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* The Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy cannot be
created or destroyed,* just transformed from one form to another.
These forms can include kinetic and potential energy .
Since energy cannot be created or destroyed,
the amount of energy present in the universe is always the same.
It is simply being transformed and transferred over and over again.
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So, conservation* laws cannot be understand without transformation laws.
Physicists explain one side and nobody* explains the other side -
-* the* transformation** of the one* single quantum particle.
And the conservation* laws and transformation laws
are like two different sides of the same coin.
A coin without picture on one side doesn't have value.
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But the real picture of the 21st century is far stranger, and amateurs
may not be fully aware of it.
In a very brief nutshell, all "things" have been replaced by fields
which extend over ALL space and time. They don't live IN space and time
like you imagine particles or ping pong balls. They are part of the
fabric OF space and time.
There are ripples in these fields, which have behavior constrained by
symmetries of nature, which are more fundamental in a deep sense than
the conservation laws of nature.
Ripples can be measured by a quantity called "action", which physicists
have known about for a long time. What they didn't know until the 20th
century is that the smallest chunk of action is given by a number called
Planck's constant. These smallest ripples are what we associate with
field quanta, and when physicists say "fundamental particles" they are
really talking about these field quanta.
So, recapping so far, the idea of "things" moving through space and time
has become replaced with the idea of fields that extend everywhere, and
the ripples in them that are bestowed with small amounts of action.
(I've glossed over a key idea that a field is nothing more than a map of
the value(s) of a property(ies) OF spacetime itself. Different fields
correspond to different sets of properties of spacetime, and all the
fields overlay each other. The little quantized ripples in the fields
can be distinct from each other though, in some sense.)
Now the last core concept is that a ripple carrying some action in one
field can generate or disturb a ripple carrying some action in a
different field. This is what we call an interaction between fields.
Here's where another old idea gets replaced -- charge (like color charge
or electromagnetic charge) is not some kind of "stuff" that belongs to
"things"; instead, charge is just defined as that tendency for a given
pair of fields to interact and create ripples in each other. The laws
that control these interactions are in fact driven by yet more
symmetries of nature (local gauge symmetries).
What's astonishing about this is that physicists now believe that the
fundamental thing that physics is about is the interaction, not the
object. And rather than physical laws, physicists now think of
symmetries as the fundamental constraint.
So gone are the days of thinking of the world as moving things in a
backdrop of space and time. Here today we have the primacy of the
interaction, of action, and of symmetry. And THAT is what 21st century
physics seems to me to be really about.
There are lots of good references here that support this nutshell recap
in much better detail.
Odd Bodkin
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