punishing, unyielding God, the Old Testament. Luther translated the Bible not only into Greek, but also into ordinary German, making it accessible to the common people. He discovered for himself God's promise of grace in the New Testament and focused on it in his translation. This slightly different perspective and the possibility of being able to read the Bible oneself through mass printing and translation into German led to an increase in the importance of each individual. Without knowing it, Luther was also a germ for a developing consciousness, an awakening of the Spirit, which suddenly assigned everyone a responsibility for world knowledge. But it is only with Keppler that the seed slowly rises.

Seen in this light, Galilei is already riding the wave of this new age. Only, he recognizes modernity more clearly than others and brings together the threads of physics on the right track.

Physics today

What has changed since Galilei's days? What does physics look like today? Have we answered all our questions about where we came from and where we are going, with all our modern means? After all, physics has become one of the most important sciences of our technological world. Its basic research has led to the development of countless, ever more sophisticated devices. Huge particle accelerators have been built to penetrate deep into the nature of matter. Galilei's simple telescope has become an impressive apparatus, with special mirrors several meters in size, which, with the help of sophisticated computer programs, explore the depths of space. Meanwhile, we have mature theories on every phenomenon. But has all this taken us further? Do we now know the origin of life, where things come from and how they interact? Can we calculate and solve it? Unfortunately not.

All we have achieved so far is that the answers become more and more confusing and above all more and more complicated. We are pushing a mountain of solutions in front of us, from which each individual approach and each explanation of the interrelationships has specialized solutions to the questions in such a way that they can only be understood by the corresponding experts, if at all. Because the answers, even to unasked questions, are available in a mathematical technical language that one don't just learn. That is why it is becoming more and more difficult to get an overview and to recognize a possible connection between the individual areas.

The language that everyone understands more or less well, the language of vividness, the description in pictures and ideas, this language has long been neglected by physicists. If one wants to make a career in physics today, one have to be outstanding in mathematics. One must feel comfortable in it and love it. But if one has great mathematical skills, one can think well in abstract formalism. This ability is further strengthened during their studies, because otherwise complex mathematical theories can usually no longer be worked on. In addition, a physicist is expected to apply the formulas, i.e. to be able to calculate and not to imagine what they mean. But that also means that we probably don't get the conclusive, descriptive pictures from the physicists. They rightly trust only their equations, which they combine and mathematically transform. The extremely abstract results are then transferred back to nature. But this should always be evaluated critically, since the results are not nature itself, but only logical connections and transformations of signs. If the calculations are simple and easy to comprehend, the abstract formulation is closely related to the real experimental conditions, well recognizable. Then also the results are clear and concise and we see more mathematics as an instrument to reach our goal faster. We do not have to check every addition with apples and oranges. But what if we have to rely on mechanisms of logic that are so complicated and so interwoven that we neither see through them properly in mathematics nor intuitively sense their relation to reality at any time? If we only assume that an electron with a mathematical description behaves as the formula dictates? What if we missed something or the formula almost fits?

Do we then further develop mathematics and drive our calculations more and more elaborately, with these only a little wrong assumptions, are then the deviations from reality only small or are they completely wrong? Suddenly we experience the diversity of mathematics that is inherent in every complex formula; Solutions which are all possible within logic, in the abstract and perhaps in another world, in another universe, but which do not reflect our world. In this way, one can develop a theory that is so symmetrical in itself and so completely closed and logical that, like Archimedes, we prefer to hold on to the spherical sound of the planets in perfect orbits rather than go into the cold water of chaotic reality. Simple, easy to understand laws can also be behind chaos. If we are dealing with the many, then a hopeless confusion can easily arise in it, in which the order is hidden behind it. Mathematics is excellent at representing logical and ordered processes. Our brain, on the other hand, can work best in images and is constantly on the lookout for patterns and changes. The complex world on earth is only beautifully arranged at a certain distance or deep in detail, on the level as we perceive it, it is hopelessly complicated and confusing, constantly changing, always different. This is what our brain specializes in and only in this way can we recognize the environment and see structures in the confusing confusion. Our brain can extract the essence from a confused flood of information and use it to plan the future. It can produce images and fantasies and thus get an idea of the outside world, but for this we need clarity. We have to imagine the movements of the electrons. Our brain cannot imagine the movement contained in a formula, it first has to be translated again and the physicists either don't feel responsible enough for it or they can't do it very well either, because more and more mathematically gifted physicists are conquering physics through the process of mathematisation. In addition, mathematical talents and very rational people usually lack the love of chaos and the fantastic, the desire to describe something only imperfectly and vividly. Perhaps one has to turn to the philosophers for this. Perhaps they are the ones who could bring meaning and clarity into these equations and mathematical systems - if only they could understand them. But perhaps philosophy is already too corrupted by logic and rationality?

