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Standard magnificence...
Dec. 13th, 2015 08:42 pmAnd we are back into heady territory with Maria Spiropulu's Master Class "Nature's Constituents". This is a course on pretty much everything we know about how the universe functions at a subatomic, particle physics, level. It's a bit more dense than the other sessions I've done, but I have to say that I actually learned stuff in this one (important stuff for me even) that I did not know about before. In particular, her discussion of how a Higgs field was discovered on someone's desktop in 1981 was quite an amazing side topic (for realz... not the Higgs field we built the LHC to observe, but a Higgs-like field in a laboratory setting, very cool stuff... was pretty much forgotten about until all the fooferah about the Higgs particle discovery, and has since been dusted off). One of the things I like about her presentation is she's not afraid to say, "well, we have no fucking idea whatsoever"... which is the utter truth in that regard. She's also very brave in suggesting that the LHC may find the lightest hypothesized supersymmetric particle in this current run (which would be even more revolutionary than having found the Higgs as this would be completely new physics). Here's an intro video for more info... it's pretty mind-blowing stuff (but pretty straightforward to understand as a concept). If supersymmetric matter exists, it might explain the fact that most of our universe is made of stuff we can't observe and know almost nothing about (except that it's there and affects things gravitationally, and is causing the expansion of our universe to speed up).
Do you think we will ever be able to comprehensively describe all of nature in a single elegant equation? Why or why not?
I do not think that is possible due to the existence of chaos. Given that we cannot analytically solve systems that contain more than two of anything (the famous "three body problem", where there is no general solution to these classes of systems), to suggest that we can come up with descriptions of anything but the simplest of systems (luckily, some quantum systems like the Standard Model qualify) would require a revolution in our ability to express these systems mathematically (and even then, we have proven that past a certain complexity, some mathematical forms are unsolvable with all the math we currently know). With that said, there is obviously some underlying structure to our universe that we have not yet discovered that will provide the connection we need between gravity and what we know of the phenomenology predicted by the Standard Model. That the Standard Model is parametrized is a glaring recognition that we don't know the "why" behind the model (it just works startlingly well when applied). Understanding how the parameters arise is definitely something I think we will eventually figure out, but that only gets us so far. Can the existence of baryons and bosons ever say anything about the nature of a flower or the latest pop song? Looking for an equation for "all of nature" is too grand of a question, but finding out "everything" about the constituents that make up these phenomena is certainly something that we will be able to describe some day. A single elegant equation? Maybe not that (the days of analytic solutions may be coming to an end, all the "low hanging fruit" have been picked), but we will at least come up with reasonably simple models that we can solve numerically with ever more powerful computers.
I saw a post in the comments that I felt the need to answer as well (for myself more than anything): i can't perceive the difference between the notion of "luminiferous aether" and the "Higgs field"?
The main difference, from my understanding, is precisely that: perception. The aether was proposed as a preferred inertial frame that all motion was relative to (including light). As such, you would be able to tell whether you were at rest or not by measuring changes in the speed of light based on what direction you were going relative to that light. Einstein's stroke of genius was stating the obvious (based on experimental evidence even, the Michelson-Morley experiment for instance) and running with it to find out what it implied, and it says that the speed of light is the same to all observers no matter what their state of motion, so such an aether cannot exist. The Higgs field does not provide any kind of reference or directionality, and thus can only be detected by setting it "ringing" with the injection of massive energies (thus forming Higgs particles, which we can detect the decay products from). Particles that can interact with the Higgs field acquire mass from that interaction, but whether the particle is here or over there, or standing still from my perspective or moving at nearly the speed of light relative to me, the Higgs field must obey the principle of relativity. What that means is that if you have a particle in front of you, not moving, it will couple with the Higgs field in a particular way, but if you take that same particle and accelerate it to nearly the speed of light, the Higgs field has to couple with it in exactly the same way as it did when it was at rest relative to you. To illustrate this, pretend you could sit on the particle as it accelerates to tremendous speed relative to the Earth... to you and the particle, you are sitting perfectly still and the Earth is moving away at tremendous speed... since you are "at rest" from your perspective, the Higgs field couples exactly as it did before you accelerated relative to the Earth and the mass of the particle from the Higgs coupling, from your perspective sitting on it, is exactly the same as it was when it was at rest in front of you before it zipped away. This is how the aether and Higgs field are fundamentally different notions. Caveat: I'm no expert, this is just my understanding, I could be wildly wrong about the Higgs field (but I'm pretty sure about the aether part, heh).
