Paradigm Shifts

Back around about 1966 I stumbled on Thomas Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, thus shortly after it appeared (Chicago University Press, 1962). It was on the shelf of Midwest Research Institute’s Economics Library. All work stopped as soon as I opened the book. For someone who had been brought up on the cyclic nature of culture, the book was confirmation, first of all. By “scientific revolutions” Kuhn meant “paradigm shifts,” defined as major changes not only in methods but also in the world-views of various domains of science. By then I had already absorbed the notion (by way of Carl Jung’s book, Psychology and Alchemy) that practical, physical sciences—however defective in their methods—could over time transform themselves into mystical practices, indeed also going back to the physical side centuries later. Here was a book that looked at this phenomenon in some searching detail.

The book surfaced again recently while I was re-reading Carl B. Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death (State University of New York Press, 1993), one of the best surveys of this subject I’ve ever encountered. In Chapter 5 Becker discusses “A Model of Resistance and Change in the Sciences.” He notes what no doubt people of my bent have long noted with interest—namely that a paradigm shift in physics has produced a world-view that might be named, after Werner Heisenberg’s, Uncertainty. There is no there there—only waves of probability. We’re at least one Astronomical Unit beyond classical mechanics, Einstein having changed Newton’s certainties, and Quantum Mechanics having dissolved even Relativity. Quantum physics generated String Theory—in an effort to produce a theory to unify them all. But—judging by a paper Brigitte had come across titled “Is String Theory About to Unravel” by Brian Greene, in the Smithsonian (link)—string theory has produced so many endless (billions) of shapes Reality might actually have, with no hint at all which might be legitimate, that we seemed to have entered a genuine Cloud of Unknowing in physics. Thus Physics, as a science, is altogether compatible with Parapsychology.

But, as Becker points out, in Biology and Psychology, the old paradigm of materialism is still hanging in there fairly hard even if resistance is weakening, see for instance earlier posts this month of Wilder Penfield.

Now if a once practical chemistry—strictly this-worldly and trying to make gold out of silver, etc.—managed to transform itself in the Middle Ages into a occult mystical practice, I have the notion that Becker’s view, namely that the paranormal sciences will eventually establish their own legitimacy in due time, is probably correct. But the shift in paradigms, especially very big one, thus from material to psychic orientations—or back again—is rather slow, slow. It comes about one generation at a time. Therefore I won’t see the day arriving. But it’s moving at the rate of a large tectonic plate. And then we may know just a little more….

Four Quarks for Muster Mark

Came news the other day I heard on the radio out shopping that somebody had discovered a molecule-like thing with four quarks—whereas in physical reality, until recently anyway, the max was three, the minimum two, the three appearing in protons and neutrons, the two in pions and kaons in cosmic rays.

Reminded of that this morning, I went looking and found the story in a Nature press release here. The discovery was made at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing by the Belle Collaboration using a particle collider in Tsukuba, Japan.

The name of this elementary particle was introduced by Murray Gell-Mann. He chose a line from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, pleased by the number three; it is the number of quarks in every atom. The novel itself is written in the poetic wirr-warr that language is when it is heard—rather than read on paper. I’ve managed to find the actual quote (here), and it sounds to me like Mister Mark was buying beer—by the quart. But then my ears ain’t used to Irish-English:

      Three quarks for Muster Mark!

    Sure he hasn't got much of a bark

    And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.

    But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn't un be a sky of a lark

    To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark

    And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmer-

        stown Park?

    Hohohoho, moulty Mark!

    You're the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah's ark

    And you think you're cock of the wark.

    Fowls, up! Tristy's the spry young spark

    That'll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her

    Without ever winking the tail of a feather

    And that's how that chap's going to make his money and mark!

Delights me when something really new happens in physics. I might even live long enough to see someone discover the missing graviton (see this earlier post on the subject).

Enantiodromia?

Back in early 2011 (link) I wrote as follows in a post: “Long ago and far away it genuinely pleased me to encounter the word enantiodromia, a coinage by Carl Jung, derived from Heraclitus, meaning “counter-running” and used by Jung to indicate the tendency in nature, certainly in society, of things to morph into their opposites: growth becomes decline, decline eventually transforms into growth.”

Out shopping a few days ago and listening to the radio, it startled me to learn from Science Friday (1) that physicists in Germany had produced gases at temperatures lower than 0° Kelvin, thus absolute zero and (2) that anything at minus-Kelvin temperatures is actually hot.

The lead scientists are Dr. Ulrich Schneider and Dr. Immanuel Bloch. Both are active at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching (just north of Munich); Schneider is also at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Their potentially dramatic discovery is discussed on a page of the Max-Planck Society (link). Another take is presented by Science Recorder (here). To quote from the last source:

The team in Munich cleverly leap-frogged this barrier by cooling about 100,000 atoms of quantum potassium gas inside a vacuum to a few nanokelvin above absolute zero, then reversing the magnetic field surrounding it.