Physicists, both experimental and theoretical, are primarily looking for regularity. From this they then derive their lawful connections and formulas. They try to connect the most different areas with each other and to recognize in it always the same. If many very different small developments can be summarized in a superordinate whole, then one speaks of the theories. If they are important, superordinate connections, this leads us to the great theories of physics. The vividness again plays only a minor role. Physicists can, for example, calculate back all these diverging movements in the universe and thus come to the theory of the Big Bang, which is actually only a hypothesis because it cannot be tested. In the meantime, they can also say a lot about what happens when matter is compressed more and more, but already there the opinions are no longer so uniform. But physicists are not the right contact persons for the question of meaning, because the question of "where from and where to" interests them only in general form, as everyone is interested, but they do not have more ideas than others.

The question about the meaning of life is a very personal question that everyone has to answer for themselves. Believers see God as the highest authority. God is then the answer to the question where everything comes from, but also what happens to us after our death. After that we all possess a soul that embodies our immortality. A religiously thinking person does not want and should not question God further. For him the search for the reason of all being ends here. If one wants to go even further, to penetrate even deeper into the connections, one must also not hold on to a reason for everything, but it is rather noticeable how unimportant we are for the whole, and that possibly the whole universe is less important or infinite than we are willing to endure. The answer to what was before the Big Bang, what remains when everything disappears, also depends on how much one is prepared to accept. And yet this is perhaps the deeper reason for most people to concern themselves with the origin at all. We are looking for a sense of the whole, something constant, something eternal, something that makes each individual something special: Matter that is from eternity and is touched by a cosmic spirit. It is possible that we find it so difficult to deal with nothingness and infinity because the senselessness of all that exists is so closely connected with it.

The Big Bang

If we wanted to create the world like a God or simulate it on a future quantum computer, the idea that everything started in one point in a singularity would be the most absurd of all ideas imaginable. Nobody would even think that everything, the whole gigantic universe, could have come into being in a tiny moment, out of nothing, like a spark of God. It is simply too absurd. As creators of things we would start from a few, but decisive basic conditions. First of all, we need a lot of material of the same kind. Than think for a long time about how we could most skillfully connect the components so that things would move, become complicated and more complex, and this preferably out of itself. We would rack our brains for a long time on how to get bodies to move, because just having matter or something substantial is not enough. There has to be a connection between them, an exchange. They must not only be rigidly arranged, otherwise everything would remain the same over millions of years. Conversely, we know from nature that nothing lasts forever, not even things as constant as stones and mountains. And in complex worlds like here on our earth, even the enormous mountains would be eroded within a few million years by rain and weathering alone, if there were no plate tectonics that push the continental plates over each other and lift them out of the oceans.

But how do we get there, how can we create a world?

Our earth, with life on it, is one of the most complex systems we know of, perhaps the most complex that nature has produced. At least we don't know a single other world that comes close to ours. How does one create something like this with simple basic conditions when matter is already available to us as a building material? How do we get movement into the parts, if possible without external help, everything only out of itself. Here, too, it becomes apparent that macroscopically the objects can seem to rest over long periods of time. Microscopically, however, all bodies are made up of atoms and molecules. If we could look deep into the microcosm, we would experience how impossible it is to find rest or standstill. Everything, every single one of the endlessly many atoms, moves; not only the atoms and molecules in gases and liquids, but also those in solids. Although atoms are trapped in the lattice connections, there is not one within their boundary conditions, despite the unimaginably large number, that rests. Even our seemingly resting mountain does not move only in relation to the earth. However, mountain and earth together move permanently through space, in a multitude of superimposed movements.