fredag 7 augusti 2009

Reductio Ad Absurdum



In the interview LHC and Unified Field Theory in response to the question: Is it possible as you drill farther and farther down with bigger and bigger accellerators and collisions, you find tiny particles made by tinier particles, or do you see a limit to this reductionism? Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize in Physics 2004, states:
  • It's an enchanted enchanting world...to me that makes it more bearable...
  • Protons and neutrons were studied very carefully, but we learned that protons are very complicated objects that obey very complicated equations...you don't get beautiful simple equations like Newton's law or Coulombs law...these marvellous simple equations, when you work at the level of protons and neutrons... 
  • But we discovered that protons are made quarks and gluons which obey simple equations,  for which I got the Nobel Prize: Maxwells equation on steroids, that's what it is... You can write them down in a few lines. That's big progress.
  • I think we are going to hit bottom. The equations we have are very rigid: you cannot change them without making them worse. We get this wonderful unification. We are really on the right track.
  • One can guess that Nature likes beautiful equations...has the same perception of beauty as we have as trained physicists...
This is extreme reductionism or reductio ad absurdum. 

If we inside a Russian doll find a simple smallest microscopic doll without any features at all, does it carry the secrets of the bigger macroscopic dolls with many features? Recall that Newton's and Coulomb's marvellous simple laws are macroscopic laws far from reductio ad absurdum... 

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