Murray
Gell Mann, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, famous for his pioneering works on
elementary particle, focuses on whether the words “beauty” or “truth”, often
used as an attribute of laws of physics, really have any significance or they
are just two philosophical words denoting some vague qualities.
Basically
the idea of “beauty” can be said to have been derived from the fact that all
the physical phenomenon are acted upon by some laws that can be expressed by
mathematical equations. According to the speaker, this “beauty” is a necessary
condition for a theory to be a successful one. Another way to put it would be,
a physicist can take a theory to be a correct one in case it can be expressed
with mathematical precision.
On this
note he talks about the topics of his own research like unified theory and
symmetry of particles and how theories in each of these fields were coherent to
the idea of “beauty” of physical laws. He also asserts the role of probability
in quantum mechanical laws like unified theory, cutting out the popular belief
that it is a theory of everything. He compared the whole concept with a
slice of onion, something which reveals more of itself as it is chopped over
and over again. But the interesting fact is that each layer of the onion skin
which symbolizes a physical law as denoted by the speaker, shares similar trait
with other layer. And this is where the motivation of turning the whole concept
into a single one comes because that is what seems to be the most obvious as
far as the “beauty” of physics is concerned. He brings up the similarity of the
laws of gravitation and the Coulomb’s law of force of electric charge to
justify his claim. He goes as deep as deep as talking about the concept of
symmetry which has turned a lot of complex ideas into a concise and elegant
form. As an example, he even shows the Maxwell’s equations denote the same
thing as that of Einstein’s, only except the latter is much more concise and
that has been possible through symmetry.
He also
shows the steps that are to be taken while approaching to derive a mathematical
formulation of unified theory. And the essential two of them are symmetry and
self similarity that is, the similarity between the intrinsic laws themselves.
The laws
of physics to be approached in this manner might look formidable and
overcomplicated but this is how any physical law is dealt with. People who are
not acquainted with these things might be baffled at the vastness of the
existing laws and at the same time might not even hesitate to ridicule the
sheer inability of physics to describe a lot of natural events, which they
often term as supernatural ones.
On this
note he shows the three principles of particle physics, of which he specially
talks about the “unreasonable effectiveness” of the mathematics done in order
to explain the behavior of elementary particles, which a lot of people might
associate with metaphysical actions.
But based
on his belief of existence of laws behind every phenomena, he denies any
supernatural intervention in explaining the phenomenon that are still
unexplained at the end of his speech because according to him every phenomena is
an action of fundamental laws with influence of probabilistic events.
To be factual, the term “beauty” described here
is an already existing criterion for a theory to be justifiable, and this is
called “naturalness”, first coined out by Einstein who had the same belief that
all the natural events can be described by “beautiful” mathematical equations.
Basically, all the physical laws and mathematics involved are formulated based
on intuition, or in other words, a physicist, while devising a theory expects
everything to go along the line of mathematics or logical consequence. Occurrence
of any event that may lie outside the region of logical consequence is very
rare. And even if it happens that is if the reason behind the unnatural behavior
is not obvious, it may be pointing towards some profound idea that is still not
known. To explain numerically, naturalness is the quality of a physical
constant to possess a value of the order 1. Two of the biggest problems of
particle physics at present involve disagreement to this notion of naturalness
and particle physicists are still confused about it. One of them is the cosmological
constant and hierarchy problem, or the discrepancy between weak nuclear force
and the gravity of particle physics being the latter. The second one, being
described by standard model gives rise to parameters with many orders of
magnitude. Thus they require fine tuning and only then the universe as we see
now, can be explained precisely.
In their pursuit to experimentally validate the
Standard Model of particles scientists are now conducting experiments with LHC
in CERN and Higgs Boson, an essential particle for the justification of
standard model has been observed. But Higgs Boson is not the only requirement
for the standard model to be verified. The other particles required to fulfill
the theory were not observed in the last experiment. This forces physicists to
reconsider their thought about a natural universe and might even make them
reach the conclusion that the universe is not “natural” and the laws in the
universe are the effect of random fabrication of time and space. This might
make them resort to multiverse theory which proposes more universe formed of “unnaturalness”
to increase the probability for such occurrence to take place. So it can be
said that the physics that we will see in the coming days will be largely
defined by what we find or do not find in LHC experiment.
Last of all, involving theology with science will
thereby give rise to misleading ideas. The belief among various religious
groups that science is not enough to explain the so called supernatural things and their claim is not
based on concrete logic. The very reason that they have come to know about the
things as mystifying as “dark matter” or “dark energy”, that physicists are
still baffled about, is because of the very existence of science rather than
their faith.
-By Ahmed Mustahid
