Thursday, August 26, 2010

The Universe Time Travel

The mystery of time travel is explored as we embark on an adventure to reveal if traveling into the future will one day be a reality. Next we examine if traveling into the past will have bizarre consequences. Finally, are scientists on the verge of discovering an Earth-like planet within the next few years?


The Universe: Time Travel

Clifford gives a heads up, as well some appearances in the production of.

I have always been fascinated by the Time travel scenarios as they have been presented in story form. I do appreciate the subtleties of the proper interpretations as sciences knows it in context of it's proper form.

I just noticed that last week’s episode of The Universe on Time Travel, which I told you about here and here, is available online on their website. Click here to learn more about the ins and outs of it, and I show you how to make one too! Kind of.Clifford of Asymptotia
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See Also

Gott Time?

TimeSpeak

Time is Like a River

Monday, August 23, 2010

Quantum Computing

Towards quantum chemistry on a quantum computer

B. P. Lanyon1,2, J. D. Whitfield4, G. G. Gillett1,2, M. E. Goggin1,5, M. P. Almeida1,2, I. Kassal4, J. D. Biamonte4,6, M. Mohseni4,6, B. J. Powell1,3, M. Barbieri1,2,6, A. Aspuru-Guzik4 & A. G. White1,2

Abstract

Exact first-principles calculations of molecular properties are currently intractable because their computational cost grows exponentially with both the number of atoms and basis set size. A solution is to move to a radically different model of computing by building a quantum computer, which is a device that uses quantum systems themselves to store and process data. Here we report the application of the latest photonic quantum computer technology to calculate properties of the smallest molecular system: the hydrogen molecule in a minimal basis. We calculate the complete energy spectrum to 20 bits of precision and discuss how the technique can be expanded to solve large-scale chemical problems that lie beyond the reach of modern supercomputers. These results represent an early practical step toward a powerful tool with a broad range of quantum-chemical applications.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Cymatics and the Heart Song

I think one has to wonder with such diversities of souls who have entered this world, such distinctions of being identified as a "emergent product of all souls" might have a distinctive element with which lives could have been choreographed. Each soul, manifests according to their Heart Song? :)Each Heart Song is carried through a series of many lives? Each Heart Song,manifests according the conceptual acceptances and digestibility of our grokking, according to each circumstance that surrounds that life?



I just finish spending the last 8 days with two of my seven grandchildren. One had passed just a couple of days after being born.

Yes "Happy feet" has become a intricate part of my days visiting as these children are mesmerized by the hearts songs and uniqueness of being borne learning to tap instead of singing. It's trials and tribulations of being different.
See:It's a Penquin?
Biology sees no possible reduction to the physics of thinking,  that I have to wonder if they might of thought of the correlation here, as distinctive elements have distinctive sounds?

It's an anologistical way of looking at the space of thinking(mind /body) to have it coincide with somethng inherent in our make up.  Some thing that is correlative to what strides the thinking mind makes and what resonances in the world are set up for each soul distinctive?  Each soul's cause and effect,  bringing home to roost the conceptually formed resonances that have been formed " by grokking and digestibility.

For example, in 1704 Sir Isaac Newton struggled to devise mathematical formulas to equate the vibrational frequency of sound waves with a corresponding wavelength of light. He failed to find his hoped-for translation algorithm, but the idea of correspondence took root, and the first practical application of it appears to be the clavecin oculaire, an instrument that played sound and light simultaneously. It was invented in 1725. Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, achieved the same effect with a harpsichord and lanterns in 1790, although many others were built in the intervening years, on the same principle, where by a keyboard controlled mechanical shutters from behind which colored lights shne. By 1810 even Goethe was expounding correspondences between color and other senses in his book, Theory of Color. Pg 53, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, by Richard E. Cytowic, M.D.

