Lost in Beauty By William Lama Ph.D.
Lost in Beauty
By William Lama Ph.D.
Goddess of Beauty: Venus, Painting by Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (c. 1486), Uffizi, Florence, Italy, License: Public Domain
Some might choose to believe this story of an alien encounter. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Soon to be released top secret documents tell of the first meeting with outer space aliens, according to a CIA source. Just before dawn on the 20th of Dec. 2015, a space ship suddenly appeared on the White House lawn close to the Rose garden. The secret service cordoned off the area and quickly put up a fabric barrier to shield the ship from view. Chief of staff McDonough immediately phoned President Obama who was vacationing in Hawaii. Science advisor Tyson was instructed to meet with the visitors.
Three hours later
Tyson: (looking unsure) “3.14159…”
Alien: (looking amused) No “pi” needed. We speak your lingo. (in perfect English with a Western accent)
Howdy gents. We are from the star Vega and planet Zhi. We come in peace to visit the folks of the 3rd rock from the Sun. We would like to meet your President Obama who is able to stop the rising seas. And we would like to talk with your scientists.
Tyson: Howdy folks. I am Neil deGrasse Tyson. The President of the United States wishes to extend a warm welcome to our visitors from the star Vega in the constellation Lyra. May I ask, how many of you are in the tiny space ship? And what are your specific scientific interests?
Alien: I am Salvor and this is my colleague Rhodan. We are the only travelers as our itsy bitsy flying machine is autonomous. We understand that you are experimenting with self-driving vehicles. Ditch them; way too dangerous, except in space.
Salvor: Rhodan and I are scientists. Our civilization has closely followed the progress of human life for many centuries. The last Earth visit was in 1680 when our ancestors had the pleasure of interviewing the great Isaac Newton. His theory of gravitation finally vanquished the Ptolemaic system of epicycles that had been dominant for more than 15 centuries. We are interested to see how far you have come since that time.
Dyson: That’s great. The panel before you is composed of some of our most accomplished physicists. They will be happy to review progress and answer questions. Murray Gell-Mann will begin with a review of our Standard Model of Particle Physics which we sometimes call the “theory of almost everything.” Then Edward Witten will tell you about our most speculative theory that we call Superstring Theory. Following lunch you will meet with the cosmologists.
Gell-Mann: Greetings. Please call me Murray. I will tell you about our theory of the elementary particles and their interactions. I’ll begin with a bit of history. Since the 1950s high energy collisions in particle accelerators produced a plethora of strange new short-lived particles. This “particle zoo” contained over 30 elementary particles. Furthermore it appeared that two of the most common particles, protons and neutrons, were actually composites of smaller particles. We called these sub-nuclear particles “quarks.” (Sad to say, nobody wanted to call them “Murrays.”) By 1970 we had developed a model of particle physics which required only three forces plus the 61 elementary particles illustrated in the following table.
Source: Wikipedia
The Standard Model has 18 adjustable parameters, including six quarks and six anti-quarks. Think of it as a machine with 18 knobs.
“Three Quarks for Muster Mark.” James Joyce, “Finnegan’s Wake”
Salvor: You have 61 fundamental particles? That’s a lot. Have they all been observed?
Gell-Mann: No, not all. Nobody has ever observed an individual quark. But that’s because they always occur in groups of three, we think.
Rhodan: And you have adjustable parameters?
Gell-Mann: Yes, but the theory is so beautiful…
The beauty of the cosmos is the beauty of symmetry.
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But there is a universal measure of beauty that is related to symmetry. Faces that we deem attractive tend to be symmetrical.
Source: sciencenewsforstudents.org Source: scienceandbelief.org
This beautiful face has reflection symmetry about the vertical axis. She would look the same in a mirror. The beautiful starfish also has reflection symmetry. In addition the starfish has 5-fold rotational symmetry. If you rotate the starfish by 360/5 = 72 degrees it will look (nearly) the same, like it wasn’t rotated at all.
Beautiful theories have symmetries.
