In Space, the Past Is Future (and Equally Unpredictable) – The New York Times

Source: In Space, the Past Is Future (and Equally Unpredictable) – The New York Times

Overbye Theory of Everything Overbye

Overbye Theory of Everything Overbye

Dennis Overbye  NYT  sep 12, 2023

…At last count, physicists have identified some 17 types of elementary particles that make up the physical universe, and at least four ways that they interact — through gravity, electromagnetism and the so-called strong and weak nuclear forces.

The cosmic bet that Western science has undertaken is to show that those four forces, and maybe others yet to be discovered, acting on a vast ensemble of atoms and their constituents, are enough to explain stars, rainbows, flowers, ourselves and, indeed, the existence of the universe as a whole. That is quite an intellectual and philosophical mountain to climb.

In fact, for all our faith in materialism, Dr. Pontzen says, we might never know if we succeeded. “Our origins are written in the sky,” he said, “and we are just learning how to read them.”

In his new book, “The Universe in a Box: Simulations and the Quest to Code the Cosmos,” Dr. Pontzen quotes an oath suggested by Emanuel Derman, a particle physicist who became a quantitative analyst for Goldman Sachs and is now a professor at Columbia: “I will not give the people who use my models false comfort about their accuracy. I will make the assumptions and oversights explicit to all who use them.”

In his email, Dr. Pontzen added: “This is, I suggest, sometimes a good maxim for physics, too, especially in domains as complex as cosmological simulations.”

For now, he added, we can take comfort in the notion that the universe is lawful: “Ultimately, galaxies are less like machines and more like animals — loosely understandable, rewarding to study, but only partially predictable. Accepting this requires a shift in perspective, but it makes our vision of the universe all the richer.”