Saturday, December 6, 2008

The Standard Model of Science

I thought it appropriate to send a post on the foundational theories of science considering the aim of this blog is to connect this to Sai-ence, consciousness and spirituality, and a more analytical platform for devotees to share their insight and views on world issues in relationship to Swami's teaching and mission. So, especially for those of you who are physicist, I want to recommend a book by Robert Oerter with the title "The Theory of Almost Everything" and introduce you to some of the content of this book and the most important theory in modern physics - The Standard Model.

Listening to the BBC on the radio months ago I was enlightened by the comments made that there are 3 Knowns;

(1) Known Knowns (Standards Model)
(2) Known Unknowns (String theory & Super gravity);
(3) Unknown Knowns(Future theories or forever mysterious according to Standard Model)

I found it's significance most clearly presented in this book through explaining the latest developments in physics and science.

With science evolving from Newtonian to Einstein to Bhors work and now theories of super-gravity, string and "M" theory to parallel universes to anti-matter and dark matter, physics is getting tremedously interesting but complicated. What I do know is that physics has not been unable to resolve the KNOWN theories with the laws of gravity.

"The Standard Model - The Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics" through this book has tied up all KNOWN theories by explaining all known physical interactions, with the exception of gravity, through the RELATIVISTIC QUANTUM FIELD THEORY that was the model established by some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century.

This is an exctract from the foreward and introduction:

"In an era when enormous attention is being paid to the promising but highly speculative superstring/M theory, a great triumph of science has gone nearly unnoticed, except by physicsts. Robert Oerter provides here an accessible introduction to the Standard Model - a towering example of human creativity. He outlines how the Standard Model can serve as the launching pad for humanity to - paraphrasing Einstein - see better the secrets of the Ancient One.... We always hear about black holes, the big bang, and the search for life in the universe. But rare is the book that celebrates the Standard Model of Elimentary Particles ... that underpins nearly all we know about physical reality.....

New reports and general interest books about the Standard Model often emphasize the particles in the theory: discovery of quarks, finding the W and Z bosons, looking for the neutrino mass, the search for the Higgs particle. The emphasis misses the underlying strucutre of the theory......

All such theories incorporate the strangenses both of special relativity, with its paradoxes of time and motion, and of quatum mechanics, with its fields that are neither wave nor particle. The framework of relativistic quantum field theory adds some weirdness of its own: particles that pop into existence out of pure energy, and disappear again, literally in a flash of light. This structure encodes the rather bizarre worldview of the physicists. It tells WHAT CAN BE KNOWN about the universe, and what must REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS. This structure, the deep symmetries of the universe that are hidden within this structure, and its implications for our understanding of the phsycial world, are what I want to tell you in this book.........

The story of fundamental physics in the twentieth century is a story of symmetry: symmetry perfect and imperfect, symmetry discovered and symmetry destroyed. The symmetries are not ones that can be discovered by the naked eye, however..........The deep symmetries of the fundamental particles are exact - there is no way to tell if the twist has been made or not. Beyond these exact symmetries, not visible even in the fundamental particle but hidden in the physicists' theories, lies yet another symmetry, one that existed in the first moments of the universe's existence, but has since been shattered. This symmetry and its downfall is the reason that matter as we know it exists, the reason for stars, planets, daffodils, and you and me.....

So, in a sense, the standard Model "explains" all those everyday phenomena, from the structure of the chair you sit on, to your very thoughts. It is not possible, though, to write an equation that describes your chair using the equations of the Standard model (much less an equation for your thoughts!). The Standard Model can only be solved in very simple cases, say one electron interacting with one proton. In those simple cases, however, the Standard Model gives such incredibly accurate predictions that we have a great deal of confidence that that is really how electrons and proton behave. Even though we cannot in practice use the Standard Model to describe a chair, we can say that a chair consists of protons, neutrons, and electrons in various configurations, and so, in principle, the Standard Model "explains the chair at its most fundamental level.

