The speaker of the talk is Prof. David Gross, Nobel Laureate of Physics in 2004. Prof. Gross discuss about 25 questions that might guide Physics in the next 25 years. The questions range from cosmology to Biophysics.
The talk was held at LT-K, which is actually a small room for lecture. Due to presence of a distinguished speaker, LT-K was actually fully occupied and some audience needed to sit (on the ground) just in front of the screen, which of course is not a desired place to listen the talk. Later the talk was relocated to LT-D, again, fully occupied.
Well, the first question came: What is Physics? Of course, one could give the "official" answer yet it would be instructive to start the talk with something different. Physics is what physicists do. Here we have to define "physicists". They are (we are?) those people, while studying graduate school, use Jackson as EM textbook! To understand this joke, you ought to be within the Physics community. Why defining like this? Prof. Gross said that he wants to distinguish physicists from engineers. That's true. The math in Jackson's EM text is really too arduous for most of the engineers.
Below is the list of most of the questions mentioned in the talk, however, I think this list is incomplete. Anyway, for those who study Physics (including me), this list might be helpful.
- How did the universe begin?
- How far can we probe?
- Can string theory determine initial conditions?
- Was there a time before the big bang?
- Is time itself an emergent concept?
- How does time begin?
- What is the nature of dark matters (~21%)?
- How do we detect dark matter?
- Can we produce them in the laboratory?
- What is the nature of dark energy (~75%)?
- Is it constant or varying in time?
- Or is it just the Einstein's cosmological constant, Λ?
- How do stars form?
- How do we understand spectrum of masses, frequency of binaries and clusters?
- How do planets form?
- What is the frequency of habitable planets?
- Is General Relativity valid in all scales?
- Would it breakdown at small distance and/or strong field?
- Is gravitational waves detectable?
- Can we determine Kerr Metric of a blackhole experimentally?
- Is quantum mechanics the ultimate description of nature or will it fail somewhere?
- Fail at very short distances? (Resolved by string theory)
- Fail in large complex systems? (the Schrodinger's cat)
- Problems with conscious systems (problems of measurements)
- Problems with Standard Model
- Is there any pattern for the masses and interaction coefficients of the elementary particles?
- Does quantum fluctuation give rise to an energy (= cosmology constant)?
- Λobs ~ 10-4eV4 ≠ 0
- Λtheory ~ 1060eV4
- Why is there such a large inconsistency between the observed and theoretical values?
- Are diamonds forever? (Is nucleus stable?) Why?
- Proton's lifetime > 1032 years. Why is it so stable?
- Can we significantly improve this measurement?
- What is the origin of the enormous hierarchy of energy scales?
- The scale (length, energy & time) of our living universe differs a lot from the natural scale (Planck scale)
- Is there low energy supersymmetry?
- Due to supersymmetry, there is a super-partner (super-particle) for each observed particle, e.g. quark → squark; electron → slectron
- These super-particles are supposed to have the same masses as the partners. But we actually can't observe them, why is there a broken symmetry?
- Can we solve quantum chromodynamics at long distance?
- Possibly by dual string theory
- What is string theory?
- Actually string theory cannot be solved in approximative way. Yet now we cannot solve it in an exact manner.
- What is space-time?
- Is space-time an emergent concept?
- Are there generic non-Fermi-liquid?
- For quantum computers, how can we deal with the background noise?
- In an quiet way - isolated from the noise
- In an deaf way - "topological" quantum bits that are delocalized and that are totally decoupled from the noise
- Can we construct an applicable quantum computer? (we need >10,000 QuBits)
- Is there room temperature (or even higher temperature) superconductor?
- Is there room temperature ferromagnet made by electronic (semiconductors) materials?
- Theoretical Biology Problem
- How to we think of analyze and exhibit dynamics over many wide-ranging time scales?
- Genomics
- Can theory of evolution be quantitative or predictive?
For example, there may be a genomics question like this in the year of 2107:
What is the outlook of the creature that have the DNA sequence of AAAGTCTGAC...... > Answer <
- What is consciousness and/or memory?
- Can one measure the onset of consciousness in infant? For instance, consciousness increases continuously with age? Or discontinuously?
- Computational Physics
- Will computer replace analytic techniques?
- When will we have creative theoretical physicists of computers?
- How do we train them? (With Jackson?)
- In high energy Physics, will the experimental apparatus become unaffordable or too difficult to be built?
- Can we find any alternative ways to prove/disprove the theories?
- Will Physics be a useful subject in the next 25 years? (Yes, for sure)
Prof. Gross is specialized in high energy Physics, so inevitably the content of the talk had to have some bias towards those area, such as string theory and standard model etc.
In my view, most of the questions related to high energy Physics can't be resolved in a short time. Physicists still have to work really hard.
沒有留言:
發佈留言