So to then in my thinking that before each soul crystallizes it's hold on the reality of being in this world,  that each soul was in a much different state. A state that the senses held no distinctions other then too, sense "all things" as connected to each other.  The differentiations were our attempts to acceptance of living within this world that it should have it;s compartments for sensory outputs distinctive themselves. See:Soul Food

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Cymatics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Resonance made visible with black seeds on a harpsichord sounboard
Cornstarch and water solution under the influence of sine wave vibration
Amplified sine wave's effects on cornstarch & water solution
Cymatics (from Greek: κῦμα "wave") is the study of visible sound and vibration, a subset of modal phenomena. Typically the surface of a plate, diaphragm, or membrane is vibrated, and regions of maximum and minimum displacement are made visible in a thin coating of particles, paste, or liquid.[1] Different patterns emerge in the exitatory medium depending on the geometry of the plate and the driving frequency.
The apparatus employed can be simple, such as a Chladni Plate[2] or advanced such as the CymaScope, a laboratory instrument that makes visible the inherent geometries within sound and music.[clarification needed]

Contents


Etymology

The generic term for this field of science is the study of modal phenomena, retitled Cymatics by Hans Jenny, a Swiss medical doctor and a pioneer in this field. The word Cymatics derives from the Greek 'kuma' meaning 'billow' or 'wave,' to describe the periodic effects that sound and vibration has on matter.

History

The study of the patterns produced by vibrating bodies has a venerable history. One of the earliest to notice that an oscillating body displayed regular patterns was Galileo Galilei. In Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), he wrote:
As I was scraping a brass plate with a sharp iron chisel in order to remove some spots from it and was running the chisel rather rapidly over it, I once or twice, during many strokes, heard the plate emit a rather strong and clear whistling sound: on looking at the plate more carefully, I noticed a long row of fine streaks parallel and equidistant from one another. Scraping with the chisel over and over again, I noticed that it was only when the plate emitted this hissing noise that any marks were left upon it; when the scraping was not accompanied by this sibilant note there was not the least trace of such marks.[3]
On July 8, 1680, Robert Hooke was able to see the nodal patterns associated with the modes of vibration of glass plates. Hooke ran a bow along the edge of a glass plate covered with flour, and saw the nodal patterns emerge.[4][5]

In 1787, Ernst Chladni repeated the work of Robert Hooke and published "Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges" ("Discoveries in the Theory of Sound"). In this book, Chladni describes the patterns seen by placing sand on metal plates which are made to vibrate by stroking the edge of the plate with a bow.
Cymatics was explored by Hans Jenny in his 1967 book, Kymatik (translated Cymatics).[6] Inspired by systems theory and the work of Ernst Chladni, Jenny began an investigation of periodic phenomena but especially the visual display of sound. He used standing waves, piezoelectric amplifiers, and other methods and materials.

Influences in art

Hans Jenny's book influenced Alvin Lucier and, along with Chladni, helped lead to Lucier's composition Queen of the South. Jenny's work was also followed up by Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) founder Gyorgy Kepes at MIT. [7] His work in this area included an acoustically vibrated piece of sheet metal in which small holes had been drilled in a grid. Small flames of gas burned through these holes and thermodynamic patterns were made visible by this setup.

Based on work done in this field, photographer Alexander Lauterwasser captures imagery of water surfaces set into motion by sound sources ranging from pure sine waves, to music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Karlheinz Stockhausen, electroacoustic group Kymatik(who often record in surround sound ambisonics), and overtone singing.



Rosslyn Chapel's carvings are thought to contain references to Cymatics patterns and in 2005 composer Stuart Mitchell and his father T.J.Mitchell created a work realised by the use of matching Cymatics/Chladni patterns to the 13 geometric symbols carved onto the faces of 213 cubes emanating from 14 arches. They have named the completed work The Rosslyn Motet and has received a great deal of media publicity and acclaim from scientific and musicological sources.

See also

References

  1. ^ Jenny, Hans (July 2001). Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena & Vibration (3rd ed.). Macromedia Press. ISBN 1-8881-3807-6. 
  2. ^ "Instructional Research Lab: Chladni Plate". University of California, Los Angeles. http://www.physics.ucla.edu/demoweb/demomanual/acoustics/effects_of_sound/chladni_plate.html. Retrieved 3 September 2009. 
  3. ^ Good Vibrations, Joyce McLaughlin, American Scientist, July-August 1998, Volume: 86 Number: 4 Page: 342, DOI: 10.1511/1998.4.342
  4. ^ Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, Institute for Learning Technologies, Columbia University
  5. ^ Pg 101 Oxford Dictionary of Scientists- Oxford University Press- 1999
  6. ^ Jenny, Hans (1967). Kymatik. ISBN 1-888138-07-6
  7. ^ Gyorgy Kepes profile at MIT

 External links


Thursday, August 12, 2010

Dark Matter

(Click on Image)


Friedman Equation What is pdensity.

