|
|
|
Is there an ultimate nature of physical reality?
MAN’S unending drive to overcome his curiosity, and seek rationality, has been a part of his nature from the very beginning. The concepts of simplicity and symmetry have always been appealing to the cognitive brain. We find scholars, philosophers and scientists working to meet this innate end persistently throughout human history.
From Pythagoras’ doctrine of the numerical translation of nature to Descartes’ attempts to put the whole universe on one mathematical foundation of mechanics, we see a struggle that tries to put “everything” into a “single” context.
In the last 100 years, this quest was fuelled by Einstein’s revolutionarily general theory of relativity. This theory set the scientific world on fire in terms of how it looked at things. It sought to explain the complex universe on simple but fundamental grounds never probed before.
This argument leads us to a twofold conclusion. The first is that humans endeavour to put a single lens on to all physical phenomenons to strip them of their peculiarities and make them more generic than ever before. The second important inference is that these ventures to bring in an ever increasing number of physical phenomenon, under one umbrella of fundamental laws, have borne fruit much too often. Experiments have been the key in this process. Many times the flow of ideas was inhibited by the lack of accurate empirical evidence to make conclusive judgments about any new candidate law in question. Although, any watershed events are only rare occurrences in the scientific arena, yet these affairs have such avant-garde scientific and philosophical implications that their perusal only seems logical.
The widely accepted Big Bang theory accounts for the origins of our universe. It is agreeably dumbfounding, to say the least, to even imagine how, from one point of singularity, something so diverse, complex and stable might have evolved. From a point of infinite density, elementary particles developed and there on gave birth to secondary constituents and the process repeated until we came to be what we are today, some fifteen billion years later. Although, we don’t really know a lot about what happened in the first minutest fractions of time after the Big Bang, we do believe that all matter originated from this point. This theory of our origin brings us to a stark revelation — we all came from a “simple” single point of singularity. I emphasize “simple” here because this is the key to what we are aiming at; a simple set of laws that could explain everything in the universe, from Einstein’s gravity to Maxwell’s electromagnetism.
Coming back to the conundrum that Einstein with his theory of relativity put the physicists in, we are experiencing essentially a small instance of the same process I just talked about. Before 1905, Newtonian physics was the answer to every question scientists could pose. Its Law of Gravitation explained not only the motion of the matter in the earthly sphere but its application stretched to even determining descriptions of heavenly bodies such as the sun. Suddenly, it looked like we had a general phenomenon-explaining structure that could describe anything with the same set of rules, be it the falling apple or the lunar eclipse. It predicted the tides, the motion of the planets and justified their elliptical paths. In short, everything to our then known degree of accuracy made sense. Apparent crevices in Newtonian physics were brushed aside initially due to scientists’ adamancy to “stick” with it due to its facial appeal and apparent workability. In the first place, there were no experiments available or even viable that could shed any doubt on Newton’s Law. Secondly, any experimental evidence in conflict with the law was reasonably overlooked due to the high probability of experimental error in these experiments
Newtonian mechanics saw a world where space and time were absolute and separate entities. Everybody shared the same space and time, that is, a single co-ordinate system stretched across the entire universe. This implied that we all would agree on the length, breadth and height of an object regardless of ones own motion, the only prerequisite being that we do the measurements accurately. It treated light as having flexible velocity that depended on the motion of the observer itself. All these assumptions combined together to give science a sturdy law with enormous applications and great focus.
Michelson-Morley’s experiment set the first ripple of controversy in motion by carrying accurate measurements to question whether light had variable velocity. Their work was mostly understated with scientists assuring themselves that more accurate future experiments would eventually prove these results otherwise, and Newtonian physics would stand tall as it always had. The second problem was its “ugly meshing” with Maxell’s laws of electromagnetism. At a rest state, Maxwell’s laws worked well with those of Newton’s, but as the velocity of that frame increased things started to look ugly.
