{"id":145692,"date":"2015-06-07T00:00:41","date_gmt":"2015-06-06T18:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=145692"},"modified":"2015-06-15T11:57:38","modified_gmt":"2015-06-15T06:27:38","slug":"another-crisis-in-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/another-crisis-in-physics\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Crisis In Physics!"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kumar David<\/span><\/a> –<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Prof.<\/a>

Prof. Kumar David<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cMost theorists working in particle physics are in a state of confusion\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A wonderful thing about science is that the greatest and best take time off to write popular books and articles, conduct seminars, or go on lecture tours to take science to the people, especially school and college kids. Einstein and Edington popularised Relativity from early days. The former\u2019s \u201cRelativity: The Special and General Theory\u201d, was in the words of the author, \u201cintended to give an exact insight into the Theory of Relativity to readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but not conversant with the mathematical apparatus\u201d and was written in December 1916 just 13 months after presenting General Relativity to that historic meeting of the Prussian Academy in Berlin. From 1920 to 1927 Edington wrote five popular books with titles like \u201cSpace, Time and Gravitation\u201d, \u201cStars and Atoms\u201d and his acclaimed \u201cThe Theory of Relativity and its Influence on Scientific Thought\u201d.<\/p>\n

More recent was a wonderful series of popular essays in the magazine Natural History<\/em>, later published as books by W.W. Norton Co. and Penguin Books, by palaeontologist and neo-Darwinian evolutionary biologist the late Stephen Jay Gould, who has done so much to captivate readers to an amazing diversity of topics relating to evolutionary biology, fossils, the panda\u2019s thumb, flamingo\u2019s smile and \u2018A Dullard Named Darwin\u2019. He will always be remembered as the stoutest defender since bulldog-Huxley of Darwin and his impeccable methodology.<\/p>\n

Quantum physics is more difficult to simplify because its results are hidden in the realms of probability (No one can be sure where a particle is, but there is such and such a probability that it may be in such and such a location!). More confusing is the wave-particle duality; an elementary particle can\u2019t make up its mind; it moves like a wave on a lake or a bullet from a gun, it all depends on when, how and how many of them you look at. Such oddities aside, quantum physicists have brought out hundreds of popular books and videos – from the excellent to the mediocre – to explain concepts, sans mathematics, to non-specialists. \u201cSchrodinger\u2019s Cat\u201d by John Gribbin tops my list of popular quantum books while Hawking\u2019s \u201cBrief History of Time\u201d, a best seller, deals with cosmology (Hawking\u2019s \u201cTheory of Everything\u201d is, comparatively, second class).<\/p>\n

The point I am making is that whether it is the physical or the life sciences (I have not given examples from medical science and genetics but very readable non-specialist accounts exist) there has been this fruitful sharing between leading scientists and millions of science interested readers.<\/p>\n

Has modern physics flummoxed itself?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The last time the term crisis in physics was used was at the end of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century when attempts to gauge the movement of the earth through the \u2018celestial aether\u2019 and to measure the speed of light relative to moving bodies confounded everybody. Finally, Hendrik Lorentz got the equations right in the late 1890s, but it was a mathematical gimmick called a Transformation. Einstein in 1905 overthrew the paradigms of classical physics and proposed a new space-time framework (Special Relativity); a new view of space and time which transformed the conceptualisation (meaning) of the Lorentz Transformation. It was a paradigm shift, not a gimmick; a philosophically consistent new physics. The crisis seemed happily resolved.<\/p>\n

But soon there were hiccups; the wave-particle duality I mentioned, and quantum uncertainty (Heisenberg says you cannot observe the location and motion of a particle – conjugate quantities – with 100% certainty at the same time; the more precise one measurement, a fundamental law called the Uncertainty Principle says the less certain the other). More recently there has been what I call the subjectivity canard. (I am in good company, Einstein said the same thing; \u201cGod does not play dice with the universe\u201d). To put it in extreme solipsist terminology, the canard declares that the material universe exists only if a conscious observer is taking a peek at it; otherwise one can\u2019t be sure it exists at all! Did the dinosaurs exits; does Haley\u2019s comet exist after it goes beyond all possible observation; when did Kepler\u2019s Supernova, first spotted in 1604 but 20,000 light years away, actually explode \u2013 only when Kepler looked up? Search me, I don\u2019t know how the solipsists will respond, but it will be eerie and unreal. (If you are a fanatic, ask Gamini Kulatunga; I have but can\u2019t fathom his profundities, or make head or tail of his reference sources). But leave all this to one side; we have managed to get along for some time despite these unresolved conundrums.<\/p>\n

\"KD\"<\/a>But things seem to have gone hugely out of control in the last decade both in particle physics and cosmology. South African born Neil Turok (his parents were white liberation fighter members of the ANC) is a distinguished academic physicist. He has been professor at Princeton and Cambridge, won awards and collaborated with Hawking and Roger Penrose, and is now Director of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo where Canada hopes to match the world\u2019s best physics research. This is what he says.<\/p>\n