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Why is fundamental physics so messy?
When the job description calls for reverse-engineering the universe, the pool of successful applicants will naturally include enough self-impressed overachievers to make second-degree ego burn a hazard of the trade. But even the leading researchers in theoretical particle physics, the most headstrong of the scientific elite, are humbled by their failure to figure out why the cosmos is such a mathematically elegant mess.
The equations themselves are lovely, describing how a baseball arcs parabolically between earth and sky or how an electron jumps around a nucleus or how a magnet pulls a pin. The ugliness is in the details. Why does the top quark weigh roughly 40 times as much as the bottom quark and, even worse, thousands of times more than the up quark and down quark combined? Maddeningly, the proton weighs almost, but not exactly, the same as its counterpart, the neutron. And wasn’t the electron enough? Did we really need its two fat cousins, the muon and the tau?
It’s as though some software engineer crafted a beautiful, bugless operating system - the laws of physics - and then fed it with random data, the output from a lava lamp, or moths bashing at a window screen. Garbage in, garbage out, generating the weird, starry heap of a universe we call home.
Optimists hope the randomness is actually pseudo-random - complexity in disguise, with The Algorithm at the core of everything, churning out the details, demanding that things be what they be.
The bet is that this codex lies tangled somewhere inside superstring theory. Deep within the quarks, face-to-face with the universal machine language, are tiny snippets of something - no one really knows what - called strings and branes. They wiggle around in their 10 or so dimensions and conjure up the universe, this universe, with a spec sheet about as symmetrical as a bingo card.
Superstring theory turns out to be more complex than the universe it is supposed to simplify. Research suggests there may be 10500 universes... or 10500 regions of this universe, each ruled by different laws. The truths that Newton, Einstein, and dozens of lesser lights have uncovered would be no more funda-mental than the municipal code of Nairobi, Kenya, or Terre Haute, Indiana. Physicists would just be geographers of some accidental terrain.
Things might look brighter next year, when the Large Hadron Collider - the biggest scientific project ever - should be running full blast, using superconducting magnets to smash matter hard enough to break through the floor of reality. Physicists hope that down in the cellar they’ll find the Higgs boson - skulking in the dark like a centipede, furtively giving the other particles their variety of masses.
Or maybe they’ll just find more junk. If so, the search will probably be over for now, placed on hold for the next civilization with the temerity to believe that people, pawns in the ultimate chess game, are smart enough to figure out the rules.
- George Johnson, author of Miss Leavitt’s Stars
Why is fundamental physics so messy?
When the job description calls for reverse-engineering the universe, the pool of successful applicants will naturally include enough self-impressed overachievers to make second-degree ego burn a hazard of the trade. But even the leading researchers in theoretical particle physics, the most headstrong of the scientific elite, are humbled by their failure to figure out why the cosmos is such a mathematically elegant mess.
The equations themselves are lovely, describing how a baseball arcs parabolically between earth and sky or how an electron jumps around a nucleus or how a magnet pulls a pin. The ugliness is in the details. Why does the top quark weigh roughly 40 times as much as the bottom quark and, even worse, thousands of times more than the up quark and down quark combined? Maddeningly, the proton weighs almost, but not exactly, the same as its counterpart, the neutron. And wasn’t the electron enough? Did we really need its two fat cousins, the muon and the tau?
It’s as though some software engineer crafted a beautiful, bugless operating system - the laws of physics - and then fed it with random data, the output from a lava lamp, or moths bashing at a window screen. Garbage in, garbage out, generating the weird, starry heap of a universe we call home.
Optimists hope the randomness is actually pseudo-random - complexity in disguise, with The Algorithm at the core of everything, churning out the details, demanding that things be what they be.
The bet is that this codex lies tangled somewhere inside superstring theory. Deep within the quarks, face-to-face with the universal machine language, are tiny snippets of something - no one really knows what - called strings and branes. They wiggle around in their 10 or so dimensions and conjure up the universe, this universe, with a spec sheet about as symmetrical as a bingo card.
Superstring theory turns out to be more complex than the universe it is supposed to simplify. Research suggests there may be 10500 universes... or 10500 regions of this universe, each ruled by different laws. The truths that Newton, Einstein, and dozens of lesser lights have uncovered would be no more funda-mental than the municipal code of Nairobi, Kenya, or Terre Haute, Indiana. Physicists would just be geographers of some accidental terrain.
Things might look brighter next year, when the Large Hadron Collider - the biggest scientific project ever - should be running full blast, using superconducting magnets to smash matter hard enough to break through the floor of reality. Physicists hope that down in the cellar they’ll find the Higgs boson - skulking in the dark like a centipede, furtively giving the other particles their variety of masses.
Or maybe they’ll just find more junk. If so, the search will probably be over for now, placed on hold for the next civilization with the temerity to believe that people, pawns in the ultimate chess game, are smart enough to figure out the rules.
- George Johnson, author of Miss Leavitt’s Stars