What are the three models of geometry? k=-1, K=0, k+1

Negative curvature

Omega=the actual density to the critical density
If we triangulate Omega, the universe in which we are in, Omegam(mass)+ Omega(a vacuum), what position geometrically, would our universe hold from the coordinates given?  

See Also:
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I am not sure if it is proper to take such expressions of dark energy and dark matter as they are perceived in the universe and apply them to a "dynamical movement of a kind,"  as an expression of that Universe?

Part of that "Toposense" you might say?




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IN their figure 2. Hyperbolic space, and their comparative relation to the M.C.Escher's Circle Limit woodcut, Klebanov and Maldacena write, " but we have replaced Escher's interlocking fish with cows to remind readers of the physics joke about the spherical cow as an idealization of a real one. In anti-de Sitter/conformal theory correspondence, theorists have really found a hyperbolic cow."

Click on image for larger version. See:Solving quantum field theories via curved spacetimes by Igor R. Klebanov and Juan M. Maldacena

See:

Sunday, August 08, 2010

She Returns


Most readers of this blog who have been around for sometime will recognize some of the pictures of Wildlife that have appeared around our property over the last couple of years.



Well the lady is back again this year, and what makes this little lady's visit a little extraordinary is that we had constructed a fence around our two acres, to stop the bears from coming in while we were outside, unaware.

If you count careful you will see three little ones


What also makes this unusual is two things. One, that the Mrs had left the front gate open for a satellite repair guy to help realign the dish to the proper coordinates, and that sometime during this,  momma and three of her cubs came to enter the area.



As our dog started to bark, and after the Mrs. had closed the front gate did she soon realize that the ruckus in the back was the mother bear and her three cubs. So while she had been outside, and while the satellite guy was working,  the trio and momma were in the vicinity without being noticed.








 I think two of the little ones take after Dad


See:

Saturday, August 07, 2010

Space Weather

3-day Solar-Geophysical Forecast issued Aug 07 22:00 UTC

Solar Activity Forecast: Solar activity is expected to be very low to low with C-class flares likely from Region 1093 and 1095 (S18E19). A chance of M-class activity is possible from Region 1093.
Geophysical Activity Forecast: Geomagnetic field activity is expected to be mostly quiet with an isolated chance of unsettled levels during the next three days (08 - 10 August). See: Today's Space Weather
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Solar flares are classified as A, B, C, M or X according to the peak flux (in watts per square meter, W/m2) of 100 to 800 picometer X-rays near Earth, as measured on the GOES−4 W/m2. Within a class there is a linear scale from 1 to 9, so an X2 flare is twice as powerful as an X1 flare, and is four times more powerful than an M5 flare. The more powerful M and X class flares are often associated with a variety of effects on the near-Earth space environment. Although the GOES classification is commonly used to indicate the size of a flare, it is only one measure. This extended logarithmic earthquakes show similar power-law[3]
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Michel Tournay,
Chisasibi, Quebec, Canada
Aug. 4, 2010
 
The whole sky was green, purple, I had a hard time deciding where to aim my cameras! Here are 3 pictures taken from a long series to make an animation of the movement. Nikon D3s , 10 000 ASA, 10.5 mm f2.8 set at full frame to get wider than the Dx format ! the last one was taken with a Nikon D3 with a 28mm f1.4 at 3200 ASA See: Aurora Photo Gallery 2010

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Lighting up the dark universe


Image ...
The CHASE detector. The end of the magnet (orange) can be seen on the right.

