I'm watching a pretty awesome YouTube video right now.
I'm surprised I've never seen it before, since I'm a pretty big Michio Kaku fanboy, and enjoy documentaries and educational content. I'm pretty sure I haven't though.
Despite watching hundreds of documentaries, including at least 50, if not hundreds, on physics, for some reason, the C in E=MC^2 never stuck with me as referring to anything other than meaning perhaps constant, for the universal constant, the speed of light. It's always been explained as the speed of light. And it is. Even in my physics classes it was explained as the speed of light. But it isn't. It is but it isn't. It is also the universal constant speed limit. But it isn't. But it is. It's actually the speed of causality, as was mentioned in an earlier video I was watching.
Why is this important? Because it's the nature of the fucking universe.
Every time you are taught about E=mc^2, or perhaps more importantly, m=E/c^2, you are just told that it's the speed of light. You aren't told why it's the speed of light, if your teacher even knows, you aren't told about the larger implications, you're just told it as a simplified fact that you don't question.
Or maybe you did. I hope you did.
See, there's an importance in there.
Why not watch another video I was just watching:
All done? Have you been watching these? Are you fully derailed from what I'm talking about? Maybe you've caught on to what I'm saying before I've said it.
I've two main points I've been pondering due to these videos. One is that energy doesn't equal mass times the speed of light. It does, but that's not the true importance of the equation. That form of the equation is important to nuclear power, or anyone converting mass to energy.
Except Einstein didn't write it that way originally. He wrote it as MASS equals Energy divided by causality, or the fundamental constant. So, mass itself, is just a dimension of energy.
It's not that we live in a physical universe, so much that we interact with the effects of the energy of the universe itself.
This is just one example of the extreme simplifications of our education.
All because we view kids as too stupid to learn the truth from the beginning, which makes them dumber at the end.
I'm sure some of you from other countries are laughing at the fact that for some reason I never knew that 'c' stood for causality. Others perhaps aren't following me at all. Oh well.
Our entire universe is simply energy, not in the form of matter, but matter is actually just a representation of that energy. It's mass is simply the potential energy it has. And that mass actually bends space time around it to create gravity.
If you aren't mind fucked by that, maybe you should go smoke a joint, or maybe you just have thought about this plenty enough already.
I dunno if we live in a simulation, but perhaps more accurately, perhaps our entire representation of the universe is a simulation. Perhaps everything we see is a simulation of energy, not on a computer, but the universe itself. Or maybe we're just being run on an alien's GameBoy.
This kinda crazy, maybe stupid, thinking, is the kinds of things that result from thinking about the nature of the universe. When we are taught about how the universe is, we can ponder upon it. When we are simply taught an equation and never explained it's meaning, we think nothing, we just have our time wasted learning fact we'll never use.
Similarly, I was always taught the story of Newton and the apple, but I was never told the story of him thinking about the moon falling. They cut the story short.
It may just be a bullshit story. Or it could be real. Maybe it didn't hit him on the head, as the story goes. Maybe he just saw one drop. Maybe he saw them on the ground. Maybe he just explained it once using apples.
The important part is not that he "discovered" gravity though, as the greeks and many others already knew about gravity. We all knew about gravity. We weren't fucking idiots back then, or Newton would not have been able to build on his education to actually create geometry and write down an accurate enough representation of gravity to simulate the movement of the planets and other bodies.
We're told a stupid story that's utterly pointless, rather than taught something real. We aren't taught about Newton and his real accomplishments. As a result, I actually don't really respect Newton as much as I should, since I only really view what he did as writing it down. He figured out the math though. That's an extreme accomplishment.
I learned a lot from school...but I also had a lot of my time wasted. School took years of my life, and taught me that adults have no respect for children, and maybe a little more than that. I likely would have learned a lot more on my own, or with less regimented help.
There's this awesome little book that I read once, and wanted to buy, but never actually did, "Lies My Teacher Told Me". Really a fabulous little book. It focuses on History, but really, there's plenty enough in every subject.
Every time your teacher made you memorize an equation in math without explaining it to you, they were doing a lie of omission. Telling you that you didn't need to know it in a way. But you do. Knowing the history of the equation, it's uses, and why you need to know it, are all things that will help you to learn and thing.
Every time your history teacher told you a stupid story about Washington chopping down a cherry tree, or Lincoln not lying or whatever the fuck, they're lying through their wooden teeth, which were actually ivory, or perhaps even taken from his slaves. But they also do a ton of lies of omission, not giving you the larger context of history, or the details in the story, that are extremely important, just teaching you over and over again the same drab history, and never really teaching you anything.
Maybe you don't see these as lies. Maybe they aren't really. Maybe they're something else. But I know they're stunting the mind. Sure, there are reasons they do it, but I don't think that's an excuse. The end result is that at the end of your schooling, you're supposed to be well educated, but you don't have enough of an education in anything, and you have to fight for years trying to fill in the gaps and learn what they never taught you and you don't even know that you need to know.
The difference is a fundamental misunderstanding of the universe, and a whole mess of kids that are fundamentally incapable of taking it to the next step, because they don't truly understand anything.