Jun 26, 2020 05:55 AM
(This post was last modified: Jun 26, 2020 05:56 AM by C C.)
An elemental problem with the sun
https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article...roblem-sun
Surprisingly, no one knows the stars’ exact chemical composition. For two decades, astronomers have argued over how much carbon, nitrogen and especially oxygen lie within our closest star — a dispute with implications for the entire universe... (MORE)
The rebel physicist trying to fix quantum mechanics
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/magaz...hanic.html
EXCERPTS: . . . the standard take on quantum mechanics suggests something far more surprising: that a complete understanding of even the objective, physical world is beyond science’s reach, since it’s impossible to translate into words how the theory’s math relates to the world we live in.
Angelo Bassi, a 47-year-old theoretical physicist at the University of Trieste, in northeastern Italy, is prominent among a tiny minority of rebels in the discipline who reject this conclusion. “I strongly believe that physics is words, in a sense,” he said across the picnic table. And whereas all the other talks at the workshop focused on the empirical implications of quantum mechanics, Bassi’s would make a case for what a vast majority of his colleagues consider a highly implausible idea: that the theory upon which nearly all of modern physics rests must have something wrong with it — precisely because it can’t be put into words.
[...] Giancarlo Ghirardi and his colleagues arrived at objective collapse models by performing a delicate conceptual transplant that excised quantum theory’s references to observation and replaced them with a new mathematical term added to Schrödinger’s equation. By inducing objective collapse, the new term transformed the theory from one that describes what observers see into one that describes the world as it is (assuming, of course, that the theory is right). The hard part was finding a way to do this that didn’t cause the new theory to contradict any of quantum mechanics’ many unerring predictions. The trick, it turned out, was to endow fundamental particles with some funky new properties.
“You should remove the word ‘particle’ from your vocabulary,” Bassi explains. “It’s all about gelatin. An electron can be here and there and that’s it.”
In this theory, particles are replaced by a sort of hybrid between particles and waves: gelatinous blobs that can spread out in space, split and recombine. And, crucially, the blobs have a kind of built-in bashfulness that explains wave-particle duality in a way that is independent of human observation: When one blob encounters a crowd of others, it reacts by quickly shrinking to a point.
“It’s like an octopus that when you touch them: Whoop!” Bassi says, collapsing his fingertips to a tight bunch to evoke tentacles doing the same.
If objective collapse were to be confirmed, the orthodoxy’s belief that the laws of physics must inevitably reference us in them will lose its main motivation. The way the world works will once again be expressible in words. “Jelly that reacts like an octopus” will be the new “particles subject to forces.” New, exotic phenomena will be identified that could spawn currently inconceivable technologies. Schrödinger’s cat will live or die regardless of who looks or who doesn’t. Even the unpredictability of the subatomic world could turn out to be illusory, a false impression given by our ignorance of octopoid innards... (MORE - details)
https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article...roblem-sun
Surprisingly, no one knows the stars’ exact chemical composition. For two decades, astronomers have argued over how much carbon, nitrogen and especially oxygen lie within our closest star — a dispute with implications for the entire universe... (MORE)
The rebel physicist trying to fix quantum mechanics
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/magaz...hanic.html
EXCERPTS: . . . the standard take on quantum mechanics suggests something far more surprising: that a complete understanding of even the objective, physical world is beyond science’s reach, since it’s impossible to translate into words how the theory’s math relates to the world we live in.
Angelo Bassi, a 47-year-old theoretical physicist at the University of Trieste, in northeastern Italy, is prominent among a tiny minority of rebels in the discipline who reject this conclusion. “I strongly believe that physics is words, in a sense,” he said across the picnic table. And whereas all the other talks at the workshop focused on the empirical implications of quantum mechanics, Bassi’s would make a case for what a vast majority of his colleagues consider a highly implausible idea: that the theory upon which nearly all of modern physics rests must have something wrong with it — precisely because it can’t be put into words.
[...] Giancarlo Ghirardi and his colleagues arrived at objective collapse models by performing a delicate conceptual transplant that excised quantum theory’s references to observation and replaced them with a new mathematical term added to Schrödinger’s equation. By inducing objective collapse, the new term transformed the theory from one that describes what observers see into one that describes the world as it is (assuming, of course, that the theory is right). The hard part was finding a way to do this that didn’t cause the new theory to contradict any of quantum mechanics’ many unerring predictions. The trick, it turned out, was to endow fundamental particles with some funky new properties.
“You should remove the word ‘particle’ from your vocabulary,” Bassi explains. “It’s all about gelatin. An electron can be here and there and that’s it.”
In this theory, particles are replaced by a sort of hybrid between particles and waves: gelatinous blobs that can spread out in space, split and recombine. And, crucially, the blobs have a kind of built-in bashfulness that explains wave-particle duality in a way that is independent of human observation: When one blob encounters a crowd of others, it reacts by quickly shrinking to a point.
“It’s like an octopus that when you touch them: Whoop!” Bassi says, collapsing his fingertips to a tight bunch to evoke tentacles doing the same.
If objective collapse were to be confirmed, the orthodoxy’s belief that the laws of physics must inevitably reference us in them will lose its main motivation. The way the world works will once again be expressible in words. “Jelly that reacts like an octopus” will be the new “particles subject to forces.” New, exotic phenomena will be identified that could spawn currently inconceivable technologies. Schrödinger’s cat will live or die regardless of who looks or who doesn’t. Even the unpredictability of the subatomic world could turn out to be illusory, a false impression given by our ignorance of octopoid innards... (MORE - details)