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Physicists War Over a Unified Theory
beggs writes: "I was looking through the New York Times and came across an article which talks about a new front in the war to find a unified theory, but this one does not come from the particle physicists, it comes from the solid state physicists. Here is a little quote for wet your appetite: 'some solid-state physicists are trying to show that the laws of relativity, long considered part of the very bedrock of the physical world, are not platonic truths that have existed since time began.'"
I know nothing about physics. So basically whatever Stephen Hawking says about this, that's my opinion too.
Try replacing the 'www' in the URL with 'archives' that usually gets past the registration thing.
Hockey - Canada's gift to the world
I haven't read the article yet, by knee jerks in that direction. I'll go read now.
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
So I think it's very good that these scientists are challenging theories like this.
It is narrow thinking to propose that we ever have the "final" answer because there is no way to prove that something is right. We can only prove that things are wrong.
Newton thought he had it covered, and the world agreed. Then Einstein came along and shook our understanding in strange ways. People got comfortable, then Schroedinger and his damn cats show up and screw things up again. Then we get comfortable. Then scientist discover that we still do not have whole story yet again.
Don't you get it? The wonderfulness of it all is that we will never know it all. The beauty of creation is that we will always have something more to discover.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Absolutely. Einstein's theories superseded Newtonian physics, though Newton's system works just fine for most things here on Earth. It's only when one approaches the speed of light that you find the discrepancies pointed at by Relativity -- and discover how matter and energy interrelate.
Einstein's work may also not adequately describe the universe in some instances; it cannot satisfactorially explain how the universe came into being. A new theory that can do so can hopefully be found -- and if it is, it will very likely teach us new things, things that may affect our every day life, just like Einstein has.
Arguing with theory (especially Relativity) is not uncommon. The only way theories become so well supported is trial by fire.
I'm all for arguing with the theory, but more interested in the result.
Since we are talking Unified theory, please allow a shameless plug to my fav String Theory site.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
If you don't feel like using the "archives" link, use the goatse:goatse account.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Challenging Particle Physics as Path to Truth
By GEORGE JOHNSON
n science's great chain of being, the particle physicists place themselves with the angels, looking down from the heavenly spheres on the chemists, biologists, geologists, meteorologists -- those who are applying, not discovering, nature's most fundamental laws. Everything, after all, is made from subatomic particles. Once you have a concise theory explaining how they work, the rest should just be filigree.
Even the kindred discipline of solid-state physics, which is concerned with the mass behavior of particles -- what metals, crystals, semiconductors, whole lumps of matter do -- is often considered a lesser pursuit. "Squalid state physics," Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark, dubbed it. Others dismiss it as "dirt physics."
Recently there have been rumblings from the muck. In a clash of scientific cultures, some prominent squalid-staters have been challenging the particle purists as arbiters of ultimate truth.
"The stakes here are very high," said Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, a Stanford University theorist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1998 for discoveries in solid-state physics. "At issue is a deep epistemological matter having to do with what physics is."
Last year Dr. Laughlin and Dr. David Pines, a theorist at the University of Illinois and Los Alamos National Laboratory, published a manifesto declaring that the "science of the past," which seeks to distill the richness of reality into a few simple equations governing subatomic particles, was coming to an impasse.
Many complex systems -- the very ones the solid-staters study -- appear to be irreducible. Made of many interlocking parts, they display a kind of synergy, obeying "higher organizing principles" that cannot be further simplified no matter how hard you try.
Carrying the idea even further, some solid-state physicists are trying to show that the laws of relativity, long considered part of the very bedrock of the physical world, are not platonic truths that have existed since time began.
They may have emerged from the roiling of the vacuum of space, much as supply-and-demand and other "laws" of economics emerge from the bustle of the marketplace. If so, then solid-state physics, which specializes in how emergent phenomena occur, may be the most fundamental science of them all.
"We're in the midst of a paradigm change," Dr. Pines said. "Ours is not the prevailing view, but I think it will turn out to be the one that lasts."
Working in this vein, one of Dr. Laughlin's Stanford colleagues, Dr. Shoucheng Zhang, recently was co- author of a paper suggesting that elementary particles like photons and gravitons, the carriers of electromagnetism and gravity, might not be so elementary after all -- they might emerge as ripples in the vacuum of space, bubbling up from the quagmire in a way that can best be explained in terms of solid-state physics.
"The idea is of course crazy, thought provoking, and somewhat anti-establishment," Dr. Zhang said. "The main idea is to apply concepts from solid-state physics to answer some big questions of the universe."
The particle physicists insist that there is plenty of mileage left in their own approach. "I strongly believe that the fundamental laws of nature are not emergent phenomena," said Dr. David Gross, director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "Bob Laughlin and I have violent arguments about this."
After hearing Dr. Zhang describe his theory at a seminar last month, Dr. Gross deemed it "an interesting piece of work." He said he found the mathematics "beautiful and intriguing, and perhaps of use somewhere."
That may sound like faint praise, but the particle physicists have reason to be wary. The squalid-staters are challenging them in a debate over how the universe is made and how science should be done.
Following the method of Plato, the particle physicists are inclined to see nature as crystallized mathematics. In the beginning was a single superforce, the embodiment of an elegant set of equations they call, only a bit facetiously, the theory of everything. Then along came the Big Bang to ruin it all.
The universe cooled and expanded, the single force splintering into the four very different forces observed today: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces, which work inside atoms, are described by quantum mechanics and special relativity. The fourth force, gravity, is described by an entirely different theory, general relativity.
The particle physicists' ultimate goal is "grand unification" -- recovering the primordial symmetry in the form of a single law -- a few concise equations, it is often said, that could be silk-screened onto a T- shirt.
This approach, in which the most complex phenomena are boiled down to a unique underlying theory, is called reductionism.
The problem, the solid-staters say, is that many forms of matter -- ranging from the exotic like superconductors and superfluids to the mundane like crystals and metals -- cannot be described in terms of fundamental particle interactions. When systems become very complex, completely new and independent laws emerge. "More is different," as the Nobel laureate Philip W. Anderson put it in a landmark paper in 1972. To the solid-staters, it would take something the size of a circus tent to hold all the equations capturing the unruliness of the physical world.
Like Aristotle, they lean toward the notion that it is the equations that flow from nature instead of the other way around. Mathematics is just a tool for making sense of it all.
"For at least some fundamental things in nature, the theory of everything is irrelevant," declared Dr. Laughlin and Dr. Pines in the Jan. 4, 2000 issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The central task of theoretical physics in our time is no longer to write down the ultimate equations but rather to catalog and understand emergent behavior in its many guises, including potentially life itself."
There may not be a theory of everything, they say, just a lot of theories of things. This is exactly the kind of squalor the particle physicists abhor.
Dr. Grigori E. Volovik, a solid- state physicist at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland, champions an idea he calls "anti- grand unification." In a review article last year (xxx.lanl.gov/abs /gr-qc/0104046), he ventured that the universe may have begun not in a state of pristine symmetry but in one of lawlessness. The laws of relativity and perhaps quantum mechanics itself would have emerged only later on.
The notion of emergent laws is not radical in itself. A flask of gas consists of trillions of molecules randomly colliding with one another. From this disorder, qualities like temperature and pressure emerge, along with laws relating one to the other.
So take that idea a level deeper. Physicists now believe that the vacuum of space is, paradoxically, not vacuous at all. It seethes with energy, in the form of "virtual particles" constantly flitting in and out of existence. So perhaps, Dr. Volovik suggests, even laws now considered fundamental emerged from this constant subatomic buzz.
Solid-state physics offers clues to how something like this might occur. The atomic vibrations that ripple through matter are, like all quantum phenomena, carried by particles -- called, in this case, phonons.
Just as photons carry light and gravitons carry gravity, phonons carry the subatomic equivalent of sound. Like bubbles in a carbonated beverage, phonons -- physicists call them "quasi particles" -- appear only when the medium is disturbed.
