A week ago, we had a very interesting Physics department colloquium by Marcelo Gleiser about his recent book, A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Cosmos.
He discussed his growing disillusion with string theory and the search for a "theory of everything" which is based on the predominance of symmetry. He gave important examples of symmetry breaking in nature including CP violation in the electro-weak interactions [which because of the CPT theorem implies time reversal invariance] and the unique chirality of amino acids in proteins.
Although it was a nice talk I thought it was all a bit sad to see someone who had become so enamoured with the propaganda of the reductionism in the high-energy physics community that it was painful when doubts emerged. Most of the points Gleiser was making seem to me to have been made long ago (in a more constructive sense) by Anderson in his 1972 "More is Different" article in Science, and more passionately and more recently by Laughlin in A Different Universe.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Science job openings in sunny Brisbane, Australia
Bribie Island, just north of Brisbane. The University of Queensland has just advertised several jobs that may be of interest to readers of t...

-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro...
-
Nitrogen fluoride (NF) seems like a very simple molecule and you would think it would very well understood, particularly as it is small enou...
-
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
I did not see the point / problem with the existence of broken symmetries in nature. In any finite group there will be operations that are not a symmetry. The fact that CP is not a symmetry seems less profound (or at least, no more profound) than the fact that CPT IS a symmetry.
ReplyDelete