Tweaking the field “suddenly shifts the atoms from their most stable, lowest-energy state to the highest possible energy state, before they can react,” said physicist Ulrich Schneider, one of the project leads. “It’s like walking through a valley, then instantly finding yourself on the mountain peak.”

At normal (positive) temperatures atoms tend to occupy low energy states, while at an infinite temperature they would be equally likely to occupy all energy states. At the newly achieved negative temperatures atoms are more likely to occupy high-energy states–potentially opening the doors for new types of matter.

As so often happens in the reporting of strange discoveries, my questions are not effectively answered. Was the result achieved a consequence of measurement only? Thus due to the nature of the scales used? Or could you, to the contrary, actually boil a kettle full of water using the extraordinarily hot gases existing at “a few billionths of a Kelvin” below absolute zero? In other words, is that “heat” physical, real?

Enantiodromia certainly comes to mind. If you get ever closer to absolute anything, sooner or later it will change into its absolute opposite. One implication of this recent discovery is that at negative Kelvin entropy is reversed and therefore, burning brightly at negative temperature, the universe becomes more orderly. We haven’t by any means heard the last of this. It has all sorts of radiations, to use a pun. Dark energy may be negative. And I’m reminded here, also, of Bohm’s enfolded order, over against the unfolded order which is our visible cosmos.

Higgs' Digs

The boys—and surely also ladies—

Who run the tunnels hot as Hades

In Switzerland, a place called CERN,

Where Hadron rules and people learn

Just how matter’s put together

Has mass or is as light as feather—

The girls, I say, but most are boys,

And big colliders are their toys,

Were celebrating Peter Higgs

At their accelerated digs,

The man whose boson or whose field

They hoped, still hope, will someday yield

The necessary gravity,

Lest world becomes a cavity

Where only light-speed particles

Fly by like cyber articles;

Where things do not cohere, for mass

Is gone, was never there; and gas,

That thinnest of all stuff we know,

Would not exists. And that is so

Because if Higgs were absent from

This sphere, we cannot go or come.

There would be too much symmetry.

There wouldn’t be a galaxy.

Thank heaven therefore for the Higgs.

It surely saves our humble digs.

Not a Lot of Popularizers

1975 The Tao of Physics

1979 The Dance of the Wu Li Masters

1984 The Looking Glass Universe

1984 In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat

1988 The Symbiotic Universe

1988 A Brief History of Time

1989 Coming of Age in the Milky Way

The 1970s and 1980s produced a rash of popular books on physics. In 1994 came Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace, another book I bought along the way, but the curious thing is that string theory does not lend itself to popularization quite so much—either that or the hot air has cooled in this balloon: we don’t have a string of books on string theory; it is too evidently a theory based on pure mathematics. When one of those twin brothers goes off on a decades-long trip to outer space at speeds close to the speed of light—and returns to find the other twin an old man while he is still full of testosterone—why that’s a worthy plot. Trips into Hilbert space, a mathematical dimension, just don’t have the same sort of impact.

The less accessible a subject, the less it will be known to the public—and the more so, if it is deemed important, will it be wrapped in awe. Mathematics wins that prize hands down. I’ve been reading Morris Kline’s book, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, a Christmas gift from Brigitte—she who knows what I need. It is not an attempt at popularization, to be sure, but the closest thing we’re likely to get. It was published in 1980 by Oxford University Press and tells the (I’m not kidding) nail-bitingly suspenseful story of the history of math. As Brigitte will testify, I’ve read many, many books of which, at first, I’ve understood at most, say, twenty percent of the content. I have some of the characteristics of the junk yard dog. This book is one of them. It is my conviction that anything made by humans is accessible—if only one makes the effort to penetrate the subject. Eventually, as John von Neumann said of math, you get used to it. And after years, one fine day, we find out that it’s true. The grand old patterns of human nature appear quite clearly again, and what felt like impenetrable fog becomes the same-old. The mild reward is that, at that point, you can eventually feel the problems the great but largely unknown names (who’s ever heard of Kronecker, Borel, Lebesgue , and Baire, for instance) actually felt as real. In my own case, alas, once I’ve penetrated the actual pattern of the thing, I tend to lose interest. I’m interested in the shape of things. For me it’s all about orientation. I appreciate the work of popularizers, and almost-popularizers like Morris Kline, because they let me get there faster.

Sometimes it does take decades to get anywhere at all. It’s been a long time since I’ve first started looking into physics—a subject entirely inaccessible until one has managed at least a certain level of comfort with mathematics, which, these days, is physics. Until then a vast complex field that throws huge shadows over everything, from practical life to cosmology, has the aspect of watching an elaborate thirteenth century Japanese drama unfold, told entirely in Japanese, and all you get is the emotional toning of the harsh shouts of the samurai engaged in its battles.

