Physicists War Over a Unified Theory 451
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.'"
natural laws hold true, but values do not (Score:3, Interesting)
So I think it's very good that these scientists are challenging theories like this.
We never really know anything (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Creationists (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:We never really know anything (Score:2, Interesting)
This is all worthless intellectual masturbation if there's no real learning involved.
Re:We never really know anything (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:We never really know anything (Score:0, Interesting)
Ugly Standard Model (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Re:Okay, Here It Is (Score:5, Interesting)
For a long time humans lived in a world with cats and cookware. Human-made items like cookware were trivial to understand, and nobody hopes to understand a cat
Then we got a little more sophisticated and had cats and clocks. We studied clocks because we could understand them. We learned about energy conservation, simple harmonic motion, and all sorts of classical physics. Reductionists can learn to understand a clock.
Then we had computers and cats. A computer looks like an elaborate clockwork but practical people don't try to manage them through first principles. They use heuristics like "it gets unstable when low on memory". Now we've got human-made artifacts, which we feel entitled to understand, which reductionism has increasing trouble explaining.
The promise here is that if we apply the same brainpower and effort to defining the laws of complex systems, maybe we'll gain some useful insights into economics, sociology, psychology and other fields of study which directly affect our lives.
I will not hold my breath waiting for a definitive theory of cats.
Sensationalist article, but neat idea (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:natural laws hold true, but values do not (Score:2, Interesting)
But as the previous comment pointed out, the unitless constant alpha is not renormalized by the slowing of physical processes, so this can be measured, and may have possibly changed over time.
Also worth pointing out, is that phyiscal processes that happened billions of years ago with a "slower" or "faster" speed of light, could have happened at different rates because of altered electromagnetic strength and electric/mangnetic constant ratio, etc. This has been suggested as one explanation of redshifted light from distant objects. However, measurements of the constant alpha show only a very small change over time (if any), so the speed of light doesn't appear to have changed much at all over the last few billion years.
L.E.J. Brouwer's "Life, Art, and Mysticism" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:natural laws hold true, but values do not (Score:1, Interesting)
> Question: Seconds, as a unit of time, have been around far longer than the ability to observe photons, have they not?
Yes.
> Has the concept of a second been redefined by physicists to mean the amount of time it takes a photon to travel a certain distance?
As far as I know, a second is still defined to be a certain mulitple of the frequency of a line of cesium. That doesn't matter though. Exactly how a unit is defined changes over time as technology changes. Right now, people are working on redefining the kilogram in terms of a certain number of silicon atoms, or in terms of the force between two current-carrying wires. (There are two competing groups.)
Getting rid of causality? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Getting rid of causality? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:a breath of fresh air (Score:5, Interesting)
i never liked the big bang theory. it stinks of creationism. ... i'm no cosmologist. but the big bang stinks of creationism to me ...
So, let me get this straight. You are rejecting a reasonable theory which fits the observed behaviours simply because it conflicts with your religious (or anti-religious) beliefs?
Isn't that what people accuse religious folks of daily?
You aren't being logically consistant. You rail against anything with any hint of taint from our human experience, but at the same moment your rejection is based in how you feel about the existing theories. Stinks of creationism is a very visceral reaction to what you insist should be a completely rational debate.
Face it. You have a philosophy guiding your argument as well. That philosophy is Nihilism [dictionary.com] and your post stinks of it.
Re:natural laws hold true, but values do not (Score:1, Interesting)
Just because we define time as a property of cesium, barium, boron, calgon, or whatever, does not mean that those properties have not changed over the millenia when the only reference we have is a decade or so of being able to measure it.
For a laugh, ask a physicist to explain gravity, and don't let him get away with saying "two bodies of mass attract each other"... Ask him why they attract!