The Crisis in Modern Physics: Too Complicated
Applied Mathematics professor, Claes Johnson of the School of Computer Science and Communication, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden publishes a lament of the failings of modern (post-normal) physics.
We take pleasure in reproducing it here:
The last sequence of posts on Quantum Contradictions 1 – 20 gives examples of the crisis in modern physics recently described by the Perimeter Institute Director Neil Turok as follows:
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Theoretical physics is at a crossroads right now…In a sense we’ve entered a very deep crisis.
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You may have heard of some of these models…There’ve been grand unified models, there’ve been super-symmetric models, super-string models, loop quantum gravity models… Well, nature turns out to be simpler than all of these models.
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If you ask most theorists working on particle physics, they’re in a state of confusion.
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The extensions of the standard model, like grand unified theories, they were supposed to simplify it. But in fact they made it more complicated.
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The number of parameters in the standard model is about 18. The number in grand unified theories is typically 100. In super-symmetric theories, the minimum is 120. And as you may have heard, string theory seems to predict 10 to the power of 1,000 different possible laws of physics. It’s called the multiverse.
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It’s the ultimate catastrophe: that theoretical physics has led to this crazy situation where the physicists are utterly confused and seem not to have any predictions at all.
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We have to get people to try to find the new principles that will explain the simplicity.
The crisis in modern physics resulting from the confusion of modern physicists originates from the statistical mechanics of Boltzmann used by Planck in a desperate attempt to explain blackbody radiation as statistics of quanta, which led to the quantum mechanics of Bohr and Heisenberg based on atomistic roulettes without casusality and physical reality.
But blackbody radiation can be explained without statistics in a classical model subject to finite precision computation as exposed on Computational Blackbody Radiation, which is simple and therefore possibly correct in the spirit of the above.
Read more at ‘Claes Johnson on Mathematics and Physics.’
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