Dust Bunnies

An addendum to the last post. Having to do some basement cleaning today, a thought occurred. If Maxwell, Lorentz, Einstein, and countless other physicists had expended their energies and equations on how dust bunnies form—and applied the resulting insights to the improvement of brooms—they might have benefitted me, today, a whole lot more than by thinking deeply about spacetime.

Candles in the Sky

The physicist David Bohm used to say that physicist were not physical enough. They relied too much on mathematical equations and had no, as it were, viscerally physical sense of what they were talking about. A variant of this came to mind yesterday as I first heard and then read about the 2011 Nobel Prize for physics awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt. The variant is that we interpret physical observations based on theoretical structures. But the work these gentlemen engaged in was right physical, actually. They used arrays of massively modern telescopes to observe one type of supernova activity, that associated with Ia supernovae.

The terminology here is unfortunate. We have two kinds of supernovae, 1 and 2, but these are rendered in Roman form as i and ii. In the first category, i, interests us here. Type ii are produced by large stars late in their lives. In the first category, we have three subdivisions: 1a, 1b, and 1c; the first is produced by dwarfs, the last two by massive stars. On YouTube videos we hear people talking about “one A,” but in press accounts we see Ia. But never mind. the 1a’s are all white dwarf stars to begin with, and these are always associated with another sun; each dwarf is thus one member of a binary system. Furthermore, each is the collapsed form of the bigger of the two, with immense density. Most white dwarfs are about the size of the earth but have mass equivalent to 0.6 of the sun. The 1a supernova comes into being when the white dwarf sucks the mass of its binary companion to itself. Slowly its mass increases. When it comes very close to having 1.38 solar mass, it produces an enormous nuclear explosion, the supernova of type 1a. That number, 1.38, is called the Chandrasekhar limit, named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekar who wrote a 1931 paper titled “The Maximum Mass of Ideal White Dwarfs.” The process described above is illustrated by the fabulous graphic authored jointly by NASA, the European Space Agency, and A. Field; I bring it courtesy of Wikipedia Commons (here).

The important point here is that white dwarfs never go into nova unless they reach that mass. And knowing that mass, we can calculate their brightness at peak with great precision. It is always just about the same. For this reason whenever such a supernova appears, we know how bright it must be where it is. Measuring its observed brightness with our by now stupendous instruments, we can therefore calculate how far away it is. 1a supernovae, therefore, act as a pretty reliable standard candles, thus objects of known absolute magnitude (luminosity). Knowing their observed magnitude, we can calculate their distance from us using a simple formula.

Our Nobelists looked for and found many, many supernovae of type 1a and measured their distances from us. In the absence of any kind of theory of the cosmos, this would give us a nice, clean idea how far away the most distant galaxies—those housing the 1a’s—are from us. Instead these men were greatly surprised by their findings. The most distant galaxies turned out to be much dimmer, thus much farther away, than they had expected them to be. I emphasize that word because “the model” now comes into the picture. That model, simply, is that the universe began with a Big Bang and has been expanding for 14 billion years. The expectation was that over time, the expansion would have slowed, decelerated, owing to the gravitational pull of everything on everything. Adam Riess uses the image of throwing your car keys into the air (read Big Bang). You expect the keys eventually to lose their upward energy—and to fall back down again. Instead, these keys just seemingly kept on going up. The following little graphic shows what they expected and what they actually saw.

Not to forget. The Big Bang is behind this expectation, thus a certain energetic, one-time dynamism. The Big Bang itself is based on Edwin Hubble’s observation that the farther galaxies are from us, the more red-shifted their light actually is, thus that the peaks of the light waves are farther apart. This used to be explained by saying that space was expanding and, as it expanded, it stretched the light. Today the explanation is that some kind of energy must be causing the expansion, dark energy, dark because we cannot detect it directly. And the observed red shifts—and now the unexpected dimming out of supernovae at great distances—has been interpreted to mean that the universe is mostly just that, dark energy (as I’ve had occasion to report here).

Alternative models are not even on the back burner these days. One of these might be that light gets tired as it moves, and therefore a red shift simply means tired light; hence there is no expansion. Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974), a physicist associated with supernovae, proposed the tired light hypothesis. Astronomer Halton Arp (1927-) holds “heretical” views on the red shift as well. If the red shift doesn’t always mean what Hubble thought it did, there might never have been a Big Bang. But we like the Big Bang. In the beginning, etc. Let there be Light. And having light, we now complete the picture with energetic Darkness.