Exploring our dark universe is often the domain of extreme physics. Traces of dark matter particles are searched for by huge neutrino telescopes located underwater or under Antarctic ice, by scientists at powerful particle colliders, and deep underground.  Clues to mysterious dark energy will be investigated using big telescopes on Earth and experiments that will be launched into space.
But an experiment doesn’t have to be exotic to explore the unexplained. At the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which ended today in Paris, scientists unveiled the first results from the GammeV-CHASE experiment, which used 30 hours’ worth of data from a 10-meter-long experiment to place the world’s best limits on the existence of dark energy particles.
CHASE, which stands for Chameleon Afterglow Search, was constructed at Fermilab to search for hypothetical particles called chameleons. Physicists theorize that these particles may be responsible for the dark energy that is causing the accelerating expansion of our universe.

“One of the reasons I felt strongly about doing this experiment is that it was a good example of a laboratory experiment to test dark energy models,” says CHASE scientist Jason Steffen, who presented the results at ICHEP. “Astronomical surveys are important as well, but they’re not going to tell us everything.” CHASE was a successor to Fermilab’s GammeV experiment, which searched for chameleon particles and another hypothetical particle called the axion.

See: Lighting up the dark universe by Katie Yurkewicz Posted in ICHEP 2010

See Also:Backreaction: Detection of Dark Energy on Earth? - Improbable

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Probing the early and present Universe with Planck



Date: 05 Jul 2010
Satellite: Planck
Copyright: ESA, HFI and LFI consortia 


This multi-colour all-sky image of the microwave sky has been synthesized using data spanning the full frequency range of Planck, which covers the electromagnetic spectrum from 30 to 857 GHz.

The grainy structure of the CMB, with its tiny temperature fluctuations reflecting the primordial density variations from which the cosmic web originated, is clearly visible in the high-latitude regions of the map, where the foreground contribution is not predominant - this is highlighted in the top inset, from the 'first light' survey.See: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=47343

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Monday, July 12, 2010

Theory of Everything

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Beyond the Standard Model
CMS Higgs-event.jpg
Standard Model
The theory of everything (TOE) is a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and, ideally, has predictive power for the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle. Initially, the term was used with an ironic connotation to refer to various overgeneralized theories. For example, a great-grandfather of Ijon Tichy—a character from a cycle of Stanisław Lem's science fiction stories of the 1960s—was known to work on the "General Theory of Everything". Physicist John Ellis[1] claims to have introduced the term into the technical literature in an article in Nature in 1986.[2] Over time, the term stuck in popularizations of quantum physics to describe a theory that would unify or explain through a single model the theories of all fundamental interactions of nature.

There have been many theories of everything proposed by theoretical physicists over the last century, but none has been confirmed experimentally. The primary problem in producing a TOE is that the accepted theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity are hard to combine. Their mutual incompatibility argues that they are incomplete, or at least not fully understood taken individually. (For more, see unsolved problems in physics).

Based on theoretical holographic principle arguments from the 1990s, many physicists believe that 11-dimensional M-theory, which is described in many sectors by matrix string theory, in many other sectors by perturbative string theory is the complete theory of everything, although there is no widespread consensus and M-theory is not a completed theory but rather an approach for producing one.

Contents


 Historical antecedents

Laplace famously suggested that a sufficiently powerful intellect could, if it knew the position and velocity of every particle at a given time, along with the laws of nature, calculate the position of any particle at any other time:
An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, Introduction. 1814
Although modern quantum mechanics suggests that uncertainty is inescapable, a unifying theory governing probabilistic assignments may nevertheless exist.

 Ancient Greece to Einstein

Since ancient Greek times, philosophers have speculated that the apparent diversity of appearances conceals an underlying unity, and thus that the list of forces might be short, indeed might contain only a single entry. For example, the mechanical philosophy of the 17th century posited that all forces could be ultimately reduced to contact forces between tiny solid particles.[3] This was abandoned after the acceptance of Isaac Newton's long-distance force of gravity; but at the same time, Newton's work in his Principia provided the first dramatic empirical evidence for the unification of apparently distinct forces: Galileo's work on terrestrial gravity, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and the phenomenon of tides were all quantitatively explained by a single law of universal gravitation.