In the world of solid-state physics, quasi particles abound. In some substances, like the semiconductors used to make computer chips, the displacement of an electron leaves behind a "hole" that behaves like a positively charged particle. An electron and a hole can sometimes stick together to form a chargeless quasi particle called an exciton. Other such ephemera include magnons and polarons.
Evanescent though they are, quasi particles act every bit like elementary particles, obeying the laws of quantum mechanics. This has led some mavericks to wonder whether there is really any difference at all. Maybe elementary particles are just quasi particles -- an effervescence in the vacuum.
Particularly intriguing is a phenomenon, occurring at extremely low temperatures, called the fractional quantum Hall effect. In certain substances, quasi particles appear that act curiously like electrons but with one-third the normal charge. (Dr. Laughlin won his Nobel Prize for a theory explaining this.)
Quarks, the basic building blocks of matter, also carry a one-third charge, a coincidence that has fueled speculation that emergence may be somehow fundamental to the very existence of the physical world.
A stumbling block to carrying this idea further has been that the quantum Hall effect seems to work only in two-dimensions -- on the surface of a substance. But in a paper published in the Oct. 26 issue of Science, Dr. Zhang and his student Jiangping Hu showed how to extend the phenomenon. In their scheme, the physical world would be a three-dimensional "surface" of a four-dimensional "quantum liquid" -- an underlying sea of particles that can be thought of as the vacuum.
Analyzing the ripples that would appear in such a medium, the two scientists were surprised to find that they mathematically resembled electromagnetic and gravitational waves. But there are problems with the model. At this point, the hypothetical photons and gravitons that emerge from the equations do not interact with other particles, as they do in the real world.
"The coupling is zero, so apples are weightless, as is everything else," said Dr. Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who recently discussed the model with Dr. Zhang.
And there is what the theory's inventors concede is an "embarrassment of riches" -- the equations predict hordes of exotic particles that do not exist.
"The hope is that some modification of the theory, not yet specified in detail, will remove the extra fields and turn on the coupling," Dr. Polchinski said. "Whether this can be done is at this point a guess. Overall my attitude now is interest with a high degree of skepticism."
If the theory can be made to work, it may point to a new way of unifying quantum mechanics and relativity. But Dr. Zhang is careful not to oversell what he considers a work in progress.
"Our work only made a tiny step toward this direction," Dr. Zhang said, "but it seems to indicate that the goal may not be impossible to reach." At the very least, he said, his work may inspire more collaboration between particle physicists and solid-staters.
Ultimately, though, the two sides know that they are talking across a divide. Taken to its extreme, emergence suggests that all the fundamental laws, even quantum mechanics, may be secondary -- that at the base of reality is random noise.
Dr. Polchinski said he found that idea discouraging.
"To me, the history of science seems to be a steady progression toward simpler and more unified laws, and I expect to see this continue and to contribute to it. Things may take many surprising twists and turns," he said, "but we reductionists are still quite happily and busily reducing."
--
General relativity didn't start until, like 1916 or something.
I think I'll stop here.
deconstructionist physics?
gus
.. if only.
Jesus Christ what arrogance!
Solid State Physics has contributed to our everyday life more than the esoteric and pretty much useless elementary particle physics which, by the way, steals absurd amounts of money from the practical fields of physics.
The owls are not what they seem
Even more importantly, how someone could mod up the post. How fucking stupid is that?
Well, darn, so much for transporters.
By the way, am I the only one that thinks Dr. Robert B. Laughlin looks like Clinton? Probably. oh well.
It sounds a bit like the argument between Java and Perl to me :) There are those who believe that things that are clean and orderly are "right" and there are those that believe things that are loose and flexible are "right". (There are those that believe that life here began... out there...)
;)
In any case it's an interesting path to explore. I lean towards the loose and flexible side myself. If you saw my code you'd be able to tell
I am I the only one, but is anyone else worried that when they finally find the unified theory, "The Theory that Explains Everything," that it'll wind up being Murphy's Law?
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
General Relativity orders a positive charge, but comes under fire from ballistic missiles. It's time for a negative charge!
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
What ought to be noted is that theoretical physics is in a state of flux. The current methods and theories are showing cracks. For that reason, several competing theories are coming about.
One of the primary things to think on, though, is not whether or not current theory ought to be completely discarded, but rather the theory just needs some small adjustments. *grinz* Even those 'minor' adjustments are often hotly debated.
Even then, the one phycist friend of mine at FERMI said that theory only advances as the older generation dies off...;)
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
"They may have emerged from the roiling of the vacuum of space, much as supply-and-demand and other "laws" of economics emerge from the bustle of the marketplace. If so, then solid-state
physics, which specializes in how emergent phenomena occur, may be the most fundamental science of them all.
If they are right and (some) higher-level laws are irreducible to particle physics, then solid-state physics probably won't be "the most fundamental" either. Any discipline that contains irreducible laws (economics? cognitive science? evolution?) will be in some sense "fundamental".
324006
IANAP (Physicist, naturally), but I'd have to say that the solid-staters argument makes sense. It seems arrogant to think that the universe must obey these silly little laws we come up with. Mathematical laws are a tool, they simpify the workings of the universe so a human mind can grasp them. But they are not the universe. I would tend to agree with thier arguement that as systems get more complex, new rules come into play. How then can the universe's intricate workings be summed up in a few silly little equations?
.
I've found the answer! The universe isn't dominated by some elaborate unified theory, or general relativity, or quantum mechanics, or anything like that. I've found a principle that applies everywhere. Everywhere I look, there it is. The central principle of the universe is: STUPIDITY! It all makes sense now . .
Well, at least its the central principle in my life,
-- If any of the above made sense, I assure it was purely by accident.
also explains certain thinks like matter as ripples in space time.....it is kind of interesting how this aspect of the theories match up.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Speaking as part of the community, the physics world is not at all portrayed accurately in this article. Nearly every physicist sees value in every subset of physics. Think nuclear physics is dead? I happen to know a few nuclear physicists who are still active in research. No-one I know refers to solid-staters as "squalid-staters". There is worthwhile research still in every discipline of physics, even solid state and particle physics.
I think what we have here is a case of journalistic hype used to make the a mountain out of a molehill. I do not think that anyone can deny that there has not been advances in the understanding of any field.
Ciao
nahtanoj
No one thinks Java is clean and orderly. Or useful.
;)
Special Relativity didn't supersede Newton's laws of motion.
They superseded the classical viewpoint that momentum was speed times a constant mass, but to his credit, Newton never made this claim. His students did. In modern form, F=dp/dt still works under SR.
They also superseded the Galilean transformations by the Lorenz transformations, but that was Galileo's problem, not Newton's.
I'm being picky because I think Newton gets a bad rap and doesn't deserve it for the laws of motion. They're still good. On the other hand, GR certainly does supersede Newton's law of gravity, and in that case the criticism is valid.
All I can say is well DUH! I'm not expert, but I have read a few things about super string theory and have to say that it really is more elegant than the standard model, the theory that particle physists use. Just fom a cursory glance at this article it sounds like the solid-state folks are proposing something similar to the super stringers. That particles are at their root a function of space and how it vibrates.
What I'd really like to see is some comparison between this new theory and string theory (it could be in there I didn't read past what was posted here)
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Hockey - Canada's gift to the world
Dentistry the worlds gift to Hockey
Renton: "So, that's your Unified Theory?"
SickBoy: "Ya, and beautifully fucking illustrated"
Some one define "platonic truths" for me please. I don't think I grasp the point of the quoted statement in the article.
And please don't just give me a Dictionary definition!
--
Does anyone remember
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. They probably changed it because too many people like us were doing it.
All good things come to an end sometime.
Here is a little quote for wet your appetite
technically, you don't wet your appetite, you whet it.
just fyi, no big deal.
I mean, okay, most of us are at least a little arrogant. We're revealing the secrets of the Universe -- how could our heads not swell, at least a little? But for most of us it's a little tongue-in-cheek, too.
Now the ideas in the article intrigue me. I'm in Particle Physics, and I was indeed under the impression that fundamental particles are, well, fundamental. The idea that this could all be quasi-particles ("effervescence in the vacuum" as the article puts it) like phonons (the sound equivalent of photons) in matter, is really cool.
