Stumbling Blocks Against Unification: On Some Persistent Misconceptions In Physics

256 Pages·2020·20.649 MB·English

by  Matej Pavsic

Stumbling Blocks
Against Unification
On Some Persistent Misconceptions in Physics
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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
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STUMBLING BLOCKS AGAINST UNIFICATION
On Some Persistent Misconceptions in Physics
Copyright © 2020 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
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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
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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
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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.
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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