Stumbling Blocks Against Unification: On Some Persistent Misconceptions In Physics PDF
Preview Stumbling Blocks Against Unification: On Some Persistent Misconceptions In Physics
Stumbling Blocks Against Unification On Some Persistent Misconceptions in Physics Other Related Titles from World Scientific Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Field Theory by Albert Schwarz ISBN: 978-981-3278-63-9 Probing Particle Physics with Neutrino Telescopes edited by Carlos Pérez de los Heros ISBN: 978-981-3275-01-0 Quantum Field Theory II by Mikhail Shifman ISBN: 978-981-3234-18-5 Field Theory: A Path Integral Approach Third Edition by Ashok Das ISBN: 978-981-120-254-4 ISBN: 978-981-120-266-7 (pbk) KahFee - 11738 - Stumbling Blocks Against Unification.indd 1 05-03-20 12:27:32 PM Stumbling Blocks Against Unification On Some Persistent Misconceptions in Physics Matej Pav s˘i c˘ Jo z˘ef Stefan Institute, Slovenia World Scientific NEW JERSEY • LONDON • SINGAPORE • BEIJING • SHANGHAI • HONG KONG • TAIPEI • CHENNAI • TOKYO Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. STUMBLING BLOCKS AGAINST UNIFICATION On Some Persistent Misconceptions in Physics Copyright © 2020 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. ISBN 978-981-121-700-5 (hardcover) ISBN 978-981-121-701-2 (ebook for institutions) ISBN 978-981-121-702-9 (ebook for individuals) For any available supplementary material, please visit https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/11738#t=suppl Desk Editor: Ng Kah Fee Typeset by Stallion Press Email: [email protected] Printed in Singapore KahFee - 11738 - Stumbling Blocks Against Unification.indd 2 05-03-20 12:27:32 PM March10,2020 10:55 ws-book9x6 StumblingBlocksAgainstUnification b3850-main pagev To my wife Mojca and daughters Tjaˇsa and Katja v b2530 International Strategic Relations and China’s National Security: World at the Crossroads TTTThhhhiiiissss ppppaaaaggggeeee iiiinnnntttteeeennnnttttiiiioooonnnnaaaallllllllyyyy lllleeeefffftttt bbbbllllaaaannnnkkkk b2530_FM.indd 6 01-Sep-16 11:03:06 AM March10,2020 10:55 ws-book9x6 StumblingBlocksAgainstUnification b3850-main pagevii Preface Inrecentyears,physicistshavebeenfacingincreasingdiscomfortduetothe frustratingsituationinwhichfundamentalphysicscurrentlyfindsitself. As stated by John Baez in a recent book review 1, this discomfort is reflected in the recent book Foundations of Mathematics and Physics One Century After Hilbert: New Perspectives, edited by Joseph Kouneiher (Springer, 2018).“The problem is that the progress, extremely rapid during most of the twentieth century, has greatly slowed since the 1970s”, says Baez. In fact, as noted by Lee Smolin in his book The Trouble with Physics [1], during the last forty years, there have been no frontier-breaking advances in fundamental theoretical physics. In this book, I will explain my view on why this lack of progress exists. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, I published a book titled The Landscape of Theoretical Physics: A Global View; From Point Particle to the Brane World and Beyond, in Search of a Unifying Principle (Kluwer Academic, 2001). At that time, I saw the problem that many directions of research are pursued more or less independently from each other. Therefore, from my perspective, I presented a global view of the connections and interrelations among those various fields under investigation. Since then, I have realized that certain points considered in my book, andsomeotherpointsthatIinvestigatedafterward,belongedtothe topics about which the majority of physicists already had their fixed opinions. I realized that such fixed opinions were rooted in the existing paradigms, which currently act as stumbling blocks of further genuine progressin fun- damental(theoretical)physics. Ithasbecomeincreasinglycleartomethat an extensive exposition of those problematic topics is necessary to help us step out of such conceptual boxes. 1NoticesoftheAmericanMathematicalSociety, Vol. 66,Number10,p. 1690(2019). vii March10,2020 10:55 ws-book9x6 StumblingBlocksAgainstUnification b3850-main pageviii viii Stumbling Blocks Against Unification Inthe historyofphysicsandscience ingeneral,weencounternumerous misconceptionsabouthowNatureworks. Thesituationnowadayscertainly is not very different. In the book, I will discuss why the general opinion about the devastating role of negative energies in classical and quantum physics, especiallyinquantumfieldtheories, shouldbe revisedforthe ben- efit of further advances in quantum gravity. To determine under which conditions a physical system is stable or unstable is not so straightforward as it is generally uncritically believed. Once this concept is understood, the doorsareopenedtowelcomingultrahyperbolicspaces,whosesignature has positive and negative signs. Such spaces are associated with Clifford algebras,whichhavenumerouspromisingapplications,aswill be discussed throughout this book. Among others, the generators of Clifford algebras in infinite-dimensional spaces play the role of quantum field operators and create particles with either definite momenta or definite positions. Within quantum field theories, the concept of a particle with a definite position is not quite well understood, and there are confusing ideas about thatnotion. Iwillshowthatoncethisconceptisproperlyformulated,quan- tum field theories can be employed in creating continuous sets of particles atdifferentpositions. Inparticular,suchsetscanbestringsorbranes. The quantizationofagenericbranehassofarbeenverydifficultandhasnotyet been completely finished. However,with branes generatedby means ofthe creation operators of a quantum field theory, we have solved the problem of the quantum brane. Now, if we consider the braneworldscenario, which regards our universe as a brane embedded in a higher-dimensional space, with the effective induced metric on the brane being the spacetime metric, we arrive at quantum gravity. March10,2020 10:55 ws-book9x6 StumblingBlocksAgainstUnification b3850-main pageix Acknowledgement Thebookisaresultofmylongtermresearchwhichwasinspiredinthecon- tacts with many people. Special thanks I owe to Erasmo Recami, Asim O. Barut, Pierro Caldirola, Waldyr Rodrigues, Jr., Milutin Blagojeci´c, Larry Horwitz, and John Fanchi. Very useful and insightful were discussions with Victor Tapia, Marcos Maia, Martin Land, Igor Kanatchikov, Carlos Castro, Antonio Aurilia, William Pezzaglia, Aharon Davidson, and Daniel Grumiller. Each of those physicists improved my understanding of theo- retical physics andhelped me to proceedfurther. The support of the Joˇzef StefanInstitute andSlovenianMinistryofScienceisgreatlyacknowledged. Last, but not least, I wish to express my thanks and gratitude to Mojca Vizjak-Pavˇsiˇc,whose love and support was invaluable for me. ix
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