The philosophies in physics

As a big week for physics comes up–a July 4 update by CERN on the search for the Higgs boson followed by ICHEP '12 at Melbourne–I feel really anxious as a small-time proto-journalist and particle-physics-enthusiast. If CERN announces the discovery of evidence that rules out the existence of such a thing as the Higgs particle, not much will be lost apart from years of theoretical groundwork set in place for the post-Higgs universe. Physicists obeying the Standard Model will, to think the snowclone, scramble to their boards and come up with another hypothesis that explains mass-formation in quantum-mechanical terms.

For me... I don't know what it means. Sure, I will have to unlearn the Higgs mechanism, which does make a lot of sense, and scour through the outpouring of scientific literature that will definitely follow to keep track of new directions and, more fascinatingly, new thought. The competing supertheories–loop quantum gravity (LQG) and string theory–will have to have their innards adjusted to make up for the change in the mechanism of mass-formation. Even then, their principle bone of contention will remain unchanged: whether there exists an absolute frame of reference. All this while, the universe, however, will have continued to witness the rise and fall of stars, galaxies and matter.



It is easier to consider the non-existence of the Higgs boson than its proven existence: the post-Higgs world is dark, riddled with problems more complex and, unsurprisingly, more philosophical. The two theories that dominated the first half of the previous century, quantum mechanics and special relativity, will still have to be reconciled. While special relativity holds causality and locality close to its heart, quantum mechanics' tendency to violate the latter made it disagreeable at the philosophical level to A. Einstein (in a humorous and ironical turn, his attempts to illustrate this "anomaly" numerically opened up the field that further made acceptable the implications of quantum mechanics).

The theories' impudent bickering continues with mathematical terms as well. While one prohibits travel at the speed of light, the other allows for the conclusive demonstration of superluminal communication. While one keeps all objects nailed to one place in space and time, the other allows for the occupation of multiple regions of space at a time. While one operates in a universe wherein gods don't play with dice, the other can exist at all only if there are unseen powers that gamble on a secondly basis. If you ask me, I'd prefer one with no gods; I also have a strange feeling that that's not a physics problem.

Speaking of causality, physicists of the Standard Model believe that the four fundamental forces–nuclear, weak, gravitational, and electromagnetic–cause everything that happens in this universe. However, they are at a loss to explain why the weak force is 10³²-times stronger than the gravitational force (even the finding of the Higgs boson won't fix this–assuming the boson exists). An attempt to explain this anomaly exists in the name of supersymmetry (SUSY) or, together with the Standard Model, MSSM. If an entity in the (hypothetical) likeness of the Higgs boson cannot exist, then MSSM will also fall with it.

Taunting physicists everywhere all the way through this mesh of intense speculation, Werner Heisenberg's tragic formulation remains indefatigable. In a universe in which the scale at which physics is born is only hypothetical, in which energy in its fundamental form is thought to be a result of probabilistic fluctuations in a quantum field, determinism plays a dominant role in determining the future as well as, in some ways, contradicting it. The quantum field, counter-intuitively, is antecedent to human intervention: Heisenberg postulated that physical quantities such as position and particle spin come in conjugate quantities, and that making a measurement of one quantity makes the other indeterminable. In other words, one cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle, or the spins of a particle around two different axes.

To me, this seems like a problem of scale: humans are macroscopic in the sense that they can manipulate objects using the laws of classical mechanics and not the laws of quantum mechanics. However, a sense of scale is rendered incontextualizable when it is known that the dynamics of quantum mechanics affect the entire universe through a principle called the collapse postulate (i.e., collapse of the state vector): if I measure an observable physical property of a system that is in a particular state, I subject the entire system to collapse into a state that is described by the observable's eigenstate. Even further, there exist many eigenstates for collapsing into; which eigenstate is "chosen" depends on its observation (this is an awfully close analogue to the anthropic principle).

[caption id="attachment_23523" align="aligncenter" width="600"] xkcd #45[/caption]

That reminds me. The greatest unsolved question in my opinion is whether the universe houses the brain or if the brain houses the universe. To be honest, I started writing this post without knowing how it would end: there were multiple eigenstates it could "collapse" into. That it would collapse into this particular one was unknown to me, too, and, in hindsight, there was no way I could have known about any aspect of its destiny. Having said that, the nature of the universe–and the brain/universe protogenesis problem–with the knowledge of deterministic causality and mensural antecedence, if the universe conceived the brain, the brain must inherit the characteristics of the universe, and therefore must not allow for freewill.

Now, I'm faintly depressed. And yes, this eigenstate did exist in the possibility-space.

The learner as far-seer

I recall a trivial incident from December 13, 2011, which was the day when the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced a possible sighting of the Higgs boson particle. It was not so much an incident as something I'm observing now: when the announcement was being made by Fabiola Gianotti, who's in-charge of ATLAS, I had to pause the live-streamed video once every few seconds to look up what she was talking about. A 20-minute-long presentation took more an hour to be understood.

The reason I remember the experience is that, more often than not, one doesn't know when the learning phase of life ends - many, like me, don't even know what comes after it if it ends. However, earlier today, when I was reading a journal article on using laser-induced plasma and the technology's application in particle accelerators, I surprised myself by understanding the entire thing without stopping even once; I could get what the authors were saying even when they were speaking only via formulae.

It was strangely dejecting because one of the most likeable things about particle physics in my opinion is its tendency to throw up previously unknown information just when we least expect it. In fact, even the one thing we thought we knew about this universe - the highest speed possible - was defied last year by some 15,000 neutrinos. And in such a scenario, when the picture suddenly becomes clear, when I can see the jigsaw puzzle board and the different empty shapes here and there waiting to be filled, it's as if I'm ready to start answering the bigger questions and leave the smaller ones behind.

[caption id="attachment_21624" align="aligncenter" width="334" caption="Clinton Davisson (left) and Lester Germer conducted an experiment since named after them - as the Davisson-Germer experiment - in 1927. Six years earlier, Einstein had won the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery that particles were discrete encapsulations of energy called quanta. In 1927, French physicist Louis de Broglie presented his thesis that all particles have a wave-like characteristic. In the Davisson-Germer experiment, the two Americans stumbled across an electron diffraction pattern where they were expecting an electron diffuse-reflection pattern while studying the surface of nickel.  This proved de Broglie's informed conjecture true."][/caption]

I feel like the depressed man whose psychiatrist suggests he witness a performance by a clown in town. The depressed man then admits he is that clown.

At this point, I see two outcomes. The first one hints that I only want to keep learning and I'm not as interested in "deploying" that knowledge usefully. That is only partly true because, hey, I don't have a particle collider in my backyard that introduces new particles into my life so I can piece the universal puzzle together better. The second outcome suggests that my knowing a lot of things - science-wise and not - is, for the most part, a product of this fear of what-will-or-won't-come-next.

The first outcome doesn't bother me much because I've discovered I like teaching. Even though I may not be using my knowledge of IC engines to fix vehicles on desolate highways, I try and ensure as many people as possible understand how such engines work and do what they want with that knowledge. The same applies for particle physics. However, in this case, the dimension of teaching acquires more weight because its capacity to be misunderstood is great: it's a developing field whose foundations are currently under fire, whose experiments are so complex that multiple governments are helping fund it, whose conclusions are so counter-intuitive that the layman and the physicist are today many perspectives apart.

The second outcome is something I learnt while writing this post. The impetus that holds my two-decade-long learning spree up is nothing but fear, a fear of the unknown. Not learning something on a given day, with me, seems like forgoing a chance to imagine something we might not physically live. It's like the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics - a.k.a. Schrodinger's cat: for as long as I don't open the box, the cat is both dead and alive, the experience is both there and not there.

Saying "I learn not because I want to" is too bland: I learn because I want to look into the darkest corners of the universe and not see something that I can't understand or gauge in some way.

