"Past is key to the Future"

(Source: Google images)

Much like looking at rock strata formed over millions of years, observing distant stars, galaxies, or cosmic events, generate a sense of looking into the layers of time, 'frozen' in space. While Homo sapiens may not have developed a bodily sense to "feel" time, both geology and astronomy (‘palaetiological’ sciences) offer a unique window into this fourth dimension.

A few years ago, one of my friends mentioned a debated concept in geology called uniformitarianism. Broadly, it assumes that the present is the key to the past and the future. I realized that in cosmology, the strongly discredited Steady State Theory shared similar sentiments. So, if we project the current physical laws of nature to understand the distant past, aren't we looking at a different past—and therefore predicting a different future? (Extending to the anthropic principle). 

So if certain conditions in our universe were just a little off, life would have never evolved. Just how is it that we're so fortunate? Of all possible universes, why did ours turn out like it did?

For instance, if electromagnetic force were slighly stronger than gravitational force, life would cease to exist. 

Interestingly, the anthropic principle first appeared at the Krakow symposium-1973, dedicated to 500th birth anniversary of Copernicus, who had proposed the 'Copernicun principle', which does not associate any speciality to human existence.

(Source: Google images)

Philosophy of Science

 A number of physicists in the 20th Century promoted the idea that beauty is a useful criterion of truth in fundamental physics? Also, intuition is sometimes mentioned as a good guiding light in research. Do you agree?

Sir Richard Feynman once said, “You can always recognize the truth by its beauty and

simplicity”. ‘Feynman diagrams’ bear witness to this statement as they greatly simplify the

representation of otherwise complicated interparticle interactions taking place at less than one

femtometer scale. One of the greatest and most famous theories- The General Theory of

Relativity which reduces gravity from being a force to being a feeling is at heart a huge

simplification. Last but not least, any hard-core theorist working on fundamental problems in

physics would agree that ‘The principle of Least action’ is the simplest description of our

Universe! But truly is it that simple? Are physicists romanticizing the idea of two rather ugly

equations precisely demonstrating how a cylinder rolls down an incline? Einstein himself

remarked, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. It all begins quite intimately

with one proton and one neutron approaching each other to ‘interact’ then all of a sudden they

produce a bunch of offspring using up all the Greek alphabets! However, if we want to elaborate

on ‘interact’, it certainly is not simple anymore. At Least not at face value (looks). Only when we

start to delve deeper do we realize that the way a particle (person) behaves is deeply connected

to some fundamental (internal) properties (traits) such as charge (say e.g. confidence), mass

(introverted), and spin (openness). At this point, some would stop digging deeper but a quantum

field theorist (or a psychotherapist) would love to know the origin of these characteristics. Thus

they find out about sub-particles like quarks and Higgs-bosons which are more fundamental

(like someone’s past experiences or upbringing) using which an entire macroscopic description

of neutron-proton collision (behavior) is possible! The journey from top to bottom and then back

to the top is a one-way journey and is factually the same for everyone. For example, it is a fact

that light always takes the shortest path between two points. This is a very deep concept, still, it

can be interpolated to a more common and straightforward fact- Light travels in a straight line (in

plane geometry). This fact is a result of Fermat's principle postulated in the mid-17th century

and remains valid in all geometries. This is what makes it appealing. The flexibility to

disintegrate it from complicated mathematics to simple terms is what makes a theory beautiful.

“Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster”-Einstein.

Hence, the truth lies in simplicity, flexibility, and transparency. Conversely, a theory with

exceptions (detours along that journey) ends up being ‘truly’ complicated and too incredible to

believe.

