When I was a little boy, I liked to think about all sorts of things and bombarded adults endlessly with questions. However, my playmates found it quite strange when I answered their question about my hobbies with “thinking”. As no one wanted to take part in my thoughts, I preferred to keep them to myself.
When I was at school, I was nicknamed “the know-it-all”. I wasn't really talented in sports or music, but I was deeply interested in all other subjects. Learning was rather easy for me. I eagerly wanted to understand how the world works. I studied mathematics beyond the school curriculum and read books about the natural history of the universe and life on earth. At school, I designed information boards about the great discoverers and inventors whose lives and work inspired me. What fascinated me about chemistry was how the periodic table of the elements succeeded in bringing a clear order to the hitherto puzzling diversity of chemical processes. I later studied physics because I hoped it would help me understand the basic principles of nature. However, I realized that the real fundamental questions belong in the realm of philosophy and that you have to combine knowledge from different fields to arrive at an answer. In science, however, interdisciplinary cooperation is prevented by the deep divides between the disciplines. The trend is towards ever more specialized research topics, while the fundamental questions of understanding the world are lost of sight. As a result, I didn't find a place in academia and dedicated my professional life to more practical tasks.
My brain has a really strange habit: Sometimes it records a situation as a “movie”, which my brain then plays back later on. This recording always happens when something is inconsistent in a situation. Once I have identified the cause of the inconsistency and found a possible solution, my head is enlightened and excitement spreads. I would like to describe two of these scenes here:
- During my time as a student, a physics professor mentioned the spin of electrons in a lecture. In order to explain the splitting of the electron orbits in an atom when a magnetic field is applied, the assumption was made in the 1920ies that electrons have an internal angular momentum of h/4π, the so-called electron spin. With a short calculation, the professor showed us that the electron spin contradicted other physical theories - electrons would have to rotate faster than the speed of light and the rotational energy of an electron would be much larger than the energy equivalent of its mass. Despite these contradictions, it is now generally accepted that electrons have a spin. Spin is a property of particles that can be described by quantum mechanics, but is not consistent with the theories of classical mechanics. The professor asked us to accept this fact without question and not to think about it any further, because otherwise we would only be kept from productively dealing with solvable physical problems. I accepted his explanation at first hand, but inside I found it highly disconcerting that students were encouraged to accept logical contradictions in physical theories. In later years, this memorable scene kept coming back to my mind because, contrary to the professor's advice, it seemed to me that behind this logical contradiction might lie the key to a deeper understanding of physics. In fact, decades later I thought of a way to resolve the contradictions associated with electron spin. Yor can read about it here on deep-thought.org.
- In a popular science lecture, biochemist Manfred Eigen (1927-2019) said that less than three percent of human genetic material is translated into proteins. The Nobel Prize winner considered the remaining genetic material to be “junk DNA” - superfluous genetic material that had accumulated during evolutionary history and was now useless. My brain gave alarm and burned the scene deep into my memory: It seemed completely implausible to me that an organism should carry around so much useless genetic material and pass it on from generation to generation. Instead, an alternative explanation shone brightly in my mind: The supposed junk DNA could contain the algorithms that determine which genes are active in a particular cell and are translated into proteins. Every cell has the same genetic material, but not all genes are active in every cell at all times. For this situational activation of genes, there must also be a program code in the genome in addition to the protein-coding genes - the supposed junk DNA could serve this purpose! How could the respected Nobel Prize winner have overlooked this obvious explanation?
I could never forget scenes like these. In some cases, I immediately thought of a possible solution to the perceived inconsistency, in other cases I pondered over and over again for many years. In this way, over the course of my life, I have accumulated a number of solutions for unsolved issues as well as unconventional explanations that are not in line with the generally accepted doctrine. As an outsider, however, it seemed hopeless for me to publish my thoughts in an established scientific journal. I had never shared most of my thoughts with anyone; I only put a few ideas on paper. The manuscripts were stuck in a dusty Leitz folder in my bedroom until some friends encouraged me to share them with others. So now I'm sitting there organizing my thoughts, checking them for stringency and relevance. What has survived self-censorship will gradually appear on welträtsel.org and deep-thought.org. Perhaps my thoughts can serve as a source of inspiration for some of you who, like me, have not lost their fascination for fundamental questions.
Yours,
Werner Ahrendt
Comments powered by CComment