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I found this fascinating story The Fundamental Constants Behind Our Universe at medium.com's "Starts with a Bang" column. Ethan Siegel posits:
But the Universe itself experiences continual growth, constant change, and new experiences all the time, and it does so spontaneously.
And yet, the better we understand our Universe — what the laws are that govern it, what particles inhabit it, and what it looked/behaved like farther and farther back in the distant past — the more inevitable it appears that it would look just as it appears.
[...] We’d like to describe our Universe as simply as possible; one of the goals of science is to describe nature in the simplest terms possible, but no simpler. How many of these does it take, as far as we understand our Universe today, to completely describe the particles, interactions, and laws of our Universe?
The answer? "Quite a few, surprisingly: 26, at the very least." He then goes on to explore what these are and how they are computed.
Sadly, we don't know enough to be able to predict everything. As the article notes, there remain problems with explaining CP violations, matter-antimatter asymmetry in our Universe, cosmic inflation, and what dark matter actually is.
Separately, but related: many years ago I came upon a site that provided interactive exploration of the scale of things in the universe from Planck length on up to the the visible universe. (And, no, it was not powersof10.com) I have a niece who is curious about such things and I would love to share such a site with her. Sadly, I can no longer locate a link. Any suggestions?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday February 08 2015, @03:32PM
Maybe there just are 25 and there's nothing to discover unifying them or expressing one in terms of the others.
There's an interesting historical analogy with Euclid's five postulates where a heck of a lot of human brain power was burned trying to express the fifth in terms of the first four, never got much of anywhere. I think Peano's axioms work the same way, there's five, not six, not four, just deal with it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 08 2015, @03:55PM
Actually, it got us through non-Euclidean geometry and Riemannian geometry all the way to General Relativity.
If people had never put thought into that axiom, they probably never would have recognized that it can make sense to assume that this axiom simply does not hold.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday February 08 2015, @05:03PM
Well, yeah, the analogy breaks down in that I shouldda specified traditional plane geometry. The analogy of non-plane geometry would be some kind of multiverse imaginings, I guess.
(Score: 2) by boristhespider on Sunday February 08 2015, @11:11PM
Or, as Maxwell Demon said, general relativity. Come to that, if you ever try to do geometry on the surface of a sphere, you're violating one of Euclid's principles. The maths to do that only came because people attacked it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheLink on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:05PM
The 25 fundamentals don't appear to cover "chocolate", that is to say the subjective experience of it (nor many of the different things it means to different people).
In theory a universe with those 25 fundamentals and our known laws of physics does not require[1] the existence of consciousness nor "chocolate" and other subjective experiences (Qualia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia [wikipedia.org] ). I cannot prove to others consciousness exists and yet I know for sure it exists.
Some scientists think consciousness is a fundamental or even universal: http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/consciousness-as-fundamental-building-in-the-universe/ [scienceandnonduality.com]
[1] You could in theory have a simulation of the universe with all these fundamentals and laws and there isn't a need for consciousness to exist is there? But in this universe it somehow exists. If you did the simulation with pen and paper (or with a bunch of rocks: https://xkcd.com/505/ [xkcd.com] ) would consciousness still be emergent?
Or am I the only conscious person in this universe and the rest of you aren't and are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:42PM
I cannot prove to others consciousness exists and yet I know for sure it exists.
Can't overlook self deception as a possible failure mode of the argument.
As far as memes go your assumption is invalid as it seems to be an epidemic meme, its hard to find an individual self reporting as uninfected, and it mostly seems to be transmitted by speech, so obviously somebody is telling some persuasive stuff about it somewhere...
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Sunday February 08 2015, @07:54PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @08:43AM
My own consciousness is the only thing I can be 100% sure exists. Can't be as sure of everything else.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 08 2015, @03:45PM
From the article:
The claims in parentheses are unsubstantiated. Here's how the sentence should correctly read:
Note the "up to now" and "so far" bits.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:32PM
I would argue we have found a first principle. In simple terms, the only piece of reasoning about a thing that does not rely on any other knowledge or assumptions is this: a thing does exist or it does not. They are mutually exclusive and defined by relation to one another. A thing exists merely because it is not counted among existence. The inverse is also true. No thing itself is or is not alone. A thing is merely a relation. All of existence and nonexistence is a matter of compounding those relations between these two states.
(Score: 3) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:44PM
Now please calculate from your "existence principle" the masses of the elementary particles. Because that was what the quoted sentence was about.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 08 2015, @10:45PM
How does that refute the point? The original quote stated that we do not have a first principle. One was shown. By stating that everything has not yet been derived from it does not refute the point. It is like because you do not know everything you have clearly not ever been born.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday February 09 2015, @06:40AM
No, it didn't. You should urgently improve your reading comprehension. Start with the meaning of the word "such".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @03:16PM
Just because a thing does not do everything you want it to do, does not mean that it does not exist. Ad hominem on your part while believing you are on the intellectual high ground belies your insecurities.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 08 2015, @10:19PM
"Nothing unreal exists" --Kiri-kin-tha's first law of metaphysics
(Score: 5, Funny) by Ryuugami on Monday February 09 2015, @05:39AM
"Nothing unreal exists" --Kiri-kin-tha's first law of metaphysics
Pure Quake propaganda. Unreal exists, there are even Tournaments in it.
If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday February 08 2015, @04:00PM
CERNLIB is a colossal FORTRAN library along with a bunch of executables such as PATCHY, is a kinda sorta cross-platform clone of IBM's JCL.
Every law of physics other than general relativity - gravity, loosely speaking - is in CERNLIB somewhere, yet despite having spent decades wandering its Gordian labyrinth, I have yet to actually find any.
I spent seven weeks coming to grips with CERNLIB in the Summer of '93, when I scored a DEO grant to go to St. Genis (the French side of CERN) to do some of the data analysis for UCSC's Clem Heusch' search for non-conservation of Lepton number (I'll explain that later - I'm tired).
Then four days to write my actual FORTRAN source, in the form of a single PATCHY patch, then three days to crunch my numbers.
I had all the graduate students - I was still an undergrad - and postdocs look at my source. They were all completely floored by its pristine clarity.
"The reason Physics software is so difficult," I asserted angrily, "IS THAT YOU PHYSICISTS MAKE IT DIFFICULT!"
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday February 08 2015, @11:00PM
"Every Law of Physics Other Than General Relativity" is commonly known as the Standard Model.
That's what TFA is about; CERNLIB numerically models reality, starting in part with all those fundamental constants - speed of light, charge and mass of the electron &c.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @10:00AM
As
Modpoints --> morpinoins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by blaze on Sunday February 08 2015, @04:05PM
http://htwins.net/scale/ [htwins.net]
Is that a link you want?
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday February 09 2015, @02:39AM
That is what I was looking for -- thank-you! And... they have an updated version, Sequel! [htwins.net]. which seems closer to what I remember visiting years ago!
Any other suggestions or recommendations?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gnuman on Sunday February 08 2015, @05:41PM
This is quite premature to start counting "fundamental constants" when we have no idea how they really fit together. The standard model may not be fundamental at all. AFAIK, Standard Model is just a periodic table of subatomic particles. To use it as some sort of counting experiment is no better than ancient Greeks assuming that everything is composed of fire, water, earth and air.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element [wikipedia.org]
Before nuclear physics, the period table was fundamental. Physics was complete! Furthermore, how certain are we that some of these "constants" aren't actually changing? Is h fixed for all time and space?
First we have to figure out how things work before we start counting any constants. Imagine an AI counting fundamental constants in its computer universe. What would it find? Would it be able to determine that there is only 2 - one and zero and only 1 fundamental operation, (eg. NOR gate)? We are an AI in some quantum-like computer. Well... so far we haven't seen far enough or small enough to scratch the surface. OK, we scuffed the surface a little.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @05:08AM
> AFAIK, Standard Model is just a periodic table of subatomic particles.
It's the model of how those subatomic particles interact as well. If you have a list of all particles and a model of how they interact, you have a model of the universe. You just need a very very big computer to calculate the probability of this or that happening.
(Score: 2, Troll) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday February 08 2015, @05:52PM
I found this fascinating story The Fundamental Constants Behind Our Universe at medium.com's -
<Peter Griffin>Done.</Peter Griffin>
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:24PM
I don't frequent or know much about medium.com. Is it a bad site?
subicular junctures
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:35PM
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 08 2015, @10:49PM
Faux intellectualism that many less-educated people fall for. Continuously presented near-truths that are absurd when looked at with competent scrutiny. Severely biased views mixed in with science to borrow authority. Yeah, it isn't so great.
(Score: 1) by stigmata on Monday February 09 2015, @01:54AM
It's quite bad. Essentially medium.com represents all that is wrong with modern web design - designed for tablets, full page width images, center justified text with huge margins leading to only a minimal amount of text on screen at the time, and constantly present footer and auto hide on scroll header both chewing up the precious little real estate left over. You're likely to wear out your mouse wheel/touchpad scrolling through their lackluster articles.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:35PM
Absolutely.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by DrkShadow on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:26PM
I recall watching a NOVA program some time ago that talked about the fundamental forces. The magnetic force and electricity are descended from the same, electromagnetic force that hasn't completely split apart at our energy level (maybe it has near absolute zero). At higher energies they interact as one force. The predictions were that at still higher energies, it would combine with the Strong(?) nuclear force, leaving us with the gravity, the weak nuclear force, and some strong-electromagnetic force. Has this theory been dismissed?
The point I'm getting at is that these things seem to _not_ be fundamental. The article talks about the fine structure constant and says,
So, has science turned into religion, and everyone is going, "Well... because!" ? This constant appears to not even be constant, just constant for our measurements, right now. Because we're not measuring anything _else_, because we're not investigating its relationship for other energyes, taking into account other laws of physics, we're taking it at that value. Did everyone forget about the highly energetic creation of the universe?
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:58PM
electromagnetic + weak, not + strong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction [wikipedia.org]
From my engineering background I always had a (probably inaccurate) gut-level feeling its like super critical water steam stables. Above a certain temp/pressure there is no dividing line between liquid and gas, and above a certain energy level no dividing line between weak + electromagnetic.
Theres a huge fixation on unified descriptions, if you think about the economic impact of electromagnetism, its pretty motivational. Then again I can't think of any economic activity related to electroweak unification, so why there is a belief that a GUT would have any practical engineering results is illogical.
If you'd like to see a far out interpretation of the FSC go searching for Noyes work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-string_physics [wikipedia.org]
Also the FSC wikipedia has innumerable numerological results matching the experimental result, so all you gotta find in a theory (assuming its not random constant) is a formula that when plug and chugged happens to fit the form of the numerological discovery (I like that one involving natural logs and exponents of 137)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:59PM
The electromagnetic force is unified with the weak force to the electroweak force. That theory has not been dismissed. I'm no particle physicist, so I cannot say for sure, but I guess the fine structure constant is still a parameter (you can probably replace the parameter set with another one not directly containing alpha, but that would not save you any constant).
The function alpha(E) contains a constant which equals alpha(0). That's like the function f(x) = x+b contains the constant b, and f(0)=b. So f is not a constant, but the value of f(0) is a constant, namely b.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by boristhespider on Sunday February 08 2015, @07:05PM
"Has this theory been dismissed?"
No.
What you're faintly remembering is the unification of forces. There are four known forces that are held to be fundamental -- gravity, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear and the strong nuclear forces. The electrical and magnetic forces are unified at all energy scales. This is very clear when you phrase it relativistically; the easiest way of dealing with electric and magnetic fields is to absorb them into a single object (known as the "Faraday tensor" -- at rest in a flat spacetime, it's effectively a matrix with time and space along both axes, with the diagonal zero, the three components of the electric field along the time line, and then the three components of the magnetic field filling in the remaining triangle). This object is the same in every coordinate system, for any observer. What changes are how much of the Faraday tensor lies along the observer's "time", and what lies perpendicular to it.
