Physics Vs. Philosophy: Really? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

• Physics Vs. Philosophy: Really? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

  • Albert claims that physics presumes the existence of fundamental fields in order to define nothing. Hence, it's not really nothing, but something.
  • he decried (as he did in his book, and Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg before him) philosophy and theology as useless wastes of time.
  • The central dogma of science is that nature is intelligible: with the diligent application of reason we can construct explanations of natural phenomena that can be tested and falsified. Within this framework, no explanation can be deemed final: as concepts and measuring tools evolve, so do our explanations of the world.
  • This strange notion comes from applying the rules of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole: close to the beginning, the entire universe can be thought as being a tiny particle, and thus must obey the laws of quantum mechanics.
  • In quantum mechanics, however, there is no such thing as complete nothingness: there is always a residual energy, which is called zero-point energy.
  • if we apply our current understanding of quantum mechanics to the universe, it should be filled with zero-point energy. So filled, in fact, that it wouldn't exist, having been forced to implode on itself right after the "beginning." To make sure this doesn't happen, we arbitrarily set it to zero or to a small value in our models. This conceptual challenge is sometimes called the "cosmological constant problem,"

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