Ashley Lawson, "Physics principles too myopic, Nobel winner says . Robert Laughlin thinks physics is in crisis because physicists have problems with their belief systems" (2005)

Robert Laughlin argues that physicists have a belief problem.
> (Courtesy Photo: Free Press) <span>

BOSTON — Physicists have problems with their belief systems and the field of physics is in crisis because of it, said Nobel Prize-winner Robert Laughlin at a recent Boston University lecture.

“They have systems of belief just like everyone else,” he said. “There is a belief system problem here.”

Laughlin, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1998, compared physicists to monotheists who hold one belief and defend it even when presented with contradictory evidence. Instead of questioning their original belief, he said, they would question the validity of the evidence challenging it.

“Physicists are kind of moralists,” he said. “They’re worried about things making sense or being right.”

This desire for one unified idea, he argued, causes physicists to search for fundamental laws or what is thought to be a “law that just is.” However, many of these laws that explain the organizational rules guiding individual things are actually synergistic, or emergent, said Laughlin.

All fundamental laws, he said, are actually derived from observing collective events, and many do not accurately describe the actions of the individual parts.

In his recent book, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, Laughlin offers a tornado as an example of an emergent property. By studying how air molecules work together, not as individual molecules, scientists learn how tornados work.

In the April lecture, he explained that Newton’s law of gravity is considered to be a fundamental law, but it is impossible to observe this force in objects on a nanoscale.

“When you get up close and take it apart to see how the law works, you discover it’s not there,” he said.

Heat laws are also thought to be fundamental, he explained, but the smallest particles do not obey them.

“Heat, conceptually, is like a painting of Monet; when you get up close to see its parts, to see how the parts work, you discover nothing but a lot of meaningless dots,” he said.

The distinction between fundamental and emergent laws then becomes nonexistent and even basic assumptions become mysterious. Because laws like those regulating heat and gravity are only true for some matter, the foundations of physics are becoming weak, he said.

“Physics is now in the midst of a crisis, an ideological battle,” he said. “The most fundamental things you know may not be fundamental.”

Laughlin also argued that, for mysteries like why atoms are so uniform throughout the galaxy, physicists form creation myths to explain away these quandaries. Inflationary cosmology, he said, is the “myth” created to solve this problem by saying that during the expansion after the big bang, matter became uniform.

“That, on the face of it, is a pretty far-fetched theory, but the reason we take this theory so seriously is the depth of the crisis. In other words, we really need to have an explanation for why this stuff is so uniform, and we don’t have it,” he said. “I like to say that the emergentist nature of the theories of the universe are really an act of desperation.”

The best chance at solving some of these mysteries of the universe, Laughlin suggests in A Different Universe, is to avoid the reductionist approach of studying particles too minute to measure, and to look at the basic realities of the natural world.

The exact characteristics of substances like ice or salt is not fully understood, he said, but may reveal more about the universe than the far reaches of space or the first nanofraction of a second after the big bang.