In 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted discovered a connection between electricity and magnetism, triggering decades of work that culminated in James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism. Also during the 19th and early 20th centuries, it gradually became apparent that many common examples of forces—contact forces, elasticity, viscosity, friction, pressure—resulted from electrical interactions between the smallest particles of matter. In the late 1920s, the new quantum mechanics showed that the chemical bonds between atoms were examples of (quantum) electrical forces, justifying Dirac's boast that "the underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known".[4]

Attempts to unify gravity with electromagnetism date back at least to Michael Faraday's experiments of 1849–50.[5] After Albert Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity) was published in 1915, the search for a unified field theory combining gravity with electromagnetism began in earnest. At the time, it seemed plausible that no other fundamental forces exist. Prominent contributors were Gunnar Nordström, Hermann Weyl, Arthur Eddington, Theodor Kaluza, Oskar Klein, and most notably, many attempts by Einstein and his collaborators. In his last years, Albert Einstein was intensely occupied in finding such a unifying theory. None of these attempts were successful.[6]

 New discoveries

The search for a unifying theory was interrupted by the discovery of the strong and weak nuclear forces, which could not be subsumed into either gravity or electromagnetism. A further hurdle was the acceptance that quantum mechanics had to be incorporated from the start, rather than emerging as a consequence of a deterministic unified theory, as Einstein had hoped. Gravity and electromagnetism could always peacefully coexist as entries in a list of Newtonian forces, but for many years it seemed that gravity could not even be incorporated into the quantum framework, let alone unified with the other fundamental forces. For this reason, work on unification for much of the twentieth century, focused on understanding the three "quantum" forces: electromagnetism and the weak and strong forces. The first two were unified in 1967–68 by Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and Abdus Salam as the "electroweak" force.[7] However, while the strong and electroweak forces peacefully coexist in the Standard Model of particle physics, they remain distinct. Several Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) have been proposed to unify them. Although the simplest GUTs have been experimentally ruled out, the general idea, especially when linked with supersymmetry, remains strongly favored by the theoretical physics community.[8]

 Modern physics

In current mainstream physics, a Theory of Everything would unify all the fundamental interactions of nature, which are usually considered to be four in number: gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force. Because the weak force can transform elementary particles from one kind into another, the TOE should yield a deep understanding of the various different kinds of particles as well as the different forces. The expected pattern of theories is:

Theory of Everything


Gravity
Electronuclear force (GUT)

Strong force
SU(3)
Electroweak force
SU(2) x U(1)

Weak force
SU(2)
Electromagnetism
U(1)


Electric force
Magnetic force
In addition to the forces listed here, modern cosmology might require an inflationary force, dark energy, and also dark matter composed of fundamental particles outside the scheme of the standard model. The existence of these has not been proven and there are alternative theories such as modified Newtonian dynamics.[citation needed]

Electroweak unification is a broken symmetry: the electromagnetic and weak forces appear distinct at low energies because the particles carrying the weak force, the W and Z bosons, have a mass of about 100 GeV, whereas the photon, which carries the electromagnetic force, is massless. At higher energies Ws and Zs can be created easily and the unified nature of the force becomes apparent. Grand unification is expected to work in a similar way, but at energies of the order of 1016 GeV, far greater than could be reached by any possible Earth-based particle accelerator. By analogy, unification of the GUT force with gravity is expected at the Planck energy, roughly 1019 GeV.

It may seem premature to be searching for a TOE when there is as yet no direct evidence for an electronuclear force, and while in any case there are many different proposed GUTs. In fact the name deliberately suggests the hubris involved. Nevertheless, most physicists believe this unification is possible, partly due to the past history of convergence towards a single theory. Supersymmetric GUTs seem plausible not only for their theoretical "beauty", but because they naturally produce large quantities of dark matter, and the inflationary force may be related to GUT physics (although it does not seem to form an inevitable part of the theory). And yet GUTs are clearly not the final answer. Both the current standard model and proposed GUTs are quantum field theories which require the problematic technique of renormalization to yield sensible answers. This is usually regarded as a sign that these are only effective field theories, omitting crucial phenomena relevant only at very high energies. Furthermore, the inconsistency between quantum mechanics and general relativity implies that one or both of these must be replaced by a theory incorporating quantum gravity.

