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Has reductionism run its course? + 'Quantum foam' may explain away huge cosmic energy

#1
C C Offline
Has Reductionism Run its Course?
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/1...ourse.html

EXCERPT: . . . In summary, history does not support particle physicists’ belief that a deeper understanding of natural law will most likely come from studying shorter distances. On the very contrary, I have begun to worry that physicists’ confidence in methodological reductionism stands in the way of progress. That’s because it suggests we ask certain questions instead of others. And those may just be the wrong questions to ask.

If you believe in methodological reductionism, for example, you may ask what dark energy is made of. But maybe dark energy is not made of anything. Instead, dark energy may be an artifact of our difficulty averaging non-linear equations. It’s similar with dark matter. The methodological reductionist will ask for a microscopic theory and look for a particle that dark matter is made of. Yet, maybe dark matter is really a phenomenon associated with our misunderstanding of space-time on long distances.

The maybe biggest problem that methodological reductionism causes lies in the area of quantum gravity, that is our attempt to resolve the inconsistency between quantum theory and general relativity. Pretty much all existing approaches – string theory, loop quantum gravity, causal dynamical triangulation (check out my video for more) – assume that methodological reductionism is the answer. Therefore, they rely on new hypotheses for short-distance physics. But maybe that’s the wrong way to tackle the problem. The root of our problem may instead be that quantum theory itself must be replaced by a more fundamental theory, one that explains how quantization works in the first place.

Approaches based on methodological reductionism – like grand unified forces, supersymmetry, string theory, preon models, or technicolor – have failed for the past 30 years. This does not mean that there is nothing more to find at short distances. But it does strongly suggest that the next step forward will be a case of theory reduction that does not rely on taking things apart into smaller things. (MORE - details)



Physicist suggests 'quantum foam' may explain away huge cosmic energy
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-physicist-...osmic.html

RELEASE: Steven Carlip, a physicist at the University of California, has come up with a theory to explain why empty space seems to be filled with a huge amount of energy—it may be hidden by effects that are canceling it out at the Planck scale. He has published a paper describing his new theory in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Conventional theory suggests that spacetime should be filled with a huge amount of energy—perhaps as much as 10^120 more than seemingly exists. Over the years, many theorists have suggested ideas on why this may be—most have tried the obvious approach, trying to figure out a way to make the energy go away. But none have been successful. In this new effort, Carlip suggests that maybe all that energy really is there, but it does not have any ties to the expansion of the universe because its effects are being canceled out by something at the Planck scale.

The new theory by Carlip is based very heavily on work done by John Wheeler back in the 1950s—he suggested that at the smallest possible scale, space and time turn into something he called "spacetime foam." He argued that at such a small scale, defining time, length and energy would be subject to the uncertainty principle. Since then, others have taken a serious look at spacetime foam—and some have suggested that if a vacuum were filled with spacetime foam, there would be a lot of energy involved. Others argue that such a scenario would behave like the cosmological constant.

Thus, to explain their ideas, they have sought to find ways to cancel out the energy as a way to make it go away. Carlip suggests instead that in a spacetime foam scenario, energy would exist everywhere in a vacuum—but if you took a much closer look, you would find Planck-sized areas that have an equal likelihood of expanding or contracting. And under such a scenario, the patchwork of tiny areas would appear the same as larger areas in the vacuum—and they would not expand or contract, which means they would have a zero cosmic constant. He notes that under such a scenario, time would have no intrinsic direction.
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
One of the drawbacks of reductionism imo is the consistent overlooking of system-wide relationships and spatio-temporal structures that arise out of the order of the components of wholes. A television reduced to nothing more than a bin of all its components might give us a partial idea of how the TV works, but it will also leave alot out because it misses all the information contained in the geometric and operational structure of the whole television. This information will contain facts and algorithms about how the components connect to each other and interact with each other as one working complex network. Is it enough to know that all matter is made up of 6 different flavors of quarks without taking into account all the stacked hierarchies of form and structure that arise almost emergently from these fundamental units? No..not at all. A theory of everything surely must include all the interconnecting relations and processes by which all matter is manifested as what it is to our sensory experience.
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