In many of the other Master Classes, you've heard theorists describe how they try to understand our natural world. In this Master Class, you've learned a bit about how an experimentalist goes about the same task. Which do you find yourself more inclined to, the theoretical side, thinking up new science to explain phenomena, or the experimental side, being hands-on and trying to discover incredible evidence?
Getting personal, eh? Well, I have a lifetime of experience doing practical/experimental stuff (hey, a roof over my head and food on the table is important to me), but my personal interest has always been more on the theoretical side. I like to think that having a grounding in the demonstrably possible provides for the possibility that theories I might come up with are eventually testable. I think we do need people that are focused on theory and many times more that are working on experiments, but I see it as a spectrum rather than a binary choice, hopefully with those who are extremely one way or the other being outliers on the curve. Being able to communicate between the two domains is critical for progress to be made. I should add that communication skills are key to being able to keep doing science, because without it society will lose interest and eventually take its resources somewhere else.
The Large Hadron Collider is one of the biggest scientific undertakings in all of history. It is estimated to have cost somewhere around $13.25 billion (USD), including operating costs of about $1B/year since it became operational in 2008. Do you think that's money well-spent? (I actually think this was a pretty good answer, btw)
The first thing to realize is we didn't take 13.25 G$ and set fire to it in someone's back yard for a barbeque, it was paid to research institutions, manufacturing companies, services companies, government departments, and the salaries of tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, project managers, highly skilled tradespeople, and general labour ... all over the world. All of the capabilities developed to build and run the thing, all of the innovations created to solve problems we've never faced before, all of the infrastructure put in place to support it (including network infrastructure as well as industrial and intellectual infrastructures) have returned on that investment since then, and will continue to do so for decades to come. As a bonus, we get to pursue fundamental questions of existence (and as a double bonus, it was money that wasn't spent developing ways to murder other members of our species with new and more efficient war-making capabilities). All in all, to me, it seems like a pretty good way to have spent that money.
In this module, we've learned about how ideas from condensed matter physics were able to inform particle physics. Do you see so-called "cross-fertilization" as being something that has to happen again and again in science in order to deepen our understandings of the natural world?
It doesn't need to happen... brute force and ignorance (and lots and lots of money) could win the day, but I don't think too many people want to take that route. To that end, cross-fertilization (multi-disciplinary exploration) is a powerful tool to figure out new ways to search and new places to look for interesting phenomena related to the many questions we know are trying to answer (or for ideas on what questions we should be posing, and how). The main problem is there are so many silos of information with so little cross-communications. In some cases, it's from people wanting the power that comes from control of information; but in most cases it's simply the truth that people are so busy with just trying to do what they have to do that there is no time to pursue what they want to do (presuming they want to do this sort of information sharing and synergizing). In that regard, physics is no different than most other professional pursuits. I find it fascinating that "Higgs" (Higgses? Herds of Higgs? ... need a new plural form for non-boson Higgs-like entities, heh) were created back in the early 1980s, but that fact was lost until the publicity frenzy around the Higgs particle discovery. I wonder what insights could have been applied to the search for the Higgs boson if that line of inquiry had been pursued actively since then (35 years is a long time, and much could have been discovered)? I strongly believe that developing "desktop analogs" of quantum and/or cosmological systems provides an excellent way of having many more eyes and hands and inspiration devoted to answering important questions (one of my favourites of these recently is the production of black hole optical analogs in Bose-Einstein condensates... a much safer endeavour than trying to make black holes large enough to study carefully over long periods of time).
In April 2015, the LHC began its second run, with collisions at much higher energies, as it searches for (among other things) the long-sought supersymmetric partners. But what if we don't find any new particles at the expected energy scales? Would you advocate for building an even bigger machine to search for them? Or is it time to spend that money elsewhere?