I will agree with this much: there isn't enough discussion between the various disciplines. Scientists in general need to talk to each other more.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
Besides giving jobs to all those number-crunching peons at the supercolliders ("Ooooh, after 10 years of massive computation, we've decided that we were wrong by 2% on the mass of this inconsequential particle that only exists because otherwise my friend's theory would be wrong"), and giving people like Hawking free license to write books about mathematical nonsense like black holes, white holes, and parallel universes, what the hell has SR or GR actually gone and done?
-peter
If I am reading things correctly it would seem, that both the "Squalid Staters" and Chaitin are coming from the same angle. Both reckon that any maths we can derive to describe the physical world are almost fluke, and that underlying everything is sheer randomness. Fascinating Stuff. Can anyone offer a more qualified comparison of these two areas?
i'm glad to see the theory of everything crowd take a hit. their absolutism can be compared to religious fundamentalism.
;-P
the solid staters talking about the universe being nothing but noise from which various descriptive rules emerge, but dependent on no other larger organizing principle, is satisfying to me.
allow me to be a crank about something that always bothered me: i never liked the big bang theory. it stinks of creationism. it seems out of line with the trend of what humanity has been learning from science over the last thousand years: that the universe is random, trivial, makes little sense, and we are not anywhere near the center of it.
it doesn't all boil down to an equation on a t-shirt? woop-de-friggin'-doo. just because us humans are reductionist thinkers and anal-retentive "everything in my world has to make sense" psychological types doesn't mean the universe has to fit that template. there does not have to be a theory of everything for the universe to work. it doesn't need a beginning, it doesn't need an end. the universe can be timeless, static, and random. what's wrong with that?
expansion of the universe? why can't the expansion we see be local, temporary. like being on the trough of a wave in the ocean, only able to look around in the trough we're in and see the trough expanding, unaware of the tips of the waves to our right and left. or unaware of the overall picture of us being in an endlessness ocean, infinite through space and time, backwards and forwards.
background microwave radiation? merely the effects of only being able to see a certain distance. the night sky may not be glowing white even though there might be infinite stars in every direction, but after a certain distance, light can be lost through means beyond our understanding, or through merely mundane reasons we already understand: absorption? dark matter? gravity lensing?
entropic death of the universe? or a big crunch in our future? why the absolutism? perhaps this might happen locally, and an as-of-yet unforeseen restoking of the entropy balance happening through processes we are not even aware of yet. black holes? they are singularities of some sort. i wonder what kind of bedrock rules we take for granted are broken in them. maxwell's demon indeed.
do i sound quasi-rational, like i'm grasping at straws? maybe so, i'm no cosmologist. but the big bang stinks of creationism to me, and if anything we have learned historically trend-wise, through galileo, kepler, hubble, etc., is that our place in the universe is vanishingly small, pointless,and trivial. to speak of a creationistic big bang seems vaguely anthropomorphic and self-centered, like how we used to think the sun revolved around the earth.
same with a theory of everything. why does gravity have to be united with any other forces? to satisfy a psychological urge? "it just is" sounds ok with me.
just because us little humans have a beginning and an end does not imply the universe does. and just because we have to make little reductionist rules up to govern how we live our lives and make sense of it all does not mean the universe has to conform to our psychology.
bravo to the solid staters. the dudes who gave us the silicon chip are telling us that the universe begins and ends with local rules dependent on nothing else. now that's a theory of everything i can live with: everything begins and ends with my computer.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Beware, you who seek first and final principles; for you are trampling the garden of an angry God, and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem!"
--Sister Miriam Godwinson, We Must Dissent
I know I'd buy one ;)
komi
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
If an article like this appears, someone somewhere is trying to get some funding.
These are, IMHO, the key points in the whole article:
"Like Aristotle, they [(the emergent propossers)]lean toward the notion that it is the equations that flow from nature instead of the other way around. Mathematics is just a tool for making sense of it all."
"[...]he ventured that the universe may have begun not in a state of pristine symmetry but in one of lawlessness. The laws of relativity and perhaps quantum mechanics itself would have emerged only later on."
"Ultimately, though, the two sides know that they are talking across a divide. Taken to its extreme, emergence suggests that all the fundamental laws, even quantum mechanics, may be secondary -- that at the base of reality is random noise."
How would you go about testing Murphy Law? It seems to me that if Murphy's Law was true, any such test would give you a false negative.
We developers used to be stationed on the 13th floor, on the premise that that was unlucky, so bugs would show up sooner. Didn't work.
Ok, now that I've actually read through all of it... Ummm could someone please tell the reporter that General and Special relativity don't have much to do with particle physics?
General and Special relativity are theories of the large, describing gravity and the warping of space/time due to gravity.
Quantum Mechanics is the theory of the small, at the particle and sub-atomic level and it's a nasty dirty theory that has all kinds of exceptions and sepcial rules.
The problem in particle physics today is that you can't join Relativity and Quantum Mechanics without some nasty consequences, infinities, zeros and things that don't make much sense. Not that physisits haven't tried. The current merger of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics is the Standard Model. Which works but doesn't expain WHY it works.
The String theorists have a theory that does merge Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and solves the problems of inifinities and zeros, however current string theory is only an approximation and isn't refined enough for experimentation yet. That is predictions from String Theory can't be tested in the lab at the energies that are available. Who knows you may only be able to test string theory with a big bang, and then look out everything starts over again.
Again, I'd be interested to see a piece on this in Scientific American or some other Science journal that can delve a little deeper into the solid-state theory and see where it fits between the Standard Model and String Theory.
I do wonder if the solid-staters look at things in 10 or 11 dimensions do they start looking like strings?
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
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Will it let me put metal in a microwave?
I remember reading an article some time ago in which a scientist proposed that Quantum Physics could actually be a natural corollary of General Relativity (where each particle is some kind of "ripple" in the space-time continuum), and that the mathematics of this could make sense if the requirement for Causality ("cause must happen before effect") were dropped from General Relativity.
His proposal suggested that quantum coupling (where two particles can become intertwined based on an earlier interaction) was caused by some kind of ripple-effect going back in time from the observed particle to the time that the original interaction happened.
He was able to explain many other aspects of Quantum Physics the same way, although he claimed that the mathematics was so complex that only the simplest of interactions had been formally proved to match between his model and QP - most of his theory, including the explanation of coupling, was hand-waving.
I always thought that this theory seemed one of the most elegant I've ever heard - no need to introduce new hypothetical particles like Strings, no need to assume that all the complexities of the Standard Model are fixed, absolute and arbitrary. Just take General Relativity, drop Causality, and look at what emerges.
I've often wondered whether this guy's theory ever went anywhere. It seems to have something in common with the theory proposed in this article - that QP is just an "emergent behavior" from GR. The difference is that the article seems to propose that there is no underlying rule at all except chaos and GR itself emerged from that; this guy proposed that GR was fundamental and QP was the emergent behavior.
Anyone know anything about this theory or know where the original article might be? Did this guy have any success or get any recognition? Has his theory been actually disproved, or simply ignored?
Stuart.
Not to nitpick, but if IIRC Hockey was invented in the US. I also seem to remember something about Basketball being invented in Canada (remember those little Canada Post "Our history commercials), but I could be wrong.
:wq
That's what the scientific method is all about. Disprove, disprove, disprove until a theory stands up to all tests... then take it down some more.
Einstein's theory is likely far from correct, so we need to create a new one. Why must scientists hold to 'truths' that they know aren't? We're just getting closer to the truth as allow for more and more variables. We learn, theories improve.
If the solid-state physicists don't stand up and fight, then the particle physicists have already won...
Its kind of unfair to NYT to post the whole article and then people mod this up for all to see. NYT deserves the Clicks so they will continue to post interesting articles. I guess having the article mentioned on /. is a huge bonus but the principle remains. What if it had been in reverse someone posted the "best of /." with no connection to CMDTaco et al.
Help fight continental drift.
That was fucking funny (and I'm not even the one who wrote it).
