Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Is physics wrong after all?
When I left school about 68 years ago, I had absorbed just enough physics and mathematics to understand how these two domains of scholarly activity related to each other to explain why things happen in the way that they do in our universe. This is (or maybe was) the universe according to Einstein. Over the decades since those far off and long ago school days, I've tried to stay, more or less, abreast of advances in physics. Not, alas, the mathematical basis of the physics of the very large, astrophysics, or the very small, particle physics, but at least abreast of the observations, and thence the comforting way the mathematical theories support these observations. I could understand how and why the atom bomb worked, because E = MC squared. C is the speed of light in a vacuum and nothing can exceed the speed of light. Now something has. It has been observed twice, because no one believed the original observation, which came from CERN, the European theoretical and observational physics laboratory on the border between Switzerland and France near Ferney, a sort of suburb of Geneva. The physicists who observed particles traveling faster than the speed of light are associated with the Large Hadron Collidor, and their second set of observations of particles traveling faster than the speed of light confirms their earlier observations, and overturns our 100-year old understanding of physics according to Einstein. I've got no idea what this means, nor do any of the physicists, apparently. Like other observations, such as the fact that the expanding universe is expanding much more rapidly than it ought to be to conform with the conventional mathematical theory, it suggests that much remains unknown about the basic fabric of the cosmos. Sometimes I think that if I were starting my career rather than ending it, I would like to work at the growing edge of physics, or better still, at the interface of physics and molecular biology. I have a feeling that the next generation of physicists might make some surprising discoveries at that interface.
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I've counted up on my fingers and it's almost 69 years since I left St Peter's College boys' school in Adelaide in December 1943, aged 17, not really ready to start the medical course but I did so anyway at the beginning of the following February.
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