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. "

Comments

hrm...

[Haven]

The only thing I am worried about is the fact that people in 1960 thought we'd be living on the moon by now

Don't they do one of these every ten years?

[Christopher B. Brown]

There tends to be a "retrospective" issue roughly every ten years for magazines like Scientific American that supplies these sorts of predictions.

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.

GUT

[KodaK]

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...

Note: Author knows his stuff...

[morris57]

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.

Transmeta processor release possible by 2049

[mistabobdobalina]

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."

Re:Grand Unified Theory

[Sheridan]

Alright, I am a Mathematics/Physics major at my college.

Congratulations. In a few years time when you graduate, you might even understand why the rest of your comment is such utter tripe.

All I want to know is "How many people actually understood what the article said...?"

Me, for one.

Oh, I see, only two of the hundreds of posters. That's okay, it just makes reading some of these posts funny, but sad at the same time. Alright, here's what the article is missing as far as linking Quantum theory with Standard theory. The link isn't impossible at all...If you have no clue what you are talking about.

I assume you mean "quantum gravity" and the "standard model". Reading the original article would have helped you here, I think. It is amazing that anybody with such and obvious lack of knowledge of particle theory could write the above comment about lack of knowledge being sad.

Has anybody here dealt with Chaos Theory and implications of the Riemmann Zeta function for starters. And I don't mean a search on Yahoo for a definition. Modern science cannot to this day even predict accurately, given all determinable factors what will happen during a reaction on an atomic scale. Quantum theory is based on Probalistic Physics, Relativistic or Standard Theory is based on Deterministic Physics.

The Standard Model is a fully quantum theory. Furthermore, just because a theory is probabilistic, it does not imply that it does not make precise predictions. In fact, the standard model is about the most rigorously tested theories out there (along with GR). It makes extremely accurate predictions of measurable quantities, and agrees with experiment to a phenomenal degree of accuracy. You obviously dont have a clue what you are talking about. (inanity about complex plane etc. snipped)

If you want to respond, please say something intelligent and not pathetic/flame...Thanks

Of course, you could help responders out in that by reading the article and posting something intelligent in the first place.
--
"I am not a nut-bag." -- Millroy the Magician

(R)evolution in science

[Edwin Oostra]

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.