There's some talk that perhaps colliding baryons is too sloppy for precision physics and we need to build a massive electron/positron collider (the ILC). Certainly if the LHC can be upgraded, it probably should be (rather than scrapped in favour of something like the ILC... much like so many facilities were scrapped or nearly scrapped when everyone's money was put into building the LHC in the first place). So yes, I see value in upgrading the LHC (especially since it can also accelerate large nuclei) and I don't think that conflicts with building the ILC as well (which last I heard will be in Asia, possibly Japan... there seems to be no stomach for it in North America at least, and Europe has CERN).
Hmmm... video posting this time around? Hmmm... Going to go far afield for this one and post one of my favourite songs/videos by FKA Twigs (nothing to do with physics, but she certainly uses a lot of it in this video with seeming natural giftedness, heh).
Do you think we will ever be able to comprehensively describe all of nature in a single elegant equation? Why or why not?
I do not think that is possible due to the existence of chaos. Given that we cannot analytically solve systems that contain more than two of anything (the famous "three body problem", where there is no general solution to these classes of systems), to suggest that we can come up with descriptions of anything but the simplest of systems (luckily, some quantum systems like the Standard Model qualify) would require a revolution in our ability to express these systems mathematically (and even then, we have proven that past a certain complexity, some mathematical forms are unsolvable with all the math we currently know). With that said, there is obviously some underlying structure to our universe that we have not yet discovered that will provide the connection we need between gravity and what we know of the phenomenology predicted by the Standard Model. That the Standard Model is parametrized is a glaring recognition that we don't know the "why" behind the model (it just works startlingly well when applied). Understanding how the parameters arise is definitely something I think we will eventually figure out, but that only gets us so far. Can the existence of baryons and bosons ever say anything about the nature of a flower or the latest pop song? Looking for an equation for "all of nature" is too grand of a question, but finding out "everything" about the constituents that make up these phenomena is certainly something that we will be able to describe some day. A single elegant equation? Maybe not that (the days of analytic solutions may be coming to an end, all the "low hanging fruit" have been picked), but we will at least come up with reasonably simple models that we can solve numerically with ever more powerful computers.
I saw a post in the comments that I felt the need to answer as well (for myself more than anything): i can't perceive the difference between the notion of "luminiferous aether" and the "Higgs field"?
The main difference, from my understanding, is precisely that: perception. The aether was proposed as a preferred inertial frame that all motion was relative to (including light). As such, you would be able to tell whether you were at rest or not by measuring changes in the speed of light based on what direction you were going relative to that light. Einstein's stroke of genius was stating the obvious (based on experimental evidence even, the Michelson-Morley experiment for instance) and running with it to find out what it implied, and it says that the speed of light is the same to all observers no matter what their state of motion, so such an aether cannot exist. The Higgs field does not provide any kind of reference or directionality, and thus can only be detected by setting it "ringing" with the injection of massive energies (thus forming Higgs particles, which we can detect the decay products from). Particles that can interact with the Higgs field acquire mass from that interaction, but whether the particle is here or over there, or standing still from my perspective or moving at nearly the speed of light relative to me, the Higgs field must obey the principle of relativity. What that means is that if you have a particle in front of you, not moving, it will couple with the Higgs field in a particular way, but if you take that same particle and accelerate it to nearly the speed of light, the Higgs field has to couple with it in exactly the same way as it did when it was at rest relative to you. To illustrate this, pretend you could sit on the particle as it accelerates to tremendous speed relative to the Earth... to you and the particle, you are sitting perfectly still and the Earth is moving away at tremendous speed... since you are "at rest" from your perspective, the Higgs field couples exactly as it did before you accelerated relative to the Earth and the mass of the particle from the Higgs coupling, from your perspective sitting on it, is exactly the same as it was when it was at rest in front of you before it zipped away. This is how the aether and Higgs field are fundamentally different notions. Caveat: I'm no expert, this is just my understanding, I could be wildly wrong about the Higgs field (but I'm pretty sure about the aether part, heh).
In many of the other Master Classes, you've heard theorists describe how they try to understand our natural world. In this Master Class, you've learned a bit about how an experimentalist goes about the same task. Which do you find yourself more inclined to, the theoretical side, thinking up new science to explain phenomena, or the experimental side, being hands-on and trying to discover incredible evidence?
