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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."
She talks about physics like it's cooking. If it turns out she's right, a whole new generation of scientist will grow up thinking that women are only good with kitchen-related things. If it turns out she's not, then, it's just a flash in the pan. Insert moronic sexist joke here. (I hope she's right though, it's about time that somebody found something significant, to finally have another woman's name in physics books).
The ENIAC Demo Competition
The physicists who can make stuff like this comprehensible to laymen like me (like Stephen Hawkings) are the ones that really deserve a Nobel prize.
but how will this help me with getting laid
It'll help with that special physisist of your dreams you've had your eye on, of course! Great conversation peice.
Just like to point out that what she's doing is combining relativistic gravitation with quantum physics to produce the physicist's holy grail - quantum gravity.
Merely mixing relativity and quantum theory has been done for years and years - the form of the strong nuclear force was found by Yukawa to be a solution of the Klein-Gordon equation - which was proposed in 1924. The relativity papers were published in 1905, 1908.
OK, so I haven't actually clarified anything at all, have I?
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?
Physisist Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara (try saying that 3 times fast)...
Try saying "physicist" once, and slowly.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
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
"It's a beautiful thought: we each have our own universe. But there's a lot of overlap. "We mostly see the same thing," Markopoulou Kalamara explains, and that is why we see a smooth universe despite a quantized spacetime."
Personally I like this version of unified relativity but I'm very certain that there will be many nay-sayers concerning her metaphysical POV of light cones and spin networks as personal and individual interpretations of the universe... though it is really nice to hear a published physicist speak about overlapping collective conciousness and the impact on perceived physics of the universe.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I may still be a plain old physics student, but even I know that using the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, as she appears to, to create an entire cosmology, is very problematic. The standard interpretation is beset by massive difficulties in the form of the measurement problem, and most other intepretations are far more successful in dealing with this. The Everett interpretation (sometimes referred to as the 'Many-Worlds' interpretation, although this ascription is inaccurate in several ways) is the one most commonly used by quantum cosmologists, and with good reason, as it does actually allow for a quantum state vector to be applied to the universe. The standard intepretation, however, does not allow for such an assignation, it is nonsensical to talk about it in the standard interpretation, a point which seems lost on the writer and perhaps even the obviously very intelligent physicist. Maybe they both should have attended philosophy of physics 101.
There's one thing I don't get. Here's the relevant snippet:
But a spin network represents the entire universe, and that creates a big problem. According to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, things remain in a limbo of probability until an observer perceives them. But no lonely observer can find himself beyond the bounds of the universe staring back. How, then, can the universe exist? "That's a whole sticky thing," Markopoulou Kalamara says. "Who looks at the universe?" For her, the answer is: we do. The universe contains its own observers on the inside, represented as nodes in the network. Her idea is that to paint the big picture, you don't need one painter; many will do. Specifically, she realized that the same light cones she had used to bring causal structure into quantum spacetime could concretely define each observer's perspective.
Because the speed of light is finite, you can see only a limited slice of the universe. Your position in spacetime is unique, so your slice is slightly different from everyone else's. Although there is no external observer who has access to all the information out there, we can still construct a meaningful portrait of the universe based on the partial information we each receive. It's a beautiful thought: we each have our own universe. But there's a lot of overlap. "We mostly see the same thing," Markopoulou Kalamara explains, and that is why we see a smooth universe despite a quantized spacetime.
So my boggle is this: Until the first "observer" evolved, nothing observed the universe, so it existed in all quantum states simultaneously. If so, how did that first observer ever evolve? Or is she posutlating that the universe's existence is its own observation?
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
"I remember reading on the side of my McDonalds Happy Meal box that we'd see the "edge" of the universe within the decade."
That's the first article I've seen quoted from The McDonalds Happy Meal box. Odd, since it is truly the most reliable scientific resource of our time.
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 mysteries of life (as we know them) are all but solved - most of them are simply unexploited due to moral or political pressure. Most of biology is understood, at least when viewed from a safe distance.
This nice lady is working on the mysteries of the universe - specifically a unifying theory to merge quantum mechanics and relativity. Once someone does this, you'll find the mysteries of the universe might just start cracking themselves pretty quickly.
Now, you may not have taken the time to understand relativity nor quantum mechanics, but I assure you that with the proper teachers, and effort on your behalf, neither is beyond the grasp of "mere mortals."