Line Segments with Golden Ratio, Author: Stannered, License: Public Domain
Amalie Emmy Noether has been called the most influential woman in mathematics. In 1915 the famous mathematician David Hilbert invited Noether to join the Göttingen University math department. He was blocked by the philologists and historians on the faculty. Hilbert responded with indignation, stating, "I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as privatdozent. After all, we are a university, not a bath house." Undeterred, Hilbert established Noether as the permanent guest lecturer in his courses. Noether’s great discovery was that things that are conserved in nature, like electric charge and energy, are connected to symmetries. The conservation laws of physics are the measurable manifestations of symmetries in the laws governing the universe.
Emmy Noether, Queen of Symmetry, Wikipedia
In 1932 Noether fled Germany for the US and was appointed to a professorship at Bryn Mawr College.
Nature is nearly perfect
The search for symmetry in physical laws became an important goal of physics, especially fundamental particle physics. When I was in grad school in the late 1960s, physicists were beginning to find fault with the Standard Model. In their search for a model that did not have adjustable parameters, they were driven by the preoccupation with beauty (symmetry). On the other hand, scientists observed that many of the universal symmetries are broken, that is, not perfect. The most profound example concerns the three fundamental forces (the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism) that coalesce into a single force law at high energy, about a trillion times higher than the energy achieved by the Large Hadron Collider (where they found the Higgs particle).
Witten: If I may interject, this is where cosmology and string theory play a role. Since the energy required could never be achieved on Earth, we can look to the very beginning of the universe, just after the Big Bang. At one-trillion-trillion-trillionth of a second after the Bang the temperature was so high that the forces were symmetric and a Grand Unified Theory prevailed. We call this model Superstring Theory. Theoretically.
Tyson: Meanwhile, back on Earth, “symmetry-breaking” produces the three forces that we live with and that make the universe so very interesting. Like a beautiful woman with a slightly crooked smile.
“Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray”
In some ways physics and particle physics inhabit two planets. If physics is Earth, with all its natural wonders, then particle physics is Venus, rotating opposite to earth’s rotation, the symbol of the feminine.
Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist. As a Venetian, she lives in the world of particle physics but has lately become disenchanted. Her recent book “Lost in Math” reviews the perilous state of particle theory and experiment. Led by aesthetic criteria, particle physicists “concocted mindboggling new theories, invented dozens of new particles, and declared that distant places across space are connected by wormholes.”
Hossenfelder is concerned about the mental state of particle physicists. Obsessed with finding a theory of everything, the “grand unified theory,” they invented sub-sub-sub nuclear entities called “strings.” In other words quarks are supposed to be composed of strings.
When string theory required 10 dimensions of space-time, they just swept the six extra dimensions under the rug to arrive at the four dimensional world (3 space plus time) we actually live in.
But sweeping with mathematical rigor meant that there were a near infinite number of unique string theories. Thus they invented the “multiverse” – an infinity of universes where ours is just the one with the natural laws that we experience.
Of course that explained precisely nothing and “string theory” is still unable to predict anything, which means that it cannot be experimentally verified. The stringer’s solution: post-empirical physics. In other words, abandon the scientific method.
Perhaps Francis Urquhart (House of Cards) “couldn’t possibly comment”- but I can.
Physicist John Baez defined a scale, the “crackpot index,” that rates theories and theorists. As in golf a high score is bad. The crackpot index gives, for example, 5 points for a thought experiment that contradicts the results of an actual experiment; 10 points for each favorable comparison of oneself to Einstein; 20 points for claiming to have the “standard model” of anything; and 50 points for a “theory of everything.” The reader can decide where to place string theory.
Please note, all you need to construct all the atoms in the periodic table and all the molecules in chemistry and biology are the electron, the proton and the neutron. The rest is fun, but not very useful. And there is plenty of modern physics that is quite useful.
And quite beautiful.
Dr. William Lama has a PhD in physics from the University of Rochester. Taught physics in college and worked at Xerox as a principle scientist and engineering manager. Upon retiring, joined the PVIC docents; served on the board of the RPV Council of Home Owners Associations; served as a PV Library trustee for eight years; served on the PV school district Measure M oversight committee; was president of the Malaga Cove Homeowner's Association. Writes about science, technology and politics, mostly for my friends.
email: wlama@outlook.com