As well known and loved baseball personality Yogi Berra has often stated, “You can observe a lot just by watching”. So let’s observe humans, electrons, and Black Holes. Who wins out in the personality stakes?
Say you observe a fellow human, someone you don’t know, from a distance. You can observe an awful lot just by watching! You obviously get an immediate handle on their physical size and shape, a rough estimate of their age, their race, and of course their sex. You might figure out something about the person’s occupation if they are wearing a uniform, or at least guess whether they might be a white collar or blue collar worker. You will note distinguishing features such as baldness, or eyeglasses, or maybe even suss out their religious affiliation by the way they dress. You might note if they are under the influence. You might figure out something about their history from scars, whether they limp, are in a wheelchair, wear a cast, or have deformities. If you observe them at say a supermarket, you might be able to figure out if they have kids or pets or even determine something about their lifestyle and relative wealth. In short, not knowing someone doesn’t mean you can’t uncover a lot of information about them – just by watching. However, you can’t extrapolate that information and claim you know anything about yet another person.
Apply that thought experiment on an electron – I’ll assume for the sake of this mental exercise that you can observe an electron. You can’t tell where it’s been; anything about its history, what its age is. You can determine its charge, mass, shape and size, but that’s just about the sum total of what you are going to learn. The electron has no scars or distinguishing features, and has just one lifestyle and occupation. They are in perfect health – unless they meet of course their antimatter equivalent, a positron. But, electrons can be reborn out of energy – sort of like a resurrection. But when resurrected, they resume the exact same properties that all electrons have. So, you’ll find out that by observing one electron, you’ve in theory observed all electrons. All electrons have the same charge, shape, size, mass, and occupation. Their histories and ages might be different, but you can’t tell by looking. It’s like everyone was an identical twin or clone of everyone else.
In between humans and electrons are Black Holes, and again, I will assume for the sake of discussion that you can observe Black Holes. Like electrons, if you see one Black Hole, you’ve pretty much seen them all. Any school kid can look at our nine planets (I’m restoring Pluto’s former status here) and tell that they all differ and have unique personalities (just like looking at any nine humans – you can tell them apart because they’re all different – even identical twins will have some distinguishing features). However, even though Black Holes have way less individual features relative to humans or planets, they do have more than electrons. Line up nine electrons – you got nine identical clones. Line up nine Black Holes. They won’t all have identical masses; their overall electric charge may be differing; their rotation rates won’t all be the same; they can grow or shrink, be born and die (no resurrection). Still, they don’t have much of a personality. A Black Hole made up from the remains of a massive star that went supernovae could have the exact same size, mass, rotation, etc. as a Black Hole made up from just scrap metal or crooked politicians or cotton candy. You can’t tell, by observation, what sort of stuff went into making up a Black Hole, or any of the properties of the stuff that made up a Black Hole. You get one color like the original Model-T Ford (as the joke went, “You can have any color you want with your Model-T as long as it’s black”), and what’s inside is a surprise – like the surprise toy in a box of Cracker Jacks only this box can’t be opened. In short, it is said that Black Holes have no hair, because Black Holes have no real individual personality. You can distinguish a person by their hair style – not so a Black Hole.
So any essay written about the unique features of nine electrons is going to be a heck of a lot shorter than an essay about the personalities of nine Black Holes, which in turn will be way shorter than an essay describing nine different humans!
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