Know This

by Mr. John Brockman

  The great thing about intangible value, I suppose, is that its creation involves very little environmental damage. It may help disabuse people of the belief that the only way to save the planet is for us to impoverish ourselves. What it may mean is that those human qualities of status rivalry and novelty seeking which can be so destructive might be redirected, even if they cannot be eliminated.

  Science Made This Possible

  Bruce Parker

  Visiting Professor, Center for Maritime Systems, Stevens Institute of Technology; author, The Power of the Sea

  There is a dichotomy in the scientific news stories we see most frequently today. The first group includes stories about exciting and/or useful scientific developments; the second includes stories about actions taken in blatant defiance of scientifically acquired knowledge and full of skepticism as to science’s value. Stories from this second group include: parents refusing to vaccinate their children, the scare over genetically modified foods, the movement against teaching evolution in schools, skepticism about global warming, and a fear of fluoridating water.

  One would think that the first group, along with other scientific writing aimed at a general audience, should work to reduce the number of news stories in the second group. Unfortunately this does not seem to be happening. In this modern era of the Internet and cable TV, the quantity of positive scientific news has certainly increased, but so has the quantity of negative scientific stories. Doubtless the positive stories are primarily read by those who already believe in science and the negative stories by those susceptible to the anti-science message. We need to find ways of bringing well-explained stories from the first group to a broader audience. And we need well-explained rebuttals to counter the stories in the second group.

  Skepticism is understandable, considering the complexity of some of the science that people are being asked to believe. Climate change/global warming is a good example. It involves physics, chemistry, biology, and geology and relies heavily on proxy data (based on isotope ratios of various elements captured in ice cores, sediment cores, corals, etc.) to provide us with records of temperature, carbon dioxide, methane, sea level, ice sheets, and other parameters needed to describe change (including ice ages) over millions of years. Such data are critical for validating computer climate models that predict future climate change. We try to explain to the non-scientist, as best we can, how the climate system works (likewise, how vaccines work, why genetically modified food is as safe as food derived by Mendel-based breeding methods, why fluoridated water is safe, how natural-selection-based evolution works, and so on). But whether or not we succeed, we must at least get across the vast amount of meticulous work and theory testing carried out by thousands of scientists to reach these conclusions.

  How can we use the positive science news stories of the first group to change the minds of the audience for the second group? If the skeptics could be made to realize that their transportation, their means of communication, everything in their homes, at their jobs, and in between came originally from science, would that make a difference in their thinking? Would they be willing to look at a subject a bit more objectively? Many (most?) might still be too heavily influenced by religious beliefs or propaganda from special-interest groups to change their minds; in this Internet cable-news driven world, the negative influences are everywhere. But in writing scientific news, more emphasis should be put on the ways in which science has made modern life possible. If only we could put “Science made this possible” at the end of every scientific story, every technology story, and every story about our everyday activities. If only we could put “Science made this possible” signs on every appliance, drug, car, computer, game machine, and other such necessities of life! That might eventually make a difference.

  The Brain Is a Strange Planet

  Dustin Yellin

  Artist; founder, Pioneer Works

  The brain is a strange planet; the planet is a strange brain. The most important science story of the past year isn’t one story but an accumulation of headlines. With advanced recording and communication technologies, more people than ever before are sharing details of individual experiences and events, making culture more permeable and fluid. This verifiable record of diversity has brought people together while also amplifying their differences.

  Marginalized groups are enjoying widespread recognition of their rights. Measures like federal legalization of gay marriage and partial state-level legalization of marijuana show that lifestyles once considered abnormal have gained acceptance. At the same time, political divisions remain alarmingly stark. In the past year, over 1 million fled their home countries for Europe, seeking a better life. And not all signs show we are becoming more tolerant. One of the frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination suggested America address the threat of global terror by denying all Muslims entry into the United States, after which he performed well in the polls.

  At the summit on climate change in Paris last December, delegations from India and China objected to measures that would limit their economic development by curtailing pollution. Without recognizing that today’s climate is a product of damaging methods of expansion, India and China argue that emerging markets should be able to destroy the environment as did Western economies as they matured. This view is driven by fear of being usurped, outpaced, and overcome, and its myopia demonstrates that fear short-circuits the logical decision making of entire countries just as it does that of individuals.

  “One person’s freedom ends where another’s begins,” we seem to be saying. If this is what drives the formation of cultural norms today, dialogue about issues like water rights, energy use, and climate change will be determined by how those issues affect individuals.

  According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Our culture has potential to realize a seismic shift in consciousness and rebalance environmental and social scales. We’ve invented the story of this world—the cities we live in, the language and symbols we use to articulate thoughts, the love we nurture to propel us forward. A shift in perspective may be all it takes to convince us that the greatest threat to humanity comes not from another people in another land but from all people, everywhere.

