Using Me!

Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Reality and Computation

What is to follow will be a very long piece that I am going to break down into separate sections. My rough plan indicates about ten posts will be needed! I hope readers will find it worth working through the necessary mass of topic introduction and discussion to get to the meat of my points. So here goes!

1. The Forces of Nature and Laws of Physics.

Before I begin let me just say that I do not intend to provide many, if any, references for what I say in the following posts. The technical content of what follows is there only to provide an overview of the way the universe works. Anyone with an interest in greater detail, the equations and so on is encouraged to search the internet for more information. There is a lot out there I assure you. I cannot guarantee that everything I say is 100% accurate but I only aim to describe the general features of the Physics that follows in order to get to a more Philosophical discussion. I will provide (to come) a few general links at the end of each part of this article to get the interested reader off on the right foot.

In order to get to the realm of Quantum Mechanics which is where I want to be a recap of the discovery of the fundamental forces of nature and the forumlation of our best Physics Theories would be useful:

There are just 4 known forces in Nature, some known of for a long time and some only for a relatively brief part of scientific history. The first to be formulated was of course Gravity. Newton and the apocryphal apple falling from a tree. Force = Mass x Acceleration, F=ma and his laws, such as a Body at rest will remain at rest unless a force acts on it.

In 1864 Maxwell published the paper on Electromagnetism for which he is remembered. In it he combined Electricity and Magnetism into one field. Through his work and the work he built upon we now recognise Electric and Magnetic fields as part of the same phenomenon and thus there are four and not five forces in nature.

Evidence that a new theory was required to describe the universe on small scales was building up in the 19th century but it was not until 1905 that it became tangible with Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize winning paper on The Photoelectric Effect, which started the ball rolling. Sometime later the term Quantum Mechanics entered the mainstream to describe this new branch of Physics.

Thereafter Einstein went on to publish his papers on first Special and then General Relativity. The latter is a complete description of Gravity. Newton’s notion of Gravity and the laws of motion he drew up turn out to be a very close approximation to General Relativity where the accelerations, gravitational fields or velocities are small.

Much later Physicists discovered the ‘Weak Force’ which operates at the atomic level and is responsible for some aspects of Radioactivity. Around 1968 this was incorporated with Maxwell’s Electromagnetic theory in ElectroWeak Theory – a single description of Electromagnetism and the Weak Force.

Somewhere around this time, or perhaps earlier, it must have become apparent that the fundamental forces of nature were being unified. What had appeared to be different phenomena were able to be described in one set of mathematics. But no one was able to see a way of unifying Gravity with any of the other forces.

From the 1970’s onwards it was realised that there must be a 5th force, named the Strong Force, which prevents elemental particles from flying apart. It is described, as part of the Standard Model, by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) which is the most complete form of Quantum Mechanical Theory.

In the continuing pursuit of unification of these theories Physicists hope to combine the Electroweak Theory with QCD to make a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) and then to combine that with Gravity to form a Theory of Everything (ToE). How incredible indeed it would be if we could describe every interaction between everything in the universe with one self-contained theory!

The final part here should be skipped for the sake of your sanity unless you want to hear about GUT’s or ToE’s in my opinion…

The current contender for the GUT is the ‘Standard Model’ (SM). This is an internally self-consistent set of rules that combines descriptions of both the ElectroWeak and Strong Forces as mathematical fields, using Quantum Field Theory. It has made several predictions which have all been shown to be correct and has one more prediction which is yet to be confirmed. It requires a Higgs Boson to work. This particle has such a huge energy that we have not been able to produce them in our particle colliders. Until now. Once the Large Hadron Collider goes online at CERN it is hoped that the energies will be reached that could allow us to detect the Higgs for the first time.

In the SM the Higgs Boson has the crucial role of giving all the other fundamental particles their masses. For this reason alone I find I hope the prediction fails and no Higgs is found. I just cannot understand why a particle is required to give mass to everything else. Mass (or Mass-Energy) seems so fundamental to me that I can’t envisage how making particles queue up to find out their mass assignments makes any helpful contribution to understanding the Universe. Sorry for such cynicism… of course it’s a field and the particles gain mass through interaction with this field. However in order for each particle to get a different mass surely it has to have some other intrinsic property that interacts with the field to get the known masses? It’s like saying the fundamental property of matter is ‘mass potential’ but they only realise that potential through interacting with the field. It seems to add an extra layer of abstraction. I was under the impression that in String or Quantum Loop theories a particle is a construction – differing vibrations on a string in the former – and this construction would require energy, i.e. Mass! Not ‘mass potential’.

Furthermore the SM is utterly inelegant. General Relativity can be written down in a few lines but the SM takes a small book to write it all down! More objections to the SM can be found here.

Part 2 will follow soon in which I will discuss probably the most important and confusing experiment in all of Quantum Physics…