Impossible?

Virtually all human endeavor is, one way or another, connected to the quest for, or use of energy. Scientists and engineers have spent lifetimes in search of better, more efficient, methods for creating energy and channeling it for our purposes. The Holy Grail of research is finding a way, perhaps by cold fusion, to create more energy than it takes to produce the reaction. That may now have been, on a limited basis, accomplished. Imagine a world with cheap, unlimited energy. There would be literally no limits to what we could do.

But if they asked us old folks they just might get a difference of opinion. From our perspective, the insatiable quest for industrial and engineering progress has been less than an unqualified success. Some have figured out we need to back off and give the environment a chance to recover from our rapacious use of natural resources. Having more energy to pave over the earth so we have more highways, more parking lots, more sterile human construction is a recipe for our collective demise.

Although I’ve long advocated we should stop hoping science will somehow step in and save us from our worst instincts I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion it will take nothing short of a scientific miracle to change our course.

Fortunately, we may be on the cusp of some truly astounding scientific breakthroughs so radical we cannot even begin to guess where they will lead.

Quantum physics and computing are on the cusp of capabilities we could not have imagined. There will be some folks who will fight such things as Artificial Intelligence but once something is possible the best we can do is try to use new technology for good because we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. If something can be done, someone will do it regardless of any danger.

The most mind boggling development, at least to me, is the reported verification of a seeming impossibility. Back in 1956, a theoretical physicist named David Pines predicted that electrons in a solid, such as metal, can combine to form a composite particle that has no mass, is neutral, and does not interact with light. A team of researchers at the University of Illinois have found such a critter. At least they’ve supposedly found the evidence proving such a thing exists.

I cannot wrap my head around the idea that anything can exist that has no mass. How can anything exist that, when we look, we see nothing there? It does not interact with light so…

Since I cannot even begin to comprehend it makes it more exciting. If it is impossible given our normal way of experiencing reality, then potentially our collective thinking may have to change.

The folks who claim they do not believe in anything they can’t see and touch and prove may have to reorient their assumptions. As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”