{"id":12778,"date":"2016-05-10T09:30:20","date_gmt":"2016-05-10T16:30:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=12778"},"modified":"2016-05-09T14:35:02","modified_gmt":"2016-05-09T21:35:02","slug":"big-picture-part-three-essence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/10\/big-picture-part-three-essence\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Picture Part Three: Essence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>One of a series of quick posts on the six sections of my book <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/bigpicture\/\">The Big Picture<\/a><em> &#8212; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/08\/big-picture-part-one-cosmos\/\">Cosmos<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/09\/big-picture-part-two-understanding\/\">Understanding<\/a>, Essence, Complexity, Thinking, Caring.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Chapters in Part Three, <strong>Essence<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"p3\">19. How Much We Know<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">20. The Quantum Realm<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">21. Interpreting Quantum Mechanics<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">22. The Core Theory<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">23. The Stuff of Which We Are Made<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">24. The Effective Theory of the Everyday World<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">25. Why Does the Universe Exist?<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">26. Body and Soul<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">27. Death Is the End<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In Part Three we get our hands dirty diving into some of the central features of how our world actually works: quantum mechanics, field theory, and the Core Theory describing the actual particles and forces that make up the visible universe. The discussion of the basics of quantum mechanics itself is quite brief, and I mention the Many-Worlds formulation only to emphasize that there&#8217;s nothing about QM that implies we need to be idealist, anti-realist, or non-determinist. (Those options are open, of course &#8212; but they&#8217;re not forced on us by what we know about quantum mechanics.)<\/p>\n<p>More directly relevant to this discussion are the ideas of effective field theory and crossing symmetry that let us conclude <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/29\/seriously-the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-really-are-completely-understood\/\">the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known<\/a>. (I used to say &#8220;&#8230;completely understood,&#8221; but too many people chose to quibble about whether we &#8220;really understand&#8221; them rather than grasping the point, so I&#8217;ve switched to &#8220;known.&#8221;) (No, I don&#8217;t think it will really help either.) In early drafts I went on a bit too long about all the quarks and gluons and so forth, since personally I think that stuff is endlessly fascinating. But it dragged down the pace a bit, so now I have an Appendix in which I give the full <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/04\/the-world-of-everyday-experience-in-one-equation\/\">Core Theory equation<\/a> and explain &#8212; tersely but accurately! &#8212; every single term that appears in it.<\/p>\n<p>In the body of the text I concentrate more on explaining what the claim actually says and why it has a chance of being true. For example, why it doesn&#8217;t matter for everyday purposes that we don&#8217;t yet understand quantum gravity.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Physicists divide our theoretical understanding of these particles and forces into two grand theories: the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which includes everything we\u2019ve been talking about except for gravity, and general relativity, Einstein\u2019s theory of gravity as the curvature of spacetime. We lack a full \u201cquantum theory of gravity\u201d \u2014 a model that is based on the principles of quantum mechanics, and matches onto general relativity when things become classical-looking. Superstring theory is one very promising candidate for such a model, but right now we just don\u2019t know how to talk about situations where gravity is very strong, like near the Big Bang or inside a black hole, in quantum-mechanical terms. Figuring out how to do so is one of the greatest challenges currently occupying the minds of theoretical physicists around the world.<\/p>\n<p>But we don\u2019t live inside a black hole, and the Big Bang was quite a few years ago. We live in a world where gravity is relatively weak. And as long as the force is weak, quantum field theory has no trouble whatsoever describing how gravity works. That\u2019s why we\u2019re confident in the existence of gravitons; they are an inescapable consequence of the basic features of general relativity and quantum field theory, even if we lack a complete theory of quantum gravity. The domain of applicability of our present understanding of quantum gravity includes everything we experience in our everyday lives.<\/p>\n<p>There is, therefore, no reason to keep the Standard Model and general relativity completely separate from each other. As far as the physics of the stuff you see in front of you right now is concerned, it is all very well described by one big quantum field theory. Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek has dubbed it the <em>Core Theory<\/em>. It\u2019s the quantum field theory of the quarks, electrons, neutrinos, all the families of fermions, electromagnetism, gravity, the nuclear forces, and the Higgs. In the Appendix we lay it out in a bit more detail. The Core Theory is not the most elegant concoction that has ever been dreamed up in the mind of a physicist, but it\u2019s been spectacularly successful at accounting for every experiment ever performed in a laboratory here on Earth. (At least as of mid-2015 \u2014 we should always be ready for the next surprise.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/220px-1636_Elisabeth_of_Bohemia.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-12818\" src=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/220px-1636_Elisabeth_of_Bohemia-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>One of my favorite chapters in the book is 26, Body and Soul, where I relate the story of <a href=\"http:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/elisabeth-bohemia\/\">Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia<\/a> and Ren\u00e9 Descartes. And how, you may ask, does quantum field theory relate to an epistolary conversation carried out in the seventeenth century? Descartes, of course, was famously a champion of mind\/body dualism. Elisabeth challenged him on this, asking how something (the immaterial soul) that had no location or extent in space could possibly influence something (the physical body) that manifestly did. The updated version of Elisabeth&#8217;s challenge is to ask, &#8220;How could an immaterial soul possibly affect the evolution of the particles and fields in the Core Theory? How should that gloriously precise and well-tested equation be modified?&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of a series of quick posts on the six sections of my book The Big Picture &#8212; Cosmos, Understanding, Essence, Complexity, Thinking, Caring. Chapters in Part Three, Essence: 19. How Much We Know 20. The Quantum Realm 21. Interpreting Quantum Mechanics 22. The Core Theory 23. The Stuff of Which We Are Made 24. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-picture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12778"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12826,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12778\/revisions\/12826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}