Now, this one was shared by a lot of you who, like me, have been
following the developments at CERN's large hadron collider in Geneva
with a bit of a jaundiced eye. First we had the sort-of announcement of
the discovery of the so-called "god particle," the Higgs boson,
allegedly the particle in the quantum pantheon for imparting mass to
everything else. I say "pantheon" here because it strikes me as
extremely odd and curious that physics seems somehow trapped in the old
this-god-does-that-function paradigm: we have gods of "wisdom,
fertility, and (pick a function)" and this particle-does-mass and that
particle does that... and spin moments, and directionality, and quarks
and "colors,"... I'm reminded a bit of the old nominalist-versus-realist
debates of the late Middle Ages. But anyway, back to the Higgs. Then
the discovery was sort-of retracted, then sort-of confirmed.Then we even
heard, briefly, of some sort of "discovery" of something with
"superluminal" velocities, but no, that's impossible because Pope
Einstein said so. Then we had the stories coming out of how some
physicists were actually toying with the idea of recasting their
equations entirely without the notion of dimensionality, allegedly, so
the story would seem, because of the High Weirdness they're finding when
they crank up their alchemical machine at Geneva. When I heard that
one I had to do a double-take, for the idea of modern mathematical
physics without dimensionality in the equations would seem to throw the
whole last 200 years of physics into a cocked hat. Maxwell, of course,
had his quaternions with its scalar potentials, but even he had to get
around to dimensionality at some point. Einstein's general relativity is
a highly dimensional theory, as are the various early 20th century
stabs at unified field theories from Kaluza-Klein to Vaclav Hlavaty and
on down even to modern string and m-theory. It's as if they are
suggesting that the whole of mathematical physics be recast as a theory
of Nothing with lots and lots of scalars and zero-sum vectors (or are
those the same thing? One can imagine David Bohm asking such a
question).
READ MORE:http://gizadeathstar.com/2015/02/cern-physicist-amit-goswami-we-have-no-idea-what-were-doing/
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