Kip Thorne - Does Physical Reality Go Beyond?

kiff the common perception is is that we understand relativity theory we understand quantum theory we know they have to be integrated but pretty much we know all that's going on but when you look at the future what what opportunities do you see for new physics new ideas to emerge let me approach this by talking about old physics because it day it sets the context Newton gave us his laws of gravity his laws of gravity say that the earth and the moon attract each other through a force the gravitational force it's an action at a distance force the earth here far away from the moon pulls on the moon and makes the moon go into orbit around the Earth and going in orbit to prevent itself from falling into the earth centrifugal force balancing gravitational force so gravity was this action at a distance inverse square law farther away you go the strength of the gravitational pull goes down as one over distance squared Einstein came along formulated the laws of relativity and looked at them and said my goodness Newton's laws of gravity are not compatible with my laws of special relativity my laws that space and time are personal my laws that there is no I no absolute concept of simultaneity and so you can't have action at a distance because actually this says simultaneous this thing now creates a force here now it's incompatible I have to create new laws of gravity obviously I'm right it had to be wrong I'm saying had cut spot and so Einstein then formulated general activity as a new theory of gravity he explained the gravitational pull in a different way it was due to a warping of time due to the prediction the time flows more slowly near the surface of the earth and it does far away and he was able to work through that through some four dimensional geometry of space-time to explain gravity so we had a complete a different picture of gravity that gravity is due to warping of space and time which one is right after all Newton's laws give absolutely perfect - as far as we can see predictions here in the laboratory exceedingly accurate predictions in the solar system not quite perfect you do need a little bit of correction from general tivity but is gravity in action in distance or is it warped space-time well Maurice to say today obviously it's warped space-time and Newton's the description is an approximation but very good approximation today we have a problem that day that Einsteins laws of warped space-time I must be married with the laws of quantum physics in order to discuss things like the birth of the universe and what goes on inside black holes these laws of quantum gravity then must be the fundamental laws that govern gravity and somehow Einsteins laws of warped space-time must come out of them as an approximation and we actually if string theory is the correct laws of quantum gravity we do understand how Einsteins laws come out is an excellent approximation but not really the truth the truth is really string theory or logic autom gravity but will come next these laws seem to be nested and you go from one to the next as you go to higher and higher accuracy and greater and greater domain of validity you go from one to the next Newton to Einstein to string theory does it end there I doubt it it could be that these are like nested Russian dolls that that you have one then another than another but it goes all the way down to an infinite number of nests or it could be that string theory is the end we don't know I don't know but having these three steps in front of me and having seen that the description of gravity by each of them is so radically different from the other I can't help but wonder if there isn't something at a finer scale and finer scale yet that you keep on going down and there is there a required spectrum from complexity to simplicity as you go down and or uncover the nesting or is there anything that we can say structurally about this flow I'm not a great expert I am on the first two steps not on the third but when you step I step back as a physicist and look at it I am struck by the power of demanding that you deal with laws that are simple in some sense from the right point of view so Newton's laws are very simple when you think of action at a distance Einstein's laws are very simple when you think about warped space-time you can reformulate Einsteins laws in a sort of a Newtonian sort of a way they get god-awful complicated and so and then you go to string theory the string theory laws are well they prepare to be simple and elegant when you look at them for the right point of view so simplicity is a touchstone in finding new physical laws that simplicity combined with finding a new piratical inu point of view and it's not just simplicity itself these aren't principles these are guidelines and searching for new physical laws the guideline of the combination of searching for news mathematical structures in which you will be able to come up with simple laws elegant simple laws that explain the domain that you're moving into do you see an infinite number of these nesting I mean that that seems impossible I mean I hate to say anything's impossible but you know and then yet yet pick out any finite number we have three potentially right now and well you know the book that more than anything else made me a theoretical physicist convinced me at age 13 that this is what I wanted to do with my life is a book by George Gamow whose title was one two three infinity maybe I'm influenced by gamma all right but just having one two three I can't help but wonder if there is four five six infinity well we don't know we don't know we're far from knowing you know it's that they say that any finite number is Iraq it would be irrational because why that finite number infinity sort of has its own charm to it one would have a charm yeah you know none would have a charm also but but but any finite number it would be hard but of course we're now getting into philosophy that at this stage in our understanding of physics isn't terribly helpful and so this is a philosophy that I'll talk about usually over beer on camera sure but for a physicist this is an intriguing question but we're not at a point where we have any way to come to grips with it and so it's a question that we set aside and we just focus in at this stage on understanding quantum gravity and string theory on one hand and in fleshing out our understanding of relativity in warped space-time and let future generations it when the subjects mature enough when our understanding is mature enough that future generations develop the tools to ask an immediate million in a definitive way is there a fourth layer and more what is exciting is the is the emergence of the previous layer from just flowing logically out of the elegance of the more fundamental layer that's one of the keys to finding the more fundamental layer the previous layer has to flow out of it it must flow out hopefully elegantly if it's elegant then is a rough rule of thumb you're on the right track I love the word elegance and I must ask you to enrich our understanding of how to describe that word in physics from a physicists point of view what's elegant so let me describe it by talking about two different people Superman Ian Chandrasekhar it was a great astrophysicist a close friend of mine and for him the elegance with in the equations that sit on a piece of paper he could look at them and he could say these are elegant they must represent truth he could look at another set of equations and he could say that really looks ugly that can't represent truth I've never understood how he had such great contributions to science but he saw it in the mathematics on the sheet of paper on the other hand Stephen Hawking sees it all in geometric shapes in his head of course he can't write equations on the paper hasn't been able to since the mid 70s of his motor neuron disease but he developed these tools to think about physical law and geometric forms manipulating shapes and topologies in his head for him elegance is all in these shapes in these topologies I don't think there's any uniformly read on idea what elegance is but well it's you know when you see it at least you know it's a personal elegance in some sense though there is certainly is a pretty universal agreement the general activity is elegant the quantum theory is not yet elegant as it should be how about the word beauty is beauty and elegance the same thing in common parlance they're not they I think again it depends on the physicist for Chandrasekhar the beauty and elegance are equivalent I think for me looking at physical laws that's also true it's not true in everyday life but it is true for physical law so how much does a search for elegance and beauty affect you when you're doing the physics of relativity in black holes so the search for elegance and beauty has been crucial in finding new laws of physics crucial Scents Einstein playing a crucial role today I have chosen not to go that route with my career I prefer to work in a field where I have el burro and that's much a much more crowded field and I'm you so I have chosen to probe relativity warp space-time myself in this case it is still true that searching for elegance in a description of of something in relativity such as a black hole is an important thing to do because physical intuition being able to guess things before you compute them and then know what to compute in terms of a prediction such as that how black holes behave when they collide that physical intuition has to be based on some mental pictures that in order for them to really be easy to manipulate it's best that they be elegant so in in my sort of poor man's area physically instead instead of trying to understand fundamental to understand new laws of physics elegance is still important in that way

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 53,775

Rating: 4.8677354 out of 5

Keywords: Kip Thorne, Closer To Truth, CTT, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Abstract objects, cosmos, existence, laws

Id: 6VJeG-6XIe8

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2019