The Quantum Field Theory

This is on the edge of my understanding!

Patrice Ayme recently posted an essay called Relativistic Length Contraction Busts Helium3! As I said in my comment to that post:

“This is far ahead of my knowledge of science. I applaud you for writing this despite me not understanding it”

So it may seem a little strange that I now publish the following. It was published originally on Skeptic. It is quite a long video but, please, settle down and watch it.

ooOOoo

Sean Carroll is creating a profoundly new approach to sharing physics with a broad audience, one that goes beyond analogies to show how physicists really think. He cuts to the bare mathematical essence of our most profound theories, explaining every step in a uniquely accessible way.

Quantum field theory is how modern physics describes nature at its most profound level. Starting with the basics of quantum mechanics itself, Sean Carroll explains measurement and entanglement before explaining how the world is really made of fields. You will finally understand why matter is solid, why there is antimatter, where the sizes of atoms come from, and why the predictions of quantum field theory are so spectacularly successful. Fundamental ideas like spin, symmetry, Feynman diagrams, and the Higgs mechanism are explained for real, not just through amusing stories. Beyond Newton, beyond Einstein, and all the intuitive notions that have guided homo sapiens for millennia, this book is a journey to a once unimaginable truth about what our universe is.

Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He is host of the Mindscape podcast, and author of From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, The Big Picture, and Something Deeply Hidden. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the American Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of London, and many others. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, writer Jennifer Ouellette. His new book series, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, includes one volume on Space, Time, and Motion, and this new volume on Quanta and Fields.

Shermer and Carroll discuss:

  • the measurement problem in physics
  • wave functions
  • entanglement
  • fields
  • interactions
  • scale
  • symmetry
  • gauge theory
  • phases
  • matter
  • atoms
  • What is time?
  • Is math all there is? Is math universal?
  • double-slit experiment
  • superposition
  • metaphors in science
  • limitations of models and theories of reality
  • What banged the Big Bang?
  • Why is there something rather than nothing?
  • Second Laws of Thermodynamics and directionality in nature
  • Is there a place for God in scientific epistemology?
  • many interpretations of quantum mechanics
  • multiple dimensions and the multiverse
  • string theory and the multiverse
  • known unknowables: Are there things we can never know, even in principle?
    • God
    • hard problem of consciousness
    • free will/determinism.

ooOOoo

I’m assuming you have watched the video because in a world that is pre-occupied with the trivial this is just the opposite. Sean shares his physics in a profoundly different and powerful way!

11 thoughts on “The Quantum Field Theory”

  1. I have taught Relativity for the first time, decades ago. I was always troubled by Length Contraction: Time Dilation, which is the symmetrical effect has real world consequences, such as the possibility, if we had enormous energy at our disposal, to go to a distant star in a few months of so-called “proper time”. So a few months to go to Beltegeuse 620 light years away… Time Dilation is thorougly understood and experimentally verified.

    So what was the real life consequence of Length Contraction? Opinion differed… Recently recalculating every thing, I came up with a drastic conclusion… Matter can’t resist infinite duration acceleration, even if said acceleration is reasonable, say one g….

    I will listen to the Carroll video. I highly respect him, and some of my comments were inflicted to him in the distant past, especially on the Foundation of Quantum Mechanics… Where my own theory, SQPR has got to win… Because it’s simply too simple and irresistible a modification of the existing QM… Along the lines of traditional physics… where far away is always different, attenuated… I apply that attenuation to the Quantum Interaction (another concept of mine, basically what is now fashionably called “decoherence”… used to be called “collapse”)

    Although SQPR was grown purely internally inside QM, it seems to be beating LCDM, Lambda Cold Dark Matter, the present version of the Big Bang…. These are exciting times… Thanks for circulating my work….

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  2. We all belong to the Field.. or rather we are all part of it… I spoke of the Field in my own post today 🙂 It is fascinating when you begin to inner-stand it all… and then I only have grasped at the outer edges… After reading the book The Field by Lynne McTaggart… an excellent book which explains much xx The link I included in my post.

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  3. Lol , yes, it’s complex 🤣 yet what we all have is within us.

    Water! .. and if you think of water as being conscious 🤔 it shows how its possible All things are connected.
    I’m sure your familiar with The late Dr Emoto’s work with water.
    Others now are leading the field of discovery of how water holds not only information but its conscious.
    ❤️😍

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