  The Abdication of Spacetime

  Donald D. Hoffman

  Professor of cognitive science, UC Irvine; author, Visual Intelligence

  Space and time have been cynosures of science at least since Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915, transforming them from a passive stage for the play of matter into a riveting headliner of the entire production. From the Off-Broadway venue of science, they leaped into headline news in 1919 with Eddington’s confirmation during a solar eclipse that they bend, stretch, and twist, taking matter and light along for the ride. The New York Times headline of November 10th read: “Lights all askew in the heavens: Men of science more or less agog over results of eclipse observations.”

  Space and time capture the imagination precisely because they engender, and also imprison, our imagination. Imagine a holiday in Hawaii or a new design for a car, recall the wedding of a dear friend, contemplate the last moments of Custer’s last stand, and in each case space and time are your helpful, even essential, partners. But then try to imagine a world of four dimensions—up/down, forward/backward, left/right, and, say, nim/zur. No one succeeds. Our partner turns jailor and straitjackets the imagination. Now try two dimensions of time, or no time at all. The straitjacket tightens.

  In 1926 a brash talent debuted. Quantum theory can, in special cases, get on well with space and time, and the result of their collaboration is the Standard Model of particle physics, which successfully describes the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions and their associated subatomic particles. But when the density of matter is too large or the distance of interaction is too small, the collaboration breaks down and quant
um theory, it now appears, can upstage its costar.

  Hints of the breakdown surfaced in 1935 when Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen observed that according to quantum theory, measurement of the quantum state of one particle can instantly change the state of another particle entangled with it, no matter how distant in space. Entanglement cannot transmit information faster than light. Nevertheless its insouciance about space and time deeply troubled Einstein.

  The breakdown splashed front and center in string theory. Nobel Laureate David Gross observed, “Everyone in string theory is convinced . . . that spacetime is doomed. But we don’t know what it’s replaced by.” Fields medalist Edward Witten also thought that space and time may be “doomed.” Nathan Seiberg, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, said, “I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.”

  The good news is that sophisticated replacements might be on the way. One new candidate is entanglement itself. Brian Swingle and Mark Van Raamsdonk found that curved spacetimes obeying Einstein’s general theory of relativity can emerge from tensor networks of entangled quantum bits. In this scenario, the insouciance of entanglement is feigned. Entanglement itself is somehow the fabric that holds spacetime together.

  Another new candidate is a class of geometric constructions outside space and time, including the amplituhedron discovered by Nima Arkani-Hamed and Jaroslav Trnka. Subatomic particles collide and scatter in a multitude of ways, and physicists have for decades had formulas for computing their probabilities—formulas that assume physical processes evolving locally in space and time. But as it happens, these formulas are unnecessarily complex and hide deep symmetries of nature. The amplituhedron simplifies the formulas, exposes the symmetries hidden by spacetime, and in the process abandons the assumption that space and time are fundamental.

  What is fundamental, if not space and time? No one is yet sure. The prime suspect is quantum information—quantum bits and quantum gates. But quantum information viewed abstractly, not as embedded in spacetime. Spacetime and objects somehow emerge from nonspatial and nontemporal dynamics of quantum information. As John Wheeler put it, “It from bit.” But this raises its own questions. Why should information, quantum or otherwise, be the bedrock of reality? And in what sense is it information?

  It may be premature to write the obituary of space and time. The report of their death might be an exaggeration. But either way, dead or alive, it will be news that is important and lasting. Whether space and time prove fundamental or not, the proof itself will bring in its wake new and deep insights into the nature of reality, and perhaps also into the nature of our own imagination.

  I suspect that the report of their death is not an exaggeration. This will raise new questions for researchers in perceptual psychology. Why have our perceptual systems evolved to present us a world in the format of space and time if, as Seiberg says, space and time are illusions, primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated? What selection pressures favored the ascendancy of this primitive format? What fitness advantages does it confer?

  The standard assumption in perceptual psychology is that evolution favors veridical perceptions, those that accurately describe those aspects of the environment crucial to the fitness of an organism. It is not standard to assume that the very spacetime format of our perceptions is itself non-veridical, primitive, and illusory. How will this field have to change if space and time are illusions? And how will our notions of physical causality have to change? Will these changes affect how we approach the classic mind/body problem, the question of how our conscious experiences are related to our physical bodies and in particular to the activity of our brains?

  Such questions make clear that the stakes are high. The grand entrance of space and time a century ago made world headlines. Their denouement will be no less riveting.

