Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

Darkness, pt 1: Standard Model Blues

If then the light that is in you is darkness,
how great is the darkness!
-- Jesus, Gospel of Matthew

I'm no Jedi.
I'm just a guy with a lightsaber and a few questions.
-- Kyle Katarn, Jedi Outcast videogame (Raven/Lucasarts, 2002)

If you accept the reality of psychic (or any kind of fringe) phenomena - and there's more than enough evidence for me to make it apparent that something very interesting is going on with channelling, near death experiences and remote viewing / anomalous cognition -- then it becomes obvious that the fundamental physical models on which our best mainstream science is currently based are wrong.

At least, they're wrong to the extent to which they consider whole classes of demonstrated phenomena (such as those involving faster-than-lightspeed transmission of information) to be 'impossible'. And that seems a pretty hard thing to accept. Aren't general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of Particle Physics all hugely well-attested theories with terabytes of data in their support? Wouldn't accepting that 'thoughts can influence matter' or 'some people can see the future' or 'life can exist beyond physical death' require completely abandoning all science, because science is based on the discrimination between 'what can exist' and 'what can't possibly exist'? Isn't, therefore, belief in psychic phenomena, UFOs, antigravity, God, Bigfoot, etc, all just part of a public rejection of Knowledge, and if Knowledge is the ultimate good, then isn't belief in the paranormal or supernatural actually wilful rejection of reality for insanity - in other words, a form of ultimate evil?

That's the approach that the CSICOP/CSI people - and the likes of Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins - take. It's probably valid, from a certain point of view that doesn't accept data points that I do.

Thing is, though, if you look at the data - and not even the fun fringe stuff, just the mainstream history of science and physics in the 20th century - the layperson might well start to wonder just what the point of high-energy physics research has been since WW2. The crude form of the question is so where the heck are my flying antigravity cars?, but even put more subtly it seems confusing at best. I am not a particle physicist, but as far as I can piece together the story goes roughly like this:

1. There appear to currently be two fundamental physical paradigms: General Relativity (Einstein, 1916) describing gravity, and Quantum Mechanics (various dates, but let's say 1928, when Paul Dirac described the electron).

2. Since then lots of particle-smashing at ever higher energies has led to a whole rather dishearteningly hairy particle zoo, captured in a formal theory called the Standard Model of Particle Physics (kicked off say from 1964 when quarks were proposed by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, and pretty much assembled by 1974 when it was described in a single report by John Iliopoulos), but still being tinkered with by researchers; the Top Quark wasn't found until 1995 (but its mass was way bigger than predicted) and the Tau Neutrino until 2000, and when the Large Hadron Collider fires up this May this year (2008) it hopes to find the elusive Higgs Boson, the last predicted particle. Or not. Not finding the Higgs would be interesting indeed, since the Higgs basically mediates mass itself and without it - perhaps - the whole Model falls apart. Or not. The Standard Model looks so ugly that by all rights it should have fallen apart decades ago, but still there it is.

3. The Standard Model is particle-centric and based on experimental evidence: it incorporates Quantum Mechanics and is compatible with General Relativity as far as it goes, but it doesn't really 'do' gravity. It describes all fields as being carried by particles except gravity - the so-called 'graviton' isn't part of the Standard Model.

Whoops. That's kinda a big hole to leave out. Of course, gravity is actually a weak, long-range force, so though it's a big deal to us macro-sized creatures, at the kind of high energies and tiny scales flung around inside a particle accelerator, gravity doesn't really affect the outcome much.

But still. No gravity in the real world of macroscopic distances == YOU FAIL IT. So we have to augment the Standard Model with good ol' Mark II General Relativity, unchanged from 1916.

Think about that. It's 2008, we've had a century of stunning advances in uber-tiny-scale physics, quarks and gluons and pi-mesons and stuff sprawling all over the place, and we're still using a model of gravity nearly a century old. From practically before there was widespread electrical lighting. A theory of fundamental physics from the middle of World War I, when there was still an Ottoman Empire and a Prussia and Russia was a monarchy with serfs.

Isn't that kinda weird, when you stop and look at it? Why did gravity get frozen in time while the whole subatomic world got invented, overthrown, and consolidated into a whole new dogma?

General Relativity has outlasted both the rise and fall of Soviet Communism. But when you look at that, is that a good thing?

What's so special about gravity, that it gets a free ride while everything else burns?

5. Because the Standard Model doesn't do gravity, and gravity lives off in its own secluded micro-theory, a general assumption has grown up that there can't possibly be any linkage between gravity and the other forces (except through astronomical-scale masses and energies), and that anyone who suggests any kind of theory allowing for 'room temperature antigravity' is by definition an insane crank.