In relativity, we don't have a clear time coordinate, which is one of the fundamental tenets of the theory. Instead we can pick any "timelike" vector, which means one that's basically pointing at the future, and treat that as a time. The most immediate of those is the (4-)velocity of an observer. Using the 4-velocity to define a time, we then have a three-dimensional space perpendicular to it, like a field with a single mast sticking up in the middle of it. If one takes the Faraday tensor, which is itself the same in every coordinate system, the electric field is that part of the Faraday tensor that lies along the 4-velocity (phrased a different way, the electric field is the Faraday tensor projected along the 4-velocity). The magnetic field is extracted in a slightly more complicated way from the remaining parts.
At the level of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism is described by the exchange of "virtual" photons -- electrically-charged objects transfer these constantly, and the coupling of the objects to the photons determines the force. This formalism also relies intrinsically on the relativistic description, and is very well-defined once you accept the apparent ridiculousness of renormalising, when you say, effectively, "Well, there's this infinite sum here, right, multiplying an electron mass, right, so all I do, right, is say that that's a *bare* electron mass and that, right, the product of the infinite sum and the bare mass is the observed mass! Et voila, no infinities!" Sounds daft, and I believe it was Schwinger but it may have been Feynman who in the early days of quantum electrodynamics commented that they had profound doubts about the mathematical validity of renormalisation but that since it worked they didn't really care -- and it does work, admirably.
This formalism of electromagnetism is a quantum field theory, and was developed in the late 1940s. In the 60s and 70s there was a push to unify it with another quantum field theory, that of the weak nuclear force, a push that culminated in the Weinberg-Salam theory. At high energies, the two forces merge, and we're left with the electroweak force. The weak nuclear force is similar in its quantum description to the electromagnetic force, although at lower energy levels, since it's carried by massive particles it has a small range. There's also always been effort into unifying the electroweak force with the strong nuclear force. These are known as Grand Unified Theories and there are quite a few of them. I'm not aware of anyone who seriously doubts that the electroweak and strong forces merge at higher energies, but I also must admit this isn't my area of expertise and I can't do much to describe the resulting theories, other than that we still don't actually possess a fully convincing GUT. I do know that some of the issues are caused by the nature of the strong force, which is highly confined and, frankly, a total nightmare to work with. Unlike the force carriers in the electromagnetic and the weak theories, the force carriers in the strong theory (known as gluons) are tightly coupled, and the theory is non-perturbative. In QED we're helped enormously by the weakness of the electromagnetic coupling, which then allows us to take a horrific interaction and expand it, effectively, as a Taylor series. Pictorially, this is demonstrated by Feynman diagrams -- you have the bare interaction, then you add in single-loop corrections, then two-loop corrections, three-loop, and so on. (In reality, you don't do three-loop corrections if you can possibly avoid it. What a horrible idea. Two loops are more than bad enough.) Unfortunately in the case of the strong theory, we can't do this. Instead practically everything has to be modelled numerically, which is where the "lattice gauge theory", or in this particular context, "lattice QCD [quantum chromodynamics]", which you may have heard passing reference to comes in. All that means is that you literally introduce a lattice, describe the theory on it, and then make the lattice as fine as your hardware will allow.
Anyway. The point is that while we don't have a fully developed way to marry quantum chromodynamics with the electroweak theory, the two definitely combine. Interestingly, at higher energies it looks as though gravity should *also* combined, which is where ideas of a theory of everything, unifying all four forces, comes from. Personally I find this a bit more specious, not least because there are only two forces that extend beyond the nucleus, and of those only one of them is actually exhibited as a force -- gravity acts in every way as if it's as fictional as centrifugal forces. It's true that we can write down a classical theory of a massless, spin 2 force carrier, call it a "graviton", and immediately recover the first-order perturbation to general relativity, but the fact that no-one has ever managed to quantise the damned thing without recourse to string theory is a bit of an impediment. But I may well be wrong. Hell, string theory might be the be all and end all that people who read Brian Greene seem to think it is, though I'd be very, very surprised.