Consider a computer as an analogy. ..... Both levels of description are necessary to understand the computer, but the higher-level (operating and program) functions can be explained in terms of the lower-level (circuitory) processes, and not the other way around. This is why we call the lower-level description the more fundamental one.

The Standard Model describes the "circuitry" of the universe. We can't understand everything in the universe using the Standard Model (even if we omit gravity), but we can't really understand anything at the most fundamental level without the Standard Model. Suppose you are a biologist who wants to understand the functions of blood in the body. You need to investigate the penetration of oxygen across membranes, and its uptake by heamoglobin. Your biological questions turns out to depend on chemical questions. To understand how fast oxygen is fixed by haemaglobin, you need to know about the configuration of the electrons in the oxygen and the haemaglobin molecules. These configurations are determined by the electric and magnetic forces between the electrons and the nuclei , in other words, by the Standard Model....

If all that had been accomplished in the past century were that a hundred or so fundamental atoms had been replaced by seventeen fundamental subatomic particles, it would still have been a great simplification in our understanding of matter. However, the Standard Model goes much further. With a handful of additional parameters, it specifies all the interactions between the particle. Including the parameters needed to specify the properties of the seventeen particles, there are just eighteen numbers needed to specify the Standard Model. Instead of an infinite number of possible groupings of atoms into molecules, and therefore an infinite number of chemical reaction whose rates must be measured, we have a mere eighteen parameters. All but one of the particles have now been produced in accelerator experiments, and the values of the parameters have been measured. The Standard Model puts us much closer to the complete understanding of the fundamental of the universe.

For this reason, the Standard Model is the greatest accomplishment of the twentieth-century science. All you need is to measure the values of the eighteen parameters, and you know everything there is to know about everything in the universe, always excepting gravity. In principle, you could deduce the laws of thermodynamics, of optics, of electricity and magnetism, of nuclear energy, from the Standard Model. You could go on to explain the functioning of a star, a microbe, a galaxy, a human being, on the basis of those eigthteen numbers. .....

Finally, the Standard Model can't be the end of the story because it fails to account for several important phenomena that have been discovered recently.....Then there is the "dark matter" that astronomers tell us makes up most of the mass of the universe. Any theory that misses the majority of the stuff of the universe can't be compete."

The book is a very interesting read; especially the introduction and early chapters before getting rather dry and complicated for the layman not trained in physics.

However, I thought what science is revealing is very interesting for us devotees who watch swami materialise and dematierialise objects and matter at will.

And from the aspect of Veda, with its Sankhya philosophy of 24 components to understand prakriti (nature), gunas and elements with its broader metaphysical and scriptural assumptions of harmony and symmetry in a closed universe, along with the Standard Model through the scientific experiments of physics and "smaller numbers of probabilities", may lead to a grand synthnesis through metaphysics and the same ideas of proportion, ratio and symmetry.

For us devotees it is interesting that swami is opening the metaphysical school in Mysore where I presume authorities in science and architecture such as Keith Critchlow will be teaching to make this bridge between the scientific, metaphysical and Vedantic.

Ultimately, it is a question of consciousness and science ... from Steve Davies' "In the mind of God" to "Brains and Consciousness" (edited by Rose) to the latest break through is quantum mechanics (What the Bleep do we know) to the Advaita philosophy of Vedanta...the question remains one of identity; " Who am I?" in all of this... the triple of knower, knowing and known; the body, witness and mind/universe; the past, present & future.... the reflected consciousness or That which is beyond consciousness, time, space and science ... that remains forever mysterious.. some unknown source from which dark matter appears ....? Will western science, through these theories meeting Metaphyics and approximating Veda, ultimately make the intellect question its own mysterious source and identity..?

On a last note, it is interesting that Vedanta, in dividing philosophy in dualism and causality (Newtonian), to qualified non-dualism and spontaneous creation (Quantum mechanics), to non-dualism and oneness (Einstein to Bhor), may find a place to categorise theories of physics into a conceptual framework depending on the intellects focus on the outer object, inner subject or underlying wholeness of consciounsess. Time will tell?!