This isn't said out loud, though, not as such. What's actually said (when the mainstream science journals have to actually respond to such a distasteful obviously-insane subject as antigravity, thankfully a rare occurrence) is something along the lines of 'Sorry, that's not replicable (ahem, and never will be). Also, the Standard Model, and Einstein... We'd like to not have to say outright that you're a fraud, so please withdraw your claims quietly. Remember Cold Fusion. Irrational exuberance, and all that.' And then a bit of public-spirited hand-wringing about how poor the state of science education is that such outlandish ideas are even imaginable, and How to Fix That.

5. But there's not actually a conspiracy of mainstream physicists against new science. Nobody actually *likes* the Standard Model. It's ugly and inelegant and from a mathematical point of view, quite obviously wrong (or at best woefully incomplete).

The problem is that it fits the data, and all the other theories so far are worse.

6. It's now fashionable to hate on string theory (the previous best rival for the Standard Model's crown) for not making any useful predictions.

But for all its data-fitting, the Standard Model hasn't actually done much worthwhile to justify itself in over thirty years. Except provide reasons to build ever-larger particle accelerators, which are justified purely because they provide opportunities to tune the Model.

The Large Hadron Collider is twenty-six kilometers long and spans the border of France and Switzerland.

Where are the actual spin-offs? The technologies?
What are quarks for?

Stand back, look at the long view of the bare data with a layman's eye, and think.

If quarks were proposed in 1964 and the Standard Model was formulated in 1974:

The United States built fission bombs in the 1940s and fusion bombs in the 1950s without the Standard Model.

The United States put people on the Moon in 1969 without the Standard Model. They didn't even need nuclear to do that: chemistry, astronomy and electronics.

The Internet doesn't use the Standard Model (unless there are very exotic transistors out there.)

The Global Positioning System, started in 1978 and finished in 1995, needs relativity (or at least Lorentz transformations) to do its maths, but it doesn't need the Standard Model.

We have electron-based technologies. We have atom-based technologies. We have a whole shed full of photon-based technologies.

What quark-based technologies have even been proposed in a lab?

What does learning this new stuff let us actually do, rather than fill in blanks on a bingo card?

Spintronics, maybe? Quantum computing? Something with Bose-Einstein condensates? Those seem cool. But the general vibe one gets from mainstream physics right now is a cautious 'Don't get your hopes up, there are fundamental limits and we long since reached them. No faster-than-light for you. No teleportation. Quantum encryption, maybe, but no FTL communication. No gravity control. No cosmic radiant energy. No time travel. Tiny black holes, hardly likely. Fusion, still twenty years to ignition (the world will melt first). The best we can do is make silicon chips smaller and atomic fission slightly less toxic (but not really).'

So far the most interesting thing for the everyday person that CERN has created has been the World Wide Web: a spinoff, yes, but not of particle research.

So why are we firing up the LHC? In the hopes that this time, the dry well will finally spring a gusher?

Is it a wonder that the best minds of the 1980s went into banking, and in the 1990s and 2000s into Google and Facebook? At least in computing there's still actual frontiers.

Or: you could opt for the increasingly-popular paranoid layman's view that 'of course they found all sorts of cool applications for quarks and gluons: but the US government classified it for military uses'. Hyperdrive, aliens, mind-control deathrays, secret bases on the Moon: it's all there for the dreaming, if you can bring yourself to believe that evil is triumphant, that reality is a disposable farce, and that nothing the common person can do is worthwhile.

I'm not quite ready to go there yet. I think our history is mostly true, as far as it goes. But I think there are some huge blind spots.

7. This huge lack of imagination in physics is coming to a head in the Mundane Science Fiction movement: the problem (from the artistic side) is described quite well in this article The Science Fiction Event Horizon (found via the intriguing blog Spooky Paradigm).

In a nutshell: science fiction used to be a mix of fantasy and scientific extrapolation. Now it's just fantasy, because we've run out of imagination. In direct contrast to the early years of the 20th century, the best science available now tells us that the universe is vastly less full of wonders than we imagine, on any scale accessible to us. The most interesting thing we'll ever know is Earth's biosphere, and we're killing that as fast as we can, in fact it's half gone already: we're well into in the Sixth Extinction and it seems even money that it will be our own.

The best hard science available tells us that our time here is up, we're pretty much doomed as a species, and there's really nothing more to find and nowhere else to go. No God, no Heaven. No fairies, no Klingons. Just some dead particles, dead moons, dead stars, and lots and lots and lots of hard vacuum. And then oblivion.

That's not a story we want to hear, it doesn't make a good movie so we don't publicise it often, it's a story that if you take it into your bones will drive you stark staring mad, but it's the Higgs Boson's honest truth.

If you believe the Standard Model (plus Einstein) is all there is.

8. This is the darkness we live in.

This is the darkness we struggle against, even as we accept it.

This is the best science available to us, the light of truth as we know it, and it is toxic to our souls, radioactive ash in our mouth.

It kills us to believe it, but we feel we have no choice. The data has spoken. There is no there there. There never was a living Spirit in anything but our imagination. We must bow to harsh reality. To dream is but to dream; to wake, desolation.

We are in the greatest Age of Light the world has ever seen, and how great is the darkness.