Fritter - that was possibly the funniest thing I've ever read on slashdot. I'm going to use it at my earliest convenience.
Check out Reginald Cahill and Process Physics: Papers Homepage
I think the establishment scientists would do well to take a look at Chris Langan's Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe. His concept of "conspansion" is the only theoretic construct that explains all of the empiracle evidence.
I know the sig is wrong. Hockey was acutally invented a very long time ago in Europe. It is old enough that the exact origins of the sport are unkown. In regards to Cananda, one might say that currently accepted 'Modern Hockey' i.e. the NHL was started there.
Hockey is played in several countries around the world, and in many different forms, which is one of the most interesting parts of the game.
As for basketball, it was definately invented in North America, though I think it was in the US. I know that it was invented by a minister at a YMCA to provide a sport that people could play in the winter without the need for lots of special equipment.
Hockey - Canada's gift to the world
If only so many wars were fought so civily, with publication of papers, logic and reason taking the forefront over all that gun-use and wasted effort trying to convince people with a big stick.
Of course, on the other hand, there's always fighting wars with lawyers and tax-men. That qualifies as throwing papers and logic and math around, almost. Pseudo-logic and semi-science works great when you're dealing with human judges rather than mathematics.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
I've always found it interesting how narrow an understanding we really have of the universe...seems like as we go to the very large or the very small; like outside of our typical day to day world our theories start to break down and reality as we are used to it seems to change.
Neat stuff.
(oh and of course this will all result in the Earth being shrunk into something roughly the size of a pea...)
Aristotle was right. Those who think their models are more real than the world are deluded.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
...five years ago when popular science magazines were discussing how close we were to finally breaking all barriers and answering all mysteries. That seemed like a pretty strong hint we were about to see everything we thought we knew knocked helter-skelter by some of those little niggling details we hadn't cleaned up yet.
I don't pretend to have any idea where this squabble is headed, but somebody might want to start thinking up a good name for a whole new branch of physics. Looks like these guys are just about to figure out they're looking at different parts of the same elephant [from an old parable, if that makes no sense to you].
http://www.blacklightpower.com/theory.shtml
Randall Mills wrote it.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
OT, but god I loved that game!
Kalabajoui - Thanks for the quote!
In contrast, I haven't been able to stand CivIII, which strikes me as tepid and shallow. Yeah, I know actually winning at CivIII is complex, but the depth of the surrounding story just isn't there. I think with Alpha Centauri, there was no actual history to leverage; you can't just "look it up" like you can with the (more or less) historically accurate civilizations in CivIII. Therefore, AC needed a lot more story and background development. In my book, they did a great job too! I've said this before, but one of AC's unique qualities was forcing the player to explore ideologies, not just unit strategy.
I think I'll go play AC sometime soon again. In retrospect, it might have been better if I'd never played the game. It's not only addictive, but it set the bar too high for subsequent games. I personally consider AC to be Sid's masterpiece. CivIII is probably everyone else's pick I know, but bah to that I say.
:)
Also - if anyone would comment on the "sweet spot" in CivIII, I'd love to hear it. What's the draw for you? I definitely haven't found the groove yet.
(Jeez, how much more OT can I get? My karma shall surely suffer.)
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
In the late 19th century, Albert A Michelson, according to many the "Greatest" physicist of his time (and winner of the first Nobel prize in Physics (1907), decided to measure the speed of light...in 1878, he did so accurately for the first time, he was using about $10.00 of lab equipment, btw...his passion for accuracy and precision led to his teaming up with Edward W. Morley, in 1878 to prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", through the....
e du/lectures/michelson.html.....there's also a great page on Michelson here;....http://hum.amu.edu.pl/~zbzw/ph/sci/aam.ht m
Michelson-Morley Experiment. Michelson's career had been golden, and he was widely regarded as the best physicist of the 19th century. So, everyone "knew" that he would successfully prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", which would be the finally block in the edifice of Classical Newtonian physics...
instead, the experiment went completeley wrong, conclusively proved the lack of the cosmic ether, and Newton was kicked to the gutter (as an explanation for sub-macroscopic events)...
here's a link to a pretty good, non-technical account of this from U of Va....http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.
In the 1950's, in the particle chambers of UCLA, strange traces were seen on the photograpic plates of particle collisions....physics of the time couldn't account for this particle, so the postdocs and the grad students waggishly nicknamed the unknown particle the "what-on", and many ignored it for over 20 years...
as instumentation and our undestanding of sub-nuclear particles became better, some other grad students, looking for new frontiers (and new dissertation topics), started researching the "what-on"...it has become....
The Quark and is now the center of the posh new "String Theory", which is yet another attempt to explain overall particle to particle interaction,and from the standpoint of "Classical Quantum Dynamics", Superstring theory kicks QD to the curb....here we go again.....
here's a good page on String Theory
http://superstringtheory.com/
the point being...these things we are discussing are so far beyond our abilities to directly sense or measure them, it's like the old story of the scientists examining an elephant in a lightless, closed room...
one scientist grabs the tail and thinks its a thin, long snake, another scientist grabs a tusk and thinks its a rhino, another grabs the trunk and thinks its a python...
since we have no ability to directly "view" or "measure" these things, we are using inference and deduction to provide us with our theories, yet as every generation of instrumentation improves and gives us new "information" we take that info and rework it...
face it, we could come up with a "Unified Theory" that completely explains our current "knowledge" about physics, to the satisfaction of 99% of the scientists on the face of the earth and....
it could be kicked over by some new experiment, just the way that Michelson-Morely kicked over "Classical" Physics...
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Any discipline that contains irreducible laws (economics? cognitive science? evolution?) will be in some sense "fundamental".
Interesting observation, however you probably should leave out Economics and the Cognitive sciences. They are based on Human behaviour and as such is subject to change, albeit slowly.
The "Emergent" laws might be the only that is Fundamental. It kind of interesting that Murray Gell Man mentioned in the article as the key proponent of GUT is one of the founders of the Santa Fe institute. SFI is the pre-eminent "Emergent" properties research facility. It's where Holland works.
Help fight continental drift.
That should be:
Here is a little quote to whet your appetite.
For "for" is not "to" and to "wet" is to dampen while to "whet" is to sharpen.
The dictionary is your friend.
Where is this story coming from? Is it a reliable source? It hasn't appeared on any of the news wires or any of the other news sources available - as of five minutes ago. The story has all the earmarks of an urban legend - if the anal lacerations are said to be caused by a gerbil you've GOT to know that it's a hoax.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. - anon.
Gee whiz. Don't tell me someone on /. is concerned about preserving intellectual property rights. Yes it's unfair to the NY Times and this is while there are laws to punish people who do it. Of course it's not horribly likely that NYT will be bothered enough to sue, but technically they could.
You are correct that the origins of hockey are now lost in the dim fog of history. But as for basketball it is generally accepted that Naismith(a Canadian, and his first name escapes me at the moment) "invented" it. However, it isn't like he didn't have inspiration from many different other "sports" that required somehow putting a ball through a hoop.
The point was more aimed at the people modding. Its unlikely NYT could sue as its an Individual that is posting, not /. per se. Maybe you meant suing the poster in which case you might be right.
Help fight continental drift.
I always thought the answer was 42.
.... he actually says what you are saying, plus one extra bit... he thinks it's beautiful that we don't know these answers, and feel challenged to try.
1) the various quantum tunneling experiments, where the Mozart 40th Symphony was transmitted through solid metal at several times the speed of light. There is a good link here. There was even a NOVA special or something on that (see that transcript here, - info about 2/3rds into the material)
2) maybe something involving the research of Steven Wolfram (developer of Mathematica), as seen in his forth coming book A New Kind of Science, which is very geeky, very bizarre, and right up this alley, and is supposed to be a rethinking of the very fundamentals of how science works. My head hurts already. This book is due for publication in January 2002, and is well worth pre-ordering.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You neglected to mention that Michelson conducted his experiment at the Naval Academy, and that a series of discs crossing the Yard (campus) mark the original line of sight used.
Yet, this astounding feat did little to help the inmates from Sing Sing on the Severn against their noble foe, the Hooligans of Hudson High, last weekend.
