Ask A Genius 1120: Weird Physics of the World
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/28
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the weirdest physics fact that you find interesting?
Rick Rosner: The thing I find most consistently weird in physics is how you can make objects float in mid-air in a superconductor field or a magnetic field. That floating effect—where something just hovers—if you wanted to show someone how strange physics can be, that’s an easy one, especially if you’re talking to an unjaded 8-year-old. Show them something floating, and it would blow their mind for a moment.
What about those liquids that have a lot of iron in them and form spiky patterns? Have you seen those?
Jacobsen: No, I haven’t.
Rosner: They’re called ferrofluids. In a magnetic field, they form these spiky structures. If you start with a floating object that’s magnetic or conductive enough, you can coat it with this ferrofluid, and it creates these porcupine-like shapes in the magnetic field. It makes the floating object look even more bizarre.
But beyond that, what’s even weirder is my theory about IC (information collapse), where the impetus for the formation of universes is information pressure. It’s kind of like how the pressure that makes degenerate matter is gravitational collapse. The idea is that when matter gravitationally collapses, it generates information within its system by forming a new information space and making the degenerate matter non-degenerate. That process, in turn, drives time and the Big Bang in the early universe. Essentially, universes are formed from matter being collapsed into degeneracy in extreme gravitational fields. It’s like the Ouroboros—the snake eating its own tail.
Jacobsen: In our current definitions, one thing that’s pretty strange is how we arbitrarily define life versus non-life and conscious versus non-conscious. Schrodinger wrote What Is Life?, but we still don’t have a concrete, modern, quantifiable definition of life. There’s no formula for it.
Rosner: Yeah, it’s crazy that 100 years later, we still don’t have one.
Jacobsen: Everyone has a general idea of what constitutes life and non-life, partly because of discipline-based conceptual frameworks. But we still don’t have a mathematical form to make the concept concrete.
Rosner: And it’s only going to get foggier with AI and information processing. We’ll start seeing things that might as well be alive, but aren’t technically alive. The line between inorganic and “might as well be alive” is going to blur.
Another weird thing would be if we found out there’s 10 or 50 times more gold in the universe than there should be in a Big Bang universe. That would be a major contradiction to regular Big Bang theory.
Jacobsen: That’s a cool idea we haven’t fully explored. What should the ratio distribution of elements be in a Big Bang universe versus an IC universe?
Rosner: There shouldn’t be much gold at all, because to get gold, you need either a supernova explosion or two collapsed stars colliding.
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
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