Joint-Atlantic Seminar in the History of Physical Sciences

Semi-classical Speculative Turns in the Construction of the Standard

Model of Particle PhysicsBy Clarissa Ai Ling Lee

PhD CandidateLiterature Program

Graduate Certificate in the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and

Medicine.

What is This AboutPhD student working in the intersection of physics, philosophy, history, cultural theory, and literatureResearch Question and Significance

Philosophical backgroundThe science (and mathematics)Theory grounding

Research QuestionUnderstanding the historical limits and constraints in the ontological development of the Standard Model and what are the stakes today as we verge into the discovery of the Higgs Boson.

Working out the speculative theories involved in the development of the Standard Model and understanding the levels of speculation that are involved experimentally to look for solutions to the imperfectness of the model.

Understanding the philosophical implication of the Standard Model such as in understanding the conception of measurement and interpretation involving foundational questions in quantum theory.

Significance of ResearchWhat can the epistemology and ontology involved in the making of the Standard Model (SM) inform us about the formation of axioms and laws of nature.

Understanding the semi-classical status of the SM as a continuum between classical and quantum mechanics, and even the delimitations of quantum field theory in addressing its problematic.

What can other fields of sciences, and even technology-interested humanities, understand about the social and politics involved in the development of the SM.

The Mathematics – the Semiclassical Range

Lagrangian and Hamiltonian equations are invariantly transformed through the Rund-Trautman Identities, and together with the extremals, produces the Noether Theorem.

Hilbert space and Fock space for single versus multiple particles. Degrees of Freedom.

Creation and Annihilation Operators.Symmetry and Unitary Groups (Lie Algebra).Path integrals and the Equations of Fields.Representation of the point where the classical and quantum explanation of phenomena meets.

Speculative Physics: 20th Century (Whitehead)Every statement about a multiplicity is a disjunctive statement about its individual members: i.e. Standard Model.

Moved away from metaphysical inquiry through Newtonian physics.

Ontological principle – can be no determinate truth, correlating impartially the partial experiences of many actual entities, apart from one actual entity.

Birth of Physics – beginnings of Atomism (Michel Serres)

Atomic theory as ancient doctrine but modern discovery.

The clinamen (swerve) in Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things: Serres considers it an absurdity since it is counter-intuitive to the accepted laws of physics and motion. However, the clinamen can become that departure point for talking about indeterminism in modern science (physics).

Relationship of pre-modern atomism to pre-modern mathematics: potential infinitely small and actual infinitely small. Relation to infinitesimal calculus

Return to the order of the model - Serres“The chaotic unrest or perturbation is a limitless empty space traversed by movements, collisions, intervals, paths and weights, distributed at random, without conjunctions, scattered, opposed, disjunct…. Collisions and encounters without union. And so here are translations, rotations, chance vibrations, here are the places of rest for the points of collision, momentary equilibria, deviation.”

Defining the ModelAbstraction, idealization, instantiation of a theory or multitudes of theory

Models as enabling theoretical prediction with insufficient background information (theoretical underdetermination) and empirical data to be ‘fictionalized’ and laid out for further testing.

Models as a mathematically embodied ontologies of a physical universe to enable testing and simulation to be done more concretely.

Understanding the Standard Model through the lens of Speculative Physics

19th century model of the atomPlum pudding model of the atom by J.J Thomson – discovery of the electron through the cathode-ray experiment.

Early Rutherford scattering experiment involving alpha particles scattered onto the gold foil. Invalidating the plum pudding model

Chadwick’s experiment involving beta-decay emission earlier predicted by Fermi as containing the then unknown neutrino – to obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

Neutron as well understood in early-twentieth century physics because of the development of early nuclear reactors.

19th century understanding of the fieldFirst atomic field theory of everything - vortex theory of the atom, conceived as a solution to an age-old problem of the constituent of matter. The vortex theory was one of the earliest attempts to finesse over the paradox of the split between the atomistic and the continuum worldview of matter.

The theory was advanced through the work of William Thomson, later to be known as Lord Kelvin.

Same group of people who were initially interested in the vortex theory of the atom were also the people involved in the development of thermodynamics.

Moving on to the 20th Century: Elementary Particles

In Electrons (+ and -), Protons, Photons, Neutrons, and Cosmic Rays by Robert Andrew Millikan – through his oil, water and mercury drop experiment and based on Einstein-Brown’s movement equation for particles, Millikan proved through his computation that there is no known particle smaller than electron. Different measurements were also made using alpha-particles.

Different attempts had been made, including the modification of Stokes law governing the exertion of frictional (or drag) force on very small particles. Dr Ehrenhaft seems to be Millikan’s rival in trying to prove the possibility of a sub-electron.

The discovery of the positron in cosmic and gamma rays after the initial prediction made by Dirac. Positrons could also be found to be spontaneously disintegrating with the emission of the alpha, beta, and gamma rays.

Oil Drop Experiment

Cosmic Rays: Natural Laboratory of Particles

Gockel, a Swiss, did the first early radiation test on the balloon in 1910, where the electroscope he carried out detected increasing radiation after it has reached a height that frees it from influences from radiation on the earth.

Hess (an Austrian) and Kolhörster (a German) each took readings at 5200 meters and 9000 meters. They were the first to measure the cosmic ray radiation.

New era began with the work of Millikan and Cameron, and later by Anderson.

Cloud chamber by CTR Wilson for sensitivizing detection of the cosmic rays.

Wilson Cloud Chamber

Positrons or ‘positive hole in the Dirac negative sea’

Leptons to QuarksImportant lesson learnt in the lead-up to the discovery of the tau lepton: possibility of misidentification with a hadron.

By the end of 1978, it was confirmed that electromagnetic interaction produces tau lepton while weak interactions is what produces the decay.

One of the interesting aspects of the experiments is the need to produce theories that could possibly account for the excess of events not easily explicable within existing known interactions.

Important to note the problem of excesses when dealing with ill-fitting theory such as in the lepton-hadron problem in the early days before the discovery of the tau.

Electro-weak force: conceptual problem highlighted through the use of the double-slit experiment, and also the paradox of the photo-electric as first demonstrated by Einstein. Problem of wave-particle duality became noticeable.

Development of QCD: problem in explaining the why of the gluons and color parity. Prior to the introduction of the quark theory, the bound state of a nucleon was studied mostly in nuclear physics, but not given as much attention in particle physics.

In the early days of the discovery of the quark, there is still a problem in its inability to explain why the flavor (up, down, strange, etc) properties of the quarks can be transformed during the process of decay.

This was only resolved with the application of the Cabibbo mechanism, to the neutral processes proposed by Glashow, Illiopoulos, and Maiani (also known as GIM) in 1970, and then extended down by Kobayashi and Maskawa (KM) through all the three generations of quarks known by 1973.

If electric force in QED is carried by the photon, in the nuclear force, it is represented by the pion exchange, which was first predicted by Yukawa as a nuclear-force counterpart to the beta-decay for the ‘free’ electronic and neutrino particles

The first evidence of the pion was detected in the 1950s from the spray of particles coming from cosmic rays (a particle of spin 0 and about 270 times heavier than the electron mass), precedes the proposal of the Gellman Murray Eightfold way.

Murray Gell-Mann first drafted the Eightfoldway in 1961, where the particle’s isospin are plotted on the x-axis and strangeness to the y-axis. First version was a hexagon.

The first three quarks to be discovered by 1964 were the up quark, down quark, and strange quark. The bottom/beauty quark was discovered in 1977 and the top quark in 1995.

The strong interactional properties were not properly understood until after the November revolution of 1974, with the discovery of the J/psi mesons, the experimental demonstration of neutrinos, the Drell-Yan, the success of the composite quark/parton model, and the transverse momentum of the hadronic particle, all important for the foundation of QCD.

A possible problem of remaining within the landscape of Hamiltonian and Lagrangian physics - maintains the same formal ontology from classical to quantum. New mathematics.

Problems of nonrenormalizable fields and also the lack of true resolution offered by renormalization.

Problem with the Standard Model: Some speculative Issues

Too many adjustable parameters: 18 arbitrary parameters unpredicted that are mathematically valid and theoretically self-consistent. Lend to easy mathematical manipulation regardless of of the parametric values.

The quantum corrections to the gravitational processes are infinite and do not lend themselves to possible resolutions to these infinities.

Our universe is biophilic in that it supports life and the Standard Model is unable to explain why the existence of life is so tightly correlated with the parameters that has been predicted by the elements within.

The impossibility of the Grand Unified Theory to create one simple scheme, and one coupling constant.

Where goes the Higgs?Higgs mechanism for explaining how mass exists under certain circumstances.

Non-zero vacuum expectation value: is it consistent with implication of string theory?

SM Higgs and SUSY as predictor of Higgs at the Tera scale.

Different channels of searches for Higgs: different channels involved in a speculative maneuver for locating all possible juncture of its location.

Light to heavy Higgs – can it be reconciled with the Planck mass?

Explication of new candidates, other than the WIMP, for dark matter and dark energy? Neutrinos and axions out of the picture?

