The Larson Research Center

The title of this blog, The Trouble with Physics, is the name of Lee Smolin’s new book, the full title of which is, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next.  This title implies that the rise of string theory and the fall of “a science” go together; that is, it seems that Smolin asserts that string theory is responsible for the lack of real progress in fundamental physics for the past quarter century.

However, the most relevant message of the book is not the failure of string theory, but the fundamental crisis in theoretical physics that the pursuit of string theory has exacerbated.  Smolin and others, like Peter Woit, whose anti-string theory book, Not Even Wrong, has just now become available in the U.S., are worried that, based on ideas coming from string theory, physicists are abandoning hope that a unique, unified, solution to five fundamental problems in theoretical physics actually exists, while disregarding, or denying, the severe impacts the implications of this thinking have on the science of physics itself.

Smolin discusses each of these five problems in the first part of his book, entitled the “Unfinished Revolution,” referring to the second major revolution in the science of physics and mathematics.  The first revolution is so ancient that it is not normally mentioned by Smolin or other physicists.  They usually just focus on the second, modern, scientific revolution, started by Planck and Einstein, which initiated a turn away from the physics of the continuum, to the physics of the quantum, at the beginning of the 20th century. 

Nevertheless the first revolution occurred when the Pythagorean secret of the square root of 2 got out and turned mathematics from the quantum of integers to the continuum of real numbers, which finally took off in a big way with the advent of the calculus, many centuries later.  While, at this point, the second revolution, that turned mankind back to the quantum, may seem unfinished to the impatient modern physicists,  maybe they should reflect on how many centuries it took to finish the first revolution, in order to put things in a better perspective.

Clearly, however, the key issue at the heart of the modern trouble with physics is not string theory per se, but rather the mystery as to how nature can be both discrete and continuous at the same time.  The modern physics of the continuum is embodied in the classical mechanics of vectorial motion, and the most erudite and exotic form of classical mechanics is found in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, while the modern physics of the quantum is now embodied in quantum mechanics, and the much heralded theories of quantum fields, and quantum colors. 

Of course, the trouble with this modern concoction of physical theory is that these two forms of physics, one continuous and one discrete, are fundamentally incompatible, and while the hope of reconciling them in string theory grows fainter in the minds of some, it nevertheless continues to soak up almost all the manpower and resources of the theoretical community, because of the influence and tenacity of those who remain optimistic that it can eventually reconcile the differences and heal the schism of modern physics.  This has led to mighty confrontation and polarization in the LST community.

Recently, Lee Smolin and Briane Green, a popular string theorist, discussed the trouble with physics with Ira Flatow, the host of the NPR series, Science Friday. After discussing, at length,  Smolin et al’s criticism of string theory’s inability to predict physical phenomena that could verify it, and the effective suppression of new ideas due to its thorough domination of academia, these gentlemen finally began to discuss the real problem. 

As Green explained how that testing the consistency in the calculations of string theory, and its consistency with the established concepts of past physics, shows that the “theory comes through with flying colors every step of the way and keeps us thinking that things are at least headed in the right direction,” Flatow turned to Smolin and asked, “Well, Lee, what would be wrong with that, if things are working like that?”

Lee’s answer is very telling, and it’s well known in the community. Essentially, it is that in spite of these favorable things that one can say about string theory, there are some very important things “it doesn’t come close to doing.” Then Lee hit the nail squarely on the head:

If you really put quantum mechanics together with the description of space, then we know, from general considerations, that the notion of space should disappear.  Just like the notion of the trajectory of a particle disappears in quantum mechanics, …the same thing should happen to space and the geometry of space.

“So far, string theory doesn’t address this very directly,” asserts Smolin, “while other approaches do,” but before he could explain this further, Flatow took a call from a lady who suggested that “thinking outside the box,” is what’s required, which distracted Smolin into stating that, while he agreed with her, he definitely feels that it has to be the trained minds of professional physicists that do the “out of the box” thinking, who “go back in the decision tree,” looking for new answers to foundational questions, because only they are prepared to readily scale the true mountain of knowledge, once the location of the highest peak in the landscape is discovered.  Whereupon Flatow interjected,

Are we at a point now, where you just have to sit and scratch your head and think, “We need some revolution, don’t we?” I mean, we need a revolution in physics, maybe we need a new physics!