It's a little silly of you to place a date (of a " few centuries") on a process you have yourself stated you don't understand. These nuts are crackable, with current technology and knowledge - no Vulcans required. Most of what's slowing us down is funding and interest, not mortality.
...can be found in the arXiv database. A search for Fotini gives ten results between 1997 and 2002, most of them published in well-known journals, such as Phys. Rev. D, Nucl. Phys. B etc. Not that I understand any of it, by the way...
This reminds me of a theory put forth by Stephen Wolfram in "A New Kind of Science" (or, possibly from someone else earlier). Imagine that the universe was actually a huge cellular automota, where every concievable location in space-time is a cell. If you start drawing lines between these cells, you get a network which is perhaps similar to the system described by the article.
What is interesting is that this can explain the "light cone" phenomenon as well. If we are given that a cell can only be affected by those cells adjacent to it in the network, there is a theoretical fastest response of a system, depending how often the "steps" of the automota occur, and how far reaching are these network edges. For example, if we had two nodes 3 edges away from each other in this great graph, it would take at least 3 "ticks" for either cell to affect the other. Perhaps this is the concept she's using, but with actual physical concepts instead of some abstract idea of cells?
So there I was, juggling apples and small animals, when I accidentally bit into the wrong one...
If it turns out she's right, a whole new generation of scientist will grow up thinking that women are only good with kitchen-related things
only ignorant people think so even today.
STW for Emma Noether's and Lisa Mitner's stories.
(Lisa Mitner was like an underdog^2 : both a jewish and a woman
in the pre-Nazi regime. So off the Nobel went to who was very
probably the less-deserving coleague)
Working for necessity's mother.
Some of the players in loop quantum gravity (LQG) before Kalamara are Abhay Ashtekar, Lee Smolin, Carlo Rovelli, John Baez and Chris Isham. Also, Julian Barbour has written a cute semi-popular book called The End of Time on the subject as has Lee Smolin---Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
I suspect people haven't yet forgiven him for creating the Daleks.
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.
On the contrary, you have to be even better at "thinking differently" because your new ideas need to be both creative and in line with experiment. It is a form of art that allows creations rivalling the beauty of Michelangelos "David" (Maxwells equations etc.) but the constraints are so much stricter than those of marble.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
you are either getting laid or you are not, with an equal probability.
You can't just assume that the two states have equal probability. If you are in thermal equilibrium the probability will be given by the Boltzmann distribution meaning that the probability of "getting laid" falls of exponentially with the energy of the state "getting laid".
Since people getting laid are generally described as "hot" we can conclude that the chance is pretty slim unless you do something to raise the energy of the state "not getting laid" accordingly. (Please reply with suggestions)
On the other hand, if you really are in thermal equilibrium you are dead and the result may not matter much to you.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
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.
John Baez is a well-known mathematician/math. physicist who works in, among other things, quantum gravity. He is also very well known for the Usenet column This week's finds in mathematical physics, which is certainly worth a look a t if you're at all interested in these things and have a bit of a mathematics background.
One of the great things about TWFiMP is the writing style: when reading it, one really does get the idea that one understands what's going on. Of course this tends to wear off soon after leaving the computer, but. At any rate, many of the TWFiMP talk about spin networks and quantum gravity, including for example week 43 and week 55. Week 110 talks specificially about Penrose's spin networks. He mentions some of Markopoulou's work in week 99, week 114 and week 133. These might provide a bit of a middle-ground between the very fluffy SciAm article and the hard stuff on arXiv.
Of course there is also Markopoulou's recent expository article, which is a great introduction!
I'd like to see more stories like this on slashdot. It would be nice if we could spend more time contemplating real science and less time bashing microsoft.
I for one spend to much time being bitter at microsoft and not enough doing interesting things.
Especially if certain very fundamental basic patterns arise at the strangest places. Take the algebra of rooted trees, a mathematical object dealing with special graphs. In 1963, is was shown that they relate to numerical approximation methodes. In 1998/1999 they were shown to relate to feynman graphs (high energy physics). In 2002 we see them in Fontini's work.
That such an elementary math object appears in such different places certainly is something amazing. Realizing that your field of work had such a structure really requires more "intuition/feeling" then purely analytic skills. Art isn't far away.
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?
Just last night John Baez (mentioned several other times in this thread) announced a potentially important breakthrough: a LQG calculation that derives the same value for a fundamental parameter as one based on classical assumptions. He calls it "tooth-gnashingly nerve-wracking exciting."
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
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep