Thursday, December 15, 2011

Advent calendar #15: The end is nigh




  1. Good to think about at a time when people say that if we find the standard model Higgs, at a mass appropriate for vacuum stability till the Planck scale, then fundamental physics is effectively over.

  2. Hi Bee,

    This for me is indicative of a statement made by someone more impressed by answers than with questions.

    ”Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”



    -Albert Einstein



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  4. It reminds me of the historian who said in 1997 that History is essentially over. Four years later, nine eleven happened.



    Except for one man, Max Planck.

    And Max ... changed ... everything.

    Arun, as you know, theoretical physics is far from done even if the Higgs exists at 125.6 GeV. We still haven't unified the electroweak and strong forces. Why aren't more people working on that, called Grand Unified Theory? The heck with quantum gravity and theories of everything, that's down the road.

    Why don't we have a GUT ?

  5. The greatest obstacle to understanding reality is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. "Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit," Albert Einstein, 1901. Then, he denied quantum mechanics.

    Do left and right shoes vacuum free fall non-identically? Do chemically and macroscopically identical single crystal bodies in enantiomorphic space groups violate the Equivalence Principle? Is the vacuum trace chiral toward fermionic mass but not toward massless boson photons? Somebody should look. The worst it can do is succeed.

  6. Michelson's foolish boast are a cautionary tale, and similar thoughts should not be indulged in now (especially with dark matter and dark energy: most of the universe, inexplicable contents!)

  7. Steven: We still haven't unified the electroweak and strong forces,

    Yes one needs a good comprehension of what it is all about?:)

    If you approach it the right way it leaves with a question Mark? You then have to proceed to grok it in it's entirety so it leaves such a place of wonder inside. Then one's search begins?


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  9. It's not really an ending but truly a beginning, you see.

  10. I DO see, and thanks for responding Plato, dear old friend. ;-)

  11. Michelson continues directly from that quotation, on pages 22-3 of A.A. Michelson Light Waves and Their Uses, 1903:




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