Smolin’s reply revealed how difficult it is for the trained minds of professionals to think “outside of the box,” in that he referred to the need for more experiment, not clearer thinking.  “Nothing can happen without experiments,” he asserts.  Yet, surely the trouble with physics is not that there is not enough empirical data, but that there is no satisfactory explanation of the existing data from many, many experiments.  In Smolin’s view, however, the pressing need is to complete the revolution that Einstein started, by putting the existing theories together somehow, not that a revolution in existing concepts is needed that would make it possible to explain both the quantum and the continuum nature of reality in a consistent, new, way. 

Yet it is this latter meaning of “new physics” that Flatow had in mind, so he turned to Green to get his comments, and Green seemed more willing to admit that something truly revolutionary in physical concepts is needed in our conception of space and time:

I full well believe that we will, when we do complete this revolution that Lee is referring to, have a completely different view of the universe.  I totally agree with Lee, that everything we know points to space and time not even being fundamental entities…We think that space and time…rely upon more fundamental ideas…What those fundamental entities are…that make up space and time, we don’t know yet, …but, when we get there, I think that we will learn that space and time are not what we thought they are.  They are going to morph into something completely unfamiliar, and we’ll find that, in certain circumstances, space and time appear in the way we humans interpret those concepts, but fundamentally the universe is not built out of these familiar notions of space and time that we experience.

Flatow stumbled a little, trying to get his head around an idea of what this might mean in terms of changes to existing concepts, which prompted Green to state:

It would change the very notion of reality…We all think about reality existing in a region of space and taking place through some duration of time, but we’ve learned that those basic ideas of the arena of space and the duration of time are not concepts that even apply, in certain realms, and if the notions of space and time evaporate, then our whole conception of reality, the whole container of reality will have evaporated, and we’ll have to learn to think about physics and the universe completly differently.

At the LRC, we have already “learned to think about physics and the universe completely differently,” in just this way. In our work, space and time have no meaning apart from that which they have in the equation of motion.  Space is not something that can be warped, or curved. Time is not something that that can be treated like space, as if it were a fourth coordinate in a spacetime continuum.  Indeed, just as these gentlemen suspect, space and time are not regarded as fundamental entites, with their own, independent, properties, but merely as the reciprocal aspects of the truly fundamental component of the universe, scalar motion. 

Space means nothing except in relation to time, and the only known relationship of space and time is motion.  The familiar concept of space, upon which the principles of geometry depend, are the result of motion.  Discrete units of scalar motion, once they are defined, occupy definite locations relative to one another, and a set of such locations satisfies the postulates of geometry, but, without the prior scalar motion, such locations cannot be identified.

Thus, with these ideas, the concept of reality changes radically.  It changes from a concept of space and time as a container of matter, where the universe begins with a single location of infinitely dense matter and spreads out to infinity, to a concept of space and time as an eternal increase, where all we can say is that when two locations exist, one farther away than another, there is alway a third, farther out than they are, and when two events exist, one later than another, there is always a third, later than they are.

This new concept of the eternal progression of space/time, or scalar motion, as the sole component of the universe, is something completely unfamiliar, as Green predicts it will be, but Larson has shown that it is capable of leading to an astounding array of consequences that seems to explain the observable structure of the universe.  Larson was the first to discover it, and the first to investigate its consequences, but the work based on this new concept has barely commenced. 

The LRC was established to take Larson’s initial work to a new level, by engaging professional scientists and mathematicians in the task of applying the new physics.  These professionals, as Smolin points out, must have the requisite skills and training to climb the new mountain peak, discovered by Larson, but the task of convincing them that the universe of motion, unveiled by the new physics, is by far the highest peak in the physical landscape is not an easy one.  However, at the Larson Research Center, we are dedicated to accomplishing it.