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Grand Unified Theory Possible by 2050
pcarter writes "Scientific American has an interesting article
about the possibility of unifying all the fundamental physical forces (electro-weak, strong and gravity) by 2050 and how it might be done.
"
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I just hope the major players in physics like Hawking and Chakatou will be alive to see it.
Personally, I'm working on a Theory right now on how to Theorize Theorizing a Unified Theory by 2038, but I'm running into a few problems; mostly other Theories I had about how to develop Theories that would quasi-explain Theoretical recursion.
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The only thing I am worried about is the fact that people in 1960 thought we'd be living on the moon by now
Whoo, today, for the first time in my life, I got a physics teacher to sorta explain when unification means in a way that actually meant something. Not that I understood really well. Can anyone point to somewhere that explains it in terms that can be understood by someone with 1 years of college physics? (And obviouly takes advantage of assuming that knowledge...)
There is a chance the work of unification will be completed by 2050, but about that we cannot be confident.
I'll say you can't be confident. Given the speed at which developments move these days, in all areas of science and technology, who would dare to predict exactly where we'll be in 50 years time?
Better still, whose prediction would be right? Very few, I imagine. I'm no particle or nuclear physicist, but I have trouble working out what stage I'll be at in two week's time...
I'd say let's just keep plodding along at a solution, and see how far we get...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
... that humanities gonna see that day.
All is fine and finess for those who do the forecasting, that the final realization of the Grand Unification of all forces will somehow make us all that much better.
That is, _IF_ we human can do it _BEFORE_ we blow all of us in such a grandscale that we'd be in minute smitherines way before 2050.
The way US is bullying all other countries all over the world, I have doubt that humanities can survive until 2050.
People who are being bullied tends to rebel, and the more US bullies the whole world, the more it is possible that the world will rebel against Uncle Sam, and with over 7,000 NUKES pointed at EACH AND EVERY CORNER in this world, what is left in 2050 will be a bunch of barren wasted rocks, orbiting somewhere the third piece of rock (from the Sun) used to be.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
SCI AM admittedly tends to be a bit more serious than, say, Popular Science, which has been "predicting" hypersonic airliners fairly much continuously since the 1950s.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I think the possibilities for a Theory of Everything within our lifetime is pretty exciting. Anyone who is interested in learning more about the subject (instead of just spouting anti-theory crud) should check out a book I'm reading now called The Elegant Universe. It's all about recent attempts to solve the major problem with modern theoretical physics, namely, the incompatibility of point-particle quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity.
I can't pretend to understand all of it, but I think it's by far the clearest explanation of string theory and its consequences I have ever seen.
Today's fascinating insight: according to string theory, our universe has as many as 9 spatial dimensions. Furthermore, the universe cannot keep contracting forever - it has a theoretical minimum size. Cool, eh?
Can your IM do this?
You know, I follow this stuff pretty closely. I'm no physicist, nor do I pretend to be one, but I don't know how anyone can even pretend to possibly predict what we're going to know at a given time. (Yes, I've read the article.) There have been a few theories posited in the past that attempted to unify all the forces, some of them promising, but IMO, we're not going to know much unless we can do more EXPERIMENTING.
We lost the SSC, which would have told us a lot, and we're probably not going to have any accelerators for quite a while that can prove or disprove any of these theories. While the math may look good, even elegant, it's all hogwash unless we can DO something with it, some sort of experimental verification.
Personaly, I'd like to see an accelerator built around the Earth, now there we could hit some energies that could show us some really neat stuff, but we're more concerned with ketchup viscoscity tests here in the US than we are fundimental science. Bah, yeah, I'm bitter.
Anyway, any physicists out there who would care to share with us some of the more recent inroads we've made here? What have we seen? I haven't heard much about the Higgs boson since "The God Particle" (any armchair physicists out there should check that book out) and not much at all about high energy physics in general. Is there anything happening?
I'm rambling again, someone put a sock in my mouth...
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
Please do not take this article lightly. Weinberg is extremely well respected in his field. It is not a case of Scientific American just paying a random physicist to write an article on GU. What he says should be every bit as beleiveable as Hawking and all the other great scientists who came before him. He is a Nobel laureate, and regarded among his peers as one of the premier minds working on GUT. At the American Physical Society meeting last year in Atlanta, I saw a huge room filled with all of the country's greatest physicists come to see Weinberg. So, this article shouldn't be put down lightly.
Stephen Hawking himself gives Grand Unification a 50/50 chance in the next twenty years; 2050 sounds almost pessimistic in that context.
:)
I'm taking a course in theoretical physics next semester. I can't wait to get a more thorough understanding of the issues involved so that I can better appreciate what a monumental achievement Unification is when we finally get there.
Maybe it's just me being all starry-eyed optimistic, but the prospect of cracking universal mysteries like these really gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the potential of humanity. Hmm, yeah, that's just my techno-idealism coming out
-jay
Reuters: In his Comdex keynote, Finnish wunderkinder Linus Torvalds stated that secretive startup Transmeta will almost certainly release its product before a Grand Unified Theory of Everything(TM) is released and quote "way before Microsoft releases a stable OS."
