Questions that plague physics: Conversation with Lawrence M Krauss

From: Dr. Jai Maharaj (usenet_at_mantra.com)
Date: 07/31/04 

Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 21:25:12 GMT

Questions That Plague Physics: A Conversation with Lawrence M. Krauss
 
Lawrence M. Krauss speaks about unfinished business
 
Scientific American
July 26, 2004

Chair of the physics department at Case Western Reserve
University, Lawrence M. Krauss is famed in the research
community for his prescient suggestion that a still
mysterious entity called dark energy might be the key to
understanding the beginnings of the universe. He is also
an outspoken social critic and in February was among 60
prominent scientists who signed a letter entitled
"Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking,"
complaining of the Bush administration's misuse of
science. The public, though, might know him best as an
op-ed writer and author of books with mass appeal. His
1995 work, The Physics of Star Trek, became a best-
seller, translated into 15 languages. He is now finishing
his seventh popular title, Hiding in the Mirror: The
Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, which he describes
as "an exploration of our long-standing literary,
artistic and scientific love affair with the idea that
there are hidden universes out there." Krauss recently
discussed his many scientific and social passions with
writer Claudia Dreifus.

[Caption] LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS is a man of
 many opinions. One is that string theory
 has failed to shed light on the nature of
 dark energy.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: What are the top questions
bedeviling physicists today?

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Three that I find fascinating are: What
is the nature of dark energy? How can we reconcile black
hole evaporation with quantum mechanics? And, finally, do
extra dimensions exist? They are all connected. And they
are all going to require some new insights into quantum
gravity. But someone is going to have to come up with a
totally new and remarkable idea. And it's hard to predict
when that is going to happen. In 1904 you couldn't have
predicted that Albert Einstein would come up with a
remarkable idea in 1905.

I think the resolution to these problems is likely to be
theoretical and not experimental. This is because direct
experimental signatures that might point us in the right
theoretical directions in these areas probably lie beyond
the realm of current experiments. I'd also bet that the
solution to these problems is not going to resemble
anything being done now, including string theory.

SA: Is string theory the physics equivalent of The God
That Failed, as some people used to say about communist
ideology?

LK: Not exactly. But I do think its time may be past.
String theory and the other modish physical theory, loop
quantum gravity, both stem from one basic idea: that
there's a mathematical problem with general relativity.
The idea is that when you try to examine physical
phenomena on ever smaller scales, gravity acts worse and
worse. Eventually, you get infinities. And almost all
research to find a quantum theory of gravity is trying to
understand these infinities. What string theory and what
loop quantum gravity do is go around this by not going
smaller than a certain distance scale, because if you do,
things will behave differently. Both these theories are
based on the idea that you can't go down to zero in a
point particle, and that's one way to get rid of
mathematical infinities. The main difference, I think,
between the two theories is that string is intellectually
and mathematically far richer.

String theory hasn't accomplished a lot in terms of
solving physical problems, but it's produced a lot of
interesting mathematical discoveries. That's why it
fascinates. Loop quantum gravity hasn't even done that,
at least in my mind.

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 "We live in a society where it's considered okay for
  intelligent people to be scientifically illiterate."
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SA: Are you saying that string theory hasn't really
gotten us anywhere?

LK: Neither string theory nor loop quantum gravity has
told us much about the key unsolved physical problems--
most important, why does the universe have dark energy?
That's the biggest question right now. One thing that has
come out of string theory is the idea of plural universes
or extra dimensions, and that's because string theory is
based on extra dimensions. The only consistent string
theory originally had 26 dimensions, and then it got
lowered to 10. But the universe we live in is four-
dimensional [three spatial plus time]. A lot of talk went
into explaining how all these extra dimensions were
invisible. Recently some people have been trying to turn
that defect into a virtue by suggesting that the extra
dimensions might actually be detectable.

SA: You've just finished writing a book about parallel
universes. Do you think they're real?

LK: Let me answer you this way: it's an exciting area,
and it's wonderful for graduate students. One of my
former Ph.D. students is largely responsible for the
recent surge of interest in this idea. But I think these
extra dimensions smell wrong. What we are learning from
elementary particle physics about the unification of all
the forces in nature tends to point in a direction that
is not the direction these large parallel universe models
suggest. As beautiful and as sexy as they are, if I had
to bet, I'd bet that these large extradimensional ideas
are probably not right. We'll see.

SA: How did you come to write The Physics of Star Trek?