Of course, as the old saying goes, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” (Molly Bawn by

Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, published in 1878), everything boils down to the group of people

(beholders) to judge whether a theory can be labeled as truly beautiful or oversimplified or

unnecessarily complicated. But ‘facts’ or in some cases ‘universally agreed upon notions’ are

common to any arbitrary group of investigators and should be a natural consequence of that

theory (when verified in independent ways). The word ‘simple’ or ‘beautiful’ when used without

caution can become a misnomer. In reality, all ideas or concepts can be complicated. But what

makes some of them truly beautiful is their internal self-consistency! Beautiful theories are built

from first principles, they are mathematically sound and they can properly explain a certain

physical phenomenon across all scales! Such lofty expectations which come with truly ‘beautiful’

theories often end up describing fundamental physics because she (nature) is sublime. And

such beauty and simplicity are evident at any stage the enthusiast decides to stop along the

round-trip journey.

Intuition, in my opinion, paves the pathway for developing ideas. Without intuition, it is

hard to begin working on a fundamental problem. Since genuine intuition originates only from a

mind which is whole-heartedly immersed in specific thoughts, we can safely say it can be a

guiding light for research. As rightfully stated by Einstein, “The only real valuable thing is

intuition; The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in

consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don't know

how or why”. While the science of molecular bonds was comparatively well known in the early

19th century, it was the dream of a ‘snake’ catching its tail that allowed Kekule to carry forward

the known facts of chemistry to discover the structure of benzene! Newton’s mind was entirely

into Galileo's works on dynamics when he happened to notice the fruit fall. This stimulated his

mind to attach the idea of an invisible force pulling everything towards itself. Of course, it was

followed by mathematical rigor which justified everything. Taking things a little further, Einstein

famously said that the greatest feeling of his life was witnessing a man falling from his roof! His

intuition took him from being an external observer of falling objects to actually being the falling

object. This very idea is now the fundamental building block of the General Theory of Relativity,

that is, gravity switches off for a body under constant acceleration! Hence, I strongly believe in

the notion that all the greatest ideas or theories are a result of small eureka moments. At every

stage of formulating an idea or theory, those eureka moments get validated by already-known

facts. ‘Intuition’ is what stitches two sets of (sometimes unrelated) facts. But oftentimes, our

‘sixth sense’ could be fooling us and everyone else. Borrowing from Wikipedia the Monty Hall

problem states, “Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors:

Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host,

who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then

says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?”.

Even Though our gut might be telling us, “Stick with your choice”, mathematics has shown that

it's always worth switching which has the higher probability to win! The problem is

counter-intuitive when we extend from three doors to say one-hundred doors. When the host

reveals 98 doors that have a goat behind them, our gut will be telling us to switch from our initial

choice. Hence to examine whether our ‘sixth sense’ is not fooling us or others, it must be

followed by a proper examination. Without proper testing, intuition must not be promoted as true

science.

I am currently working on accretion around supermassive black holes called Active Galactic

Nuclei (AGNs). I study them in the X-ray energy range. There is a lot of room for intuitive ideas

in this field especially because it is very model dependent as of now. The X-ray observational

community still doesn't have access to good-quality data because it is difficult to observe X-rays

from an engineering point of view. Hence, we look forward to innovative ideas which can better

explain not just in X-rays but also in the full electromagnetic spectrum, since AGNs shine across

all wavebands. We know very little about the space near black holes. Existing theories provide

the foundation for building intuition which can then be mathematically modeled and fitted to

data. Light rays get bent near the blackhole and focussed on the accretion disk which then gets

reflected. This was an initial guess back in the 70s. Reflection changes the polarization state of

a wave (whose theory was already known for a century) and this simple fact has been

confirmed today with the help of state-of-the-art telescopes. This is one of the very many ideas

which is taking the field forward despite its shortcomings. However, it is worth mentioning that

our results are true only if we believe the data being received by highly sophisticated machinery

located thousands of kilometers from us and operated by space agencies is correct! If not, we

must like science fiction! But fundamentally speaking, the world operates on our faith. Without a

certain amount of faith, existence is meaningless. I have faith in the structural engineer who

designed my building. I take it for granted that NASA is not hiding from us the fact that an

asteroid is going to decimate our city by the next dawn. A certain amount of (blind) faith is what

keeps me going in this field of research.

