PHYSICS: 120 Orders of magnitude? Orders, Schmorders

Ya hafta love modern physics and especially modern cosmogeny. From a sleepy and rather certain view of the universe, the weirdness coefficient has grown exponentially until new units of weirdness are now required. I'm not sure what the fundamental unit of weirdness is, or even if there is an associated particle, but the homely weird is now measured in kiloweirds or megaweirds.

To drive this home, consider what happens when you trap several prominent physicists on a tropical island, as described here. As the convener of the group said,

What you couldn't understand was how to cancel a number to a hundred and twenty decimal places and leave something finite left over. You can't take two numbers that are very large and expect them to almost exactly cancel leaving something that's 120 orders of magnitude smaller left over. And that's what would be required to have an energy that was comparable with the observational upper limits on the energy of empty space.

We knew the answer. There was a symmetry and the number had to be exactly zero. Well, what have we discovered? There appears to be this energy of empty space that isn't zero! This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics. It is the most profound shift in thinking, perhaps the most profound puzzle, in the latter half of the 20th century. And it may be the first half of the 21st century, or maybe go all the way to the 22nd century.

Unqualified as I am, I can think of a few others that begin to rival empty space energy. Dark energy and dark matter, to name just two - if, in fact, they aren't artifacts of a failure to understand gravity fully. We are realizing, finally, that human intelligence might not be up to every task we assume it can master. The metempsychosis from carbon to silicon might just change that, too. And it might, just might, happen in our lifetimes.