The White and Yolk of the Cosmic Egg

Creation myths probably have this in common. First, they sound reasonable within their own cultures because children learn them and get used to them. As  they grow up they shrug off the odd or primitive features of the myth but retain their essence. That essence is the feeling of wonder the children had when they first heard the tale. That essence has value for life. It’s a poetic truth. Second, to people in other cultures the same creation myths will sound humorous, illogical, charming, or like some ordinary explanation wrapped in myth: motherhood, craftsmanship, kingship. If the foreign culture is wealthy and dangerous, the myth must be scorned. If the culture is backward and weak, a patronizing smile's in oder.

But do humans really have a clue? We use words like time, space, and eternity. These are sounds assigned to enigmas. Their definitions are circular. If matter produces both space and time, the child wants to know what is outside of space? And the child also insists on knowing: What happened before time began? If time began with the Big Bang, what caused that bang to bang? What’s it like to be outside of time? The child is right.

Last Friday at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory a talk revealed something old and something new. Collision experiments have seemingly confirmed a bias in nature already long a doctrine within physics, namely that particles are ever-so-slightly favored over anti-particles. As this news now reaches the laity, the press commits cosmology, as in this sentence in the New York Times today:

According to the basic precept of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

Well, the physicists already know the answer. If particles are the yolk and antiparticles the white of the cosmic egg (the one Pan Gu found himself inside “in the beginning” according to the Chinese creation myth) then there was more yolk than white. End of story.

The point here? Our myths don’t sound like myths. They sound awesome and sophisticated. But we no more explain what gave rise to the Big Bang than the Chinese myth explains how the cosmic egg came into being. We claim to understand what happened in the earliest nanoseconds of the Big Bang—an event we presume happened because the most distant stars and galaxies appear to be receding from us faster than other stars and galaxies. Yet some nearby galaxies are coming toward us, which seems odd if all things are moving away from all other things. We are amazed by the prevalence of matter over antimatter only because our theories teach us that they ought to have occurred in equal quantities. But that a Big Bang actually happened is an unprovable hypothesis.

Francis Crick, venerated in biology as Einstein is in physics, was, with James Watson, the discoverer of the structure of DNA. (Rosalind Franklin, who crucially discerned DNA’s shape, gets mention but not credit.) But Crick could not imagine how life could have originated on earth. Hence he embraced a theory of panspermia, the notion that life was seeded here from elsewhere. Where explanation fails, myth will serve.

The myths of the future will undoubtedly continue to be, like all myth, culturally sanctioned approximations—resonating with the character of the cultures that will hold them. But ours will also, in some future time, get the patronizing smile—the more so because, swallowed by the past, as we shall then be, we shall neither inspire awe nor threaten those who smile.

Swallowed by the past? Well, yes. I imagine Time to be this, this huge, monstrous Snake, its body stretching back into eternity. We live our lives in its huge maw, and all our troubles are explained because the Snake is chewing, chewing, chewing. And swallowing. And as it swallows, we slide down its slimy gullet into its infinitely huge belly, which is what we might call “the past.”

Ether

In something like 500 years we’ve replaced a theological with a mathe­matical scholasticism. The old one could be understood by a reasonably educated and diligent person; the new one requires specialized skills few have the patience to master. Furthermore, it has become difficult to check the new theology independently because the experiments that gave rise to the math are difficult (or very expensive) to reconstruct.

I often think that if I had access to the physical facts, I’d reach conclusions quite at variance with those embraced by science. Another thought is that physics posits tangible facts not because they really exist but because the equations come out a certain way. I’ve yet to read a popular book on physics in which the words persuade me. Elementary particles are supposed to be simultaneously waves and objects. A wave requires a medium like water. The water goes up and down. The cause of this motion is an invisible force. On a beach the force drives the water against the land. The damage, if any, or the rearrangement of the sand at least, is directly caused by the medium, not by the force. When a photon arrives at a screen, something tangibly lands.

My Dictionary of Physics (Penguin, 1977, p. 518) defines the wave much as I’ve defined it above, namely as the disturbance of a medium. For elementary particles, the medium itself is “space” generally and its magnetic or electrical properties particularly, the latter registering the disturbance caused by what I call a “force” and my dictionary simply labels as a “quantity.”

Based on this definition, “space” is filled with “properties” of an electro­magnetic character. Now it strikes me as peculiar to dismiss the old idea of the “ether” as nonexistent and yet to assert that “space” is filled with a “property” which has inertial behavior and is subject to ever-so-faint disturbances by light. The mysterious “field” of modern physics thus turns out to be the ether after all. The last shall be the first, the first last. The Michelson-Morely team (the pair that tested for the ether in 1877 and found it not) may someday be found right on whereas, in the not too distant future, Einstein’s relativity may be honorably retired. That sort of thing wouldn’t surprise me.