In July of last year, I wrote a review, “The Perils of Particle Physics,” of Sabine Hossenfelder’s book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (Basic Books, June 2018). Lost in Math is a critical account of the disappointing progress in fundamental physics, primarily particle physics and cosmology, since the formulation of the “standard model” in the 1970’s.
Dr. Hossenfelder has followed up her book with an editorial “The Uncertain Future of Particle Physics” in The New York Times (January 23, 2019) questioning the wisdom of funding CERN’s recent proposal to build a new particle accelerator, the Future Circular Collider (FCC), estimated to cost over $10 billion. The editorial has in turn produced the predictable howls of outrage from particle physicists and their allies:
Letters to the New York Times from theoretical physicist and science popularizer Jeremy Bernstein and Harvard Physics Professor Lisa Randall
The Worth of Physics Research
Physicists take issue with an Op-Ed article arguing against expensive upgrades to the super collider at CERN.
An article in Slate:
Particle Physics Is Doing Just Fine
In science, lack of discovery can be just as instructive as discovery.
By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and Tim M.P. Tait
And apparently informal criticism of Dr. Hossenfelder during a recent colloquium and presumably on the physics “grapevine”:
“Maybe I’m crazy”, Blog Post, February 4, 2019
“Particle physicists surprised to find I am not their cheer-leader”, Blog Post, February 2, 2019
Probably there will be additional fireworks.
My original review of Lost in Math covers many points relevant to the editorial. A few additional comments related to particle accelerators:
Particle physics is heavily influenced by the ancient idea of atoms (found in Plato’s Timaeus about 360 B.C. for example) — that matter is comprised of tiny fundamental building blocks, also known as particles. The idea of atoms proved fruitful in understanding chemistry and other phenomena in the 19th century and early 20th century.
In due course, experiments with radioactive materials and early precursors of today’s particle accelerators were seemingly able to break the atoms of chemistry into smaller building blocks: electrons and the atomic nucleus comprised of protons and neutrons, presumably held together by exchanges of mesons such as the pion. The main flaw in the building block model of chemical atoms was the evident “quantum” behavior of electrons and photons (light), the mysterious wave-particle duality quite unlike the behavior of macroscopic particles like billiard balls.
Given this success, it was natural to try to break the protons, neutrons and electrons into even smaller building blocks. This required and justified much larger, more powerful, and increasingly more expensive particle accelerators.
The problem or potential problem is that this approach never actually broke the sub-atomic particles into smaller building blocks. The electron seems to be a point “particle” that clearly exhibits puzzling quantum behavior unlike any macroscopic particle from tiny grains of sand to giant planets.
The proton and neutron never shattered into constituents even though they are clearly not point particles. They seem more like small blobs or vibrating strings of fluid or elastic material. Pumping more energy into them in particle accelerators simply produced more exotic particles, a puzzling sub-atomic zoo. This led to theories like nuclear democracy and Regge poles that interpreted the strongly (strong here referring to the strong nuclear force that binds the nucleus together and powers both the Sun and nuclear weapons) interacting particles as vibrating strings of some sort. The plethora of mesons and baryons were explained as excited states of these strings — of low energy “particles” such as the neutron, proton, and the pion.
However, some of the experiments observed electrons scattering off protons (the nucleus of the most common type of hydrogen atom is a single proton) at sharp angles as if the electron had hit a small “hard” charged particle, not unlike an electron. These partons were eventually interpreted as the quarks of the reigning ‘standard model’ of particle physics.
Unlike the proton, neutron, and electron in chemical atoms, the quarks have never been successfully isolated or extracted from the sub-nuclear particles such as the proton or neutron. This eventually led to theories that the force between the quarks grows stronger with increasing distance, mediated by some sort of string-like tube of field lines (for lack of better terminology) that never breaks however far it is stretched.
Particles All the Way Down
There is an old joke regarding the theory of a flat Earth. The Earth is supported on the back of a turtle. The turtle in turn is supported on the back of a bigger turtle. That turtle stands on the back of a third turtle and so on. It is “Turtles all the way down.” This phrase is shorthand for a problem of infinite regress.
For particle physicists, it is “particles all the way down”. Each new layer of particles is presumably composed of smaller still particles. Chemical atoms were comprised of protons and neutrons in the nucleus and orbiting (sort of) electrons. Protons and neutrons are composed of quarks, although we can never isolate them. Arguably the quarks are constructed from something smaller, although the favored theories like supersymmetry have gone off in hard to understand multidimensional directions.
“Particles all the way down” provides an intuitive justification for building every larger, more powerful, and expensive particle accelerators and colliders to repeat the success of the atomic theory of matter and radioactive elements at finer and finer scales.
However, there are other ways to look at the data. Namely, the strongly interacting particles — the neutron, the proton, and the mesons like the pion — are some sort of vibrating quantum mechanical “strings” of a vaguely elastic material. Pumping more energy into them through particle collisions produces excitations — various sorts of vibrations, rotations, and kinks or turbulent eddies in the strings.
The kinks or turbulent eddies act as small localized scattering centers that can never be extracted independently from the strings — just like quarks.
In this interpretation, strongly interacting particles such as the proton and possibly weakly (weak referring to the weak nuclear force responsible for many radioactive decays such as the carbon-14 decay used in radiocarbon dating) interacting seeming point particles like the electron are comprised of a primal material.
In this latter case, ever more powerful accelerators will only create ever more complex excitations — vibrations, rotations, kinks, turbulence, etc. — in the primal material. These excitations are not building blocks of matter that give fundamental insight.
One needs rather to find the possible mathematics describing this primal material. Perhaps a modified wave equation with non-linear terms for a viscous fluid or quasi-fluid. Einstein, deBroglie, and Schrodinger were looking at something like this to explain and derive quantum mechanics and put the pilot wave theory of quantum mechanics on a deeper basis.
A critical problem is that an infinity of possible modified wave equations exist. At present it remains a manual process to formulate such equations and test them against existing data — a lengthy trial and error process to find a specific modified wave equation that is correct.
This is a problem shared with mainstream approaches such as supersymmetry, hidden dimensions, and so forth. Even with thousands of theoretical physicists today, it is time consuming and perhaps intractable to search the infinite space of possible mathematics and find a good match to reality. This is the problem that we are addressing at Mathematical Software with our Math Recognition technology.
(C) 2019 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).