I've mentioned before in this blog the book Lost in Math, by Sabine Hossenfelder, a prominent German particle physicist. The idea behind the title of the book is that contemporary physics is too wedded to the beauty and symmetry (even "supersymmetry," like the kind of symmetry that comes from the planet Krypton) and inadequately concerned with the search for data. It may be that physicists have to accept ugly math that does nothing more beautiful than matching the data, in order to move forward. Today I come back to Hossenfelder and her book in order to quote one particular passage, about Karl Popper. It seems plain enough, but in the context of her broader point there is some ambiguity to it. For now, I'll just provide the quote: "What I learn [at a certain conference/workshop she attended] is that Karl Popper's idea that scientific theories should be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it's a philosophy that n...
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Happy New Year! On Christmas Eve Day, I mentioned a recent book, Why String Theory? by Joseph Conlon. I said I'd discuss its philosophical significance this week. Here we are, at the start of a new year, and we can start 2017 off with something weighty. String theory is often presented as a "theory of everything" or ToE. This is both its charm and (in many minds) its downfall. These fundamental strings winding through X dimensions might allow for a geometrical description of all the particles, and the forces, enumerated in modern physics courses. The bestiary of different subatomic particles has become confusing and crowded -- the strong demand of human minds for conceptual order requires some clean-up work there. As to forces, the "force left out" is always gravity. The other forces -- strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, have all made their peace with one another through the magic of quantum mechanics. Gravity remains aloof. One big goal of ...
I'm feeling lazy, in a Christmas-holiday sort of way, so today I'll just observe that Physics World has named its 2016 Book of the Year. It's a book with a philosophical dimension, about which I will say something if I'm feeling more ambitious next week at this time. The winner: Why String Theory? by Joseph Conlon. For now, I'll just insert a cartoon about hinting gently at the sort of skepticism against which string theory requires a defense.
The Nobel Prize went to two physicists honored for the discovery that neutrinos have mass . Their discovery was a major contribution to what is now known as the "standard model" of the elementary particles. Until their turn-of-the-millennium work, the widely shared opinion was that neutrinos (like photons) don't have mass. This consensus had led -- don't ask me why-- to a further consensus on how many of them ought to be detectable on earth. And that, in turn led to some confusion because the quantities actually detected were much smaller than what they 'should' be. So these are experimenters who managed to clear up a split between other experimenters and theorists. The theory had to be revised so that the experimental results, the actual quantity detected, could be accommodated, and their work showed how that could be done. A victory for pragmatism in science, the hospitable homeland of pragmatism. I enjoy this time of year for a number of reasons, n...