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.'"

Comments

natural laws hold true, but values do not

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it very amazing that some people think the speed of light and other 'constants' could not have changed in the distant past from a value much different than what we observe today. Trying to measure the age of the universe based on relativity is good, but using a 'constant' like the speed of light to aid in doing so is folly. No one has been around to observe every last possible variation in the 'constant' speed of light.

So I think it's very good that these scientists are challenging theories like this.

Re:natural laws hold true, but values do not

[RetsamYthgimla]

As I understand it, the passage of time as we humans would care to measure it, or as our clocks would measure it, is based upon chemical and physical laws of nature, which depend on, among other things, the speed of light. The speed of light affects such mundane things as the strength of electromagnetic forces and the ratio of the the electric and magnetic constants to one another. Change the speed of light, and you change the rate at which all physical processes occur which we would use to measure time. If light moves slower, these processes move slower, and our sense of time has hence slowed, and light still travels at roughly the same speed.

But as the previous comment pointed out, the unitless constant alpha is not renormalized by the slowing of physical processes, so this can be measured, and may have possibly changed over time.

Also worth pointing out, is that phyiscal processes that happened billions of years ago with a "slower" or "faster" speed of light, could have happened at different rates because of altered electromagnetic strength and electric/mangnetic constant ratio, etc. This has been suggested as one explanation of redshifted light from distant objects. However, measurements of the constant alpha show only a very small change over time (if any), so the speed of light doesn't appear to have changed much at all over the last few billion years.

Re:natural laws hold true, but values do not

[Anonymous Coward]

> Question: Seconds, as a unit of time, have been around far longer than the ability to observe photons, have they not?

Yes.

> Has the concept of a second been redefined by physicists to mean the amount of time it takes a photon to travel a certain distance?

As far as I know, a second is still defined to be a certain mulitple of the frequency of a line of cesium. That doesn't matter though. Exactly how a unit is defined changes over time as technology changes. Right now, people are working on redefining the kilogram in terms of a certain number of silicon atoms, or in terms of the force between two current-carrying wires. (There are two competing groups.)

Re:natural laws hold true, but values do not

[RogrWilco]

What was a second before Cesium 133 was discovered? Apparantly an astonishing coincidence. The second was based on 365 days in a year, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute. The cesium thing came close, and was more accurate a measurement, as the orbit of the earth can vary, making a second a little longer or shorter than the year before it. And I'm sure that there was a near equivalant measurement before it, perhaps the intervals between a caveman's heartbeat, or the time it takes you to say "Ugh" in a reasonable pace.
Just because we define time as a property of cesium, barium, boron, calgon, or whatever, does not mean that those properties have not changed over the millenia when the only reference we have is a decade or so of being able to measure it.

For a laugh, ask a physicist to explain gravity, and don't let him get away with saying "two bodies of mass attract each other"... Ask him why they attract!

We never really know anything

[KarmaBlackballed]

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.

Re:We never really know anything

[Strange_Attractor]

Well, almost - I think a significant part of the "wonderfulness of it all" is how much we do know, and how much more we continue to learn that's true (on top of which, as you said, there always is/will be more to learn).

This is all worthless intellectual masturbation if there's no real learning involved.

Re:We never really know anything

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a man called Godel who proved that so.

Re:We never really know anything

[Anonymous Coward]

True. But even a fundamental equation could lead to an infinite number of discoveries as we explore the complexities that arise from this equation. Of course, we will never know what came "before" or why the Universe exists in the first place. The whole random events infinitely theory strikes me as a little simplisticly arrogant.

Re:Creationists

[well_jung]

I've read it now, and my knee jerked in the wrong direction. This is pretty cool. Should make for quite the pissing match over the next year or so.

This is a debate that I'll be watching closely. Nothing beats Really Smart people arguing over their fundamental beliefs. And there's enough Laureates in this one to to hold a Rodeo.

Ugly Standard Model

[Genady]

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)

Re:Okay, Here It Is

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

This is really a philosophical argument, not a scientific one. But it may be a productive one. And I bet computers have caused the argument.

For a long time humans lived in a world with cats and cookware. Human-made items like cookware were trivial to understand, and nobody hopes to understand a cat :-)

Then we got a little more sophisticated and had cats and clocks. We studied clocks because we could understand them. We learned about energy conservation, simple harmonic motion, and all sorts of classical physics. Reductionists can learn to understand a clock.

Then we had computers and cats. A computer looks like an elaborate clockwork but practical people don't try to manage them through first principles. They use heuristics like "it gets unstable when low on memory". Now we've got human-made artifacts, which we feel entitled to understand, which reductionism has increasing trouble explaining.

The promise here is that if we apply the same brainpower and effort to defining the laws of complex systems, maybe we'll gain some useful insights into economics, sociology, psychology and other fields of study which directly affect our lives.

I will not hold my breath waiting for a definitive theory of cats.

Sensationalist article, but neat idea

[ErfC]

I found the article kind of sensationalist. I mean, I'm sure there are physicsists who act like that, and I'm not surprised these are the ones that make it into newspaper articles. But I don't think most physicists are so violently opposed to each other's ideas.

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.

L.E.J. Brouwer's "Life, Art, and Mysticism"

[Jagasian]

Here is a quote from the famous mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer, who saw the sciences as flawed due to their underlying philosophical foundations, which I think applies to the "Physicists War Over a Unified Theory":

Every branch of science will therefore run into ever deeper trouble; when it climbs too high it is almost completely shrouded in even greater isolation, where the remembered results of that science take on an independent existence. The "foundations" of this branch of science are investigated, and that soon becomes a new branch of science. One then begins to search for the foundations of science in general and knocks up some "theory of knowledge." As they climb higher and higher confusion grows until they are all completely deranged. Some in the end quietly give up; having thought for a long time about the elusive link betwen the intuiting consciousness (which develops from the perceptional world) and the perceptional world itself (which in turn only exists through and in the forms of the intuiting consciousness) - a confusion which arose from their own sin of constructing a perceptional world - they then plug the hole with the concept of the ego, which was self-created with and at the same time as their perceptional world; and they say, "Yes, of course, something must remain incomprehensible, and that something is the ego that comprehends."

But there are others who do not know when to stop, who keep on and on until they go mad: they grow bald, shortsighted, and fat; their stomachs stop working properly; and moaning with asthma and indigestion they fancy that equilibrium is within reach - and almost reached. So much for science, the last flower and ossification of culture.

Getting rid of causality?

[sab39]

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.

Re:Getting rid of causality?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r3/inde x.html

Re:a breath of fresh air

[Some guy named Chris]

i never liked the big bang theory. it stinks of creationism. ... i'm no cosmologist. but the big bang stinks of creationism to me ...

So, let me get this straight. You are rejecting a reasonable theory which fits the observed behaviours simply because it conflicts with your religious (or anti-religious) beliefs?

Isn't that what people accuse religious folks of daily?

You aren't being logically consistant. You rail against anything with any hint of taint from our human experience, but at the same moment your rejection is based in how you feel about the existing theories. Stinks of creationism is a very visceral reaction to what you insist should be a completely rational debate.

Face it. You have a philosophy guiding your argument as well. That philosophy is Nihilism and your post stinks of it.