It was fractures like these in the foundations of Newtonian mechanics that fuelled Einstein’s Gedanken experiments. He felt uncomfortable with the fact that a law so fundamental was not in fact hundred per cent in its applications. With his quest to lay these problems to rest, he ended up revolutionizing all of physics so thoroughly that suddenly everything looked different, yet more complete. At the time of his theories of special and general relativity, technology had not matured enough to measure the small accuracies they demanded. Scientists had to wait for at least another 50 years to conclusively test his theory’s correctness. In the meantime, Einstein’s work continued to fill in the puzzles, one after the other.
He converted the concept of absolute space and time to one that was relative to the frame of reference of the observer. It proposed the concept of a four-dimensional curved space-time whose curvature was influenced by matter itself — a mental picture that was hard even to imagine. On the other hand, the speed of light was constant and independent of the observer’s motion. This rhymed well with the Maxwell’s prediction about the speed of light, “c”. This model had resounding implications that were mind-boggling to say the least. It inferred that all previous mathematical constructs about the vast universe broke down. It predicted the astonishing contraction of length, dilation of time and mass increase nearing “c”. Despite all this, its range of explanations went much further than the scope of Newton’s work. His work, to put it mildly, was truly radical. A significant piece in the puzzle had been discovered, although the journey to unification of the universe had in fact started.
The mind questions whether this is the kind of convergence that man was looking for. Einstein’s work explained the anomalies in Newtonian Physics and further described a wider set of phenomenon. It was a convergence of the same league as the linking of electromagnetism and weak interactions to form the new field described by the theory of electroweak interactions — a possible step towards describing the ultimate nature of physical reality — and a goal that the scientists always aspired to achieve. That didn’t mean that Newton was thrown out the window. Quite contrary to that, Newton’s law gained further validation, except that a set of qualifiers had to be defined. As it turned out, Newton’s was an approximation and the reason it worked so well was that it was precisely based on worldly dimensions. It started to break down only when natural extremities of velocities nearing the speed of light and strong gravitational fields of the kinds of a hundred suns and more were witnessed. This was, of course, impossible on earth or even in our solar system, and this translated into the success of the Newtonian model. But Einstein’s proposal put everything from the Earth to the farthest star, into the same “simple” physical context.
Newton’s gravitational force unified the apples and the stars. Maxwell bound electricity and magnetism together, and Einstein wove together matter, energy, space and time. Exciting as it sounds, is that the end? We cannot claim to know. New phenomena are observed as scientists move farther into space, and speculate how it has evolved or probe deeper into the atom to see how it is formed, ravelling through the same ensemble of phenomenon. Historical development of science has its lessons for mankind. Newton’s model defined everything but the very concept of “everything” was based on the fact that “everything” was all that we experienced. It would be naive to expect that today our concept of everything is really “everything” in the absolute sense. It is this thought provoker that leads people to test theories and revolt against assumptions to form the essential components to make this evolutionary process of scientific discovery possible.
In our quest then, the most successful approach is to look for convergence in the sense of general explanations and applications keeping in mind that that new insights might be radically different in appearance from their predecessors. Emphasis is on the result and not the approach. This kind of different perspectives is what symbolized the Newton Einstein controversy — it’s the simple case of trying to look at the same car from the inside it or from outside.
I believe our academic knowledge will soon extend its coverage as long as there are mysteries or crevices beneath any hierarchy of laws. Mysteries indicate the necessity of mainstream knowledge being enriched by a new and wider theory — a theory that seeks to define the ultimate nature of physical reality based on fundamental simplicity rather than a theory describing every individual thing. Let me remind once again how it all started from one dot and stress that evidence and intuitional justification for the existence and the need for inquiry towards an ultimate “theory of everything” is indeed overwhelming.
This process is by definition continual; of course, until such an ultimate nature of reality is realized. Plato’s “dialectic” gives us a conclusive insight on the nature of this process, as “the method of inquiry that proceeds by a constant questioning of assumptions and by explaining a particular idea in terms of a more general one until the ultimate ground of explanation is reached.” That ultimate ground of explanation would be the complete description of the “real nature of physical reality.”
The writer
|
|
|
|
