Physics or Stories?

God said, “Let there be light!” Then scientists like Newton, Faraday and Young started studying light. And finally came Maxwell, who proved that light is not limited to what we can see...it extends far beyond in the electromagnetic spectrum.

And that is the starting point for Philip Ball's article titled provocatively, Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark. He starts by saying Maxwell's discovery shifted “the whole focus of physics...from the visible to the invisible”!

Physics today has “not only unseen force fields and insensible rays but particles too small to see even with the most advanced microscopes”. While that may sound like a belief or something based on faith, it is supported by the facts: telescopes today use “radio waves, infrared radiation, and X-rays”. And it was kind of funny that X-rays “not only were invisible but revealed the invisible (bones under the flesh)”!

Then came quantum mechanics. While the maths behind it was unquestionable, it led to endless “But what does it mean?” debates. The Many-Worlds Interpretation says the universe splits into different copies of itself, each copy having a different outcome of the item that was measured! But unlike X-rays and the like, which can be inferred indirectly by the effects they produce, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, by definition, cannot be proven! So is this really physics or just “taking the math (too) seriously”?

Or take string theory, where the maths says the universe has 10 dimensions of space (not the 3 we are used to)! So where are these extra dimensions then? Either they are too small to be seen, or they extend into “invisible parallel universes”!

Then there's all that dark matter and dark energy...but at least, these are used to explain phenomenon that we do observe but can't explain with our current day theories. So are they real or just “a (fancy) name for a puzzle” yet to be solved?

Have modern day physicists let their imagination run out of control or are these just ideas “to plug gaps in their knowledge with notions they can grasp”? Perhaps, as Ball says, these cannot-be-proven-theories will “be wrong in a good way, and illuminate the path to a deeper understanding of the universe”. Or are these crazy ideas right because, as J. B. S. Haldane said:
“The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Comments

  1. KumarMarch 23, 2014 at 3:51 PM

    Towards the end of the nineteenth century, many physicists actually believed that physics had more or less found all that could be found. "A few loose ends needed tying up no doubt" that was as far as they would consider for the future of physics.

    One more century has passed and we are living in the next to that. Not only physics has made tremendous strides far beyond the wildest imagination of anyone alive at the beginning of the twentieth century, but has also rendered its own domain "queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Quite something!

    In those days, the common man had nothing but fear for mathematics. Now we have at least two such subjects - maths and physics! [There are people waiting to expand into a real awesome list...time to stop for me :-) ]

    ReplyDelete

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