LK: Actually, it began as a joke, probably sometime in
1993. I had just finished Fear of Physics for Basic
Books. I was chatting with my editor about what I might
do for them next. Somewhere in the conversation, she
mentioned something about her daughter's being a Trekker.
"How about The Physics of Star Trek?" she laughed. That
night I started thinking about the transporter, a Star
Trek device that disassembled your atoms, moved them
almost instantaneously to somewhere else and reassembled
them in that place. What might it take to build one? That
led to my making a list of all these neat Star Trek
phenomena that one could use to hook people into thinking
about physics. If people loved this imaginary stuff, I
thought, why couldn't they love real science, which is a
thousand times more amazing?

I was blunt about Trek things that wouldn't work. But I
also pointed readers toward more fascinating
possibilities in the real universe. Real science comes up
with ideas that no fiction writer would have the temerity
to suggest. Think about cosmic antigravity, something I
work on at my day job: no one understands why empty space
should have energy. It's the weirdest idea in the world!

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 "I'm not against teaching faith-based ideas in religious
 classes; I'm just against teaching them as if they were
 science."
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SA: Why?

LK: If you asked a child how much energy there is in
empty space, he'd say "none," because that's the sensible
answer. But what we've learned is that's not true: if you
take everything away, there's still something there.

What's worse is: if you put a little amount of energy
into empty space, then everything we know about the laws
of physics says you should be able to put a tremendous
amount of energy into it. Once you open the dam and allow
empty space to have energy, you ask how much it should
naturally have. Our current understanding of gravity and
quantum mechanics says that empty space should have about
120 orders of magnitude more energy than the amount we
measure it to have. That is 1 with 120 zeroes after it!
How to reduce the amount it has by such a huge magnitude,
without making it precisely zero, is a complete mystery.
Among physicists, this is considered the worst fine-
tuning problem in physics.

When we solve this problem, we're going to have to
explain why the number that we measure is 120 orders of
magnitude smaller than we would expect it to be. No one
has an idea how to do that. And that's why it's the most
exciting thing in physics. Because weird makes things
exciting.

SA: You are one of the few top physicists who is also
known as a public intellectual. In the middle of the past
century, that kind of activity by scientists was much
more common. Albert Einstein, in fact, was an
international celebrity, whose private views of
everything from nuclear disarmament to Zionism were
solicited by the press. Why do you think you're such a
rare bird that way now?

LK: I can't speak for others. Besides my own research, I
see part of my mission as trying to close the disconnect
between science and the rest of the culture. We live in a
society where it's considered okay for intelligent people
to be scientifically illiterate. Now, it wasn't always
that way. At the beginning of the 20th century, you could
not be considered an intellectual unless you could
discuss the key scientific issues of the day. Today you
can pick up an important intellectual magazine and find a
write-up of a science book with a reviewer unashamedly
saying, "This was fascinating. I didn't understand it."
If they were reviewing a work by John Kenneth Galbraith,
they wouldn't flaunt their ignorance of economics.

SA: How did science illiteracy become socially
acceptable?

LK: We all know how badly science is taught in many
schools. So many middle school and even some high school
teachers have no background in science. When my daughter
was in the second grade and I went to her school, I was
stunned by how her teacher seemed incredibly
uncomfortable with having to teach even the simplest
scientific concepts. I think this is common. And there is
the reality that science has grown increasingly esoteric,
making it more difficult for laypeople to grasp.

The truth is--and I'm hardly the first to say this--after
World War II, American scientists became an isolated
elite. The secrets that allowed them to change the world
also allowed them to shirk responsibility for
citizenship. Scientists became a class above society,
rather than a part of it. And so for the longest time,
certainly until the 1970s, many American scientists just
didn't believe that reaching the public was important.
Those were good times, with lots of money coming in. The
wake-up call came in 1993, when Congress killed the
Superconducting Super Collider. That was a real signal
physicists were doing something wrong.

We hadn't convinced the public--or even all of our
colleagues--that it was worth billions to build this
thing. And since then, it has become clear: to get money
for what we do, we're going to have to explain it to the
public. My predilection is to try to connect the
interesting ideas in science to the rest of people's
lives.

SA: The big public issue you've been identified with is
fighting against creationist teachings in the schools.
For the past couple years, you've spent your time
traveling, debating creationists on proposed curriculum
changes for Ohio's high schools. Was that fun?

