If you read up on the state of particle physics and cosmology these days, you might notice that there’s a lot more humility out there these days. Not too long ago, physicists often gave in to the temptation to get haughty, given how far they’ve come over the past 100 years in untangling the deep mysteries of how the universe is put together at the most fundamental levels. First there was Einstein with his sophisticated notions of how time, space, force and gravity interact on a grand (and not-so-grand) scale. <\/p>\n
Then came Bohr and the quantum boys, who unlocked the strange mysteries of matter and energy at the tiniest levels. With better and better astronomical observations over the years, the physics people figured out that the universe had a \u201cbig bang\u201d that began it all some 13 or 14 billion years ago. As particle accelerators grew more powerful, a unified theory about what the most basic building-blocks of matter and energy came together (i.e., the \u201cstandard particle model\u201d). These concepts allowed physicists to come up with predictions that in many cases were verified by observations and experiments. It seemed like the final \u201ctheory of everything\u201d was just around the corner.<\/p>\n
But then things got strange. The universe wasn’t acting right. There was too much gravity around, pointing to some kind of matter that we don’t know about (\u201cdark matter\u201d). Even worse, the galaxies were flying away from each other at an expanding rate, indicating the presence of some kind of repulsive energy that doesn’t fit in our models (\u201cdark energy\u201d). An interesting mathematical concept called string theory showed promise in finding a way to weave it all together; but then that theory mutated into many different variations, until every phenomenon could be predicted by at least one version. But not all phenomenon could be predicted by one particular version. And thus, nothing was really predicted at all! It all got fuzzy.<\/p>\n
Now I read that another sacred notion from the \u201cmodern synthesis\u201d is under fire. According to quantum theory, there is a minimum length to anything in the universe; it’s sort of a fundamental building block. Theoretically, you can’t split anything up beyond this tiny fraction, i.e. 1 meter divided by ten multiplied by itself 35 times. This is called the \u201cPlanck length\u201d, and is felt to be a pillar of the modern understanding of physical reality. But now, a satellite making observations of gamma rays from distant stars and galaxies seems to indicate<\/a> that some kind of physical phenomenon is going on at an even smaller length (1 meter divided by ten to the 43rd power). <\/p>\n Scientists have spent years trying to figure out how gravity, described so well on large scales by Einstein’s relativity theory, fits in with quantum theory; i.e., how does gravity act when things are very tiny, e.g. at the core of an atom or the size of a light photon? They basically hoped that gravity would honor the Planck length, which all other matter and force particles appear to respect. Nothing at all seems to be going on within them at distances smaller than the Planck length. But now it looks like gravity might be the bad boy of quantum space, and many of the theories now being tested (i.e., some of the superstring variations, loop quantum gravity, etc.) just don’t work anymore. <\/p>\n So it’s back to the drawing board for the \u201cTheory of Everything\u201d. This is one of those little science findings that most people won’t notice, as it doesn’t make the front page of the papers or web sites. But it might be very significant in the long run. Just a hint, keep an eye on the \u201cIntegral\u201d gamma ray polarization results. They could well shake things up even more in the world of super-abstract physics. For now, they clearly reinforce the case for humility!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you read up on the state of particle physics and cosmology these days, you might notice that there’s a lot more humility out there these days. Not too long ago, physicists often gave in to the temptation to get haughty, given how far they’ve come over the past 100 years in untangling the deep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2201"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2203,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions\/2203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}