I have a funny job. A lot of times, not only do I know that I don't know what the purpose of it is, but I'm afraid that a lot of the people that are supposed to know don't really know either. Or at least, they have trouble putting it in the proper context. To be fair though, I don't suppose that's an easy job. I also hate when people ask me what I do. The purpose of what I do is very different from what I do, but people can't seem to separate the two. For now it's all about the purpose, something which I don't really understand.
It's pretty well accepted that the physical reality which we find ourselves in follows certain laws, which when studied by different people, do at least on some continuously evolving level yield some agreement. Some folks want to know what those laws are. One question is why they want to know? But that's not what I'm talking about.
One problem in finding out what those laws are is that the most basic laws are hidden within a very strong medium. This medium shields us from seeing what those laws actually are. Some folks call this medium a field, or a sea, but I like to think of it as a wall-to-wall shag carpet. For historical reasons, I suppose, it's also called the vacuum (not to be confused with what you use to clean a plush wall-to-wall carpet, that's a vacuum cleaner), or more properly it can be called the vacuum state (and I'm not sure which state that is, but it's definitely not New Jersey).
Folks used to think that the vacuum was empty, because after all that's what vacuum means. But upon closer inspection it seems this so-called vacuum is full of things (though this revelation was not enough for them to change the name). But the existence of these things is contingent upon the very much in vogue Heisenberg uncertainty principle. So, these suckers exist, but only if the product of their energies and the amounts of time that they exist are below some ridiculously small threshold, and I guess for that reason they are called virtual. But since there is this non-zero limit, however ridiculous, there can be a lot of them, and they're also very hard to see because they hardly exist.
These virtual suckers are like the actual suckers except there's tons of them and they pop in and out of existence at the drop of a hat. Thing is they align themselves to shield us like overprotective guardians from what the laws uncorrupted by them really are. It seems that the everyday world, the world by all practical measures, is determined not only by the basic laws, but also to a great extent by the guardians.
However, one way to help see what the laws actually are is to get some of the actual suckers (the ones whose existence in a vacuum make it not a vacuum) really close to each other so there's not so many of the guardians between them. So you aim a couple of those actual suckers right at each other, and give them enough energy to get past the guardians, and overcome the repulsion they might have for each other. Then they interact with each other, according to the basic laws, and the outcome can be studied. Albeit though studying the outcome is necessarily fraught with the same problem. That is, the guardians are still busy at work shielding us from the outcome, but I guess something new can be inferred from the results anyway. The higher the energy of the incident actual suckers is, the closer they can get to each other, and the better the information about the basic laws is that you get out of it. So, I'm wondering if that's what the purpose is: Getting some suckers going so they can meet each other despite the all encompassing, barely existing, very resilient, shag carpet that they have to travel through...Probably not.
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