Unsolved problems in physics
Is string theory, superstring theory, or M-theory, or some other variant on this theme, a step on the road to a "theory of everything", or just a blind alley? Question mark2.svg
The mainstream theory of everything at the moment is superstring theory / M-theory; current research on loop quantum gravity may eventually play a fundamental role in a TOE, but that is not its primary aim.[9] These theories attempt to deal with the renormalization problem by setting up some lower bound on the length scales possible. String theories and supergravity (both believed to be limiting cases of the yet-to-be-defined M-theory) suppose that the universe actually has more dimensions than the easily observed three of space and one of time. The motivation behind this approach began with the Kaluza-Klein theory in which it was noted that applying general relativity to a five dimensional universe (with the usual four dimensions plus one small curled-up dimension) yields the equivalent of the usual general relativity in four dimensions together with Maxwell's equations (electromagnetism, also in four dimensions). This has led to efforts to work with theories with large number of dimensions in the hopes that this would produce equations that are similar to known laws of physics. The notion of extra dimensions also helps to resolve the hierarchy problem, which is the question of why gravity is so much weaker than any other force. The common answer involves gravity leaking into the extra dimensions in ways that the other forces do not.[citation needed]

In the late 1990s, it was noted that one problem with several of the candidates for theories of everything (but particularly string theory) was that they did not constrain the characteristics of the predicted universe. For example, many theories of quantum gravity can create universes with arbitrary numbers of dimensions or with arbitrary cosmological constants. Even the "standard" ten-dimensional string theory allows the "curled up" dimensions to be compactified in an enormous number of different ways (one estimate is 10500 ) each of which corresponds to a different collection of fundamental particles and low-energy forces. This array of theories is known as the string theory landscape.

A speculative solution is that many or all of these possibilities are realised in one or another of a huge number of universes, but that only a small number of them are habitable, and hence the fundamental constants of the universe are ultimately the result of the anthropic principle rather than a consequence of the theory of everything. This anthropic approach is often criticised[who?] in that, because the theory is flexible enough to encompass almost any observation, it cannot make useful (as in original, falsifiable, and verifiable) predictions. In this view, string theory would be considered a pseudoscience, where an unfalsifiable theory is constantly adapted to fit the experimental results.

 With reference to Gödel's incompleteness theorem

A small number of scientists claim that Gödel's incompleteness theorem proves that any attempt to construct a TOE is bound to fail. Gödel's theorem, informally stated, asserts that any formal theory expressive enough for elementary arithmetical facts to be expressed and strong enough for them to be proved is either inconsistent (both a statement and its denial can be derived from its axioms) or incomplete, in the sense that there is a true statement about natural numbers that can't be derived in the formal theory. In his 1966 book The Relevance of Physics, Stanley Jaki pointed out that, because any "theory of everything" will certainly be a consistent non-trivial mathematical theory, it must be incomplete. He claims that this dooms searches for a deterministic theory of everything.[10] In a later reflection, Jaki states that it is wrong to say that a final theory is impossible, but rather that "when it is on hand one cannot know rigorously that it is a final theory." [11]
Freeman Dyson has stated that
Gödel’s theorem implies that pure mathematics is inexhaustible. No matter how many problems we solve, there will always be other problems that cannot be solved within the existing rules. [...] Because of Gödel's theorem, physics is inexhaustible too. The laws of physics are a finite set of rules, and include the rules for doing mathematics, so that Gödel's theorem applies to them.
—NYRB, May 13, 2004
Stephen Hawking was originally a believer in the Theory of Everything but, after considering Gödel's Theorem, concluded that one was not obtainable.
Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory, that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind.
Jürgen Schmidhuber (1997) has argued against this view; he points out that Gödel's theorems are irrelevant for computable physics.[12] In 2000, Schmidhuber explicitly constructed limit-computable, deterministic universes whose pseudo-randomness based on undecidable, Gödel-like halting problems is extremely hard to detect but does not at all prevent formal TOEs describable by very few bits of information.[13][14]
Related critique was offered by Solomon Feferman,[15] among others. Douglas S. Robertson offers Conway's game of life as an example:[16] The underlying rules are simple and complete, but there are formally undecidable questions about the game's behaviors. Analogously, it may (or may not) be possible to completely state the underlying rules of physics with a finite number of well-defined laws, but there is little doubt that there are questions about the behavior of physical systems which are formally undecidable on the basis of those underlying laws.

Since most physicists would consider the statement of the underlying rules to suffice as the definition of a "theory of everything", these researchers argue that Gödel's Theorem does not mean that a TOE cannot exist. On the other hand, the physicists invoking Gödel's Theorem appear, at least in some cases, to be referring not to the underlying rules, but to the understandability of the behavior of all physical systems, as when Hawking mentions arranging blocks into rectangles, turning the computation of prime numbers into a physical question.[17] This definitional discrepancy may explain some of the disagreement among researchers.
Another approach to working with the limits of logic implied by Gödel's incompleteness theorems is to abandon the attempt to model reality using a formal system altogether. Process Physics[18] is a notable example of a candidate TOE that takes this approach, where reality is modeled using self-organizing (purely semantic) information.

 Potential status of a theory of everything

No physical theory to date is believed to be precisely accurate. Instead, physics has proceeded by a series of "successive approximations" allowing more and more accurate predictions over a wider and wider range of phenomena. Some physicists believe that it is therefore a mistake to confuse theoretical models with the true nature of reality, and hold that the series of approximations will never terminate in the "truth". Einstein himself expressed this view on occasions.[19] On this view, we may reasonably hope for a theory of everything which self-consistently incorporates all currently known forces, but should not expect it to be the final answer. On the other hand it is often claimed that, despite the apparently ever-increasing complexity of the mathematics of each new theory, in a deep sense associated with their underlying gauge symmetry and the number of fundamental physical constants, the theories are becoming simpler. If so, the process of simplification cannot continue indefinitely.

There is a philosophical debate within the physics community as to whether a theory of everything deserves to be called the fundamental law of the universe.[20] One view is the hard reductionist position that the TOE is the fundamental law and that all other theories that apply within the universe are a consequence of the TOE. Another view is that emergent laws (called "free floating laws" by Steven Weinberg[citation needed]), which govern the behavior of complex systems, should be seen as equally fundamental. Examples are the second law of thermodynamics and the theory of natural selection. The point being that, although in our universe these laws describe systems whose behaviour could ("in principle") be predicted from a TOE, they would also hold in universes with different low-level laws, subject only to some very general conditions. Therefore it is of no help, even in principle, to invoke low-level laws when discussing the behavior of complex systems. Some[who?] argue that this attitude would violate Occam's Razor if a completely valid TOE were formulated. It is not clear that there is any point at issue in these debates (e.g., between Steven Weinberg and Philip Anderson[citation needed]) other than the right to apply the high-status word "fundamental" to their respective subjects of interest.

Although the name "theory of everything" suggests the determinism of Laplace's quotation, this gives a very misleading impression. Determinism is frustrated by the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanical predictions, by the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions that leads to mathematical chaos, and by the extreme mathematical difficulty of applying the theory. Thus, although the current standard model of particle physics "in principle" predicts all known non-gravitational phenomena, in practice only a few quantitative results have been derived from the full theory (e.g., the masses of some of the simplest hadrons), and these results (especially the particle masses which are most relevant for low-energy physics) are less accurate than existing experimental measurements. The true TOE would almost certainly be even harder to apply. The main motive for seeking a TOE, apart from the pure intellectual satisfaction of completing a centuries-long quest, is that all prior successful unifications have predicted new phenomena, some of which (e.g., electrical generators) have proved of great practical importance. As in other cases of theory reduction, the TOE would also allow us to confidently define the domain of validity and residual error of low-energy approximations to the full theory which could be used for practical calculations.

Some of the biggest problems facing current TOE attempts are related to Einstein's theories of relativity. None of the current attempted TOEs give a structure of matter that gives rise to the special relativity corrections to mass, length and time when a particle moves. Those corrections are just imposed as if it is some unknown property of space. Also Einstein introduced an approximation when he derived his gravitational field equations in his general theory of relativity.[21] Trying to match a theory to an approximation is always going to be difficult. It is believed[who?] that success will be easier when those two factors are taken into consideration.