Perhaps only when scientists have bridged the Vedic concepts of ether and the satwa guna which may have something to do with raising the internal speed of light in the mass of consciousness that makes up the man and mind that perceives the relativities of time and space through its holographic subjective projection based on the conditionings of memory?! Like Nataraj in his cosmic dance, when this internal speed moves so fast as to appear static, the relative phenomena slows down to an eternal vertical presence in an eternal omnipresent NOW.


A SCIENTIFIC BREAK-THROUGH to understand dark matter in the context of the above

Physicists solve mystery of missing neutrinos

PARIS (AFP) - – Scientists in Europe announced Monday they had likely solved the case of the missing neutrinos, one of the enduring mysteries in the subatomic universe of particle physics.

If confirmed in subsequent experiments, the findings challenge core precepts of the so-called Standard Model of physics, and could have major implications for our understanding of matter in the universe, the researchers said.

For decades physicists had observed that fewer neutrinos -- electrically neutral particles that travel close to the speed of light -- arrived at Earth from the Sun than solar models predicted.

That meant one of two things: either the models were wrong, or something was happening to the neutrinos along the way.

At least one variety called a muon-neutrino was actually seen to disappear, lending credence to a Nobel-winning 1969 hypothesis that the miniscule particles were shape-shifting into a new and unseen form.

Now scientists at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics have for the first time observed -- with 98 percent certainty -- what they change into during a process called neutrino oscillation: another type of particle known as tau.

"This will be the long-awaited proof of this process. It was a missing piece of the puzzle," said Antonio Ereditato, a researcher at the Institute and spokesman for the OPERA group that carried out the study.

"If true, it means that new physics will be required to explain this fact," he said by phone.

Under the prevailing Standard Model, neutrinos cannot have mass. But the new experiments prove that they do.

One implication is the existence of other, as yet unobserved types of neutrinos that could help clarify the nature of Dark Matter, which is believed to make up about 25 percent of the universe.

"Whatever exists in the infinitely small always has repercussions in the infinitely big," Ereditato said.

"A model which could explain why the neutrino is so small without vanishing will have profound implications for the understanding of our universe -- how it was, how it evolved, and how it will eventually die."

The transformation of the neutrino occurred during a programmed journey from Geneva to the Gran Sasso Laboratory near L'Aquila in central Italy.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) provided a laser-like beam composed of billions upon billions of muon neutrinos that took only 2.4 milliseconds to make the 730-kilometer (453-mile) trip.

The rarity of neutrino oscillation, coupled with the fact that the particles interact only weakly with matter, bedeviled the scientists.

Unlike charged particles, neutrinos are not sensitive to the electromagnetic field normally used by physicists to bend the trajectory of particle beams.

They can also pass through matter, and thus keep the same direction of motion from their inception.

It took nearly four years from the time the beam was switched on to witness the muon-to-tau metamorphosis.

8 comments:

rayesh said...

suren, very insightful, especially from a spiritual point of view. there is a documentary avalible ¨the elegant universe¨ presented by brian greene. it talks about string theories and it goes on to state that there are more dimensions out there and its finally possible to ´go´ into these dimensions using string theories. i vaguely remember somewhere hearing that there are more than just the 3 dimensions that we are familiar with. well, i highly recomend this film/documentary ¨the elegant universe¨. It certainly is as elegant as it is mysterious !!!

JiVa said...