Getting personal, eh? Well, I have a lifetime of experience doing practical/experimental stuff (hey, a roof over my head and food on the table is important to me), but my personal interest has always been more on the theoretical side. I like to think that having a grounding in the demonstrably possible provides for the possibility that theories I might come up with are eventually testable. I think we do need people that are focused on theory and many times more that are working on experiments, but I see it as a spectrum rather than a binary choice, hopefully with those who are extremely one way or the other being outliers on the curve. Being able to communicate between the two domains is critical for progress to be made. I should add that communication skills are key to being able to keep doing science, because without it society will lose interest and eventually take its resources somewhere else.
The Large Hadron Collider is one of the biggest scientific undertakings in all of history. It is estimated to have cost somewhere around $13.25 billion (USD), including operating costs of about $1B/year since it became operational in 2008. Do you think that's money well-spent? (I actually think this was a pretty good answer, btw)
The first thing to realize is we didn't take 13.25 G$ and set fire to it in someone's back yard for a barbeque, it was paid to research institutions, manufacturing companies, services companies, government departments, and the salaries of tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, project managers, highly skilled tradespeople, and general labour ... all over the world. All of the capabilities developed to build and run the thing, all of the innovations created to solve problems we've never faced before, all of the infrastructure put in place to support it (including network infrastructure as well as industrial and intellectual infrastructures) have returned on that investment since then, and will continue to do so for decades to come. As a bonus, we get to pursue fundamental questions of existence (and as a double bonus, it was money that wasn't spent developing ways to murder other members of our species with new and more efficient war-making capabilities). All in all, to me, it seems like a pretty good way to have spent that money.
In this module, we've learned about how ideas from condensed matter physics were able to inform particle physics. Do you see so-called "cross-fertilization" as being something that has to happen again and again in science in order to deepen our understandings of the natural world?
It doesn't need to happen... brute force and ignorance (and lots and lots of money) could win the day, but I don't think too many people want to take that route. To that end, cross-fertilization (multi-disciplinary exploration) is a powerful tool to figure out new ways to search and new places to look for interesting phenomena related to the many questions we know are trying to answer (or for ideas on what questions we should be posing, and how). The main problem is there are so many silos of information with so little cross-communications. In some cases, it's from people wanting the power that comes from control of information; but in most cases it's simply the truth that people are so busy with just trying to do what they have to do that there is no time to pursue what they want to do (presuming they want to do this sort of information sharing and synergizing). In that regard, physics is no different than most other professional pursuits. I find it fascinating that "Higgs" (Higgses? Herds of Higgs? ... need a new plural form for non-boson Higgs-like entities, heh) were created back in the early 1980s, but that fact was lost until the publicity frenzy around the Higgs particle discovery. I wonder what insights could have been applied to the search for the Higgs boson if that line of inquiry had been pursued actively since then (35 years is a long time, and much could have been discovered)? I strongly believe that developing "desktop analogs" of quantum and/or cosmological systems provides an excellent way of having many more eyes and hands and inspiration devoted to answering important questions (one of my favourites of these recently is the production of black hole optical analogs in Bose-Einstein condensates... a much safer endeavour than trying to make black holes large enough to study carefully over long periods of time).
In April 2015, the LHC began its second run, with collisions at much higher energies, as it searches for (among other things) the long-sought supersymmetric partners. But what if we don't find any new particles at the expected energy scales? Would you advocate for building an even bigger machine to search for them? Or is it time to spend that money elsewhere?
There's some talk that perhaps colliding baryons is too sloppy for precision physics and we need to build a massive electron/positron collider (the ILC). Certainly if the LHC can be upgraded, it probably should be (rather than scrapped in favour of something like the ILC... much like so many facilities were scrapped or nearly scrapped when everyone's money was put into building the LHC in the first place). So yes, I see value in upgrading the LHC (especially since it can also accelerate large nuclei) and I don't think that conflicts with building the ILC as well (which last I heard will be in Asia, possibly Japan... there seems to be no stomach for it in North America at least, and Europe has CERN).
Hmmm... video posting this time around? Hmmm... Going to go far afield for this one and post one of my favourite songs/videos by FKA Twigs (nothing to do with physics, but she certainly uses a lot of it in this video with seeming natural giftedness, heh).
