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Relativity Finally Meets Quantum Theory?
prion86 writes "Physisist Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara (try saying that 3 times fast) believes she has found a way to blend relativity with quantum theory. The article can be found on the Scientific American site."
Am I the only one that found some of the article's tone, and the cooking analogies, a bit sexist? I don't think the oven stuff at the end would have made it into the article if this work was being done by a man.
As a student of physics, this is still a bit beyond me, but I'll be there soon. Things like this pop up occasionally -- most disappear. The theory has to make predictions that can be tested and verified. Just getting QM and gravity together mathematically is not enough.
Tim
-- Hello_World.c: 17 Errors, 31 Warnings
"Having fun is essential, because otherwise you get stressed out. You think, I have to show the universe is made out of atoms, and aaaaahhh, you flip out! So you want to keep loose."
One experiment could be to track gamma-ray photons from billions of light-years away. If spacetime is in fact discrete, then individual photons should travel at slightly different speeds, depending on their wavelength
From the article:
She talks about physics like it's cooking. (at the beginning), and In the meantime, she's hard at work, and waiting for the oven bell. (at the end).
Why are women always associated with cooking? Maybe she does cook well but that's not the point of the article... so why open and close it with that?
Definitely hypersensitive.
Not every attempt at humor is a slur. And shame on the moderator for marking this comment at all.
Insightful my ass. The poster obviously thought this was important or wouldn't have posted it. Why would they do such a thing AND make a 'racist' comment about the person they are evangelizing?
Get a grip and then go get a life.
Anyways, back to real commentary.....
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
but when was the last time any of us has seen a woman, let alone a woman that looks like that in our physics departments? I don't know about the rest of your schools, but my University's Math and Physics departments are completely devoid of females both on the student and faculty level. I think something like this could finally tell that majority of women that feel that they just can't do stuff like that, that in fact, they can, and that they can do it well.
:) and then stated that she works in the Physics field with QM and Relativity? I know I would be.
Honestly, how many of you would not be totally stuned if a girl looking like that introduced herself to you (first big surprise
Forgive me, oh vengeful modders-down, but...
Every up-and-coming physicist and his brother has a "theory" of quantum gravity.
Note I said "his". What ratio of physisists do you suppose have two "X" chromosomes?
So why did *this* theory make it to the increasingly (and disconcertingly politically correct) Sci-Am?
You already have the answer, from what I wrote above.
To put it bluntly, this wouldn't have gotten a second look from someone's dissertation advisor if "she" had 'nads.
Note that I do NOT mean this to say a female can't do physics - I only mean to say it only got published in such a high profile magazine because of her gender, not on its own merits. Sad, really. I used to like, Sci-Am, once upon a time. Long ago, I even switched from the somewhat flakier "Discover". Looks like I'll need to go to just plain vanilla "Science", along with its HUGE pricetag, if I want to continue getting reasonably unbiased and non PC-censored news from the world of science.
Well.. we had relativity (which has been beyond us mortals), we had quantum mechanics ( whic again has been beyond us mortals) and now we have quantum relativity (and guess what ! they all are STILL beyond us). Now what? Humans have this notion that they are gonna solve the mystery of life.. which they may someday.. but not for the next few centuries (unless we have vulcans landing up on earth a-la star trek). When we discovered the atom we thought we had all the answers.. and NOW we say if we crack quantum mechanics.. we are gonna have it all. Hm.. maybe if I understoof what this lady was saying, it would help.. but.... wooooooshh.. over my head
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
The real point to the whole article is that she's a hot chick. There's lot's of speculative ideas floating around about how to resolve the differences between relativity and quantum Mechanics. The discussion has been running since the twenties.
She may well have some contribution to make, but that's not how you get your picture in a magazine. You get your picture in a magazine by looking good. I used to work as a TV cameraman, and we always interviewed the hottest chicks we could find. Why not? They have opinions too. And they draw audiences, thus spreading the word.
"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down / In the most delightful way" as Mary Poppins put it.
So sexist remarks are very appropriate. Pile'm on.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
The measurement problem was solved by Spinoza hundreds of years ago. God is observing the universe. Funny how science gets around to proving what religion has known for hundreds of years.
Well, in Russia there are more female than male students in ALL DEPARTMENTS of various universities.
Some professions such as medicine, are DOMINATED by females. For example in Medical Schools 70%-to 80% of students are female (being a physician is usually thought as being a 'female job'). There are only a few exceptions, for example there are more male surgeons than females.Other branches, such as Internal Medicine, are dominated by females
Very different from the US, isnt it? Could slashdot people come up with an explanation for this phenomenon?
It bugs me when these physicists get all postmodern about their work and call it art. What they do is organize phenomenalogical data into commessurable patterns. They then mess around with seemingly conflicting patterns in weird combinations to see if they can get 'fundamental' patterns. They do this over and over again. She probably means that advancing physics requires a willingness to break the rules, think differently, color outside the lines... etc. The the degree to which physics posesses that quality pales in comparison to the classical definition of art I suppose the process of physics does require creativity, but physics is an overwhelmingly destructive context for ideas.
Really, this is just PR for L.Q.G, not that I'm knocking that - string theory attempts to solve similar problems (quantum gravity) and although it is in a much more advanced state of understanding (hundreds if not thousands of physicists have been working on it for 20 odd years) it is still completely hypothetical without a shred of experimental evidence and yet, if you listen to the popular science guys, that's quite often put in the small print - giving the impression that string theory is accepted fact. Giving some popular airtime to some of it's (admittedly few) rivals can only be a good thing.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
It is important to notice that the light cones for all humans being (dead, living, and in all probability those not yet born), are not just ovrlapping, they are for all practical purposes identical, because we all live so close together (cosmologically speaking) in both time and space.
