Lisa Randall: The Standard Model for Particle Physics

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Realists believe that there is an exactly understandable way the world is — one that describes processes independent of our intervention. Anti-realists, however, believe realism is too ambitious — too hard. They believe we pragmatically describe our interactions with nature — not truths that are independent of us. In nature, properties of Particle B may be depend on what we choose to measure or manipulate with Particle A, even at great distances. In quantum mechanics, there is no explanation for this. "It just comes out that way," says Smolin. Realists struggle with this because it would imply certain things can travel faster than light, which still seems improbable.

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LEE SMOLIN

Lee attended Harvard University for graduate school receiving a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1979.  He held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, The Institute for Theoretical Physics (now KITP) in Santa Barbara and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. This was followed by faculty positions at Yale, Syracuse and Penn State Universities, where he helped to found the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry.   In September of 2001 he moved to Canada to be a founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, where he has been ever since.

Lee's main contributions to research are so far to the field of quantum gravity. He was, with Abhay Ashtekar and Carlo Rovelli,  a founder of the approach known as loop quantum gravity, but he has contributed to other approaches including string theory and causal dynamical triangulations.  He is also known for proposing the notion of the landscape of theories, based on his application of Darwinian methods to Cosmology.  He has contributed also to the  foundations of quantum mechanics, elementary particle physics and theoretical biology.  He also has a strong interest in philosophy and his three books, Life of the Cosmos, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity and The Trouble with Physics are in part philosophical explorations of issues raised by contemporary physics.

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TRANSCRIPT:

LEE SMOLIN: So let's first define what we mean by being a realist. What I mean when I say I'm a realist is that I believe that there is an exactly understandable way the world is, which is independent of our intervention, independent of our existence, our knowledge. It's possible for everything that happens in nature, to give a complete individual description to that process or those events.

And thence, to understand what -- the causal processes behind those events, to understand exactly what's behind, what goes on in a physical process. Now, for reasons which have a lot to do with World War I, and a lot to do with philosophy and things that I'm not a scholar of, the predominant view among educated people in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was not-- was not realism. They didn't believe that realism was possible.

They thought that science was a way of speaking about our interactions within our interventions in nature. That the concepts that we use, like wave or particle or law or causality or energy, represent our own intuitions, and are useful to describe what happens when an atomic system interacts with a measurement device. But are not -- do not extend to concepts that stand alone, have meaning when applied just to the atomic system without the context of the experiment.

And I'm trying to talk here the way that Niels Bohr talked because he was the most radical of these anti-realist thinkers. Let's talk about what it means to be not a realist. What it means to be not a realist is that realism is too ambitious and too hard. We don't have it -- they would say something like, "Our concepts come from our experience." Our experiences of the world are the big things we throw them. They bounce back and forth. We play with balls. We sail, we have some intuition about water and wind and so forth.

And then we go into the laboratory and we try to take apart an atom and understand what its components are well, there are things called electrons and nuclei and protons and neutrons and quarks. But what are these things? What-- and we get very confused when we try to understand what they are. And it is indeed confusing. They're not balls like a baseball or a soccer ball. They're not waves like a breeze kicking up some ripples on a lake. But there's something that, to d...

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