If y've read Wilczek's book (comment on ideas of chapter 8)

[Fra]

So my personal attitude is bifurcated---I keep two contradictory perspectives. The evolutionary origins of physics law, including possibly symmetry, is extremely interesting but on the other hand I think it is right for people to be working in the presentday context, working from the bottom up, with whatever astronomical and collider data becomes available.

In the larger sense I certainly share your dual view. As I see it, those who do the first-line processing new data simply has no other choice but to do that using the currently best theories (since this is somehow our measuring-stick). Or even in an inside model where the physicists are players rather than just outside observers(which we are), there are parts of the evolving model that represents that currently most accepted expectation, and this is relative to the data is judged.

Then the other view is the work of the theorists, by which I mean no those who make first like computations, but those who has generate hypothesis for testing, and those who use the data of compliance of deviation from first line experiments with current models to come up with a modified model (ie how to EVOLVE the measuring-stick).

One additional vague thought. In the two Smolin videos, he argues that cosmology is qualitatively different from studying subsystems where there can be a classical outside observer. He argues that therefore, because of the qualitative difference, we need a different understanding of physical law (if we consider the universe as a whole rather than an isolated piece of it.) Rovelli has a relational QM perspective, where the separation between the observer and the observed is not so sharp. For him, I don't think quantum cosmology is qualitatively different. For him, this may blunt the force of Smolin's argument.
I'm not sure how important that is, however.

I am totally onboard with Smolin on that argument. However, I am willing to take it one step further. Not only does this argument IMO apply to cosmology, it might applies to particle physics, if you consider that the point of view of say a proton looking out into the big world, is not totally unlike our human-cosmology perspective *informationwise* since a proton can not hold as much information about it's environment as a human Earth based lab can. This is the beauty I see in evolving law, the same principle can apply to particle physics as well, if you picture the inside-view, of these "miniature observer". This is why I am thinking in terms of "scaling physical law", what exactly happens. And is there simply a LIMIT to the complexity of LAW that a simplest possible observer (say the "elementary particles") can RELATE to? IF so, that's simply one nice inside view of "unficiation" right? So the question of unification isn't what laws there ARE, but what laws that becomes distinguishable to the observers that are STABLE at the excessively high energies of unification?

I also think the spirit of rovelli's RQM belongs to this context. The first time I read it, I was very impressed by his reasoning. But what he makes out of it, is I think not perfect. Or if it is, it could be that I simply doesn't see it.

I like the common denominator of Rovelli and smolin, but Smolin focuses very hard on the cosmological scale. I have not seen him make the suggestions I tried to make about, that connects evolution of law, to perspective at all scales, not ONLY the cosmology scale. And therefore evolution of _observable law_ should logically go hand in hand with evolution of observers, which in this terminology is another way of talking of emergence of "elementary particles", and thus perhaps the link to incorporating matter.

/Fredrik

 

[marcus]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html

"It's confirmed, matter is merely vacuum fluctuations."

A year of supercomputer time at the Jülich research center.

Looks like what is confirmed is the essentially the vision of matter that Wilczek's book aims at conveying.

The general idea of matter consisting of vacuum fluctuations reminded me of a passage in The Lightness of Being that starts around page 91.

Technically (it's not the quite the same as determining hadron masses!) it's about the formation of a chiral symmetry-breaking condensate. Technically sigma mesons which he calls Q Qbar pairs. The passage begins with a kind of thought experiment, or at least an interesting "What-If" gambit.

What if you could completely clean out a patch of space? Then he presents the idea that the empty space would have an explosive potential to actually liberate energy by bringing Q-Qbar pairs into existence. Because the quark masses are small and so the energy cost of realizing them can be LESS than the binding energy released as they form what he calls "little molecules".

Have a look on page 91 and see if you understand it better than I do. I think it is a central message of the book, and raises nagging questions. He corroborates this puzzling paradoxical story on page 93 by referring to experiments at the Brookhaven RHIC (relativistic heavy ion collider). He says that a collision of two gold nuclei creates a fireball with enough energy to clear out a small region, hot enough to evaporate the condensate---and then we get to witness the aftermath, as the region cools back down and the Q-Qbar condensate forms in it again.

==============
Here are some links related to the news about the successful determination of hadron masses. The point is that the three quarks that make up a proton have themselves very little mass. Most of the proton's mass is somehow the result of the interaction of those three component quarks.
http://www.durr.itp.unibe.ch/

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;322/5905/1224
Ab Initio Determination of Light Hadron Masses
S. Dürr,1 Z. Fodor,1,2,3 J. Frison,4 C. Hoelbling,2,3,4 R. Hoffmann,2 S. D. Katz,2,3 S. Krieg,2 T. Kurth,2 L. Lellouch,4 T. Lippert,2,5 K. K. Szabo,2 G. Vulvert4

"More than 99% of the mass of the visible universe is made up of protons and neutrons. Both particles are much heavier than their quark and gluon constituents, and the Standard Model of particle physics should explain this difference. We present a full ab initio calculation of the masses of protons, neutrons, and other light hadrons, using lattice quantum chromodynamics. Pion masses down to 190 mega–electron volts are used to extrapolate to the physical point, with lattice sizes of approximately four times the inverse pion mass. Three lattice spacings are used for a continuum extrapolation. Our results completely agree with experimental observations and represent a quantitative confirmation of this aspect of the Standard Model with fully controlled uncertainties."

