PROJECTS & RESEARCH
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Reporter: In this video, we are interviewing Dr. Peter Morley about some outstanding physics problems being worked on by research physicists.
Dr. Morley: People who do physics research have two qualities that are essential for success. The first one is that they have a pictorial view in their mind about what is happening – a graphical representation almost. It's an intuitive understanding. The second quality is the ability to put the intuition into mathematics.
I claim anyone can obtain an intuitive understanding of physics, as long as you have a good physics teacher. Unfortunately a certain percentage of engineers did not have a good experience with their physics teachers and so have not mastered physics in their engineering field. That has enormous repercussions for America's national security because some of those engineers have important positions in mega-defense contracting companies. Their lack of physics mastery causes mission failure and billions of dollars in wasteful spending. America's adversaries have not made this mistake and their weapon and sensor fields are dominated by their-own physicists.
So in this video we will talk about the physics research frontier without writing down a single equation! I'll be your physics teacher.
Reporter: What area of physics will we be talking about?
Dr. Morley: We will be talking about one of the most perplexing issues in physics: putting together General Relativity that describes gravitation, with Quantum Mechanics that describes microscopic matter.
Reporter: What is that issue?
Dr. Morley: Well, when you do an experiment and obtain data, that data is in the context of the universe we reside in, namely, the experimental data is in the presence of quantum fluctuations.
Every measurement in physics has units. Numbers are abstract objects that do not exist. For example, you cannot show me the number 5.
Reporter: Oh but I can, here is the number 5 (showing her hand).
Dr. Morley: No, that is a measurement showing me 5 fingers. Fingers here is the unit. One can show that all measurements have uncertainties. In this measurement of yours, the number 5 is an integer and so has no uncertainty. The uncertainty in your measurement is in the unit “fingers”. This simple measurement you have done is actually in the presence of quantum fluctuations which produce the uncertainty. So we learn that the difference between mathematics and physics is that physics is the mathematics of units.
Reporter: How do quantum fluctuations enter in this problem of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics?
Dr. Morley: I want to have a mathematical theory that predicts your measurement. It has to work in the presence of quantum fluctuations, because your measurements are in their presence. If a theory can handle quantum fluctuations, we call it “renormalizable”. If a theory cannot handle quantum fluctuations, we call it “non-renormalizable”.
The issue with General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics is that General Relativity in four space-time dimensions is non-renormalizable.
Reporter: Because all theories have to work in the presence of quantum fluctuations, it must mean that General Relativity has an error of some sort.
Dr. Morley: Yes that is absolutely correct, but the difficulty is in finding the error. In this video, we will find the error, but it takes a little more understanding of physics beyond what we have already discussed. Again, I'll be your teacher.
Reporter: OK, let's start finding the error in General Relativity. How do we begin?
Dr. Morley: We begin by noting that General Relativity has passed all experimental tests in macroscopic physics. All of them, so the error in General Relativity cannot be in the macroscopic arena.
There are two pieces to General Relativity: its Lagrangian and its Action. The Action in physics is arguably the most obscure object in physics. So let's talk about Lagrangians and their Action.
When Newton put forward the classical equations of motion, it was in a context of rather simple forces. When you have constraints in the problem or general co-ordinates, the equations of motion become complicated. Lagrange in the 18th century showed that the general problem of classical mechanics can be obtained by minimizing a function, called the Lagrangian. The procedure gives the correct equations of motion, but it must have been very frustrating for Lagrange.
Reporter: Why do you say that?
Dr. Morley: Because Lagrange did not know why the minimization of his Lagrangian is
important – it just works. So for him, he must have died a very frustrating man.
Reporter: What is the Action?
Dr. Morley: The nineteenth century is the century of electro-magnetism, but Hamilton made a critical contribution to classical physics when he showed that Lagrange's formalism comes about by minimizing or maximizing a functional, called the Action. This minimization/maximization is called Hamilton's Principle. But now Hamilton must have died a frustrating man, because he never understood what is the significance of the Action.
Reporter: So the eighteenth and nineteenth century left big holes in our understanding of physics because the Action and its extremal variation to give the equations of motion were an oddity, without physical understanding?
Dr. Morley: Yes, exactly. We now enter the twentieth century and have two major results which shed light on the “oddity”.
The first result was done by Planck when he realized that the Action is quantized. He gave us this quanta of Action, called Planck's constant. The second result was Feynman's path integral when he showed that the quantum probability is an integration of the Action over all paths.
Reporter: But how is this related to Einstein's mistake in General Relativity?
Dr. Morley: We're almost there now.
So General Relativity has two pieces, the Lagrangian and the Action. Ordinarily, the Action is known immediately because the equations of motion are known. But in this particular instance, we may have a missing equation of motion.
Reporter: How is this possible?
Dr. Morley: It is possible. The matter Lagrangian is called the Standard Model. Einstein had to make a choice in the Action as to how the matter Lagrangian couples to the gravitation Lagrangian. He chose a simple addition.
Reporter: You mean that the combined gravitation and matter Lagrangian that Einstein chose was a simple addition of each Lagrangian?
Dr. Morley: Yes – it's called the Einstein-Hilbert Action. But let me tell you a secret about Nature.
Reporter: What is the secret?
Dr. Morley: The secret about Nature is that Nature loves the ugly baby.
Reporter: The ugly baby?
Dr. Morley: Yes – that means that humans look at physics trying to comprehend physical phenomena with Lagrangians, and the correct Lagrangians are terribly complicated mathematically. They're down-right ugly. The electroweak theory has close to a hundred different discreet Lagrangian pieces and it's ugly. The Standard Model of matter has additionally the whole quark zoo where each individual quark has its own specialized electric charge and weak hyper-charge. It is ugly – pure ugliness, but it works. Nature loves the ugly baby.
Reporter: So what you are saying is that Einstein's Action, of simple addition of Lagrangians is the error in General Relativity. It's pretty, not ugly and it's wrong.
Dr. Morley: You got it – gravity couples with matter through a very non-linear Action and that Action is renormalizable, as required by Quantum Mechanics. And it gives us the missing equation of motion that we did not know existed. That equation of motion says that all of the terms in the matter Lagrangian, the Standard Model, have a scalar curvature associated with them. But everybody who sees this non-linear coupling walks away saying it is just pure ugliness.
Reporter: But what about the oddity of the Action – does the non-linear Action finally tell us why Action is important?
Dr. Morley: It does, because using this equation of motion involving the Standard Model scalar curvatures and Feynman's path integral, you can show that all quantum mechanical probabilities are a space-time integration over the scalar curvature per unit area. All, quantum mechanical probabilities – all. So if you are measuring the Stark effect in atomic physics, for example, it reduces to an integration over the atomic scalar curvature.
And now we see Planck's true Action quantization. It turns outs to be an area quantization, involved in the per unit area of quantum mechanical probabilities because his constant and Newton's constant combine to give you a per unit-area, a true 2- dimensional surface.
However, it's ugly – very ugly.
Reporter: But Dr. Morley, you don't get to choose what is reality!
Dr. Morley: (Looking intently at the reporter) How old are you?!