The popularly perceived notion of beauty comes with inexplicability: the capacity of an entity to defy definition and/or predictability, to defy structure and exhibit a will of its own in form and function. However, the silent reminder we are everyday given that, no matter how far out into the universe we venture or how deep we probe into the atom, the laws of physics are the same is the soul of beauty. And the inexplicability I seek to defy by learning is simply understanding how the same thing that gave us the dung beetle also gave us the Carina Nebula, that the same thing that gave us the Monarch butterfly also have us black holes.

[caption id="attachment_21625" align="aligncenter" width="335" caption="This image of the Carina Nebula is composed of multiple shots taken from the Atacama Desert in South America."][/caption]

I think that's a fear I've enjoyed and enjoy having.

My kingdom for a neutrino

In 1982, when the construction for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment was given the go-ahead, physics entered a very exciting period. It promised them the answers to their biggest questions and, in the event that that didn’t happen, it promised them ample evidence to come to a conclusion of their own.

Two decades later, with the device in full operation, results are emerging, some more improbable than the rest. The project was put in place to attempt to create the conditions of the Big Bang so physicists could detect the Higgs boson. However, nobody anticipated such a thing as evidence of super-luminary travel by neutrinos.

The existence of neutrinos was first proposed by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to account for the excess mass and energy left behind after a neutron disintegrated into a proton and an electron. The first direct observation was to be made only in the 1970s, more than 40 years later. The neutrino is one of the many indivisible particles of this Universe, and is of neutral charge and very little mass. In fact, amongst all the particles that have any mass, a neutrino is the lightest. This means that according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the mass of the particle will hit infinity only when it travels at speeds terribly close to that of light. And by terribly close, I’m talking 99.9999% close.

Such neutrinos were generated by the LHC over the course of some of its experiments and sent to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy for study. Located 730 km south of the LHC and almost a kilometre under Mt. Gran Sasso, the laboratory receives the particles in a massive tank of ultra-pure water.

Once a neutrino comes in contact with a proton of a water molecule, they react to form a neutron and a positron. The positron collides with an electron, its anti-particle, to annihilate each other, releasing two gamma rays. The neutron is captured by another nucleus to release a third gamma ray. Therefore, the signature of a neutrino capture is the release of three gamma rays.

[caption id="attachment_20371" align="aligncenter" width="439" caption="The Super-KamiokaNDE experiment in Japan contains a tank of 50,000 litres of water, fit with an array of tens of thousands of photo-multiplier tubes (as above) to detect the release of energy in case of a neutrino capture. The cylindrical container has other systems in place to detect the position of a capture, too."][/caption]

At the laboratory, as scientists waited for the neutrinos to arrive and set off the reactions, they were hardly prepared when the release of the gamma rays was detected precisely 60 nanoseconds before it was due. While such a small difference might seem trivial, the implication is that the neutrinos arrived before any other kind of electromagnetic radiation did. Since electromagnetic radiations possess the fastest speed attainable in this Universe according to Einstein, the speeding neutrinos have possibly defied the greatest physicist of the last century.

Where does that leave the world of physics?

Centuries of hypothesizing and experimenting by scientists have ingrained the importance of reasoned scepticism in their minds. While the Gran Sasso National Laboratory has claimed that 16,000 such instances have been recorded and documented, they haven’t ruled out any errors. For now, physicists the world over await similar conclusions, and so confirmations, from the two other colliders capable of replicating such conditions.

One of them is the J-PARC in Japan. Located along the coast of the Tohoku prefecture, the device was damaged and unable to operate for the next 12 months, at least, by the earthquake in March 2011 in nearby Fukushima. The other collider is the Fermilab Tevatron, an atom-smasher of considerable reputation, in the USA. After close to three decades of operation, the facility is scheduled to shut down permanently on September 30, 2011.

