Wednesday, September 29, 2010 Tags: 0 comments

Taking Flight into a Single Great Problem; The Theory of Everything


"Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem..." Ludwig Wittgenstein

Theory of Everything is supposed to be a theory, not really of everything, but of "everything fundamental." A mere precise word for fundamental would be "basic or irreducible." That is physicists' Theory of Everything is supposed to provide all the laws that can't be derived logically even in principle, from other laws.

The structure of DNA surely emerges-in-principle from the equations of the standard model; so these phenomena, while they are vastly important are clearly fundamental in the usual sense, aren't fundamental in the technical sense, and elucidating them is not part of a Theory of everything.

Example:
*The Large Hadron Collider(LHC)- is used to recreate the conditions of the early universe. We could unify the description of fundamental interactions (gauge unification) only within an expanded version of relativity, which includes transformations of spin (symmetry supper). To make the unification we had to bring in new particles, which were too heavy to be observed at the time, but ought to be coming into range at the Large Hadron Collider. If they do exist we'll have a new world of phenomena to discover and explore. The astronomical riddle of dark matter could well be found there.

The glamour of the quest for the Theory of Everything, or a final Theory, harks back Einstein's long quest for his version, a Unified Field Theory.

Einstein's marvelous theories of particular things: Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, the electrodynamics of moving bodies, the equality of inertial and gravitational mass.

Physicists wants to write all the equations of the Universe on a t-shirt.

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