For every particle there is a corresponding symmetric particle. Physics has a translational symmetry, which means that the laws and values of physics are the same at every location in the universe. If an observer were to travel from one point to a much farther distant point the observer we see no change in the physics. A broken symmetry introduces change—a non-absolute uniformity. The breaking of symmetries creates complexity in the laws of nature in the outcome of laws. There’s a symmetry and uniformity between the strong and weak nuclear forces, which have been unified as electromagnetism by James Clerk Maxwell. A typical example of vital symmetry breaking is that which gives rise to the balance between matter and antimatter in the early universe. However, there is an asymmetry between the quantum and the large (a la gravity). String theory is the attempt to unify all of physics.
What Does it Mean for Physics to Have Symmetry?
Q&A 15: What, Exactly, IS Gravity?
Question:
Hello Max,
My name is Chad Gross and I am the director of Truthbomb Apologetics. Brian Auten of Apologetics315 recommended that I email you with a question that I have.
My question deals with gravity and whether or not it is immaterial. It seems to me that gravity is not composed of matter and/or energy; therefore, it is immaterial. However, when interacting with an unbeliever on the topic on this post and he said the following:
“Without mass there would be no gravity, right? It’s true that gravity itself isn’t made of atoms, but you must admit that the material world is more than just particles. Einstein showed that matter and energy are equivalent and can transform into each other. When I talk about something being material, therefore, I’m thinking of both matter and energy.
It’s true again that gravity might not be a form of energy, since it’s just a force. Maybe gravity arises due to the nature of space and time. But without matter, there would be no space and time. So I think it’s uncontroversial to consider the physical forces to be “material.”
When I think of things that are not material, I’m thinking of spirit, or soul. God isn’t made of matter or energy, and God would still exist even without any matter or energy, right?”
Now, I realize gravity is not immaterial in the same way that moral judgments, mathematics, logic, etc. Here is my reply to him:
Higgs Boson Calculations Indicate a Finite Lifespan for the Universe
Reblogged from Irene Klotz with Yahoo News.
Scientists are still sorting out the details of last year’s discovery of the Higgs boson particle, but add up the numbers and it’s not looking good for the future of the universe, scientists said Monday [Feb. 18].
“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, told reporters.
Lykeen spoke before presenting his research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.
“It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out,” said Lykken, who is also on the science team at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.
A Theological Argument for an Everett Multiverse
Max Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” Scientific American 2003.
The following is the abstract to Don Page’s paper, “A Theological Argument for an Everett Multiverse.”
Science looks for the simplest hypotheses to explain observations. Starting with the simple assumption that {\em the actual world is the best possible world}, I sketch an {\it Optimal Argument for the Existence of God}, that the sufferings in our universe would not be consistent with its being alone the best possible world, but the total world could be the best possible if it includes an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God who experiences great value in creating and knowing a universe with great mathematical elegance, even though such a universe has suffering.
God seems loathe to violate elegant laws of physics that He has chosen to use in His creation, such as Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism or Einstein’s equations of general relativity for gravity within their classical domains of applicability, even if their violation could greatly reduce human suffering (e.g., from falls). If indeed God is similarly loathe to violate quantum unitarity (though such violations by judicious collapses of the wavefunction could greatly reduce human suffering by always choosing only favorable outcomes), the resulting unitary evolution would lead to an Everett multiverse of `many worlds’, meaning many different quasiclassical histories beyond the quasiclassical history that each of us can observe over his or her lifetime. This is a theological argument for one reason why God might prefer to create a multiverse much broader than what one normally thinks of for a history of the universe.
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New Paper: The History and Macro-Ontology of the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics
In 1956 Hugh Everett III published his Ph.D. dissertation titled “The Theory of the Universal Wave Function.” In this paper Everett argued for the relative state formulation of quantum theory and a quantum philosophy, which denied wave collapse. (DOWNLOAD HERE)
Initially, this interpretation was highly criticized by the physics community and when Everett visited Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1959 Bohr was unimpressed with Everett’s most recent development.[1] In 1957 Everett coined his theory as the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. In an attempt to circumvent the problem of defining the mechanism for the state of collapse Everett suggested that all orthogonal relative states are equally valid ontologically.[2] What this means is that all-possible states are true and exist simultaneously.
“The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was Never Quite Right”
Pioneering experiments have cast doubt on a founding idea of the branch of physics called quantum mechanics.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is in part an embodiment of the idea that in the quantum world, the mere act of observing an event changes it.
But the idea had never been put to the test, and a team writing in Physical Review Letters says “weak measurements” prove the rule was never quite right.
That could play havoc with “uncrackable codes” of quantum cryptography.
Quantum mechanics has since its very inception raised a great many philosophical and metaphysical debates about the nature of nature itself.
The experiment requires preparing pairs of “entangled” photons, the particles from which light is made (BBC)
The Standard Model of Particle Physics Written Out
With the recent discovery of a new boson, which is likely to be the elusive Higgs boson, the standard model for particle physics would not be complete. Keep in mind that this only confirms the model that has been used for a long time now. This explains the early moments after the big bang where there was the electroweak force which separated and became the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces (there’s also the strong nuclear force). This doesn’t unify the theory of gravity. Physicists must still develop a theory of quantum gravity.
Quantum Physics: How Small? How Fast? How Long?
Length
Atomic nuclei range from about 10-4 to 10-5 of the size of an atom. If the atom were about the size of a medium-sized airport (say, 3 km) then the nucleus would be about 30 cm, about the size of a basketball. Now imagine the airport, 3 km, having a sphere encompassing it. If you change the basketball to a golf ball you have a rough scale of the hydrogen atom with its central proton. Inside the golf ball are the quarks. Change the scale from the proton being the size of a golf ball to the size of a marble, about 1 cm. The sphere is now the size of the earth’s orbit. The actual size of a proton is about 10-15m. This is equivalent to one femtometer, or one Fermi (1 fm). The smallest distance probed is 10-18m, which is one thousandth of a fermi. The fundamental particles such as quarks are smaller than this.
The radius of the Hubble volume, or known universe, is about fourteen billion light years, which is about 1026m away. The size of your desk is about 1026 times smaller than the universe and only 1018 times larger than the smallest probed distance. The mean distance between the large distance of the universe and the smallest distance probed is 104m, or 10 km. This means that the mean distance of the universe is about six miles.
Word of the Week Wednesday: Multiverse
The Word of the Week is: Multiverse
Definition: The term to designate the existence of many worlds or universes. Contrary to just one world, a uni-verse, there are many worlds, a multi-verse.
More about the term: The multiverse is not monolithic but it is modeled after the contemporary understanding of an inflationary model of the beginning of this universe suggesting a plurality of worlds. Max Tegmark has championed the most prominent versions of the multiverse.[1] There are four levels of the multiverse.
- Level One: The level one is, for the most part, more space beyond the observable universe. So, theoretically, if we were to go to the “edge” of the universe there would be more space. Having this model as a version of the multiverse may be misleading because there is still only one volume, landscape, or system involved. A generic prediction of cosmological inflation is an infinite space, which contains Hubble volumes (what we see in our universe) realizing in all conditions—including an identical copy of each of us about 10^10^29 meters away.[2]
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