Energy is transformed into mass, the kinetic energy of colliding particles giving rise to new particles. This is effectively what is happening at the LHC.
.. the LHC was also designed to reveal new physics. The LHC remains in operation, and, in the wake of the Higgs discovery, expectations remain high for the detection of unknown and unexpected phenomena.
.. Another avenue of inquiry is the search for additional dimensions. The idea that the world could be composed of more spatial dimensions than the three we experience is not new. It was first explored in an unsuccessful attempt to unify James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism and Einstein’s theory of general relativity.4 The advent of string theory, which predicted the existence of at least nine dimensions, led to renewed interest in the idea.
.. From a pragmatic standpoint, supersymmetry has an immense advantage: it explains the mass of the Higgs boson. In the absence of supersymmetry, the mass of this boson should be immense.
.. String theory and supersymmetry, now and forever, one and conceptually inseparable.
.. Supersymmetry offers precise predictions for the existence of heavy, stable, and weakly interacting particles; it is the most widely accepted view regarding the composition of dark matter.
.. “Your ideas are beautiful, coherent, and attractive, but they are also wrong.”
.. The standard model was created in the 1970s and some physicists have never had the experience of confronting their work directly with new data.
- The first option is to assume that there exists an as-yet-undiscovered natural mechanism that can explain the values of the fundamental constants.
- Good luck is the second option. Among all the possible laws, we have come across the nearly unique solution leading to a complex universe. This is a less than convincing argument.
- The third option is a universe in which the fundamental constants are reinterpreted as environmental parameters. Just as our local environment is not representative of the observable universe as a whole, the laws of nature, or the fundamental constants, might not be representative of the universe beyond what we can observe. As complex organisms, we find ourselves, naturally enough, in a specific zone where things just work out.
.. Alan Guth and Andrei Linde’s theory of cosmological inflation is today widely accepted, and generically predicts the emergence of bubble universes. If these bubble universes contain any dynamic fields at all, then they may well contain different effective laws.
This multiverse has been predicted by some of the theories commonly used in cosmology.
.. The multiverse is predicted by the simplest of our theories. In order to make it disappear, it is necessary to repair to theories that are far more complicated. Should we seek simplicity in the theory, or in the world?
.. The existence of the multiverse is a consequence of well-defined and testable theories. If they are testable, they must be falsifiable.
Quantum Questions Inspire New Math
In order to fully understand the quantum world, we may have to develop a new realm of mathematics.
Mathematics might be more of an environmental science than we realize. Even though it is a search for eternal truths, many mathematical concepts trace their origins to everyday experience. Astrology and architecture inspired Egyptians and Babylonians to develop geometry. The study of mechanics during the scientific revolution of the 17th century brought us calculus.
.. The bizarre world of quantum theory — where things can seem to be in two places at the same time and are subject to the laws of probability — not only represents a more fundamental description of nature than what preceded it, it also provides a rich context for modern mathematics. Could the logical structure of quantum theory, once fully understood and absorbed, inspire a new realm of mathematics that might be called “quantum mathematics”?
.. Ideas that originate in particle physics have an uncanny tendency to appear in the most diverse mathematical fields. This is especially true for string theory.
.. in the quantum world everything that can happen does happen.
.. Mirror symmetry illustrates a powerful property of quantum theory called duality: Two classical models can become equivalent when considered as quantum systems, as if a magic wand is waved and all the differences suddenly disappear. Dualities point to deep but often mysterious symmetries of the underlying quantum theory. In general, they are poorly understood and an indication that our understanding of quantum theory is incomplete at best.
.. A succinct way to summarize that theory is that mass tells space how to curve, and space tells mass how to move.
.. It is comforting to see how mathematics has been able to absorb so much of the intuitive, often imprecise reasoning of quantum physics and string theory, and to transform many of these ideas into rigorous statements and proofs.
Einstein and Quantum Theory
Albert Einstein famously rejected parts of the theory of quantum mechanics. His skepticism is understandable. The theory, after all, said that a single subatomic particle could occupy multiple places at the same time. A particle could move from one location to another without traversing the space between. And multiple particles that had previously interacted and then separated by vast distances, could somehow “know” what each other was up to. It didn’t seem to align with what scientists thought they knew.
.. Even though Einstein was never fully satisfied by it, quantum mechanics is now generally accepted as the fundamental way of the world.
.. One of the hard-to-get-your-head-around concepts at the heart of quantum mechanics is called superposition. Simplistically, superposition is the idea that something can be in multiple states at the same time. A single electron can have both up and down spin, a single photon can travel both this path and that one, and, conceptually, a luckless cat in a box can be both dead and alive. Until you check, that is. Once the electron’s spin is measured, or the photon is tracked, or the box lid is lifted, the system goes classical and assumes either one state or the other.
The lifting of the lid causes decoherence—another oddity of the quantum world. For a system to exist in a state of superposition it must not interact with its environment at all, including observers or scientific instruments. The loss of any information from the system to the environment—the lid being lifted and the condition of the cat becoming known—causes the system to decohere.
.. Particles that interact with one another enter into a strange relationship with one another. This relationship, known as entanglement, is preserved as long as the two particles remain sheltered from the rest of the environment, lest their entanglement decohere.
“Schrodinger’s Immigrant” Is No Paradox: Welfare and Work Go Together in Today’s America
the American welfare system has become increasingly focused on buttressing low-wage workers rather than supporting non-workers. Put more simply, welfare and low-wage work go together. Just as natives with low levels of education and large numbers of children are apt to consume welfare, immigrants with those same characteristics are also likely to be on welfare. A strong work ethic does not change this reality.
To repeat, immigrant-headed households consume more welfare than native households not because they don’t work, but because they have fewer skills on average and, as a consequence, have lower earnings. As long as we pursue a policy that encourages low-skill immigration, many more “Schrodinger Immigrants” will come across our borders.