There is a sad tendency of some less honrable people at humaniora to try to tie their pet models of the weak (consensus reality, social consructionism, cultural relativism, whatever it is called this month) to physical theories like quantum physics and even Einsteins relativity theory, apparently to give them some extra credibility.
Apart from it being bad science to apply models outside their domain, these attempt are never really based on more than some shared terms, even if this usually is hidden by a flood of words.
The models humaniora are actually pretty good in their own domain, as long as one remember they are models useful for dealing with a limited range of problems, and does not attempt to interpret them as metaphysical truths.
"only ignorant people think so even today."
You say that as if ignorant people were a rarity.
BTW, what's STW?
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
"I may still be a plain old physics student"
Enough said. Ms. Kalamara here has a Ph.D in Quantum Gravity. I think she knows more on the subject more than a plan old physics student.
Then again, the wavefunction isn't a physical observable, but its modulus is. However, as with experiments on entanglement or teleportation, even though spooky action happens at a distance, the measurements still have to be made in such a way that information travel is subluminal. So maybe the wavefunction does instantaneously collapse, but as it is impossible to gain any information directly from the wavefunction relativity is preserved.
The abstract of the "hard stuff" mentions: "We show that all of these issues can be addressed by the recent application of the Kreimer Hopf algebra for quantum field theory renormalization to non-perturbative statistical physics."
Great! We are talking about heavy duty physics, and this line says that all the stuff can be translated to a mathematical algebra, the one about rooted trees to be exact. I could teach nearly anyone what this algebra is in 5 minutes, how for example differentiation in n dimensions is reduced to a simple excercise with graphs (i.e. dots and lines) and concrete physical results can be proven by proving their counterpart in this simple algebra.
Amazing how such a relatively new, seemingly unrelated part of mathematics (Hopf algebra's were put into new perspective in 1963 because virtually the same algebra can be used for approximation methodes like the Runge Kutta method) rapidly ganis such a central place in physics.
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
The EPR 'paradox' isn't a problem at the level of physics. Quantum theory (even non-relativistic) makes very clear predictions about the statistical properties of measurements on spatially separated but correlated particles, and experiments agree. There is no violation of causality. No information propagates faster than the speed of light. Certainly the effect is weird, and it conflicts with some of our naive (i.e. non-quantum) intuitions of how to interpret a physical theory, but there is no logical contradiction and no need to extend or modify the quantum theory to account for experiment.
Wavefunction 'collapse' has some interesting details to be worked out, and some deep matters of interpretation that could use clarification, but it also to date presents no conflicts between experimental results and theoretical predictions. Wavefunctions follow the time-dependent Schrodinger equation, always. It's just when the quantum mechanics extends substantially into macroscopic systems with very large numbers of degrees of freedom, the dynamics of the many-body correlated wavefunction becomes quite complex and our regular intuitions can't keep up very well.
One thing to keep in mind is that wavefunctions do not exist, according to a reasonable definition of exist. The only thing that exists is that which can be measured, that which is physically observable, that which is accessible to an experimental observation. A wavefunction is not physically observable. It is a mathematical tool used to make predictions about experimental results. The simultaneity of collapse of a wavefunction isn't like the simultaneous collapse of say an egg carton. All physical properties related to the process of collapse of an egg carton can be measured by experiment as a function of distance across the carton: density, shear forces, stresses, shape, etc. Not so for a wavefunction.
Curtains for windows?
Einstein and others of his ilk that expected science would continue to find simpler and simpler rules that explain how things work would be very sad.
Once we completely understand the laws of physics, I have every expectation that they will be completely incomprehensible, even to really smart people.
Each dimension does not have to have the common names we give it but it helps to use those names. Using the same pattern you can give names to any of the other dimensions required by String Theory. You could use any type of measurement to explain it. You could explain it as a "hue" dimension. It does not have to be this but let me explain how this works.
;)
When you have a two dimension world you plot on the x and y axis'. When you add a third dimensions you can have infinite points using in space using the same x and y coordinates.
When you add time to the third dimension it does nto change the thrid dimension at all. Two things can exist in the same place (a big no-no in physics) only if they do so in a different time.
If you want to use soem type of "hue" explaination for the fifth dimension it would work like this. You have your regular 4 dimensional world we live in, then you add one more. Now each point in time is defined by x, y, z, time, and "hue". You can have infinite space inside the same old 4 dimensions. If you never changed the "hue" rating of your existance it would be like living on a two dimension sheet in a three dimensional world.
Who knows if we really live in 4 dimensions? Im not saying we dont but there are some ways to explain why we would not have seen extra dimensions if we didn't live with em... but alas the turkey is almost done so i gotta go
happy thanksgiving
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You say that 'observer' is difficult to define because the spectrum of observers is not computable. This is only a problem because we think that we are some special kind of observer and have more significance than the rabbit.
This is an assumption on your part and I suspect that if there is indeed a qualitative difference in the status of an observer in defining the quantum mechanical state of the universe - A difference between a chlorophyll molecule absorbing a photon and my mind seeing the photon pass through a spectrometer and reveal its wavelength - then I think we would be well on our way to using hard science to answer some metaphysical questions.
However even apart from this interesting question, is it not the case that all observers - be they molecules, people or plants receive information about the universe and respond to it in a simple deterministic manner which is well explained by mechanics chemistry and physics? Thus a network of 'observers' are in fact merely the objects within the universe acting on the physical laws which are in operation - which come into operation because the 'observers' respond the way that they do? And the universe is the way it is because the 'observers' respond the way that they do.
Does this also mean that something outside my light cone may well be subject to different physical laws?
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