Hacking the Nature of Reality

January 27th, 2020

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In particle physics we try to understand reality by looking for smaller and smaller building blocks. But what if that has been the wrong philosophy all along?

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In standard use, the S-matrix can be calculated if you understand the forces in the interaction region – for example, in the nucleus of an atom. But what if you don’t know those internal interaction forces? Heisenberg sought a way to ignore that internal structure and, rather, treat the S-matrix as fundamental. The S-matrix was to become the physics of the interaction, rather than an emergent property of more fundamental, internal physics. Heisenberg’s made some progress in the 40s, but the approach came into its own 20 years later when the atomic nucleus refused to give up its mysteries.

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Posted in Physics |

Solving the Three Body Problem

January 20th, 2020

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The three body problem is famous for being impossible to solve. But actually it’s been solved many times, and in ingenious ways. Some of those solutions are incredibly useful, and some are incredibly bizarre.

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Physics – and arguably all of science changed forever in 1687 when Isaac Newton published his Principia. Within it were equations of motion and gravity that transformed our erratic-seeming cosmos into a perfectly tuned machine of clockwork predictability. Given the current positions and velocities of the bodies of the solar system, Newton’s equations could be used in principle be used to calculate their locations at any distant time, future or past. I say “in principle” because the reality isn’t so simple. Despite the beauty of Newton’s equations, they lead to a simple solution for planetary motion in only one case – when two and only two bodies orbit each other sans any other gravitational influence in the universe. Add just one more body and in most cases all motion becomes fundamentally chaotic – there exists no simple solution. This is the three-body problem, and we’ve been trying to solve it for over 300 years.

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Posted in Physics |

How To Capture Black Holes

January 13th, 2020

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Black holes are awesome – but how about black holes being captured by the screaming vortex of a quasar, where they merge and grow like some monstrous version of a solar system. This insane hypothesis is getting closer to reality, according to the papers in today’s space time journal club.

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Thanks to LIGO we’ve now seen black hole mergers, but there was some striking surprises. For one thing, many of the merging black holes were too massive to have been formed by the collapse of stellar cores. That is if our understanding of stellar evolution is half as good as we think it is. This led astrophysicists to think about new ways to produce black hole mergers. Here’s the most awesome possibility: what if black hole mergers actually occur in orbit around supermassive black holes, embedded deep in the whirlpools of searing gas that surround some of these monsters? Today on Space Time Journal Club we’ll be looking at a pair of 2019 papers that talk about this possibility. We have Yang et al., which predicts the properties of black holes that merge this way, and McKernan et al. which proposes a way for us to actually test this hypothesis.

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Posted in Physics |

How To Detect a Neutrino

January 6th, 2020

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Why is there something rather than nothing? Well the answer may be found in the weakest particle in the universe: the neutrino. For over half a century Fermilab has been the premier particle accelerator facility of the United States and we got to visit with Don Lincoln to explore it’s science and its engineering. These days many of the super-powered geniuses of Fermilab are tackling the mysteries of the neutrino. Why? Because this elusive particle may hold powerful secrets: from the unification of the forces of nature to the biggest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing?

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Posted in Physics |

Do Black Holes Create New Universes?

December 17th, 2019

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What if every single black hole that formed in our universe sparked the big bang of a new universe? Cosmological natural selection proposes exactly this – but even better, it claims to be able to test the hypothesis.

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Physicists have been struggling for some time to figure out why our universe is so comfy. Why, for example, are the fundamental constants – like the mass of the electron or the strength of the forces – just right for the emergence of life? Tweak them too much and life, stars, galaxies, the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist. In recent episodes we explored one possible explanation for this – the anthropic principle and the idea of the multiverse. If there are countless universes with different fundamental constants, then it’s not surprising that a few exist with the right numbers for life – and certainly not surprising that we find ourselves in one of those good ones. But if you don’t like the anthropic principle – and many scientists don’t – then rest assured, there’s an alternative. You only need to accept two things: that our universe formed inside a black hole, and that universes can evolve.