"So, has science turned into religion, and everyone is going, "Well... because!" ? This constant appears to not even be constant, just constant for our measurements, right now. Because we're not measuring anything _else_, because we're not investigating its relationship for other energyes, taking into account other laws of physics, we're taking it at that value. Did everyone forget about the highly energetic creation of the universe?"
No, not at all. I think you've got this the wrong way round. I mentioned above that we look to higher energies and find that the electromagnetic and the weak nuclear forces should merge, and then at higher energies that force should merge with the strong, and that at higher again it looks as though it may merge with gravity. That statement is built entirely and fully on the changes in these "constants". (They should never have been called constants in the first place; the nomenclature is a hangover from a hundred years ago when no-one had reason to suspect that the fine-structure constant is not, in fact, constant; and that even Newton's gravitational constant is probably not actually constant.) They change with energy, and when you write down the detailed theory, they change in a very well-defined way. The fine-structure constant dictates the coupling of electrons to photons in quantum electrodynamics -- and its value of around 1/137 is why a perturbative approach to QED works so well. At higher energies, this quantity and a similar "constant" governing the couplings in the weak theory reach the same (still non-constant) value. At a higher energy again, this combined coupling seems to reach the same value as its analogue in the strong nuclear theory. In gravity, the place of the "coupling" is taken up by a quantity which is effectively the Newton constant, and various speculative changes to the nature of general relativity suggest -- and this one is almost, though not quite, entirely speculative -- that the Newton constant at extremely high energies will also end up lying at the same value as this GUT coupling.
We take the fine structure constant to be 1/137 because that's basically what it is. If we're working in higher-energy environments, we allow it to "run" up to its value at that energy. I can assure you that it's accounted for.
(What is quite interesting is how constants tend to appear in combination with one-another, and particularly in conjunction with the speed of light and with Planck's constant. Allowing more things than just the couplings to vary gives one a hell of a lot of leeway to seriously fuck up your physics in all-new and exciting ways.)
(Score: 3, Informative) by boristhespider on Sunday February 08 2015, @07:22PM
This figure may help
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2004/phypub4highen.jpg [nobelprize.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @01:50AM
(Score: 3, Funny) by melikamp on Monday February 09 2015, @02:13AM
(Score: 2) by boristhespider on Monday February 09 2015, @10:15PM
If there's something that I didn't make clear - which wouldn't at all surprise me - then feel free to ask someone to elaborate (or rephrase, or condense) and if it's not me there are a couple of other posters on here who are familiar with relatively high-level physics. I'd be genuinely happy to try and rephrase. I've commented before that finding a level to pitch at is pretty tough.
I'm also open about the fact that I'm a cosmologist first and a gravitational theorist second; I'm not, and nor have I ever pretended to be, a particle physicist, merely someone who probably has a bit more familiarity with the field than many others on here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by arslan on Monday February 09 2015, @05:23AM
So, has science turned into religion, and everyone is going, "Well... because!" ? This constant appears to not even be constant, just constant for our measurements, right now. Because we're not measuring anything _else_, because we're not investigating its relationship for other energyes, taking into account other laws of physics, we're taking it at that value. Did everyone forget about the highly energetic creation of the universe?
It is fundamental to the existing paradigm, when that paradigm changes or proves to be wrong, I'm sure the science and all its fundamental claims will change as well. That may be a fundamental difference between science and religion.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 08 2015, @11:22PM
The universe is really quite to explain and predict. Everything in it exists solely to fuck with me.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by redneckmother on Monday February 09 2015, @01:56AM
no... 42!
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @08:10AM
So you think we need 1405006117752879898543142606244511569936384000000000 constants?