Monday, July 1, 2013

More physics porn (further updated)



Contemporary atheists point to cosmological findings of the Big Bang Theory era, to argue that no Creator is logically necessary.   Earlier writers, compassing the same end of assailing theism or even deism, likewise adverted to Big Bang Theory, but put an opposite spin on it.  A philosopher, reviewing Filosofskie Problemy Sovremennoi Fisiki (Moscow, 1957), by  Marxist author Ernst Kolman:

He appears to reject outright the docrine of a cosmological commencement, on the grounds that such theories inevitable lead to the invocation of non-material causes  and hence to religion.  Do they?  How pleased some of our theologians would be if this were so.
-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 138

(Note:  Gellner is not here by any means espousing deism, but merely critiquing one instance of Physics Porn.)

 ~

Richard Feynman, a highly engaging guy and no spoilsport, yet disliked the tawdry “three quarks for Mr Mark” sort of foolishness that the public laps up like frumenty.  In QED (1985), he wrote (p. 136):

The quarks have an additional type of polarization that is not related to geometry.  The idiot physicists, unable to come up with any wonderful Greek words anymore, call this type of polarization by the unfortunate name of “color”, which has nothing to do with color in the normal sense.

And (p. 145)

The “flavor” of this quark is called c, and I haven’t got the guts to tell you what c stands for, but you may have read it in the newspaper.  The names are getting worse and worse!

("Charm".)

And all this was prior to the horrors of .... "The God Particle" ...


~ We here reprint a post from August 2011. ~


"What is that streaking 'cross the evening sky?"
"It's a bird!"  "It's Balloon Boy!"   "It's the HI-I-IGGS  BOSON !!!"

In an earlier post, I commented on the debased public presentation of physics, comparable to the way in which Natural History is reduced to giant colored plastic dinosaurs (with or without Adam&Eve in the diorama, according to taste).
Do  note:  the epithet "porn" is hurled, not at the content, but at the presentation.  As Edward Wilson lamented (in Consilience, p. 268),  concerning Americans' attitude towards science:

They don’t understand it, they prefer science fiction, they take fantasy and pseudoscience like stimulants to jolt their cerebral pleasure centers.

Even more trenchantly, Richard Dawkins, in his essay “Drawing Room of Dukes”:

‘Science Weeks’ and ‘Science Fortnights’ betray an anxiety among scientists  to be loved.  Funny hats and larky voices  proclaim that science is fun, fun, fun.

(Having myself tried to scale its cliffs, I can rather attest, that it is hard, hard, hard -- and gets unbelievably harder as you near the summits.)
Our remarks here are thus in the spirit of  Dawkins,  who wrote “I am attacking only the kind of populist whoring that defiles the wonder of science.”   By no means are the barbs aimed at science, nor at haute vulgarisation.

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We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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The other day, a most useful site, aldaily.com, which links to articles of especial interest from around the globe (though only in English), saw fit to link to this one, in the Irish Times:

         'God particle' may be discovered soon

No, don’t bother to click -- spare your forefinger.   The brief wisp of an article announces, not any actual development, but a hope or anticipation of a possible eventual development, namely the ‘discovery’ (something of a misnomer; see below) of the freaking Higgs boson.  (Somehow I can never resist calling it that.  Might as well re-dub it the FHB.)  Such an anticipation has been in the news for many, many years, and has grown mold.

For those (chiefly children and Pacific Islanders) who have not yet heard of the marvelous (though possibly non-existent, anyhow completely unobserved) FHB,  the article explains:

It has been called the “God particle” or the “stuff that makes stuff stuff” as, without it, there is a mystery as to how objects get their mass.

Don’t misunderstand -- it will be very nice if they do ‘discover’ the Higgs boson, since particle physics is rather a mess, and needs all the help it can get.  It would be like filling in a gap in the periodic chart of the elements.   But how would it be more than that?  True, there is a mystery as to how objects get their mass.  But at that level, there is a mystery, how Time got its start, or Why is there something rather than nothing.   At this level, such questions are fundamentally unanswerable:  we have hit rock bottom, our spade is turned.  

