At the dawn of the 21st century let us review and reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of front-line fundamental research in Physics. Let us pause and reflect on our major achievements, major failures, and the missed opportunities if any, during the 20th century. Are we on the right track? Or perhaps in the grand maze of the unknown, have we somewhere missed the right track and are now approaching a dead end? In all branches of applied sciences, our progress and achievements have been tremendous. But in theoretical Physics, which had been once regarded as Mother of all sciences, the situation is quite grim. Today the best talent, the cream of our youth no longer finds it attractive to choose a career for doing fundamental research in Physics. Why? Is it that at the beginning of 21st century, the fundamental research in Physics is no longer that challenging a job as it was at the beginning of 20th century?
Throughout the 20th century, Physicists have occupied themselves with working out Quantum Mechanics and Relativity in all their implications. In the process Physics has absorbed mathematical ideas and notions of increasing sophistication and abstraction. The Particle Physics too has been pushed into mathematical abstraction to the limit. Today, ‘Unification’ is the theme, the backbone of modern physics. But the meaning of Unification, in this context, is the search for some grand mathematical structure, which could link the mathematical description of all separate phenomena. The mathematical structures describing unification have certain elegance and power. It is remarkable that physical interactions so evidently different as the weak, electromagnetic and strong forces can be made to appear as different aspects of the same thing. Quoting David Lindley from his book The End of Physics, "The achievement of grand unification is a mathematical tour de force. But is it any more than that? Does it lead to prediction and test in the traditional way? Are Physicists truly laying bare the fundamental laws of nature in these overarching mathematical schemes, or is the beauty of unification entirely in the eyes of the beholders?"
The tragedy of the 20th century, I suppose, is the gradual shift in our focus from the physical reality to the abstract mathematical formulations, which are supposed to describe physical reality. The quest for some grand unified theory, no longer implies a quest for some fundamental theory that could fully explain separate phenomena of physical reality, which could enable us fully understand and visualize all aspects of physical reality. In my opinion the community of Physicists in general, appear to have been steadily indoctrinated into believing that due to complexity of physical reality, we can not even demand deeper meaning, deeper understanding and mental visualization of the basic phenomena in quantum mechanical world. For example we are made to believe that the interaction between two electrons takes place through the mutual exchange of ‘virtual’ photons; but we are prohibited from demanding any meaning, deeper understanding or mental visualization of such virtual particles, or of such exchange interaction phenomenon. Even in most simple case of 1s orbital in Hydrogen atom, we are made to believe that the angular momentum of the 1s electron about the proton is zero, that the electron in 1s orbital gets ‘spread’ or ‘distributed’ in a sort of spherical symmetry around the proton. Further, we are prohibited from attempting to mentally visualize the orbital motion of the electron around the proton. This sort of mass hypnotisation of the Physicists in general is so complete that they don’t even listen to or pay any heed to any alternative point of view.
Modern Particle Physics is, in a literal sense incomprehensible. The most recent speculation of the theoretical physicists is that elementary particles are not particles at all but vibrations of tiny loops of quantum mechanical strings, wriggling around in twenty-six dimensional space. Again quoting David Lindley, "Even within the community of particle physicists there are those who think that the trend towards increasing abstraction is turning theoretical physics into recreational mathematics, endlessly amusing to those who can master the techniques and join the game, but ultimately meaningless because the objects of the mathematical manipulations are forever beyond the access of observation and mental visualization."
As a consequence of our shift in the focus from the physical reality to the mathematical description of physical reality, we have inadvertently adopted certain abstract mathematical concepts into our physical worldview. For example the concepts of virtual particles, of particles with negative energy content, of physical singularities like infinite mass concentrated in zero volume associated with the notions of big bang and black holes, might have actually come up as abstract mathematical concepts. Instead of rejecting these concepts as physically invalid, these have been erroneously adopted into our physical worldview. At the top of it, experimental proofs and validations of such physically unacceptable mathematical concepts are often claimed. Invariably the results and conclusions of all experiments have to be drawn through interpretations of the observations by making use of some generally accepted theories or assumptions. Often, when the sophisticated experiments confirm or validate some physically invalid concepts, the fault is not in the observations or the techniques but with the interpretation of those observations. While announcing the results of all sophisticated experiments, the underlying theory or assumptions are never highlighted. For example, the current belief that the universe is continuously expanding, is said to be experimentally verified and well established. Actually what is observed in the experiments is the red shift in spectral lines. The crucial assumption made while interpreting the red shift observation to mean expanding universe, is that the relative separation velocity of the source and the observer causes the said red shift. However, what is not highlighted is the fact that the red shift in spectral lines could also be caused by loss of photon energy during its passage through vast expanses of the universe. The photon could lose a small fraction of its energy through scattering off Hydrogen atoms or Neutrinos or by virtue of its passage through stellar gravitational and electromagnetic fields.
Agreed that fundamental research does require a lot of mathematical support. Also agreed that the mathematics supporting the fundamental research in Physics, may be highly complex and highly abstract. But the end results of the entire complex mathematical processing, must be applicable to the Physics, must be applicable to the physical world and hence must come within the grasp of human mind and mental visualization. Just as a complex computer program may be written in a low level coded language or even in machine language but the efficacy of the program will be tested by its end results, which must come within the grasp of the user and must be expressed in some user-friendly language. If as an end result of a most sophisticated program we see some strange characters on the screen, we say that the program needs to be ‘debugged’. We never say that the program has produced some abstract results, which cannot be fully grasped by the human mind. In that sense we might say that most of the abstract mathematical Physics today needs to be ‘debugged’!!
Other
Important Articles
§
Ether, Vacuum or
the Elastic Continuum
§ Permittivity and Permeability Constants of Vacuum
§ What If the Permittivity and Permeability of Vacuum were Zero
§ Physical Theory and Mathematical Models
§
Time is a Relative Measure of Change
§ GTR is founded on a Conceptual Mistake
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