LK: It was the least fun of anything I've ever done.
Convincing people of the excitement of science is fun;
trying to stave off attacks on science feels like the
most incredible waste of time, even if necessary. I got
drafted after several creationists were appointed to the
Standards Committee of the Ohio State Board of Education.
They were proposing new standards to create false
controversy around evolution by introducing an ad hoc
idea called intelligent design into high school science
classes.

For nearly a year, I found myself in the middle of what
was almost the equivalent of a political campaign. When
it was over, we won and we lost. We won because we had
kept intelligent design out of science classes. We lost
because in the spirit of "fairness," the board added a
sentence to the standards saying, "Students should learn
how scientists are continuing to critically examine
evolutionary theory." I strongly opposed this. I wanted
them to say that scientists are continuing to critically
examine everything.

As I feared, this sentence opened the door for the
creationists' claiming that there is controversy about
the accuracy of evolutionary theory. And it's come back
to haunt us. Just the other week, I had to put everything
I was doing aside because the creationists were back at
their old games again in Ohio. One of the model lessons
that came out was an intelligent-design diatribe.
Basically, they snuck the whole thing in again, through
the back door. This becomes so tiresome that you just
want to say, "Forget about it, go on." But then you
realize that this is exactly what Phillip Johnson, this
lawyer who first proposed the intelligent-design
strategy, proposed when he said something like, "We'll
just keep going and going and going till we outlast the
evolutionists."

SA: Do scientists trap themselves when they try to be
"fair" and "give equal time" in their debates with the
anti-Darwinists?

LK: Yes. Because science isn't fair. It's testable. In
science, we prove things by empirical methods, and we
toss out things that have been disproved as wrong.
Period. This is how we make progress.

I'm not against teaching faith-based ideas in religion
classes; I'm just against teaching them as if they were
science. And it disturbs me when someone like Bill Gates,
whose philanthropy I otherwise admire, helps finance one
of the major promoters of intelligent design by giving
money to a largely conservative think tank called the
Discovery Institute. Yes, they got a recent grant from
the Gates Foundation. It's true that the almost $10-
million grant, which is the second they received from
Gates, doesn't support intelligent design, but it does
add credibility to a group whose goals and activities
are, based on my experiences with them, intellectually
suspect. During the science standards debate in Ohio,
institute operatives constantly tried to suggest that
there was controversy about evolution where there wasn't
and framed the debate in terms of a fairness issue, which
it isn't. [Editors' note: Amy Low, a media relations
officer representing the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, says that the foundation "has decided not to
respond to Dr. Krauss's comments."]

SA: Why do you find this grant so particularly disturbing
that you single it out here?

LK: Because we're living in a time when so many
scientific questions are transformed into public
relations campaigns--with truth going out the window in
favor of sound bites and manufactured controversies. This
is dangerous to science and society, because what we
learn from observation and testing can't be subject to
negotiation or spin, as so much in politics is.

The creationists cut at the very credibility of science
when they cast doubt on our methods. When they do that,
they make it easier to distort scientific findings in
controversial policy areas.

We can see that happening right now with issues like stem
cells, abortion, global warming and missile defense. When
the testing of the proposed missile defense system showed
it didn't work, the Pentagon's answer, more or less,
went, "No more tests before we build it."

SA: Between your popular writing and your political work,
when do you do science?

LK: In the quiet hours of the night, in between those
things. I do it then--or when I have the opportunity to
sit down with students and postdocs. It's amazing to me,
when we do that, how much we can accomplish. I rely on
that a lot lately.

There can be months when I'm working on other things, and
I get very, very depressed. Talking about science is
important, and it may be the most important thing that I
do. But if I'm not actually doing science, I feel like a
fraud. On the other hand, if I don't do the public stuff,
I also feel like a fraud.

SA: Why a fraud?

LK: Because science is not done in a vacuum. It is done
in a social context, and the results of science have
important implications for society, even if it is simply
providing a general understanding of how we humans fit
into the cosmos.

Thus, simply producing new knowledge, without making any
attempt to help disseminate it and explain it, is not
enough. I think one cannot expect every scientist to
spend time on the effort to explain science. But in a
society in which the science is of vital importance and
also in which many forces are trying to distort the
results of science, it is crucial that some of us speak
out.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0009973A-D518-10FA-89FB83414B7F0000

 - - - - - - -

This is interesting because he's part of the evolution-
creationism debates. And it's news to me that Bill Gates
is funding the Discovery Institute.

Posted on July 26, 2004 by PatrickHenry

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Watching SciAm slowly slide downhill into left-wing
political demagoguery since the early 80s, I'd say that
the biggest question being asked by many scientists is,
"With global warming becoming more and more exposed for
the junk-science it is, how can I maintain my tenure and
support my submission for next year's psuedo-research
grant?"...

