Quantum Mechanics

Quantum Mechanics (QM) is even more unsettling than relativity for one reason, it goes against our preconceived notions of everything. QM redefines what matter is, instead of being the tangible stuff we're used to matter becomes a probability. It is important to note here that in everyday circumstances this viewpoint doesn't really matter, but in circumstances where the objects and distances are incredibly small QM plays a huge role. So until you observe a particle it occupies what is known as a probability wave, where it can be anywhere, but upon observing the particle it becomes solid, that is it occupies a certain amount of space and has a certain velocity. However, as will be discussed next time this space and velocity will always have a certain amount of fuzziness associated with them.

General Relativity

General Relativity is much simpler to grasp than special relativity because all that it does is expand on it. Basically all that general relativity is a description of how gravity warps space-time, that quantity we discovered in special relativity. What general relativity says is this; being in a gravitational field (note that gravity permeates the whole universe) will have the same effect on the flow of time as moving, that is, being in a gravitational field slows time for everything in that field. It also said some interesting things about accelerated motion, that being accelerated in a direction and standing on an immovable object in a gravitational field (like standing on the surface of the earth) are the same thing. This has gone on to say many things about the nature of black holes, which we will cover at a later time. For example, let us use a common analogy, two twins are separated at birth and one is left on earth while the other is put in an environment with a much stronger gravitational field, after twenty earth years the twins are reunited and to their surprise the twin that was left on earth was significantly older than the twin that was put near a black hole. This is because since the gravitational field is so much stronger at a black hole than on Earth, so time moves slower there.

First Topic: Einstein's Special Relativity

Einstein is one of the most celebrated figure in the past 150 years of history. However, if you go up to someone on the street I would be willing to bet any amount of money that they couldn't tell you what Einstein's relativity was. Relativity just what it says, relativity took the idea of relative motion and associated time with it as well. What Einstein discovered was that space and time were not separate quantities, they are both woven into the fabric of reality. What this means is that when you move relative to something else your time moves slower than the thing thing you are comparing your motion to. We can think of it like this, when you increase your motion through space you decrease your motion through time. This combined motion of time and space will always add up to the speed of light, so that no matter how fast you move light will always move at the speed of light relative to you (it is a constant). Now we must make something unbearably clear here, just because you are slowing down your own time doesn't mean that we have opened some fountain of youth, you will not notice that time has slowed down for you unless you look at something else and notice that it appears to be moving faster than it should be. Another thing that relativity did was establish the speed of light as the "ultimate speed limit" this is because when you move faster and faster your mass increases more and more (exponentially in fact) so that when you begin getting close to the speed of light your mass will increase more and more quickly so that in order to actually reach the speed of light you must have an infinite amount of energy to counteract your then infinite mass, or have no mass to begin with (like light).

First Post

Alright, since this is my first blog bear with me. This blog will be purely information oriented, with new posts every day or so, and will be based around Theoretical Physics and other recent discoveries and theories that tie into the subject. Since all of these concepts are pretty complicated I am going to write short paragraphs in the blog posts about them and hopefully I will figure out how to upload Word documents before too long so that I can get more detail with the subjects, if anyone knows how to do this please tell me! I must warn you however, I am only a teenager and have a pretty thorough understanding of how and why things are, but if you ask me for any of the math surrounding these theories I won't be able to help. As a final note many of the ideas here are simply melted down ideas that have been presented in books that I have read, I will post the names of all of them and their authors when I get a chance