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Such mysteries require Deep Thought far beyond what humans are capable of. We need to build a stupendous super computer to do the thinking for us. We need a computer so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks are connected up it would start from 'I think therefore I am' and get as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone could manage to turn it off.
s .org
Such a computer could devise the Grand Unified Theory, as well as answer the questions of life, the universe, and everything. We would then surely have all of the answers, although the philosphers might get a bit peaved.
Regards,
lunkwell@hyperintelligent_pan_dimensional_being
The Peer Review System is a stifling and backwards way to attack something as complex and virtually limitless as the field of Physics (ok, perhaps science in general). I don't believe that it is a very logical approach to have established scientists, with set and narrow views, dictating the coarse of the sciences of tomorrow
[SARCASM]
I agree absolutley. If it weren't for the peer review system, we'd have junked this "aether" nonsense and Newton's laws of motion defended by those old fuddy-duddy scientists a long time ago in favor of relativity and quantum mechanics.
[/SARCASM]
--
"I am not a nut-bag." -- Millroy the Magician
To the best of my knowledge, science today is not what it was in say 1900
It's probably not what you meant, but I suspect that science today has a lot in common with 1900. Specifically, the feeling that we're 'almost there'; in 1900 the only things that were pissing off scientists were blackbody radiation and the Michelson/Morley experiment. Apart from that, pretty much everything was explained. Today we see that we're fifty years from a TOE.
An explanation of blackbody radiation resulted in quantum mechanics, and Michelson/Morley eventually gave us relativity. No-one could claim after 1920 that we were even close to covering everything.
The LHC will, I suspect, throw up results that'll confuse us all. Fifty years from now, most of these will be explained and someone will say that we're fifty years away from a TOE.
The basic problem with predictions about science, for the far future, is that a lot of people, make the mistake that science shows a slowly and gradual increase in knowledge. I believe that the author of the article, Weinberg, an extremely capable and knowledgebal physicist with a great reputation, also makes this mistake.
There are of course always long periods in science which are marked by a gradual increase in knowledge. But a lot of the turning points in science have been periods of turbulence for the science. Einstein's theory of relativity, which units gravity and elektromagnetism, was not something any scientist would have predicted in 1899. Quantummechanics basically grew out of a couple of pre-assumptions Bohr made, and when he made them, he hoped he would find more pleasing explanations for some of them later on. Older examples would include the discovery of oxygen, and the appearing of Newton's Principa, which replaced the Aristotelian way of looking at science in the western world.
Doing predictions about science 50 years ahead is a risky business, and I admire Weinberg's courage in doing it. But I think we should realize that it is still possible that we'll see another revolution and another theory, which will answer a lot of questions we are dealing with now, but such a theory would probably ask just as many new questions. This is basically what happened with Relativity and Quantummechanics. It would be naive and arrogant to assume we now know almost everything, and to rule out the possibility of yet another scientific revolution.
For those interested in science in general, and those interesting in philosophy and ideas about science in particular, the following books might provide interesting reading:
"Critisism and the growth of knowledge" I.Lakatos & A. Musgrave (1970) Cambridge
"The structure of scientific revolutions" T.S. Kuhn (1969) Chicago.
Edwin Oostra.
Beware of Wight Supremacists!
In the beggining.... everything was HOT. Also, everything was very very small. In fact, it's theorized that as much as 10kg of matter was all that was necessary to start off the universe. Now, when things get so very very hot, hotter than any star, it turns out that the four fundamental forces are actually all one force- unified field as it were. The reason we see them as four different forces is that when things cool off, these four forces seem to us to "cystalize" along certain set dimensions. So, as we try to theorize all the way back to the big bang (which isn't quite as hard as it sounds- we can actually still "see" it in every direction we look) we have to figure out how these forces work as one. Elcotromagnetism and the weak nuclear force were figured out- hence the electroweak theory. The strong nuclear force was added to the equation recently, but not as conclusively. And the farthest back, the hardest, the very first to crystilize off, is the incredibly weak (yet infinately ranged) gravity. This isn't the only way to look at the problem of course- we also don't have a good match for gravity as a wave vs. particle, or even still a good resolution bout wave vs. particle. But getting gravity into the equation is going to be very very hard without some really powerful testing equipment. When you're trying to measure gravity in the same proxitimity as the other forces, its effects are so small as to be almost invisible with current levels of experimental error.
Ok I know that the analogy might not be very successful. But it is the most flagrant on how Science can be very very wrong.
Exactly at the beginning of this century two guys decided to take a great feat. To reform the foundations of Algebra. At that time Algebra had an History of a few thousands of years. However it suffered from serious internal problems. It was a building of small, nearly autoctonous mathematical ideas. Somehow they possessed a common linkage though several theoretical threads. However if we compared it to the body of Geometry, Algebra looked miserable.
Geometry had a very "perfect" building body. It started from a few simple rules and all demonstrations were generated from them. So in the beginning of this century two big minds tried to make the same in Algebra. Some sort of trying to build a Theory of Great Unification.
