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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
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 Einstein's theories superseded Newtonian physics, though Newton's system works just fine for most things here on Earth.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!
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.
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.
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
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
enough Laureates in this one to to hold a Rodeo.
wouldn't that be just the funniet rodeo, ever?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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
irrc, Platos beliefs included the concept of an 'ideal' thing or truth.
It's easiest explained with an example. When I write 'chair' you may think of one particular chair and I may think of another, except that we both know what a chair is without needing to know exactly what chair the other is thinking of.
That thing we both know of as a chair, but is not necessarily what each of us thinks of is the platonic ideal of a chair.
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...
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
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."
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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As well, it's "to whet" not "for wet". This what happen is when English she not be studied in school no?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
To expand on the previous explanation, as far as Plato is concerned there exists the universal idea of "chair". We may see isolated instances of "chairs", but the only reason we know these are chairs is because they are reflections or shadows of the universal (true, global, ) Chair.
I would suspect that most of us think the other way around: society has taught us to use the word chair, and now their is a general consensus of what a chair is. Thus the universal idea arises from the details. Plato would have argued that the details arise from the universal idea.
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.
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 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
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.
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...
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"
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.
If you enter that url then it changes to http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.n ytimes.com/2001/12/04/science/physical/04SQUA.html and you get a stupid form to fill out. NYTimes doesn't "get my click" if they don't give me the story, and I don't think they will stop posting interesting articles just because I don't join their spam list.
...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
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.
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
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
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!
The signature of your metric is wrong. The time and space components should have opposite signs.
> 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.
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
I think you're giving Plato short shrift by bringing over the concept of "chair"; Plato doesn't really say that all the words that we use are Ideas. To use a more Socratic example, we both use the word justice; what do we mean by justice? Or more importantly from a Socratic perspective, what do you mean by justice? Most people's explanation of justice is self-contradictory, or at least does not fully explain what they mean.
What happens if we try to work out these contradictions and clarify their meaning? Eventually, says Socrates via Plato (skipping over many steps), we arrive at the Idea of the Good, in light of which all other ideas make sense. Not only that, but since we as humans experience the world only through our humanity, making sense of these ideas makes sense of all phenomena. In the end, the idea of justice for the philosopher may not appear at all like that of the citizen, the former being informed by a single idea that ties everything together.
Not that I for a moment suggest that this is what the Times article meant in its opposition of Plato and Aristotle, but as we began to discuss Plato, I weighed in. The Times article oversimplifies. Yes, Plato thought you could explain everything with reference to this single idea, but we gained knowledge of this idea by beginning with the various human phenomena, i.e., with the details. And yes, Aristotle thought that science began with a study of the details, but that study was to lead us to first principles from which we could explain all the other details.
~~~~~~
under-paid karma whore
...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
I don't see that you've proved that time can't exist. I am kinda wondering about your grasp of calculus though. Did you mean for dx to mean "delta x" or "differential of x"? In any case, you seem to be bothered that you can't describe motion in space-time with a variable independent of space and time. This is the same thing that bothered many physicist when Einstein first introduced relativity.
This might explain your difficulty with "distance between two points". You give the equation (X1-X0)+(Y1-Y0)+(Z1-Z0)+(T1-T0), this equation assumes that the two points are fixed in space (X,Y,Z) and time (T). You also don't mention in your definition of distance that time is measured in units separate from X,Y,Z. Thus a solution would look like "1 million meters + two thousand seconds". If, however you measure X,Y,Z at the same time (T1=T0), then your solution is much easier to work with as it would just be "1 million meters".
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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...
Such as 1 == 2 and the proposition ``a horse has an infinite number of legs.'' (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing