Bikash Sinha
Theoretical physics to most is a complicated and complex affair. There is absolutely no romance, even hidden, in the maze of intricate formulae. The obvious question that comes to mind is what one has got to do with it? With that perspective, Roger Penrose's latest book, Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, is a unique treat.
In the preface to the book, Penrose asks, "Are fashion, faith or fantasy relevant to fundamental science?" According to the author, science is not only rigorous but the rigor is also continuously being questioned by experiments; the question of faith in poetry seems almost irrelevant in this context.
Penrose opines that "fantasy is surely the province of certain area of fiction and entertainment, where it is not deemed essential that significant regard be paid to the requirement of consistency and observation or to strict logic or even to a good sense. Indeed, if a proposed scientific theory as being too much influenced by the enslavement of fashion following an experimentally unsupported faith or by romantic temptation of fantasy, then it is our duty to point out such influence and steer away any who might perhaps unwittingly be subject to influence of this kind." However, Penrose is not totally sold out to the inapplicability of such terms as "fantasy", "faith" and "fashion". There are many such cases in history, the history of physics.
Hypothesis is a close instrument of faith in physics. At the same time - and this is entirely personal - string theory could be a product of fantastic fashion. This is because, string theory, with the best minds working on it, has not been able to provide a single experimental verification, except one object called AdS/CFT, which has some faint connection to string theory and has followed its application in the flow of something called quark gluon plasma, a product created after the melting of nuclear particles under very high temperature and density. Indeed, some of the words, "Brave-world and the landscape", could be a great fantasy in a "fantastic" landscape. Penrose's understanding of faith is straightforward. He calls it 'wave particle paradox' - a concept in those words sound an article of faith. I believe that all paradoxes are articles of faith at a very fundamental level. It is, to my mind, the beginning of wave particle duality. Indeed, the real world of "duality" started cohabiting with us since Louis de Broglie discovered the wave particle duality.
The Cambridge school to which the author belongs, although he lives in Oxford, has a very realistic yet romantic view of the second law of thermodynamics. Penrose considers the second law as a part of fantasy and uses it as a part of his theory. Stephen Hawking uses it for the black hole. Such is the "fantastic" power of the second law.
Penrose is a British gentleman. He is considered among the great thinkers of the 20th and the 21st centuries. Penrose's book is a fashion of fantasy and faith. It goes back to his old day when he proposed the twistor theory. Is twistor theory an alternative to string theory? Imagine Penrose's surprise when Edward Witten, a theoretical physicist in Princeton, agreed that twistor theory and string theory have something in common. The book is a work of labour. In spite of its 'crazy physics', it is a book of fantastic creativity.
No comments:
Post a Comment