Collaboration rather than competition seems to be the emerging mantra. The shadow of CERN is beginning to loom large on most particle physics labs, and they’re finding it difficult to compete with CERN and its flagship project. Further, in these days of ballooning fiscal deficits and bond rating downgrades in the US, funding is hard to come by for such "creamy" projects.

Unsurprisingly, physicists are prepared to wait. Why won’t they when the speed of light – a form of electromagnetic radiation – has been the definitive cornerstone of some of the most important foundations of our understanding of this Universe? By defying that limit, neutrinos have brought upon them the scrutiny of the entire scientific community.

For one, by being faster than light, neutrinos speeding toward Earth from distant stars get here before the image of the star does, making it possible for astrophysicists to peek farther back into history. Second, the particle that carries electromagnetic energy, the photon, was thought to be massless so it wouldn’t violate the theory of relativity. However, the neutrino has mass, and that means all of Einstein’s works will have to be disrobed and studied. The larger consequence of this is that almost all high-energy installations on this planet, ranging from nuclear power plants (NPPs) that power cities to radio-telescopes searching for extra-terrestrial life, become available for changes as much as at the design level.

(In an NPP, the flow of single-phase coolants in pressurized water reactors is assumed to flow not faster than the speed of light. Even if the fluid dynamics of single-phase coolants has already been modelled on luminary principles, how could there be any changes at the design level?

If the speed of the coolants can be increased even higher, then the critical discharge, i.e., the maximum flow rate permissible, will also go higher. This translates into enhanced cooling, and this obviously means that fuel rods can be made even thicker and more power could be generated.*)

Similarly, the way the world works also is not going to change since the neutrino has always been working the same way for billions of years irrespective of how we thought it worked. But what is going to change is the way we understand electromagnetic concepts. The Standard Model of particle physics, the Big Daddy of all the theories of physics, won’t have to be tweaked so much as twisted around to accommodate this yet-unsubstantiated phenomenon.

Physicists will wait, and while they wait, they’ll debate. They’ll conduct more experiments, record more data, hypothesize more, refute more, argue more, all the while hoping that the Tevatron will be fired up for one last battle, that the J-PARC will be resuscitated for a one-of-a-kind challenge. In my opinion, no overbearing modifications will have to be made to the pool of knowledge we possess regarding physics as such. Even if the neutrinos did travel at super-luminary speeds - which I highly doubt and attribute to minute measurement errors adding up to cause the spike - it won't be long before the concept of the phenomenon is quickly subsumed by the search for other even greater truths. Yes, our perspectives are going to change, but more than anything, the discovery's original role as a tool with which to discover more about nature will not.

Let's not get carried away, though. After all, disproving the greatest minds of physics in history requires a future of its own.

*On the other hand, for example, the speed at which the gravitational force acts on any body is limited to the speed of electromagnetic radiations, but that doesn't mean discovery of a higher speed in this Universe is going to change anything. It's only a role reversal at the most (although the massiveness of the neutrino is going to make a difference) because the practically achievable velocity is going to remain the same.

My kingdom for a neutrino

In 1982, when the construction for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment was given the go-ahead, physics entered a very exciting period. It promised them the answers to their biggest questions and, in the event that that didn’t happen, it promised them ample evidence to come to a conclusion of their own.

Two decades later, with the device in full operation, results are emerging, some more improbable than the rest. The project was put in place to attempt to create the conditions of the Big Bang so physicists could detect the Higgs boson. However, nobody anticipated such a thing as evidence of super-luminary travel by neutrinos.

The existence of neutrinos was first proposed by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to account for the excess mass and energy left behind after a neutron disintegrated into a proton and an electron. The first direct observation was to be made only in the 1970s, more than 40 years later. The neutrino is one of the many indivisible particles of this Universe, and is of neutral charge and very little mass. In fact, amongst all the particles that have any mass, a neutrino is the lightest. This means that according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the mass of the particle will hit infinity only when it travels at speeds terribly close to that of light. And by terribly close, I’m talking 99.9999% close.

Such neutrinos were generated by the LHC over the course of some of its experiments and sent to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy for study. Located 730 km south of the LHC and almost a kilometre under Mt. Gran Sasso, the laboratory receives the particles in a massive tank of ultra-pure water.

Once a neutrino comes in contact with a proton of a water molecule, they react to form a neutron and a positron. The positron collides with an electron, its anti-particle, to annihilate each other, releasing two gamma rays. The neutron is captured by another nucleus to release a third gamma ray. Therefore, the signature of a neutrino capture is the release of three gamma rays.

[caption id="attachment_20371" align="aligncenter" width="439" caption="The Super-KamiokaNDE experiment in Japan contains a tank of 50,000 litres of water, fit with an array of tens of thousands of photo-multiplier tubes (as above) to detect the release of energy in case of a neutrino capture. The cylindrical container has other systems in place to detect the position of a capture, too."][/caption]

At the laboratory, as scientists waited for the neutrinos to arrive and set off the reactions, they were hardly prepared when the release of the gamma rays was detected precisely 60 nanoseconds before it was due. While such a small difference might seem trivial, the implication is that the neutrinos arrived before any other kind of electromagnetic radiation did. Since electromagnetic radiations possess the fastest speed attainable in this Universe according to Einstein, the speeding neutrinos have possibly defied the greatest physicist of the last century.

Where does that leave the world of physics?

Centuries of hypothesizing and experimenting by scientists have ingrained the importance of reasoned scepticism in their minds. While the Gran Sasso National Laboratory has claimed that 16,000 such instances have been recorded and documented, they haven’t ruled out any errors. For now, physicists the world over await similar conclusions, and so confirmations, from the two other colliders capable of replicating such conditions.

One of them is the J-PARC in Japan. Located along the coast of the Tohoku prefecture, the device was damaged and unable to operate for the next 12 months, at least, by the earthquake in March 2011 in nearby Fukushima. The other collider is the Fermilab Tevatron, an atom-smasher of considerable reputation, in the USA. After close to three decades of operation, the facility is scheduled to shut down permanently on September 30, 2011.

Collaboration rather than competition seems to be the emerging mantra. The shadow of CERN is beginning to loom large on most particle physics labs, and they’re finding it difficult to compete with CERN and its flagship project. Further, in these days of ballooning fiscal deficits and bond rating downgrades in the US, funding is hard to come by for such "creamy" projects.

Unsurprisingly, physicists are prepared to wait. Why won’t they when the speed of light – a form of electromagnetic radiation – has been the definitive cornerstone of some of the most important foundations of our understanding of this Universe? By defying that limit, neutrinos have brought upon them the scrutiny of the entire scientific community.

For one, by being faster than light, neutrinos speeding toward Earth from distant stars get here before the image of the star does, making it possible for astrophysicists to peek farther back into history. Second, the particle that carries electromagnetic energy, the photon, was thought to be massless so it wouldn’t violate the theory of relativity. However, the neutrino has mass, and that means all of Einstein’s works will have to be disrobed and studied. The larger consequence of this is that almost all high-energy installations on this planet, ranging from nuclear power plants (NPPs) that power cities to radio-telescopes searching for extra-terrestrial life, become available for changes as much as at the design level.

(In an NPP, the flow of single-phase coolants in pressurized water reactors is assumed to flow not faster than the speed of light. Even if the fluid dynamics of single-phase coolants has already been modelled on luminary principles, how could there be any changes at the design level?

If the speed of the coolants can be increased even higher, then the critical discharge, i.e., the maximum flow rate permissible, will also go higher. This translates into enhanced cooling, and this obviously means that fuel rods can be made even thicker and more power could be generated.*)

Similarly, the way the world works also is not going to change since the neutrino has always been working the same way for billions of years irrespective of how we thought it worked. But what is going to change is the way we understand electromagnetic concepts. The Standard Model of particle physics, the Big Daddy of all the theories of physics, won’t have to be tweaked so much as twisted around to accommodate this yet-unsubstantiated phenomenon.