To sum up, despite its limitations, intuition appears to be a crucial part of human thinking,

according to research. The ability to link seemingly unrelated events is said to aid us in

understanding the chaos of the outside world, while others contend that it is essential to our

ability to perceive events immediately.

Physics poem

 The year 2020 was unique in so many ways. The whole world was busy fighting a never before seen virus outbreak. Streets were filled with ambulances and hospitals with dead bodies. Every sector, be it professional or academic, had come to a standstill. 

    Among all the chaos, my only solace was physics. I was rather enjoying the ample time available to read out-of-the-syllabi books (Feynman Lectures and MIT OCW), revisit unclear concepts, etc. One fine night, out of nowhere it struck me that I should write a poem on physics. The poem should touch upon all the great minds and their works that have shaped the world as we see it today. Thus I began:

Physics

Derived from Latin or Greek, some say

I rule the world from night to day.

Hardly a king, hardly a queen,

I was how Archimedes solved the gold thing.

All round and around the sun

Earth goes by Kepler’s cubic term

“No!” said The Church, “Its’ all flat,

Winged angels carry it on their back”.

Then came revolution, came a great law

Inverse square term became the new awe

Newton gave gravity, Coulomb gave electricity

Mustn’t forget how Hooke provided all their elasticity.

So asked Roentgen, what’s that green glow?

Later Marie and Pierre found it in Uranium, only low.

How charges behaved, which Maxwell knew,

In four compact equations easy and few.

But wheels of revolution sought to turn, 

Not of politics but scientific upturn

The atom was split, and so were the minds,

As electrons and protons were of another kind.

Planck came forward with an outrageous guess,

For blackbody radiation and something else.

None knew then, what quantization meant,

It took decades only after Schrödinger dreamt.

Parallel to these, ground was breaking,

For someone was working on speeds that were breathtaking.

Gravity was seemed quite wrong, to no one

But Einstein alone.

He gave a new theory, not much understood

Maybe after a century, someone would.

“Coming back to Hydrogen atom”, said Neils Bohr,

“Why not stationary orbits and solve Rutherford”.

Cat’s life hangs in balance with equal probabilities, claimed Erwin

“What are you getting at”? Einstein grins.

But came an equation, like nothing before,

Only a new mathematics could support it anymore

Determinism started to gather dust,

Now position will be certain at the momentum’s cost.

Quantum theory started becoming the story,

Along came many writing their own theory.

The atom went larger as they delved deeper,

Finding leptons, hadrons, bosons and all peculiar

Far in the east, a poor physicist,

Stopped in his tracks with a crazy insist.

A new kind of matter, then opened its gate,

They call it The Bose-Einstein condensate.

Fundamental forces named along,  

Gravitational, Electromagnetic, Weak and Strong.

As time went by, complexity arose,

So came Feynman, simplified in a prose.

His famous diagram was all one needed,

To realize how subatomic particles, did it

Lot about miniscule, what about outer space,

Did someone figure the relativity case?

Reached the invisible ripple and made a noise,

Coming from a black hole to LIGO’s sophisticated toys.

Followed by a greater news, only a blurry image,

Dark hole in the center, disk was orange.

So many scientists, so many stories,

I have failed to tell each of their glories.

So, forgive me all those,

Whose works I could not compose. 

Then asked a layman,” you must stop”,

Physics replied,” not until my breath drops”.

                                                                    Biswaraj Palit

9-6-2020

 

When I finished writing, I had only sent it to my then-girlfriend. I had no intentions of posting it on social media or any other platform. Delighted by the poem, she insisted that I post it on Facebook. Thus, it already exists on my FB wall long before I publish it through this blog. 

Thank you for the patient read. Hope you all like it. Let me know what you think of it in the comments.

Bye.