.
As we meander along the path of life we come to accept the natural and inevitable aspect of some of the realities we encounter: The Arrow of Time. The Pull of Gravity. The Speed of Light. Death and Taxes. Some, like death and taxes, we experience as events to which we must attend, and we give both their due in the appropriate time and place, with the significance of the former muting the more transient irritation of the latter.
The others infuse themselves into our existence in more subtle ways. We grow older, not younger. The cup of coffee we accidentally nudge off the counter, fails to hover comfortably by our elbow and falls to earth. We observe the stars in the midnight sky, stars that do not currently exist in the guise we observe - they may no longer exist at all. Much will have changed in the millions or billions of years that have passed since the light we now observe left its own star to go hurtling at a constant 700 million miles an hour across space and time, only to be interrupted by our glance. But we rarely pause to think about those verities that wrap us in the eternal mandates of existence. Something startling is needed to convince us to put down our smartphone and attend to time and gravity and light.
The confirmation of the discovery of the Higgs particle on July 4th of 2012 was such an event. Yet perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this much ballyhooed occurrence is that, rather than revealing something new and revolutionary, it simply confirmed what we already suspected - that the Higgs field exists, and that it is "a field that permeates the universe, imparting certain subatomic particles with mass while letting photons and other massless particles pass unimpeded." [See the Science News citation at the end of this post.]
The fascination, for me, comes from the confirmation that we exist immersed in, dependent upon, and defined by a "field," a physical environment of which we are completely unaware. We cannot see it, feel it or taste it. Yet, there it is.
There is a delightful analogy, often credited to theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, that is used to clarify the nature of the Higgs field and our awareness of it. He asks us to imagine an "ocean world," no land, no atmosphere, everything is water. The world is inhabited - naturally - by aquatic creatures. But very bright, intelligent aquatic creatures; damn smart fish who build cities and gather together not simply in schools, but in universities, research centers, and, we would assume, think tanks. The question Wilczek poses is "How would they discover water?" If water was as natural to them as - well, breathing - how would they come to consider it as something apart from themselves?" And that is, of course, the genius of the very idea of a Higgs Field: The intellectual act of conceiving of something all encompassing that we could not sense without the aid of the sharpest of cutting edge science - the Large Hadron Collider, that was still just a dream when Higgs conceived his field. That Higgs could imagine such an invisible field that wraps around us and defines us - well, that, as they say, that there is genius - and exceptionally cool.
Some theorists are, nonetheless, disappointed that the Higgs particle seems to have simply put the bow on the package that is the standard model of physics. How short-sighted. Those same physicists will admit that "The standard model of physics explains about 5 percent of the mass energy content of the universe. The rest is a mystery." [See Science News again.]
To my mind it doesn't get much better than that - a fairly stable 5% platform from which we can now feel around for the mysteriously missing other 95%. A less-forgiving perspective might find fault with a discipline that admits to being ignorant of 95% of its object of study. Still, it may be that some physicists are simply being more forthcoming than their colleagues in other disciplines. I, for one, am delighted that the notion of a "Higgs-like" field has been confirmed. Not only because of the characteristics of the Higgs field itself with its implications for mass, but because of what may be found in the deeper levels of what we are calling the Higgs field.
Consider, if you will, the ageless theoretical treatise by Dr. Suess, Horton Hears a Who. In this groundbreaking work Suess postulates a world, "Whoville," almost unimaginably tiny, that underlies our normal world. If we make the particles that inhabit the Higgs field the "normal world," it becomes possible to imagine an underlying "Stringville" inhabited by the unimaginably tiny vibrating strings of string theory. String theory allows us to shrink this far, but no further. What then would this "Stringville Field" impart to the worlds and universes hovering above it, as the Higgs Field imparts mass to ours?
If we accept the notion that strings are the smallest elemental units of the universe and that they are drawn together or repelled from one another depending upon their rate of vibration, then it does not seem beyond feasible conjecture that the vibrations emanating from this seminal Stringville Field are passed along to the larger but contiguous fields that lead eventually to and through the Higgs Field, to us, on through the observable 5% of the universe we have "discovered," and finally outward to "infinity and beyond." What I am trying to say is that I would cautiously assert that a Stringville Field - with a more serious scientific name - imparts resonance to the universe, it imparts harmony - as natural, powerful, and unalterable as gravity, the arrow of time and the speed of light. It is the source of the flow of harmony.
But, of course, I couldn't let it go at that. Two questions continued to keep me tossing into the tiny hours of the morning. First, the Stringville Field is home to both harmonic and discordant patterns. How do I explain my assertion that harmony, and not discord, becomes the flow that dominates the cosmos? And, two, what are the "real life" implications for the apparent unavoidable tension between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm? And, I'll share my thoughts on those issues with you in Part II.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/350985/description/Hard_Times_for_Theorists_in_a_Post-Higgs_World
.
No comments:
Post a Comment