Quantum Effects Bring No Solace for Physicists

The quest to know the foundational "rules" of the physical universe may never be realized in any conclusive way. Too bad, that.

Quantum effects bring no solace for physicists

• 17 November 2008 by Michael Brooks
• Magazine issue 2682. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• For similar stories, visit the Cosmology Topic Guide

Galaxies in the early universe (Image: NASA, ESA, Hubble Deep Field team)

ONE of the grandest visions of physics could be a mirage. Conventional thinking has it that all the fundamental forces of nature diverged from one single force soon after the big bang. Now it seems that quantum effects may make it impossible to prove if this idea is correct.

In the 1970s, data from the Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN near Geneva hinted that the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces were beginning to converge at the energies created during particle collisions. By extrapolating this convergence to much higher energies, physicists speculated that the forces would become indistinguishable at around 10¹⁶ gigaelectronvolts. The universe was in this energy state soon after the big bang, which suggests that all the forces may once have been unified.

Now Xavier Calmet of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and his colleagues argue that it may be impossible to prove if this theory is right via any conceivable experiment in a particle accelerator.

The problem is that the high energy levels at which unification of all the forces is thought to occur is close to the "Planck scale", at which quantum fluctuations in space-time become strong. These fluctuations may create huge uncertainties in the strengths of the forces at this scale, says Calmet. If true, it would mean that all bets are off as to how the forces will actually behave at high energies - no matter what the data from particle accelerators might suggest in the future.

Read the rest of the article.

Tags: Quantum effects, physicists, New Scientist, physics, Space, Science, Michael Brooks, cosmology, Planck scale, quantum fluctuations, particle accelerator