1 John von Neumann–Institut für Computing, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron Zeuthen, D-15738 Zeuthen and Forschungszentrum Jülich, D-52425 Jülich, Germany.
2 Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Gaussstrasse 20, D-42119 Wuppertal, Germany.
3 Institute for Theoretical Physics, Eötvös University, H-1117 Budapest, Hungary.
4 Centre de Physique Théorique (UMR 6207 du CNRS et des Universités d'Aix-Marseille I, d'Aix-Marseille II et du Sud Toulon-Var, affiliée à la FRUMAM), Case 907, Campus de Luminy, F-13288, Marseille Cedex 9, France.
5 Jülich Supercomputing Centre, FZ Jülich, D-52425 Jülich, Germany.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;322/5905/1198
The Weight of the World Is Quantum Chromodynamics
Andreas S. Kronfeld

"Ab initio calculations of the proton and neutron masses have now been achieved, a milestone in a 30-year effort of theoretical and computational physics."
Theoretical Physics Group, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL 60510, USA.

 

[gpitynski]

In chapter 19 he makes this note that I found to be quite amusing and made me smile while reading it, but also quite deep statement that I think is a hint that he has some deeper visions that really trace down to the scientific method. This is also in line with his datacompression analogy of "profound symmetry".

"We succeeded in producing a theory that was not just falsifiable but outright false. Very scientific, says Karl Popper. But somehow, we are not left feeling gratified"
-- F. Wilczek, p183, The lightness of beeing

I feel a connection here to his vague idea of thruthification, as a kind of more "contructive" version of falsification. It seems closely related to what I have called the "logic of revision or correction". He seems to suggest, to which I totally agree, that some more focus should be not only on "falsifiable hypothesis generation" but on the deeper mechanics for evolving a falsified hypothesis into a new hypothesis. I think this is what Wilczek calls truthification. But the not is short, so perhaps is emphasis is not too strong.

/Fredrik

what's actually a very interesting idea...truthification I have to use this concept with my colleagues.

 

[MTd2]

I will post little by little abouty my thoughts regarding his book.Alright, after all this time, I finally finished reading this book. As I said elsewhere, I was turned down because it seemed this books was aimed at a general public and it didn't have any mathematical insight. Because of this, I delayed to start reading it for a long time. But last week I started with that and I finished today.

Thinking about chapter 8 and Appendix B made me thought that Wilkcez could have speculated much more of cosmology. For example, he didn't think of finding an analog for the superconductor condensate in gravity.

Given the low coupling constant of gravity, I would expect a really low temperature for a gravity condensate. Perhapes that is the event horizon? That is, the eveng horizon is the boundary of a gravity condensate media, and behind it, gravity would be a low range force and graviton would give rise to a similar particle with mass. Call that eventon. Given that the graviton has is 2 spin particle, perhaps it would give rise to some weird eventon particles, that is, massive Eventons, with integer or half integer spins, =<2.

 

[Fra]

Hello Mtd2, I'm sorry about your dissapointment! I hope I'm not guilty of "hyping" the book.

I agree the book is definitely a non-technical. I've been in a period where I read up on a number of different people, both more techincal papers but also some popular books. My main reason to read these books is a very specific one: to try to extract the reasoning used. And sometimes for this task, some of the more philosophical style writings are more revealing, that is a condensed technical paper. Technical papers containing say mathematical deductions are usually making use of an implicit reasoning, that is often not question in that particular paper, for good reasons. During this mission, lack of mathematics does not always strip out the information.

From my point of view, all mathematical model make sense withing a choice of reasoning, or an abstraction of physics. Without accepting that, the mathematics loose contact with reality. Take string theory as a good example, if you find the basic principles of string theory convincing and plausible, then to analyse possible mathematical implications will be very interesting. But if you do not, then the technical papers that are conditional on the foundations, come out as so speculative that you might think it's not worth the time reading.

I have personally spent a lot of effort on the conceptual foundations the last year, which has motivated my strong interest in choice of reasoning and abstractions in physics, more so than what the reasoning results in. This is why I think wilczeks view and comments on symmetry, is the most revealing, because it's somehow one of the main abstractions in the standard model. He doesn't IMO present in clear any novel views, but it's nontheless always interesting to see how some of the big names reason. This is in the same spirit I really enjoy some of the old writings of dirac. The logic is clear, clear enough to both show the virtues and the flaws of the reasoning. And the significance of the choice of reasoning on the development of theories.

/Fredrik