Physicists will wait, and while they wait, they’ll debate. They’ll conduct more experiments, record more data, hypothesize more, refute more, argue more, all the while hoping that the Tevatron will be fired up for one last battle, that the J-PARC will be resuscitated for a one-of-a-kind challenge. In my opinion, no overbearing modifications will have to be made to the pool of knowledge we possess regarding physics as such. Even if the neutrinos did travel at super-luminary speeds - which I highly doubt and attribute to minute measurement errors adding up to cause the spike - it won't be long before the concept of the phenomenon is quickly subsumed by the search for other even greater truths. Yes, our perspectives are going to change, but more than anything, the discovery's original role as a tool with which to discover more about nature will not.

Let's not get carried away, though. After all, disproving the greatest minds of physics in history requires a future of its own.

*On the other hand, for example, the speed at which the gravitational force acts on any body is limited to the speed of electromagnetic radiations, but that doesn't mean discovery of a higher speed in this Universe is going to change anything. It's only a role reversal at the most (although the massiveness of the neutrino is going to make a difference) because the practically achievable velocity is going to remain the same.

Philosophy and the scientific method

Philosophy's widely been called the classification of thoughts; although that seems like a simple definition, those requirements in place to ensure that it is also accessible to the principles of scientific enquiry make it a daunting and esoteric subject to pursue. While intriguing challenges central to the human nature are presented in no small numbers along the way, the latter quality has prevented it from embraced by the masses as another context within which to investigate the Universe.

At the core of the philosophical argument lies its ability to define principles—any principles—which are, in turn, what enable the classification of thoughts. Would that the Universe contained all of its information as a garble of colours and noise, the process of learning would've been substituted by the process of discovery entirely. However, the case has been demonstrably polar: there are patterns everywhere, patterns that show a remarkable similitude to each other in that they are all principled, in that they all display characteristics of endurance and not grant any incidents of epistemological construction the misfortune of stagnation as structures of the past.This is one of the foremost reasons that inquiry into these matters has proved crucial for social, economic and political progress irrespective of "germane concerns" such as ethnicity, culture or racial history.

In order to both discover and establish (or, recognise and understand) such a replicable ontology, an underlying experimental process is necessary that abides by the principles of scientific investigation and, essentially, empiricism so as to prevent the case of reductio ad absurdum as well as to be able to verify the credibility of any hypothesis without interfering with its functions.

Philosophy and the scientific method

Philosophy's widely been called the classification of thoughts; although that seems like a simple definition, those requirements in place to ensure that it is also accessible to the principles of scientific enquiry make it a daunting and esoteric subject to pursue. While intriguing challenges central to the human nature are presented in no small numbers along the way, the latter quality has prevented it from embraced by the masses as another context within which to investigate the Universe.

At the core of the philosophical argument lies its ability to define principles—any principles—which are, in turn, what enable the classification of thoughts. Would that the Universe contained all of its information as a garble of colours and noise, the process of learning would've been substituted by the process of discovery entirely. However, the case has been demonstrably polar: there are patterns everywhere, patterns that show a remarkable similitude to each other in that they are all principled, in that they all display characteristics of endurance and not grant any incidents of epistemological construction the misfortune of stagnation as structures of the past.This is one of the foremost reasons that inquiry into these matters has proved crucial for social, economic and political progress irrespective of "germane concerns" such as ethnicity, culture or racial history.

In order to both discover and establish (or, recognise and understand) such a replicable ontology, an underlying experimental process is necessary that abides by the principles of scientific investigation and, essentially, empiricism so as to prevent the case of reductio ad absurdum as well as to be able to verify the credibility of any hypothesis without interfering with its functions.

Boltzmann's brain

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="525" caption="Try to wrap your head around this one."][/caption]

Boltzmann's brain

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="525" caption="Try to wrap your head around this one."][/caption]