This thing about dimensions is intersting. I am not familiar with the latest in physics to know much. But would be nice to see the documentary probably simplified to make complex concepts understandable. What I do know again, is that in Vedanta there are 7 levels as reflected in the chakras, 7 states of mind (from waking to deep sleep), 7 lokas and 7 akashas (spaces/dimensions?) that have to be trascended to abide in the transcendental reality. From the normal concrete mind to Supermind to Illumind Mind to Higher Mind to the Overmind or Cosmic Mind Vedantic authority reveals a whole universe enveloped by Maya. And swami also states that it is only on the earth through the instrument of the bubble body that the mind can be stilled to experience ones true nature that is beyond this totality. So as far as theories of physics, I wonder if the speculations of string and dark matter will ever lead to realsiation of the truth. And by using vednata to suggest dividing physics into the 3 conceptual aspects, I would think that by the proliferation of the imagination in the apparent objective by the subject or physicist, that all these latest theories still fall into the departement of causality rather than the one's of consciousness that quantum and relatativity can approximate by bringing in the subject into the equation. But I really am not physicist. And perhaps the evolution of these scientific concepts will make for a greater scientific model that give a holistic resolution of our understading of what is... not; according to Vedata and Advaita. thsi is all that the intellect and science can see or infer is the false appearance or illusion on the underlying "rope" or akasha or brahma. This known or the "not" is teh knot of identifiaction which prevents the intellect from arriving at quintesnce and teh tranquility neccessary after a thorough investigation into oneselg wioth a detachemetn from teh false to allow the sponateous or reflection of waht is to tgake place. Perhaps though the advances in science leading to teh resolution of the standard model, string theory, dark matter and gravity will lead to discovering the same things that ancient rishis were making manageable through a broader and more comprehensive philosopjhy such as the Sankhya one. Then, along with metaphysics in revealing the same symmetry and intelligence of the universe wiil lead to understading the laws of karma and causality; objective and subjective; in a unified perspective of the ancient one in all its dimensions, categories and philosophies.

rayesh said...

suren, i have the film/documentary. if anyone is interested i would be more than happy to give it for viewing (and disecting).

what you state is quite true and i think ´the elegant universe´reinforced your spiritual claim into tangible results.

JiVa said...

Is there anyway of making a link from this blog to the video for all to access..?

Also wanted to share some more on Hinduism in the context of physics; that is the personification of cosmic forces through the deities that allows the mind of man to propriate in order to unite with in consciousness and transcend. In Vedata, these 3 cosmic forces of creation (Brahma), preservation (Vishnu) and destruction (Rudra-Siva) are divided into the 3 gunas of raja, satwa and tamas; with the latter being the matter aspect. This 'family" of matter: Siva, Sakti, Murugan and Ganesh represents the forces of proton, electron, electro-magnetism and gravity. Ganesh as the law of gravity is represeted by AUM or the acutally gravitational force that keeps teh physical universe together adn corresponds to the 1st root chakra in yogic physiology and the foundation for teh Kundlini energy. Interstingly, in jyotish (Vedic astrology) this chakra is ruled by Saturn being reflective in the body of the astronomical/anatomical distance from the Sun/head. In jyotish Satun is teh only planet given the jurisdiction of karma and called Shani-ishwara (God). Anyway, just wanted to point out their are strange correspondences and assocaition in Vedanta's mythology, comology, astrology and biology (yogic physiology) that corresponds to sciences law of gravity. Also, it is intersting that in metaphsycis, this relationship of the family of 4 (Siva to Ganesh) can be correlated to the fixed zodiac of astrology (vehicles Bull, Lion, Bird, Man; with Rahu's ownership relating to the greedy anture of mans mind - Rat. This coreespondence of 4 is found in the Sphinx and the pyramids with the body of a bull, claws of a lion, wings of an eagle adn face of man; relating to the 4 elements (like the fixed zodiac) and the (pyramid to astronomy and space). So I do think that it is a mtter of time til science co-ordiantes with metaphysics, Vedanta and religion to develop a unified theory of everything.

rayesh said...

hey suren, i am sure a comuter nerd would find more than 1 way to link up a system where any video can be viewed. however, i can nly claim that i am but an ignorant when it comes this far into computing. i guess you could also download the film through torrent, www.thepiratebay.org

r

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