“Is our universe extremely unnatural, a weird permutation among countless other possibilities, observed for no other reason than that its special conditions allowed life to arise, or, are the properties of the universe are inevitable, predictable, that is, ‘natural,’ locking together into a sensible pattern?” This is the question,The great unknownThis preoccupations theoretical physicist Nima Arkani HamedA professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, N.J.
Beyond Spacetime and Quantum Physics
Arkani-Hamed takes you beyond Einstein and beyond space-time, quantum mechanics, and the tropes 20th-century Physics to a stunning new vision of the cosmos. In 2012, he won the inaugural $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize “for original approaches to outstanding problems in particle physics, including the proposal of large extra dimensions, new theories for the Higgs boson, novel realizations of supersymmetry, theories for dark matter, and the exploration of new mathematical structures in gauge theory scattering amplitudes.”
The “Participatory Universe”
Arkani-Hamed’s preoccupation is the question that intrigued his predecessor, the great American quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler in the last decades of his life was: “Are life and mind irrelevant to the structure of the universe, or are they central to it?” Wheeler originated the notion of a “participatory,” conscious universe, a cosmos in which all of us are embedded as co-creators, replacing the accepted universe “out there,” which is separate from us. The bizarre laws of quantum mechanics revealed the nature of reality, Wheeler suggested. According to the quantum theory, before the observation is made, a subatomic particle exists in several states, called a superposition (or, as Wheeler called it, a ‘Smoky Dragon’). After the particle has been observed, it instantly falls into one state.
The Shape-Shifting Cosmos –“Huge Clue to the Nature of the Ultimate Truth”
“Multiverse” of Universes Beyond Our Reach
In principle, a natural universe is a known one. Béatrice de Géa in Quanta. But if the universe is unnatural and fine-tuned for life, observes Arkani-Hamed, “the lucky outcome of a cosmic roulette wheel, then it stands to reason that a vast and diverse “multiverse” of universes must exist beyond our reach — the lifeless products of less serendipitous spins. Our universe is impossible to understand on its own terms due to this multiverse.
For Life, Amazingly Fine-tuned
The known elementary particles, concludes Béatrice de Géa, codified in a 50-year-old set of equations called the “Standard Model,” lack a sensible pattern and seem astonishingly fine-tuned for life leading Arkani-Hamed and other particle physicists, guided by their belief in naturalness, to spend decades devising clever ways to fit the Standard Model into a larger, natural pattern while particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider have failed to turn up proof of their proposals in the form of supersymmetry, new particles and phenomena, “increasingly pointing toward the bleak and radical prospect that naturalness is dead.”
The Doom of Spacetime
Today many physicists feel trapped writes Natalie WolchoverIn The New YorkerThey see the need for a new mathematical language to reformulate modern physics theories. “They have a hunch,” she writes, “that they need to transcend the notion that objects move and interact in space and time. Einstein’s general theory of relativity beautifully weaves space and time together into a four-dimensional fabric, known as space-time, and equates gravity with warps in that fabric. But Einstein’s theory and the space-time concept break down inside black holes and at the moment of the big bang. Space-time, in other words, may be a translation of some other description of reality that, though more abstract or unfamiliar, can have greater explanatory power.”
Space and Time as fundamental Components of Reality: Challenges
2013 Nima Arkani-Hamed Jaroslav Trnka discovered a reformulation of scattering amplitudes that makes reference to neither space nor time, rather they discovered that the amplitudes of certain particle collisions are encoded in the volume of a jewel-like geometric object, which they named the “amplituhedron” that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.
The amplituhedron is a seamless connector between the large-scale and small-scale pictures. This could allow for the removal of two fundamental principles of Physics: locality, and unitarity. “Both are hard-wired in the usual way we think about things,” said Arkani-Hamed. “Both are suspect.”
This discovery has led them to explore this new geometric formulation of particle-scattering amplitudes, hoping that it will lead away from our everyday, space-time-bound conception to some “grander” explanatory structure of reality.
The Unknown Question –To Which the Universe is the Answer
Arkani-Hamed believes that the laws of nature are a new way of understanding physics. “We’re not building a machine that calculates answers,” he says, “instead, we’re discovering questions. Nature’s shape-shifting laws seem to be the answer ”to an unknown mathematical question”.
“The ascension to the tenth level of intellectual heaven,” says Nima Arkani-Hamed, describing the ultimate goal of physics, “would be if we find the question to which the universe is the answer, and the nature of that question in and of itself explains why it was possible to describe it in so many different ways.”
“It now appears that the answers surround us. It’s the question we don’t know.”
Avi ShporerResearch Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. via Institute for Advanced Studies, The New YorkerAnd Quanta. Avi was an formerly NASA Sagan Fellow at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Image credit: Shutterstock License
Your free daily fix of stories of space and science –a random journey from Planet Earth through the Cosmos– that has the capacity to provide clues to our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our Anthropocene epoch.
Yes, Sign Me Up for “The Galaxy Report” Newsletter
Avi Shporer Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google ScholarAvi was once a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