They went on this task no matter that, by that same time, Geometry had already broke into several Geometries. It was demonstrated the not only the theoretical consistence of "dissident" geometries but also the fact that some of them were much more "real" than the traditional Euclidian Geometry.
However there was still some stubbornes to consider Euclidian Geomtry a "right" geometry and the others "wrong".
The blow came right at the moment of the publication of a huge work that pretended to unify the whole Algebra into one body. And right from the inners of that same body. A logical inconsistence on one theorem gave a death blow to the whole theory. Years of hard work were turned into dust in a few lines.
As far as I know one of the mathematicians seemed to have quit after that. The other passed the rest of his life trying to repair a building that theoretically was impossible to restore.
This story ended with a miriad of Algebras. It reflected in every corner of Mathematics. In a few years the number of mathematical branches and theories skyrocketted. The culmination was Godel's theorem which "popularly" stated that "there will be always undemonstratable truths" and laid the foudations to the axiomatic nature of modern Mathematics.
Physics can be quite different from Mathematics. But we have already a good past experience on how such Unifications may end. There is only one problem. In the beginnings of the Christian era there were also some attempts to unify the branches of human knowledge. Many aspects of Geoncentrism and its interpretations were a clear reflection of this. And we know how this beautiful "Harmonia Mundii" ended. The names of Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler are a testimony in the History of Science to what happens when someone tries to hold the Theories of the Great Unification
Okay, I know something about this. I have a Ph.D. plus three years of postdoc'ing in experimental high energy particle physics. I worked at both Fermilab and CERN (1991-1995, guess what else was going on around there at that time?)
I left the field (and became a computer consultant) in despair at getting a chance to do interesting science. Okay, the real reason was that I didn't think I was going to be able to get a tenure-track faculty job. But these two reasons are connected: unpromising fields of study lose funding. My field is currently undergoing severe contractions.
The problem is that existing theories work well for all experiments and observations we know how to make, and building bigger accelerators costs too much money. The US cancelled the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) in Texas. I can't say I blame US. Europe is going ahead with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, but they may or may not get anything out of it.
Weinberg is a respected theorist. The article is a good introduction to current theoretical fashions, and some of it was new to me. At the same time I was somewhat offended that he expects answers to come from a "young theorist".
Physics is an experimental science, and a theory is not validated until it has experimental evidence to back it up and to distinguish it from competing theories. It is the shortage of new experimental data over the last fifteen years that has left theorists grasping at thinner and thinner straws. Mathematical elegance in a theory does not validate it.
The evidence drought may continue to 2050 and beyond. I, personally, do not expect the LHC to turn up supersymmetric particles. And maybe not even a Higgs. If they are found, it does not necessarily select one theory over another. It certainly doesn't amount to evidence for string theory or M-theory. It's hard to think of any experiment that could validate those theories.
Recent evidence of neutrino oscillations is hopeful. But is it something that will help tie up all these theorietical loose ends? I don't think so. In fact, my friends who do theory are having an even harder time finding jobs (or interesting research topics) than I did as an experimentalist.
My 2 centimes. Michael
We really do know more about what we're talking about than back then.
It's like arguing about when Moore's law will end. Most reasonable people agree that at some point it will end. There are fundamental barriers where the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle meets Information Theory. Yes, that's "only according to the current paradigm of physics", but even supposing we could somehow overcome such a barrier, it would take a serious scientific revolution. It requires a very high degree of faith to assume that such a revolution will fit within the constraints of Moore's law - it would almost definitely be either too fast or too slow.
So, physics and CS are in the same boat. Both are riding a developmental process, unprecedented in history, that will eventually end. In both cases, human nature provides an inexhaustable store of unimaginative prophets to predict that the end is near. And in both cases, there is no fundamental barrier to valid prophesying. That means that not only will one of the prophets one day be right; they'll probably be right for most of the right reasons.
The question thus becomes: how do we separate the wise prognosticators from the deluded ones? If you can't answer that question for yourself, you need to work on your epistemology. Personally, I can see so many differences between Weinberg's argument and that of the turn-of-the-century end-of-science prognosticators - and not just differences of degree - that I feel confident giving him more credence. Moreover, I think that, posing the question as I have posed it, it would have been easy to see through the end-of-science claims last time the century turned, without any anachronistic knowledge of physice.
Note that Weinberg does not actually claim we'll have a TOE (theory of everything) by 2050, just that we'll have a GUT (grand unified theory). The difference is, a TOE would explain the fundamental physics of everything, whereas a GUT only covers everything that happens at energies of less then 10^18 GeV or so. Now, some physicists believe that these two are the same thing, and some don't. This is mostly an article of faith. Moreover, it's totally immaterial on a practical scale. As Weinberg explains, it would take an accelerator light-years long (and magnetic fields strong enough to rip apart normal matter) to begin to see the difference. With a GUT, for the first time in history we'd know everything there is to know about the fundamental physics of everything currently observable, and we could settle down and spend the next millenia or so working out the implications of that knowledge.
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