Go Navy, be at Army!
Just do a search. The man WAS a genius. I also recommend the Feynman lectures on physics, the so called "red books". You will be sorely hurt if you do not check him out.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
or are "virtual particles" still particles? I mean, if the solid-staters are going to maintain that reductionism is silly, does it make sense to back up your argument with an idea that sounds like more reductionism?
...The Cosmological Anthropic Principle. It has some nice discussion of how the symmetries we observe in particle physics might 'emerge' from low energy regimes of physical systems that are in some sense lawless. In general it's an interesting book that discusses why we have order in the universe quite a bit. But the part on order apparently emerging from a lawless universe seems to be what the current discussion is based on.
-- SIGFPE
What happens when or if these notions are applied to string theory with multiple other dimensions?
I would love to hear what Steven Hawking would have to say about this.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
Maybe I'm bias being a quantum nuclear structure physicist (similar to a particle physicist), but this article seems rather ridiculous. Most of the wild pictures painted are ridiculous comments based on nothing more than wild imaginations off in Alice in Wonderland. I wouldn't take such articles from NYTimes so seriously. The effort it takes to get a article published there and the editing/critic treatment given it is rather weak.
Can light be slowed down by very powerful gravitational fields?
Can light be sped up by very powerful gravitational fields?
Can light be bent by very powerful gravitational fields?
Here's my question. If light can be bent by a black hole or a planet, there is a force exerted on the light as the light travels near. Can also that same force that bends the light act on light as it approaches the source of the force, and as it moves away from the source of the force?
My hand can change the speed of light from c to 0. But is there anything that keeps going through my hand? Is the light riding along something that keeps going throught? Can that something, pick up light after it has gone through my hand?
Ohh, dang, I need more coffee... it's getting foggy.
I have other questions about gravity, but that's for another day.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Yes, the big bang theory can imply a creator, but since you appear to be against the idea of a "god" you are willing to reject the best theory out there. You are philosophically locked in to a certain view of the world, and it appears you refuse to accept evidence that might cause you to reconsider your world view.
Anyone who is seriously interested in physics should read the book "Escape from Einstein" by Ron Hatch. Ron is currently the president of the Institute of Navigation and is recognized as one of the top experts in the world on GPS. He is certainly no crank.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
This man has all the answers.
Sure, THIS could be local too, but this locality did START, because the light cone relative to us has a terminus.
If a solid-state physicist hits a particle physicist over the head with a tree that fell in the woods while nobody's around, we can finally get Schrödinger's cat out of that box...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Zhang is actually the reserve member of the Pine-Laughlin tag team!
Gross's partner should have been....
Dr. Joe "The Big Book " Polchisnki!
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
The fact that Einstein didn't take the uncertainty principle
into account in the Relativity theory means that it isn't a
complete unified theory.
IANAP, but I understand that It is possible for particles to,
briefly, move faster than the speed of light at a quantum
level. Relativity works on a large, cosmic scale, but breaks
down at the subatomic level.
I'm sure this isn't new news to everyone, but it is something
that I just learned recently when reading an old Hawking
book.
Hockey has been around in some form since around the time skates were invented. The first game organized by rules that would make it recognizable as the modern (read: NHL) sport took place in Canada mid-nineteenth century.
Basketball was invented by James Naismith for the YMCA while he was at the University of Michigan. It was invented to fill the lull between sporting seasons by providing a vigorous indoor sport. It originally used Peach Baskets. Hence, basketball. Dr. Naismith was a Canadian; the first players were Americans.
-l
Many people are mentioning that Newton was wrong and Einstein found out the truth. Newton was right, but only for special cases--when an object is going at speeds much slower than the speed of light. Even the fastest space probe traveled at 1.8e5 mph, which is .03% of the speed of light(pretty insignificant I'd say).
R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic sphere (among other things) and the fellow who coined the term 'synergy' in the first place could have told them this back during the 60's and 70's.
The idea behind synergy comes from material science where two or more elements or compounds combine to form a third material that exhibits properties that are not characteristic of any of the original materials.
Bucky's essential comment on synergy was that you could not understand emergent synergetic behaviour by studying the component parts, only the end result. They existed on two entirely separate levels of organisation, governed by entirely different sets of principles. In a way, complexity theory came along and merely confirmed his ideas.
So how does the analogy work when the elephant gets pissed at being groped and tramples all the physicists in the room?
Nathan.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
i never liked the big bang theory. it stinks of creationism. it seems out of line with the trend of what humanity has been learning from science over the last thousand years:
Ironically your comments reflect exactly the same kind of reasoning which makes the creationists so maligned. You have a theological presupposition and are willing to disregard scientific analysis when that analysis suggests that your theology may be wrong. The only difference appears to be the content of your theology: you, an atheist, don't "like" the big bang theory and they, theists, don't "like" the theory of evolution. Meanwhile the universe (and perhaps God) goes on as it will whether you want it to be that way or not.
It seems out of line with the trend of what humanity has been learning from science over the last thousand years: that the universe is random, trivial, makes little sense, and we are not anywhere near the center of it.
I can agree with the "not anywhere near the center of it" comment about what science has taught us in the last thousand years. But that the universe is random or that it makes little sense is the exact opposite of what scientific progress has taught us. Ancient man lived in a world that was truly random and made little sense - the world and elements around him where not governed by discoverable and predictable laws of physics but by unpredictable gods and spirits. Science is built on the alternative belief that the universe is orderly - NOT random but governed by predictable rules that can be discovered and that when tested will give the same results every time. If science taught that the universe is "random" and "makes little sense" there would be no point in scientific experiments and peer review since the results would be different every time. That fundamental belief in predictable order in the universe has been vindicated by scientific progress. An electrical storm that looked to ancient man like the chaotic temper tantrum of a petulant Thor is revealed to be obeying laws of physics that we can understand. We certainly don't understand them all and probably never will - and those things we still don't understand still looks like random chaos just like an electical storm did to our ancestors - but the whole point of science and what these physicists will eventually discover with their duelling theories is truth (or at least a theory that comes closer to the truth) and predictable order in the physical universe.
I was wondering if anyone here could clear up my thoughts on the speed of light.
I have heard that light gets bent around planets due to gravity? (Also, gravity gets sucked in by black holes.)
So, if light is affected by gravity, how is the speed constant? As it approaches a great mass, it should speed up; and as it leaves, it should slow down?
Just looking for a little explanation.
vk
If they do, then the quote from the following text will lead to 21st century science (that really should have been 20th century science but for some rather unfortunate concepts born of the Continental -- primarily German/Swiss -- physicists):
Thus we find that the concept of linking, which before led us immediately to the heart of quantum mechanics, has now led us immediately to the heart of relativity!
Out takes from Process System and Causality and "Reflections" on same.
Most discussions of the meaning of quantum mechanics these days seem to be about the problem of the "collapse of the wave function." In link theory this problem simply vanishes, since there is no wave function to collapse. Imagine if the Eighteenth Century caloric were still hanging around as the official theory of heat: we'd be chronically plagued by ever more complicated theories explaining the collapse of the "caloric field" when you measure an atom's energy. What a relief to get away from the spell of such nonsense!
This large-number explanation of quantum mechanics raises two basic questions: Large numbers of what? and Must we buy it?
The answer to the first question is implicit in the above discussion, but needs to be said simply: The things we count large numbers of are cases. Simple arithmetic reveals that the core quantum laws, in a generalized form, are features of any probabilistic system whatsoever. Von Neumann's formulation of the Born probability rule prob(P) = trace(PS) holds at every connection between the parts of such a system, and the dynamical rule S'T = TS governs every part that is connected at two places.
I brought up caloric to draw a parallel between our present situation and the situation in physics when it was discovered that the laws governing heat could be interpreted as statistical laws of atomic motion. However, there is a big difference. In the case of heat, the statistical theory sat on top of the Newtonian theory of motion, whereas in our case there is no underlying empirical theory at all. Probability theory is just the arithmetic of case counting, so the generalized quantum laws are like xy = yx in that their truth is assured, the only empirical issue being where and when they apply.
The answer to the second question is no, we don't have to. However, the same can be said about the arithmetical explanation of five fields with ten sheep each. It's logically possible that when true tranquillity reigns, the gods always make sure that every field contains ten sheep (presumably the age of true tranquillity is long since past). It's also logically possible that the non-local "guide wave" explanation of quantum phenomena is the right one. With both sheep and quantum, the arithmetical explanation makes so much more sense that it would be most malicious of the gods to reject it just to save our old habits of thought.
We'll see that there is another reason to prefer the arithmetical explanation, which is that, as our discussion of Markov processes suggests, it also applies to classical things like computers. This at last enables us to make sense of quantum measurement, which has always been a great mystery. Quantum and classical now stand revealed as two "shapes" made of the same stuff, so there is nothing more mysterious about their both being parts of the same process than there is about round wheels and square windows both being parts of the same car. The radical path also leads to a good Kantian solution of Hume's problem, which is that of finding causality in the order of succession, and we'll see that the choice between acausal and causal/classical thinking is to some extent a choice of analytical method, like the choice between polar and rectilinear coordinates.
Boost theorem. u = (v+v')/(1+vv'), i.e., taking the velocity of light be 1, the velocities of linked binary variables satisfy the relativistic addition law.
Proof: Let p and q be the probabilities of HEADS and TAILS for V, and similarly let p' and q' for V'. Then v = p-q and v' = p'-q', and from the definition of linking one can quickly verify that u = (pp'-qq')/ (pp'+qq'). Thus we must show that (pp'-qq')/(pp'+qq') = (p-q+p'-q')/ (1-(p-q)(p'-q'). Now in fact these two expressions are not identical as they stand, but only become identical when we bring in the additional fact that probabilities add up to one, i.e. p+q = p'+q' = 1. The easiest way to take these conditions into account is to note that v = (p-q)/(p+q) and v' = (p'-q')/(p'+q') and substitute these expressions for v and v' in (v+v')/(1+vv'); the resulting expression then reduces to (pp'-qq')/(pp'+qq'). QED.
Applied to observer and object, the boost law implies the Lorenz transformation.
Thus we find that the concept of linking, which before led us immediately to the heart of quantum mechanics, has now led us immediately to the heart of relativity!
There is still a lot of work to be done to relate the above theorem to the concept of "probability space" based on separability. One approach here may be to interpret "time lines" as binary Markov chains from which the LEFT-RIGHT variables are abstracted statistically. 1x1 space-time would then be the indefinite process that results from linking these velocity variables in an unspecified collection of such chains. Notice the formal resemblance here to our construction of complex amplitudes, which also resulted from linking an indefinite set of processes via a binary phase variable.
The question arises whether this resemblance is more than just an analogy. Could it be that at some fundamental level, the phase particle and the "velocity particle" are one and the same? Let's briefly consider where this would lead. Since in (complex) Minkowski space boosts are rotations of the complex plane, this identity would make the relativity of amplitude phase into a generalization of the relativity of motion.
Even more important for the science of the future is that the conjugation symmetry of the phase particle would become the symmetry of v and -v, which is the symmetry that results from reversing object and observer.
Given the importance of computer modeling in today's science, it's hardly an exaggeration to say that, for most scientists, to explain something means to describe it in a way that could in principle be turned into a real-time computer simulation. This belief, which I'll call computerism, usually does not rise to the level of an explicit statement; it's just one of those things that "goes without saying". It's a funny thing about things that go without saying, though, which is that when you actually say them carefully, and then take a close look at what you have said, they sometimes turn out to be wrong!
Is computerism wrong? That's not something I'll take sides on here. However, I have observed that many people hold onto computerism simply because they can't imagine any other possibility. Here is where a proper understanding of Markov processes makes a big difference. It turns out that computers are only a tiny island in the vast sea of formal possibilities encompassed by the general concept of a Markov process. The quantum is another tiny island.
As mentioned, there are also hybrid forms that belong to neither island. The important point is that by no stretch of imagination can the encompassing expanse of Markovian forms be located on Computer Island alone. Quantum structures can't be located there, even quantum computers can't be located there, and most of the remaining expanse isn't even in sight.
Which brings us to the future of science. Physical science grew up in close collaboration with engineering, and for the most part shares with engineering a view of the world as something to be taken apart into functional units. To this the engineer adds the art of reassembling functional units into useful functional wholes; this is called technology. The abstract skeleton of a functional part is a transition matrix, also sometimes called a transfer function, representing the functional dependence of a set of outputs on a set of inputs. In the deterministic or "causal" case, the actual values of the outputs are a function of the values of the inputs, while in the more general case it is only the probabilities of these values that are a function of the inputs. The generality of engineering consists in its being to able to use a small variety of functional parts and design principles to assemble a large variety of useful complex structures.
Here is where I see the broader significance of PSCQM. I believe its chief accomplishment was to mathematically extend the basic conception of lawful change that underlies current scientific practice. This extended lawfulness retains Markovian separability, but no longer requires that we separate things into functional parts. To put it another way, it no longer requires that the internal variables be inputs connected to outputs. The links between parts, and even between past and future, can now have a two-way information flow. This is easy to say, and it turns out to be rather easy to formulate mathematically, but it also turns out to be very hard to digest. Indeed, most of the work since PSCQM has involved trying to digest it. We have studied numerous examples, which provided numerous surprises, and a lot of work has 5 gone into grounding the mathematics at a more fundamental level - we'll come to this in the next section.
Major changes in science are foreshadowed by movements in the culture at large. A variety of cultural movements in modern times, ranging from the counterculture of Woodstock to the arcane isms of Continental philosophy, share a strong discontent with the technocratic narrowness of science as it stands. The broad message here is that nature, including human nature, has many ways of being besides using things. A world that is nothing but functionality is a world fit only to be used. The world of the engineer is an abstraction geared to a particular mode of activity, not the world we live in.
But the world of the engineer is also an enormous intellectual achievement, and there is the problem. It is romantic folly to think that throwing away this achievement would return us to some imagined idyllic state of nature. I would like to think that PSQM offers a hint of a less foolish path. It clearly describes radical alternatives to functional composition that are none-theless accessible to the engineer's mathematical tools. It also shows how these can simply explain some of the more puzzling laws of physics. This is certainly not The Answer, but it does offer hope that there may be ways to steer the intellectual power of science into a better partnership with our real human nature.
Seastead this.
It seems to me that the solid-state physicists theory that "Fundamental Laws" are only emergent rules that in most cases accurately portray the actual reality of the universe, would do away with the need to have the inelegant, unimaginative and feeble "Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics".
IMHO any theory that would do away with "Many Worlds" is a big step in the right direction. My biggest problem with "Many Worlds" is that those who embrace this interpretation gladly accept unnecessary infinities in the results of their calculations where most scientists recognize that their theory is in serious trouble when they start seeing infinities in their solutions.
The universe is big enough for randomness, I'm just not sure it's big enough for infinity.
-~-~-~-~-~
"I have set my life upon a cast, and I will stand the hazard of the die!" -- Shakespeare, Richard III
-~-~-~-~-~
"I have set my life upon a cast, and I will stand the hazard of the die!" -- Shakespeare, Richard III
Physics is based on observation and on mathematics. And anyone without overweening ego issues can have the courage to admit that mathematics is particular and specific to our cognitive, embodied perception.
Platonic ideals are as likely as Great Sky Gods, or GUTs. There are no Natural Laws, but instead narrative descriptions of the world. These stories use metaphor and analogy, and their popularity waxes and wanes along with the lives and influence of their storytellers. Blend Kuhn (anti) and Kuhn (pro) and Foucault with a dash of Popper. And don't skimp on the hermeneutics.
Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being
Da Blog
Theories Of The World Unify!!
And throw down your oppressors!
http://home1.gte.net/res02khr/crackpots/notorious. htm
"The particle physicists' ultimate goal is "grand unification" -- recovering the primordial symmetry in the form of a single law -- a few concise equations, it is often said, that could be silk-screened onto a T- shirt."
That's a lot of freakin' work for a T-shirt design.
Never trust an physics article with the words "synergy", "epistemological", or "paradigm" in either the title or the abstract. They're universally crap. If they weren't crap, the author wouldn't need to obfuscate the reader by using flowery information-free phrases.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? "Higher organizing priciples"? What is this guy, some sort of directed-evolution creationism disguised as objective journalism? Sure there are things in physics no one has clearly explained yet, but "cannot be further simplified" has, historically, almost always proven to be wrong.
First, no physicist has every seriously claimed that any theory of physics is a Platonic truth (although I've seen the occational philosopher try). Second, solid state physics types don't try to study relativity for two reasons: first, we don't have the background to do so credibly and second, general relativity is not observable in the laboratory and thus is not a subject most solid state physicists are interested in.
Solid state physicists (or condensed matter physicists, same idea) do not specialize in "how emergent pheomena occur" (whatever the hell that means). We study matter in the solid state (superconductors or semiconductor physics for example). Touchy-feely stuff, things you can put on a lab bench.
Only by English majors. Physicists call it "trying to understand what's actually going on".
The hell they can't. Just because I can't sit down with a pen and paper (or a Cray supercomputer) and solve the resulting system of equations doesn't mean they don't apply. These so-called "new laws" are just approximations to the real (albeit unwieldy) quantum mechanics.
The difference is, quasi-particles are not real. They're a useful mathematical trick, but without an underlying object (usually a crystal of some kind), they wouldn't exist. Electronts are real.
Except when they carry an -2/3 charge.
Yours in disgust,
-JS
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
It's helpful to keep in mind that any mathematical description of a system doesn't really shed light on what the system is; merely how it behaves.
It's quite possible that all these different approaches (string theory, solid-state, quantum gravity, etc.) could each lead to perfectly consistent and accurate descriptions of the universe, and might eventually shown to be mathematically equivalent to each other (I wouldn't be surprised), but none of them can answer the more fundamental question of what the universe actually is, or why it is here... or for that matter, why we are in it.
My own viewpoint is that the complexity of the universe is a result of the emergent properties of a finite number of simple laws, particle-based or otherwise. The caveat is that the word "Particle" in this context is really a "suitcase" word, (sort of like "consciousness,") where we take a nebulously defined concept and slap a label on it to make it sound concrete, without explicitly defining what we mean. Perhaps the solid-state theories work by defining large and complex objects as "particles" in their system? The tail can wag the dog in any field, and in my area of expertise, software hacking (ahem, development) often seems the epitome of dog-wagging.
And in the end, what fun would the universe be if there were no more mystery left? Fortunately, the complexity of the universe appears to be far enough beyond our capacity to figure it out, that it will keep things interesting for us for a very long time to come. I can't even figure out my cat; what hope is there for solving the really fundamental questions?
But it's sure fun to speculate.
-Ben
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
I have never quite understood why FTL is supposed to be impossible. I'd like a physicist to explain.
.9999 C. Now accelerate it more. And more. No matter how much you accelerate it, it will never reach 1.0 C, let alone a speed faster than light. (As I understand it, relativistic effects make the apparent mass of the tin can increase, making it harder to accelerate, and as it gets more massive it takes more energy to accelerate it, such that it would take infinite energy to push it to C, and it would have infinite mass, clearly impossible. You can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light if you can pour enough energy in, but never reach it.)
First of all, I do understand this: take a tin can, and accelerate it to
So far I'm happy. But now let's imagine a magic closet door, and its twin orbiting Alpha Centauri, about 4 light years away. You toss the can through the magic door on Earth and it pops out of its twin; never mind how this works. My understanding is that physics says it must take 4 years for the can to get there, that it is fundamentally impossible for it to get there sooner. This is the part I don't get. Why is this?
It has something to do with causality and the speed of light: I've been told that if the can is able to get there faster than the speed of light, the can has essentially travelled back in time, and this is forbidden because we like to believe in cause and effect. But I still don't get it.
P.S. If your answer to this question is "RTFM", please tell me which FM. I have already tried to figure this out by looking at physics books, and I'm clearly looking at the wrong ones.
Thanks.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
as a studying mathematician, i do believe that we can proove and disprove things absolutely
As a studying mathematician, you should be familiar with Godel's Incompleteness Theorm, and realize that there are true statements within any consistent axiomatic system that can never be proven.
A quantifiable way to affect gravity (one of the fundamental forces of the universe) with the one most common to us, an electromagnetic force. Of course, your mileage may very as to how :). A good unified theory of life, the universe, and everything would do for gravity what E=MC^2 and quanutm physics did for nuclear physics and what Maxwell did for electricity - give us a way to possibly engineer it.
Of course, lots of other crazy things might be possible then, too. All of it comes from a way to unite the fundamental forces, though. It's too bad more articles (and comments!) don't make this clear.
..don't panic
In the 1950's, in the particle chambers of UCLA, strange traces were seen on the photograpic plates of particle collisions.... physics of the time couldn't account for this particle, so the postdocs and the grad students waggishly nicknamed the unknown particle the "what-on", and many ignored it for over 20 years...
as instumentation and our undestanding of sub-nuclear particles became better, some other grad students, looking for new frontiers (and new dissertation topics), started researching the "what-on"...it has become....
The Quark
I never heard of anyone detecting a quark directly. Only mesons or baryons. You have your story a little messed up.
Plus, I think calling quarks the center of the Posh new String theory is kinda silly. Thats like calling letters the center of lingustics.
Lottery: a tax on those bad at math.
...Here is a little quote for wet your appetite...
could not resist...
Yep it is! Or at least what must exist in order for there to be "Theory."
equations along with concepts
Then there is the gears and bearings that all this happens on... but you have to figure out how to get there, to that link.
This ether field, this noise state from which all else comes out of..... What is the controlling factor that decides what comes out of the noise?
Life has an aura that we can even photograph. The human brain generates energy that it uses and transmits, perhaps similar to being near high power lines and feeling the charge, but on a much different power level, in that the mind can more fully integrate with the ether/noise and cause something like a chain reaction and cause such forces to come out of the ether/noise. Like putting a filter on white noise causing some frequencies to be suppressed and others to be emphisized to get tone.
Mind over matter? OH damn! Someone has a patent on that too!
You can look up the patent at the www.USPTO.gov site.
more relative info found here
All we need now is a scientist to come along who's smart enough to walk over and flip on the light.
We wave the flag of freedom as we conquer and invade.
Not a troll.. but..
Think about it. We can't really know anything for certain. Take Schroedinger's equation and try solving it for the microscopic universe that is a single hydrogen atom. Oh, BTW.. have fun. =)
See, I am of the school that states that time itself is non-existent, and we measure this illusionary entity with clocks and day planners.
My main gripe with people who take relativity WAY too seriously is thus.. they call this mess that we live in 'time-space', citing that it is one entity. In that sense, there is no such thing as just the space, or just the time.. it is the same.. now.. how do we determine our distance from another point in spacetime? Simple.. (X1-X0)+(Y1-Y0)+(Z1-Z0)+(T1-T0).. lets simplify this by just stating dx+dy+dz+dt.. ok.. now lets try velocity...
velocity in the x coordinate.. dx/dt ok.. =)
velocity in the y coordinate.. dy/dt ok.. =)
velocity in the z coordinate.. dz/dt ok.. =]
velocity in the t coordinate.. dt/dt oh shit. =(
so one particle is moving through the t coordinate really fast, and the other isn't moving through t at all.. dx,dy,dz being equal, they are have the same velocity. riiight.
i say just elimate 't' as a whole.. makes things about as easy as can be imagined.. The problem is that the illusion of time is just so strong, so intuitive that we might just end up taking another 2000 years to break free of it. Think about how long people thought the earth was flat... why? Because it seemed like it was. The moon was round.. but it always presented itself to us with one face.. if that bastard was spinning just a little faster, man would have taken it for granted that the moon was a sphere, and would have given earth that same attribute..
I think we are just now starting to realize that there is something that just doesn't seem quite right with our universe..
. echo -e \\04 >
The signature of your metric is wrong. The time and space components should have opposite signs.
The Definitive Theory of Cats, unfortunately, can only be laid down in Cat. I know of no people still alive capable of translating Cat to English (most of them died about 40 years ago...). Here is the text as I have it:
Meow.
It's remarkable in its simplicity, isn't it? That, more than any other aspect, tells me it must be right.
> instead, the [Michelson-Morley] experiment went completeley wrong,
/.er would I be if I let a comment I disagreed with go unchallenged?
> conclusively proved the lack of the cosmic
> ether, and Newton was kicked to the gutter
> (as an explanation for sub-macroscopic events)...
Sorry to nitpick, but this just isn't true. I did a research paper over these experiments and found that much of what many people believe about these experiments is simply wrong.
When the first experiments were done, everyone simply accepted that the accuracy of the experiment was compromised by any of the numerous obstacles the experimenter had to overcome. Even after the experiment was repeated several times, most dismissed the results as untrustworthy. Miller, who performed the experiment various times, actually DID find a postive ether drift. (Though he later admitted his experiment may have been flawed.)
The point is, no one considered these results as "disproving" classical physics until after Einstein had presented his theory. Thus, the ether drift experiments did not kick Newton to the gutter, but only served as a hindsight demonstration of what everyone had by then come to accept.
Like most theories, relativity did not gain unanimous favor over night. Instead the shift took place slowly. To suggest that the results of a single experiment could absolutely convince scientists that what they had come to accept without offering an alternative theory makes no sense. After all, no generally accepted scientific theory becomes wrong until something different becomes right (see Kuhn).
I'm sure this is all irrelavent to the point you were making, but what kind of
By the way, you can read my paper here.
blah
Just like in regular wrestling.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I'm a physicist. I did my graduate work on a theory of spin glasses (disordered magnetic systems) and now I work on granular materials (e.g. sand). I find reductionism sometimes useful in my work, but the kind of reductionism that string theorists are pursuing is for my work and many others totally beside the point.
Even if the particle theorists succeed in unifying the physics, it won't explain a whole heap of physical phenomena. A unified field theory will tell us precisely nothing about
1) turbulence
2) granular materials
3) high-Tc superconductivity
4) chaos
It's great that they are working on this stuff, and I applaud their efforts, but one shouldn't get carried away here. Even if the string theorists are completely successful, there will still be a lot of physics around that we don't understand at _all_, most of which is observable in your everyday life.
James Landry
Even ignoring the actual content, odds are high that Stephen's incredibly wrong.
You don't have to know everything about physics to participate (otherwise nobody could participate, not even the revered Dr Hawking).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Despite the fact that the original poster was an ass, you're still clueless. Maxwell's equations will continue to be important for a long time in electronics, just as Newton's laws are important in mechanical engineering. Learning new things doesn't always make the old things worth less. Take some physics, E&M to be exact, and you'll understand.
Digital designers would adapt to quantum computing without much trouble, if it ever became feasible. They never worried about the precise technology behind the 0.15 micron process or the 0.08. Quantum computing would be a bigger step, but not the end of the world.
Personally I think the biggest applications of "nanotechnology" are in MEMs and processor fabrication technology. The former doesn't compete with the existing fields, for the most part, and the latter will adapt when we come to that point. This stuff about nano-robots belongs to the next century, at the very least. People can't even make regular-scale robots that have much practical use due to control and design issues. Why would people see nanotechnology as anything more than glorified chemical engineering?
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
...based on the concept of religion being belief in an unprovable worldview: Godel demonstrated that mathematics cannot actually prove anything, with complete certainty as such, so mathematics is the ideal religion in those terms.
Science is only a wannabee religion, which keeps on believing in the face of multiple and obvious disproofs, rather than in the mere absence of proof. (-:
Meanwhile, you can go for a walk in Saudi Arabia and visit the real Mount Sinai (complete with burnt top and artefacts), see the split stone from which water gushed (complete with erosion) - at the top of a hill, no less - and dive nearby to look at the remains of Pharaoh's army on the bottom of the Gulf of Aquaba (which at the time was considered part of the Red Sea). You can also track the progress of rock formation in real time (dt/dt or not) in a variety of radiohaloes, and damn, it's fast. So all in all, at least one of the religions is set to lose its status, at least under that ``unprovable'' rule.
Funny old world, isn't it? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Unified Theory is a kickass band, too!
http://www.unifiedtheorymusic.com
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
w00t! -1 pr0st k1ng!!!!!!!!!!!!111
Once this duty has been successfully performed, the Slashdot Moderators may then return to "the smoking of crack" at their leisure.
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Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
his passion for accuracy and precision led to his teaming up with Edward W. Morley, in 1878 to prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", through the.... Michelson-Morley Experiment. Michelson's career had been golden, and he was widely regarded as the best physicist of the 19th century. So, everyone "knew" that he would successfully prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", which would be the finally block in the edifice of Classical Newtonian physics...
instead, the experiment went completeley wrong, conclusively proved the lack of the cosmic ether, and Newton was kicked to the gutter (as an explanation for sub-macroscopic events)...
Is the "ether" theory so far off the mark? Everyone says 'ahhh yes, it was totally wrong. It's all a complete vacuum out there.' Yet we now accept that electromagnetic waves are ripples in the "fabric of space-time", that massive bodies cause distortions in space-time (gravity), that subatomic particles can pop in and out of existance in the midst of the "vacuum"... Could it be that the old people had a couple of misconceptions about some of the properties this 'ether' could have, but it's not in fact the "empty space" that we seem to think of it as?
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
Hi,
This is Alexander from akpcep.com, I wrote the article referenced above. The PAP isn't watertight, but like a James Cameron movie, it gets you into some great arguments with your mates.
The article charicatures the particle physicists as insisting that every explanation must be reductionist whilst the solid-state physicists will only accept holistic explanations (i.e. it is just the emergent behaviour that matters, reductionism doesn't really tell you anything useful.)
Whilst modern scientists may earnestly and usefully debate which approach is currently most worthwhile in one or another area of science, I believe most would not argue there is a fundamental dichotomy here, especially if they've taken any interest in the 20th century philosophy of science.
Instead, I think many would suggest that neither holism or reductionism is the 'one true ism'. Science is about producing useful and testable explanations (aka theories) for observed phenomena. Both reductionist and holistic explanations can be useful and testable. Even at the level of rival explanations of the same phenomena rather than rival 'isms', different kinds of explanation need not be inconsistent or practically redundant.
One well-known essay partly along these lines would be "Prelude... Ant Fugue" from Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach", which discusses holism and reductionism both in general and in the particular context of models of consciousness.
--Anthony.
I believe the universe is a simulation.
It's natural that the quantum state of a particle is not known until it's observed. Why would you render all this detail out when nobody's watching? It would be the same as Quake rendering things behind you.
The same situation would explain why sometimes things only seem to work on a macro-scale - they're only being rendered out that far. Quake doesn't compute motion for each polygon - it moves an object.
Only when we're looking at one pixel (I mean particle...) is it fully rendered.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
The analogy still works... the particle beam is derailed or a micro black hole appears and turns into a macro black hole...
Still, there are elephants in the world and we have to learn how to deal with them.
:)
Such as 1 == 2 and the proposition ``a horse has an infinite number of legs.'' (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
A UFT will with all certainty be discovred one day. Out of box thinking is the true cornerstone of modern science not to mention physics. Wasn't it Einstein that said imagination is more important than knowledge. Mathmatics and theory can be taught but imagination is a gift of uninhibited observation. One day someone with similar attributes will turn the scientific world on it's head just as Einstein and Gallileo did. For millenia humans have had a desire to reach for the stars to answer that all important question, " Are we alone?" It is from that question that warp drive will one day become a reality, and the only way to conquer the ultimate speed limit is to understand what the UFT really is. The one force that dictates all other forces; gives rise to all forms and functions. In other words the one characteristic that all mass/matter/energy share. I leave it to you make your own conclusions. Remember if you risk nothing you gain nothing.