## Sunday, June 2, 2013

### Science Sings Us A Song (via McGill U in Montréal)

It's noteworthy that he's capable of singing acapella Bohemian Rhapsody, which is kind of a feat in itself.  But he also put together a fairly complicated piece of film.  Is this what it takes to get a PhD in physics?  These are all fairly complicated things, but to combine them, the power is equal to infinity.

Timothy Blaise clearly spent a decent amount of time on this video.  But the video really functions just as a trailer for his thesis.  The point:  to combine explanations and disciplines of physics.  In his thesis:

 You'll recognize this from the video.
"Despite both being nearly a hundred years old, the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity have yet to be combined in a completely satisfactory way. There are several reasons for this. The attempt to treat general relativity perturbatively as a quantum we immediately run into intractable in
general relativity, whose coupling constant G1/2, a nonrenormalizable theory: it requires a UV completion to properly understand its behaviour at high energies and short distance scales. The search for this UV completion has given rise to several theories, the most popular being string theory, which purport to describe this short-distance physics in such a way that quantum mechanics can properly be applied to the theory. While these programs have yet to make contact with experimental reality, they have led to rich mathematical theories and spawned many in compact extra dimensions, brane worlds, spacetime holography and noncommutative geometry, which continue to shape the way we think about gravity and the nature of spacetime."

Of the links in the paragraph above, only "noncommunicative geometry" has a wikipedia entry listed first in its search.  The others go to academic pages, meaning that either they're fairly recent discoveries or they're difficult to explain (or haven't been proven / can't be proven).

A Historically Novel Approach to Physics and Mathematics

There's a way to mathematically prove anything.  And by proving it in equations, you make it possible to cause it to happen in the real world.  The best practical example?  Einstein's theory allowed scientists to test and produce nuclear energy.  Before there was a theory for it, it was simply impossible.  And surely to make that possible, Einstein's theory must be right, in some context.

The trouble with nuclear energy is that we haven't mastered the art of producing "Fusion."  When you think about it, though, fission was made possible by scientists in the 1940's who did it without the use of a single iPad.  The problem is that it produces nuclear waste, and has been weaponized throughout the world (thankfully its use as a military weapon has been limited to this point).  If we could discover Fusion in our lifetime, it would make it possible that we'd have an infinite amount of clean energy available to us.  Clean, in the sense that it's purported by science that Fusion doesn't produce radioactive waste.  It's surprising that scientists are not working more intently on discovering the secret to this (or does it already exist?)  If I were a scientist, I would be focused entirely on this real thing, more than experimenting with hypothetical equations in imaginary realities (although that's fun).

What is "Renormalizable?"

In order to understand "nonrenormalizable" one must grasp what it is to be renormalized.  I would assume that it would relate to being taken to the dark side of the moon, and then brought back by some kind of renormalizing situation (waking up, getting coffee).  And that's not actually too far from the truth.
 $m_\mathrm{em} = \int {1\over 2}E^2 \, dV = \int\limits_{r_e}^\infty \frac{1}{2} \left( {q\over 4\pi r^2} \right)^2 4\pi r^2 \, dr = {q^2 \over 8\pi r_e},$ That's confusing.
Formulas profess a relation between different forces which are summarized as symbols, and different numbers, which are also represented by symbols in a math equation.

To put this simply, it's meant to solve a problem which was caused by the 19th and 20th century approach, which is that the way the equation is written, when a particle is charged, it's set to have infinite inertia.  The answer to this is to set the 'bare mass' to 'negative.'

Back To Tim's Thesis:

Most remarkably interesting is that when you understand the mechanics of how this universe works, it becomes possible to imagine other universes with other sets of circumstances:

"This leaves us free to worry about other questions in quantum gravity, such as: What is a state in a quantum gravity? What determines the initial state of a big bang universe?"  -Timothy Blaise

Nothing could be more valid in a thesis than to create something new with what's been proven about two already established approaches.  What's relevant to the whole of this operation is that it displays that one person can grasp both disciplines, and that these approaches both prove and reinforce, rather than contradict, each other.  To understand the world more fully as a whole, we'd have to grasp the real meaning of both, not either.

Maybe that's the way it works.  Scientific discovery is much like stumbling around an unlit room, searching for a light switch.  Technology helps.  His thesis references [43] other works.

Read Thesis published april 12, 2013
Watch Video Again posted two days ago