 Theory of everything and philosophy

The status of a physical TOE is open to philosophical debate. For example, if physicalism is true, a physical TOE will coincide with a philosophical theory of everything. Some philosophers (Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Whitehead, et al.) have attempted to construct all-encompassing systems. Others are highly dubious about the very possibility of such an exercise. Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time that even if we had a TOE, it would necessarily be a set of equations. He wrote, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”[22]. Of course, the ultimate irreducible brute fact would then be "why those equations?" One possible solution to the last question might be to adopt the point of view of ultimate ensemble, or modal realism, and say that those equations are not unique.

 See also

 References

  1. ^ Ellis, John (2002). "Physics gets physical (correspondence)". Nature 415: 957. 
  2. ^ Ellis, John (1986). "The Superstring: Theory of Everything, or of Nothing?". Nature 323: 595–598. doi:10.1038/323595a0. 
  3. ^ Shapin, Steven (1996). The Scientific Revolution. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226750213. 
  4. ^ Dirac, P.A.M. (1929). "Quantum mechanics of many-electron systems". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A 123: 714. doi:10.1098/rspa.1929.0094. 
  5. ^ Faraday, M. (1850). "Experimental Researches in Electricity. Twenty-Fourth Series. On the Possible Relation of Gravity to Electricity". Abstracts of the Papers Communicated to the Royal Society of London 5: 994–995. doi:10.1098/rspl.1843.0267. 
  6. ^ Pais (1982), Ch. 17.
  7. ^ Weinberg (1993), Ch. 5
  8. ^ There is one GUT not linked to super symmetry that has not been eliminated by experiment. That is the four universe theory of George Ryazanov. It has been tested once in a lab at Hebrew University informally. The results were reported to be positive. But the test has not been repeated elsewhere. See http://george-ryazanov.com/book4/03-Physics_of_Unity.html. However Ryazanov's theory does involve Lorentz violation. If the Fermi Glast project does not find Lorentz violation, this will be a blow to the Ryazanov Theory.
  9. ^ Potter, Franklin (15 February 2005). "Leptons And Quarks In A Discrete Spacetime". Frank Potter's Science Gems. http://www.sciencegems.com/discretespace.pdf. Retrieved 2009-12-01. 
  10. ^ Jaki, S.L. (1966). The Relevance of Physics. Chicago Press. 
  11. ^ Stanley L. Jaki (2004) "A Late Awakening to Gödel in Physics," p. 8-9.
  12. ^ Schmidhuber, Jürgen (1997). A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer. pp. 201–208. doi:10.1007/BFb0052071. ISBN 978-3-540-63746-2. http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/everything/. 
  13. ^ Schmidhuber, Jürgen (2000). "Algorithmic Theories of Everything". arΧiv:quant-ph/0011122 [quant-ph]. 
  14. ^ Schmidhuber, Jürgen (2002). "Hierarchies of generalized Kolmogorov complexities and nonenumerable universal measures computable in the limit". International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science 13 (4): 587–612. doi:10.1142/S0129054102001291. 
  15. ^ Feferman, Solomon (17 November 2006). "The nature and significance of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems". Institute for Advanced Study. http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/Godel-IAS.pdf. Retrieved 2009-01-12. 
  16. ^ Robertson, Douglas S. (2007). "Goedel’s Theorem, the Theory of Everything, and the Future of Science and Mathematics". Complexity 5: 22–27. doi:10.1002/1099-0526(200005/06)5:5<22::AID-CPLX4>3.0.CO;2-0. 
  17. ^ Hawking, Stephen (20 July 2002). "Gödel and the end of physics". http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/strings02/dirac/hawking/. Retrieved 2009-12-01. 
  18. ^ Cahill, Reginald (2003). "Process Physics". Process Studies Supplement. Center for Process Studies. pp. 1–131. http://www.ctr4process.org/publications/ProcessStudies/PSS/2003-5-CahillR-Process_Physics.shtml. Retrieved 2009-07-14. 
  19. ^ Einstein, letter to Felix Klein, 1917. (On determinism and approximations.) Quoted in Pais (1982), Ch. 17.
  20. ^ Weinberg (1993), Ch 2.
  21. ^ Equation 20 in Einstein, Albert (1916), "Die Grunlage der allgemeinen Relativätstheorie", Annalen der Physik 49: 769 
  22. ^ as quoted in [Artigas, The Mind of the Universe, p.123]

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