Posted on July 26, 2004 by Joe Brower

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

> Neither string theory nor loop quantum gravity has told
> us much about the key unsolved physical problems -- most
> important, why does the universe have dark energy? That's
> the biggest question right now

I don't follow these subjects all that well, but I was of
the understanding that "dark energy" is simply a theory
that has not been proven, nor disproven.

He speaks of it as if it were a proven fact.

Posted on July 26, 2004 by babyface00

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

You may want to read about the incarnations of Vishnu
(the Hindu God of creation). The incarnations are fish,
tortoise, boar, lion-man, dwarf, Parashuram, and then
man. The dwarf as a small arboreal monkey. Parashuram is
an upright primate. See the evolution? Fish -> amphibian
 -> mammal -> monkey -> man.

Unfortunately, [some] Hindus tend to read this literally,
worship Vishnu, and forget that the incarnations are
telling us about evolution.

Posted on July 26, 2004 by razoroccam

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It's not the case that Global Warming has been
demonstrated to be "junk science" ~ rather, that the idea
that mankind is responsible for Global Warming has been
demonstrated to be the mother of all junk science! Even
Mars is heating up, and the Germans now say "zee Sun isht
brighter" (in their quaint broken-English fashion).

The problem for the professional grantsmanship
researchers is they have to switch off from the Earth
sciences to Astronomy ~ that's no small leap.

Posted on July 26, 2004 by muawiyah

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

> I don't follow these subjects all that well, but I was
> of the understanding that "dark energy" is simply a
> theory that has not been proven, nor disproven.

Actually, it's almost the opposite. It's something that
almost nobody expected or wanted, but the effect of which
became unmistakable in cosmological observations. It
really upset a lot of applecarts a couple of years ago.
It's a stub-your-toe physical fact that left the
theorists scrambling to see where it fit in.

Posted on July 26, 2004 by Physicist

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 End of forwarded messages

Jai Maharaj
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti

Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust

Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org

The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate

The terrorist mission of Jesus stated in the Christian bible:

     "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth:
I came not so send peace, but a sword.
     "For I am come to set a man at variance against his
father, and the daughter against her mother, and the
daughter in law against her mother in law.
     "And a man's foes shall be they of his own
household.
 - Matthew 10:34-36.

     o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the
educational purposes of research and open discussion. The contents of
this post may not have been authored by, and do not necessarily represent
the opinion of the poster. The contents are protected by copyright law
and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
     o If you send private e-mail to me, it will likely not be read,
considered or answered if it does not contain your full legal name,
current e-mail and postal addresses, and live-voice telephone number.
     o Posted for information and discussion. Views expressed by others
are not necessarily those of the poster.

Relevant Pages

  • Q!Re: Shall We All Leave At Once?
    ... The Travels of Noe into Europe is based on primary and secondary sources including Berosus' Chaldanean history and is not a personal opinion. ... Yove not studied real science or philosophy. ... other scientists - sneer at cosmology these days). ... Most of the elementary particles in modern physics were predicted by the mathematics decades before the equipment could be built to detect them. ...
    (rec.arts.drwho)
  • Re: New report on Science in the 21st century: social, political, and economic issues
    ... This report presents a nonidealized vision of 21st century science. ... Nature, Science, or Physics Today... ... scientists feel lots of pressure to follow ... Consequently rejection is recommended». ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)
  • Re: MS in Creationism
    ... C-14 testing of a Lake Bonney seal estimated its age as 615 years ± ... Beyond this number, the instruments scientists use ... Larry Vardiman, PhD Atmospheric Science ... Russell Humphreys, PhD Physics ...
    (rec.bicycles.tech)
  • Re: Nameless critics on the Internet and critical analysis of Einsteins E=mc2
    ... (Book will be published in Dec. 2006, By NOVA Science, New York, ... E=mc2 is the most wonderful and significant equation is physics. ... In his 1905 paper Einstein did not ... There may be back door critics but none of the scientists have dared to ...
    (sci.energy.hydrogen)
  • Re: Was Einstein the first to publish E=gamma*m*c^2 ?
    ... (Book will be published in Dec. 2006, By NOVA Science, New York, ... E=mc2 is the most wonderful and significant equation is physics. ... In his 1905 paper Einstein did not ... There may be back door critics but none of the scientists have dared to ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)