What defines a person ? Their job, personality, political views, what music they like,some pigment in the skin or the lack of that pigment, what their forefathers did, who is their imaginary friend ? What if we strip away all these things from them, then what is left? How can we define ourselves without citations, absolutely.
With my advisor/guru in Hannover
Defining oneself can be a challenging work, some might say even poetic or even worse philosophical, its obscure. Imagine telling who you are to some alien, it will not know anything about the history of the earth, there is no absolute scale. What we can do is, if the alien is from at least a world as scientifically advanced as ours, we can tell it what is our weight, height. Be careful before you tell this alien that because he does not know that 1 kilogram is some stuff kept in Paris and 1 meter is the length of some rod kept somewhere in this world.
We have to come to an absolute scale, even to tell something basic like weight and height. It can be complex, we can however define a scale as one elementary particle lets say proton, proton here on earth will be same everywhere (we know for sure)*. Lets put the energy of that proton to be E =mcc=1, mass of proton times speed of light squared = 1 (speed of light is same everywhere). Now we can simply tell to anyone how many protons do we weight, how many protons you can put end to end to find some height. Now I can finally tell something about myself absolutely thanks to quantum field theory, I am about 10^29 protons heavy and about 10^14 protons high. This was no simple task to do, actually we only recently, in last 100 years are able to do so, before we would have not been able to tell our weight and height absolutely to anyone. Only the knowledge of elementary particles enables us to do so. Physics is beautiful and unlike other beautiful things it has purpose. I will be trying to explore the purpose and beauty in physics in the coming posts.
So, I am Shubhanshu, part of the GraWITon project currently in the mountains of north of Itay, I work in understanding the gravitational waves emitted by various astrophysical processes, I am really non political, I like prog rock and classical music a bit of an audiophile, I am Indian and I do have many imaginary friends. One of them is in the picture.
*Interestingly this is known very recently to human kind for only about 100 years when the proper birth of quantum field theory took place.
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