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Friday, January 26, 2007

Theory of Everything

Tensions in academia between science and social theory are largely the result on an over-inflated sense of righteousness and self-importance from both sides towards the other. Sometimes they have far more in common than they are willing to admit.

For example here at Goldsmiths computing research is developing an algorithm for beauty, assuming that by analysing beautiful things it will be possible to create beauty through rules-based models. The assumption that beauty can be contained in variables and fixed definitions is almost laughable to social theorists considering the subjective experience and context. And the technology, as almost always, seems grossly optimistic. After all image recognition software can barely decipher (looking for a job?) what objects are in a photograph let alone identify the social and cultural representations that go into ephemeral beauty.

But the real issue is not if it is currently possible to do such a thing but whether it is possible at all. To that question the scientific community would advice constant testing and advancement, moving forward all the time, largely discarding the notion that not all variables in beauty can be eventually counted. When unaccountability is apparent science devises names for things that can be inferred like Dark Matter. Basically we don't know what it is (or its partner in darkness Dark Energy) but we know it is Dark Matter. After all in all the known universe only about 4% of total energy density can be seen directly, about 22% is inferred as dark matter and the remaining 74% inferred as dark energy. It sounds a bit like how sociologists view society with about 4% of what is going on obvious and directly observable, the rest inferred. Journalists love the idea by describing anything that is not observable as "the dark matter of ...".

That's what makes the as yet untested theoretical physics concept of a "Theory of Everything" so engaging as a scientific topic. Personally I would not be happy with any theory of everything that doesn't definitively explain why all belly button fluff is blue or why bullets fired into the sky never seem to hit anything on the way down. And from what I have read this one doesn't seem to be able to do that. Instead it is a hypothetical theory that would make any postmodern proud. The idea is that everything around you is made up of tiny strands of energy that vibrate at different frequencies. Kind of like all the people on earth vibrating in their own frequency to make up the complexities of social life. It grafts together quantum mechanics with relativity in an attempt to explain the fundamental interactions of nature. It brings a new meaning to being strung out if we consider that if the universe collapses on itself after expansion (a Big Crunch) superstring theory suggests that the universe can never be smaller than the size of a string before expanding again. If you are imaginative you can imagine us all just hanging out on that string, chilling and waiting for the universe to get a bit bigger so we can fit a few couches in.

To date superstring theory has launched a number of best-selling scientific texts and television programs, most notably The Elegant Universe, while continuing to struggle with the fact that it makes prediction that cannot be tested. But in an academic paper appearing in the January 26 edition of Physical Review Letters a test has been proposed. It involves use of the incredible Large Hadron Collider, a subatomic particle collider scheduled to be fully operational in early 2008. Weaving under the borderlands of France and Switzerland, the CERN based 27-kilometer tunnel will collide bunches of protons and observe the results. It takes a proton around 90 microseconds (one millionth of a second) to travel around one uber half-marathon lap of the circuit. In tests of the Theory of Everything observations will input to substantiating the canonical forms of string theory.

“Our work shows that, in principle, string theory can be tested in a non-trivial way,” said Ira Rothstein, co-author of the paper and professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon. Now that's some postmodern dark matter.

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