Vacuum catasrophe
Could anyone please simply explain to someone with no physics background what this means:
Vacuum catasrophe
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Can I ask just why someone with no physics background wants Quantum Field Theory explained simply?
In plain English with no mention of physics, it's a case of 'what we worked out on paper wasn't what we saw when we gathered the data' (something that happens an awful lot, and is how science progresses - experimentation until it goes right, then more experimentation).
Last time I checked, the Universe was still in working order, we just don't know how it works.
Is there a posibility that it is constantly changing and thats why we cant figure this out? Afterall humans have evolved from apes
Only if the experimental data shows that it's constantly changing, which to my brief recollection it isn't.
Well. Apparently the experimental data doesnt agree with theory, so i am a little perplexed
Well. Apparently the experimental data doesnt agree with theory, so i am a little perplexed
It doesn't agree on that one point, but otherwise works quite well, so clearly some important fact is missing. That's all the article is saying. More often than not, science works precisely in such a manner.
Well when it disagrees to 10^107, that is quite some room for something to go wrong - Astro, please explain further what is going on here
I think Elliott has described it pretty well.
the "catastrophe" part is simply that a very well-thought-of theory has a big hole in it. The observed energy density is much, much lower than the energy density proposed by Quantum Field Theory, which otherwise agrees with observations.
In the words of Richard Feynman, "therefore, it is wrong".
Some people find that to be catastrophic, and have set out to find out why QFT is wrong. Ergo, science is happening, and that is a good thing.
"Do you ever think about things you do think about?" - Henry Drummond to Matthew Harrison Brady in Inherit the Wind
An honor to have talked to someone as brilliant as yourself - really appreciate your time - hopefully with us nearing 7 billion people on this planet, we will find a way to figure these things out soon enough. They certainly could help us to some degree im sure
Does the survival of 7 billion people rely on finding the answer to the vacuum catastrophe? I for one don't really need to know the density of the vacuum energy in order to function.
Yes fair enough, us pushing the limits of our understanding is completely unneccesary in means of survival. You look back and life has thrived for millions of years with no means of science. But if we are to push our understanding farther than ever before than the cooperation of all brilliant minds alike would certainly help solve issues like this, and create new more intracite problems for us to understand even more about the 'universe'
Just as an aside, there are many others here who are smarter than I am. I can give you a list, if you'd like. Elliott is on it.
"Do you ever think about things you do think about?" - Henry Drummond to Matthew Harrison Brady in Inherit the Wind
I would not consider anyone 'smarter' than another- I am sure that everyone has their strong points and that is why we have teams of scientists to figure these things out, instead of individuals
Ofcourse as the newer generations age, they are going to be brought up completely different than the current scholars that we have in this day and age(with computers advancing faster than ever before). The thing that scares me is just how much we can possibly learn before our time is up
Well when it disagrees to 10^107, that is quite some room for something to go wrong - Astro, please explain further what is going on here
This effect has absolutely nothing to do with the world we live in.
It is an atomic scale effect that has is not even part of the chemical and physics processes of stars, humans, planets and galaxies.
Is there a posibility that it is constantly changing and thats why we cant figure this out?
Afterall humans have evolved from apes
The facts if people evolved from apes is irrelevant.
It is not constantly changing, scientists are just creating better models that are better in prediction.
The models like Newton and Einstein are simplifications of reality. They both work great, only Einstein models, even though more complicated give better and accurate results but your calculation get harder to do.
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