  The News That Wasn’t There

  Antony Garrett Lisi

  Theoretical physicist; independent researcher

  On July 4, 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. While this was big news in fundamental physics, it was not surprising. The existence of the Higgs boson, or something like it, was necessary for the consistency of the Standard Model of particle physics, established in the 1970s and now supported by an extraordinary amount of experimental data. Finding the Higgs was central to confirming the Standard Model. However, despite the well-deserved attention accorded to the discovery of the Higgs, this was not the biggest news. The biggest recent news in fundamental physics is what has not been discovered: superparticles.

  The theory of supersymmetry—that all existing particles are matched by “superpartners” having opposite spins—was introduced soon after the Standard Model was established and quickly became a darling of theoretical physicists. The theory helped solve a fine-tuning problem in the Standard Model, with superparticles balancing the quantum contributions to existing particle masses and making the observed masses more natural. (Although why particles have precisely the masses they do remains the largest open question in fundamental physics.) Also, for proponents of Grand Unified Theories (GUTs), the three strengths of the known Standard Model forces more perfectly converge to one value at high energies if superparticles exist. (Although a similar convergence can be achieved more simply by adding a handful of non-super bosons.) And, finally, supersymmetry (SUSY) became a cornerstone of, and necessary to, superstring theory—the dominant speculative theory of particle physics.

  One of the strongest motivations for constructing the Large Hadron Collider, along with finding the Higgs, was to find superparticles. In order for SUSY to help the Standard Model’s naturalness problem, superparticles should exist at energies reachable by the LHC. During the collider’s first run, the anticipation of superparticles at CERN was palpable—it felt as if a ballroom had been set up, complete with a banner: “Welcome home SUSY!” But superparticles have not shown up at the party. The fact that the expected superparticles have not been seen puts many theorists, including string theorists, in a scientifically uncomfortable position.

  Imagine that you had a vivid dream last night in which you saw a unicorn in your backyard. The dream was so vivid that the next day you go into your backyard and look around, expecting to find your unicorn. But it’s not there. That’s the position string theorists and other SUSY proponents now find themselves in. You may claim, correctly, that even though you now know there is no unicorn in the backyard, the Bayesian expectation that the unicorn is actually hiding in the closet has increased! You are “narrowing in” on finding your unicorn! This is precisely the argument SUSY proponents are presenting, now that the LHC has failed to find superparticles near the electroweak energy scale. Yes, it is correct that the probability that the unicorn is in the closet, and that superparticles might be found during the current LHC run, has gone up. But do you know what has gone up more? The probability that the unicorn and superparticles do not exist at all. A unicorn would be a wonderful and magical animal, but maybe it, and SUSY, and superstrings really just don’t exist, and it’s time to think about other animals.

  No News Is Astounding News

  Lee Smolin

  Theoretical physicist, Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; author, Time Reborn

  The most important news from 2015 in fundamental physics is that probably there is no news. With one tantalizing exception (which may be a statistical anomaly), recent experiments confirm a frustratingly incomplete theory of fundamental physics which has stood since the 1970s. This is in spite of enormous effort by thousands of experimentalists hoping to discover new phenomena that would lead to greater unification and simplification in our understanding of nature.

  Since 1973, our knowledge of elementary particles and fundamental forces has been expressed in what we call the Standard Model of elementary-particle physics. This reduces all phenomena, save gravity, to tw
elve fundamental particles interacting via three forces. The Standard Model has been confirmed in all experiments to date; this includes measurements announced in December by two teams of experimentalists operating the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, which is working at nearly twice the energy as in previous experiments.

  In 2012, the news from the LHC was the discovery of the Higgs, the last particle predicted by the Standard Model remaining to be discovered. But the Standard Model cannot be the whole story, in part because it involves twenty-nine free parameters. We have no explanation for the values of these parameters and hence seek a deeper theory that would explain them. Moreover, many of these values seem extremely unnatural: They are very tiny numbers with large ratios among them (the hierarchy problem), and they seem to be tuned to special values needed for a universe with many stable nuclei allowing complex life to exist (the fine-tuning problem). In addition, there’s no reason for the choices of the fundamental particles or the symmetries governing the forces between them. Another reason for expecting new particles beyond the Standard Model is that we have excellent evidence from astronomy for dark matter, which gravitates but doesn’t give off light. All these pieces of evidence point to new phenomena that could have been discovered at the LHC.

  Several beautiful hypotheses have been offered on which to base a deeper unification. I’ll just give the names here: supersymmetry, technicolor, large extra dimensions, compositeness. These each imply that the LHC should have discovered new particles. Some also point to more exotic phenomena, such as quantum black holes. To date, the experimental evidence sets impressive limits against these possibilities.