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Thursday, February 20, 2014

HEAVENLY CLUES TO THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF PHYSICS


Daniel Chung, U. W. Department of Physics, explained that the fundamental laws of physics is a way that ties explanations together (measure one thing and predict another) and it can be broken down into 2 parts:  model (specific to our world of measurements) and formalism (may apply to different worlds).  Small things are fundamental (postulate).  The reason we think this is because big things are made up of small things.  In theory, if you understand the small things you will understand the big ones.  What makes up all things? They are still hammering away to find the answer.  Traditional small scale physics was studied under colliders such as the LHC (Large Hadron Collider which is the highest-energy particle collider ever made and is considered as one of the great engineering milestones of mankind).  From the degrees that the particles collide you can actually understand what governs the physics of small things.  Events fundamentally can be qualitatively explained in terms of the following numbers when described symmetries in equations (patterns of ideas).  There are reasons that exist for us to think that all these numbers are not the whole story and that they are actually related.  Fundamental theories have a certain beauty because of these symmetries.  The symmetries described by these numbers are actually describing a pattern of ideas.   How can cosmology give us clues to the questions about the fundamental theories?  Cosmology is the study of the history and evolution of the universe.  This is interesting because it is our quest for understanding our origin and long term fate.  Cosmology is proven by looking up into the heavens where you have gamma rays, cosmic rays, neutrinos, x-rays, antimatter, etc.  where we can extract information about the universe.  According to the author of relativity and many other important ideas and educators in physics, the reason the earth moves around the sun is that space time is stretched by the presence of the sun.  Space time is like a stretchable membrane and the universe is expanding.  What is large today was small yesterday.  The study of the fundamental physics is the study of the early universe.  There is a symbiotic relationship between cosmology and fundamental physics and the following are some links:  dark matter/dark energy, Higgs & matter/antimatter and inflation and the multiverse.   Dark matter gravitates and behaves like a gas of particles that does not emit light.  Nothing in the standard model of particle physics seems to be consistent with dark matter observations.  Abundance has been more accurately measured and is as expected it is cold.  Dark matter is weakly interacting with ordinary matter than the weak force that is responsible for making neutrons into protons and electrons.  Dark energy is energy density that does not dilute as the universe expands and does not shine.  Contrast this with a gas of particles such as dark matter which dilutes like N/volume as their volume expands. The models indicate that interaction with ordinary matter is most seen through gravity with no chance of bumping into dark matter.  Inflation is a solution to the initial condition problems in cosmology.  During the inflationary process small scale quantum fluctuations get stretched and freezes due to a general relativity effect that leaves an imprint on the sky.  There are many imprints in the sky.  There is a possible universe outside of our observable patch that is sometimes investigated.  Different patches can have different laws of physics.  The universe could be been created by collusions of membranes.

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