Still, there is much that can usefully be done.   Thus, Newton did not discover the fact of gravitational attraction, let alone explain how it came to be -- as he well knew.   What he did was posit a precise formula -- the inverse-square law -- which, when you do the math (and he had to invent much of the math) turns out to fit precisely the observed orbits of the planets, as well as the behavior of falling apples.   This was a formal tour de force, and was of immediate philosophical significance as well, as uniting the supralunary and sublunary spheres, traditionally thought to obey quite different laws.  Nay further, as Arthur Koestler puts it epigrammatically  in The Act of Creation (1964):

This equally applies to the discoveries of the artist who makes us see familiar objects … in a strange new revealing light … Newton’s apple and CĂ©zanne’s apple  are discoveries more closely related than they seem.

Now, there are two basic ways in which some new constuct, like the FHB, might be desirable. 
One, like Newton’s Universal Gravitation, it might be illuminating, in that it would formally unite gravity with something else, which is the goal of the Theory of Everything.   But in that case, it would seem, the intellectual work has already been done:  someone has calculated that, given a particle of such&such particulars, it would be a key that would fit both locks.   And that might constitute a conceptual tour de force, only -- the actual ‘discovery’ of the particle is philosophically an anticlimax:  it would not be really a discovery, the way penicillin or X-rays or the Cosmic Microwave Background -- previously unsuspected -- were discovered.   It would simply mean that the already-posited and largely-understood particle  was finally physically spotted -- the way the positron was spotted, after Dirac had predicted its characteristics with math.

 [Update 23 April 2012]  Thus indeed now Steven Weinberg:
"The discovery of the Higgs boson would be a gratifying verification of present theory, but it will not point the way to a more comprehensive future theory. We can hope, as was the case with the Bevatron, that the most exciting thing to be discovered at the LHC will be something quite unexpected. Whatever it is, it’s hard to see how it could take us all the way to a final theory, including gravitation."

Unfortunately, this happy scenario may not be the case.  Rather, we may be faced with Case Two:  the particle is needed, not because, like the calculus and the working out of the consequences of the inverse square laws, it is a key that opens many doors;  but only because, for purely formal reasons, without it, you’re screwed.  Such is the picture as presented in Wikipedia:

The existence of the particle is postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in current theoretical physics …

In other words, the Standard Theory is sweating beneath the auditor’s eyeshaded gaze,  “We seem to have uncovered certain inconsistencies in your physicofinancial statements…”, and the hope is that adding yet one more creature to the Particle Zoo  will stave off the day of reckoning for a time.

Okay, so:  a non-story, at many levels.   Why, then, did a well-informed site like aldaily choose to link to it, rather than to any of a number of substantive scientific articles for a lay audience?  (For examples, see any issue of the excellent American Scientist.)   The answer is obvious:  the tawdry misinvocation of the Deity in that misbegotten amelus of a nickname, “the God particle”, which manages to degrade comprehension of both science and religion at one go.

[update 19 IV 11:]  aldaily has now promoted that piece of tripe to its coveted "nota bene" section.

[update 21 IV 11:]  Ah, just what we needed:  toss in the much-battered metaphor of the Holy Grail (now decapitalized and pluralized):
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/physics-and-the-search-for-the-holy-grails/779476/0

[update 26 IV 11:] As we anticipated.... "Nevvah mi-ind..."
And so the media once again climbs down from its puffed-up non-event.  But meanwhile they have sold some more newspapers, and John Q. Citizen can feel that he has kept "up-to-date" with Science.

[update 28 IV 11]  As an antidote to all this, see the current New Yorker for some excellent physics reportage.  The subject -- quantum computation and Many Worlds -- is difficult to approach without falling into mystification or gee-whiz, but reporter Rivka Galchen manages nicely.

[update 14 VIII 11]


More digs at Higgs

The FHB is beginning seriously to get on my tits.   Now this:

To More, the usual concept of empty space was meaningless because space is always filled with divine spirit.  To us, the usual concept of empty space  may be similarly elusive, since the empty space we’re privy to  may always be filled with an ocean of Higgs field.
 -- Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), p. 270

Ergo, a new Paternoster, for the Physics-Porn crowd:

            Our Particle, who art in Aether,
            Shallow be thy name …


[update 24 VIII 11]
The alarming possibility just occurred to me, that this post might be misconstrued as dissing physics popularization  as a genre, as a whole.  Not at all !  There are several quite excellent books.  Heading the list would be the brief and very readable title by Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1965).

~
~  Posthumous Endorsement ~
"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,
this is what I'd be reading: "
(My name is Dick Feynman, and I approved this message.)
~         ~
~

[update 18 IX 11]
Cf. now also this.

[update 24 IX 11]
And this.

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