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The Doomsday Argument

December 9th, 2019

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Since the dawn of humanity around 100 billion people have lived. How many will live in the future of our species? We might hope for a trillion times that if we colonize the galaxy. But a simple statistical argument tells us that the doom of our species is much, much closer.

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In some recent episodes we’ve explored the anthropic principle and seen how it can be used to explain the fact that both our planet and our universe seem very finely tuned to allow the development of life. Our planet and/or universe can be rare and unlikely as long as there are enough other planets and/or universes to stack the odds in favour of our existence. We touched on both the potential power and potential misuse of this principle. Today we’re going to push our luck, and see how this controversial idea can be used to predict the physics of our universe, and also to predict the imminent demise of the human race.

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Posted in Physics |

Is The Universe Finite?

December 2nd, 2019

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The universe is big, really, really big. Although according to a new paper, it may literally be infinitely smaller than we previously thought.

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Every time you walk out the door, light from the Big Bang strikes your face, enters your eyes. This is the cosmic microwave background radiation – the left-over heat-glow from the very early universe. We can’t see this microwave light with our eyes, but we can catch it with even a simple radio antenna. As soon as we became aware of its existence we’ve been feverishly building better and better devices to collect it. Why? Because it encodes so many secrets. And within this light, a group of scientists have just found evidence of the limits of space. A clue that our universe may be actually be finite in size. Today on Space Time Journal Club we’ll delve into the Nature Astronomy paper that just reported this: Planck evidence for a closed Universe and a possible crisis for cosmology by Eleonora Di Valentino, Alessandro Melchiorri, and Joe Silk.

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Posted in Physics |

Can You Observe a Typical Universe?

November 18th, 2019

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The moment you started observing reality, you hopelessly polluted any conclusions you might make about it. The anthropic principle guarantees that you are NOT seeing the universe in most typical state. But used correctly, this highly controversial idea can be extremely powerful. So, how do you correctly use the anthropic principle?

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According to the original definitions by Brandon Carter, the weak anthropic principle states that we must live in a place and time in the universe capable of supporting observers – in our case, a habitable biosphere, and the strong anthropic principle, which states that the universe itself must have the conditions necessary for producing environments that, in turn, produce observers. That means the fundamental constants and initial conditions of the universe must be just right to allow nice habitable planets to one day form. Let’s just call it the anthropic principle: we necessarily observe from an environment capable of producing observers; be that environment a planet within a universe or a universe within a multiverse.

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Posted in Physics |

Does Life Need a Multiverse to Exist?

November 11th, 2019

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Life exists in our universe. There we go – one hopefully uncontroversial statement. Therefore our universe is capable of producing and supporting life. How am I going? Two for two? Let’s try for three: therefore there are countless universes. Hmmm. Did I break my streak?

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Our universe seems to operate according to a set of fundamental rules that we try to understand and model with the equations of our laws of physics. Those equations always include one or more fundamental constants – simple numbers that set the scale for the equation. We can’t determine the values of these constants from pure theory – we have to measure them in the real universe. These are things like the speed of light, the Planck constant, the masses of the elementary particles, and the constants defining the relative strengths of the fundamental forces – the so-called coupling constants.

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Posted in Physics |

Why We Might Be Alone in the Universe

November 4th, 2019

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Why does it appear, that humanity is the lone intelligence in the universe? The answer might be that planet Earth is more unique than we’ve previously assumed. The rare earth hypothesis posits exactly this – that a range of factors made Earth exceptionally unusual and uniquely able to produce intelligent life.

In upcoming episodes we’ll be exploring the anthropic principle and its two main versions – the strong and the weak anthropic principles. The strong anthropic principle tells us that the observed universe must be able to produce observers – including the contentious idea that this predicts the existence of universes beyond our own. But in today’s episode we’re going to focus on the weak anthropic principle. It says that we must find ourselves in a part of the universe capable of supporting us. For example, in a planetary biosphere rather than floating in the void between the galaxies. This may seems tautological, but accounting for this observer selection bias is important to understanding why the universe looks the way it does from our perspective. And the weak anthropic principle is much more useful than that. When combined with the apparent absence of alien civilizations, it may tell us why intelligent life is incredibly rare in our universe.

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