BACK UP SLIDES

‘Speculative’ creative non-fiction/popular science

Atomic Pile from Popular Mechanics, Oct 1948

More Details about the history of the Fields

In his article “On Faraday’s Lines of Force,” Maxwell is interested in working out a more mathematically systematic way for speculating on the formation of laws on electricity.

His later work, influenced by the concept of ether and its formulation as vortices, was drawn from work on eddy currents, current measurements, magnetic fields/forces, and from Weber and Gauss’s work on electrodynamics for measuring current flows of positively and negatively charged particle flows.

Maxwell’s model was built on a mechanical viewpoint that drives the dynamical model formulated by Maxwell whereby his four famous equations of electromagnetism are connected to changing electric forces and the displacement of electrical current observed in the work of Faraday, Ampere, as well as Biot and Savart. The famous equations, shown below, were first articulated in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.

Cosmic Rays to Elementary ParticlesLaboratori Nazionali di Frascati that is 25 kilometers from Rome. The experiment has to do with the exploration of collisions at the center-of-mass region of the collider and certain physical theories in circulation at that time such as the dispersion relation of particles stemming from their collision-based interaction.

The development of colliding beams in the form of electron-positron was itself a form of a speculative endeavor for there were many reservations concerning the plausibility of its design, especially since some changes in the design would be required to allow one beam to be coming from the opposite direction from the other beam while still being able to track their collisions.

Cyclotron

Taken from the Institute of Physics 1950 publication “The Acceleration of particles to High Energies. So are the next two pictures on the betatron and synchrotron

Betatron

Synchrotron

Speculative Physics: My Explanation

Act of constructing new concepts from imperfect and incomplete knowledge, while allowing this knowledge to be unhinged from existing paradigms so that possibilities not yet in existence in the vocabulary of that paradigm can still be considered.

Development of a narrative that allows for uncertainty and indeterminism in an object to become the primary gateway of critical intervention dealing with theoretical predictions and composites of possibilities external to prevailing paradigms in physics.

Speculative method allows and enables defamiliarization to take place so that ‘impossible’ theories and experiments, set within the constraints of the ‘factual’, can become the catalyst of new concepts, theories, and philosophies.

Defining Speculative Theory

Realism: empirical, objective, subjective, operational.

Temporality: material witness that connects theory to experiment, but begins its conjecture in theory.

Choices in mathematical formalism: physicalism versus mathematical abstraction.

Materialism: a subset of realism. In a physics sense, has its genesis in atomism. It is also a conceptual move for providing concrete representation to an otherwise abstract/non-physical meaning.

Why is Speculative Theory Important?

Modeling of a theory based on incompletely known facts through fiction-based narrative for situating new knowledge.

Navigating the ambiguity of language in rendering the conceptual real in physics.

As a methodological archive that delineates the constraints and potential of a theoretical prediction that does not yet have direct empirical evidence by negotiating through indirect methods. This includes expanding the rule of ‘constraints’ when dealing with currently known speculative models by also including theories that are physically feasible even if not yet manifested into the interpretation for the development of hybrid models that include what theories under-testing and theories not before considered.

Development of conceptual models for theory-testing that can later be turned into computable algorithms for Bayesian-like analysis.

Activist philosophy where real and phenomenological are interconnected, and which ‘points’ to theory that can have particular ‘nodes’ activated for experimental triggers.

Speculative Theory is not Hypothesis

Speculative theory has many more layers than a hypothesis: a hypothesis rests on the idea that theory-induced predictions are made out of some axioms that have been extended from a mixture of facts and existing theories. It has a more extensive narrative life, as well as more complex explicatory model, for the creation of mechanisms that provide scientifically logical explanation for the causes behind all the different interactions of the various objects populating the spatial-temporal location of the model.

Speculative Theory is not Theory of Underdetermination

Speculative theory differs from the underdetermined theory because it is less about the uncertainty of correlation between a cause and effect; rather it is about trying to link the cause-and-effect via a well-constituted narrative structure with quantifiable characteristics that may have ‘invisible’ hidden variables that prevent one from presenting, clearly, an elegant universal theory that will delineate every paradox that exists.

A speculative theory overlaps with a speculative model, as one cannot prove definitely whether that theory has failed or succeed, until a better alternative that can plausibly embody the successes while accounting for the failures, be conclusively demonstrated.

Defining Speculative ExperimentMoving beyond the ‘habit’ of a cycle of

validation and falsification.Data cuts and the points of agency when choices

are made concerning triggers.Analysis of the material traces of branching

ratios and cross-sections of collisions to elucidate the final state of decay for the particles.

Experiment that operates within unfamiliar paradigm.

Experiment that can also generate its own theory by following the trail of the empirical, rather than merely acting as confirming/disconfirming a theoretical prediction.