The Best Nobel Prize Winners in Physics of the 21st Century

Matin Durrani, writing in Physics World, analyzes the 25 Nobel Prizes awarded during the 21st century and selects those that he believes to be the five best. His criteria are based on looking for prizes that meet the following conditions:

·         It must be easy to understand.

·         The awarded theoretical or experimental work was an exceptional effort (a tour-de-force).

·         It opened new paths for science.

Universe or multiverse?

In the posts in this blog I have often said that theories about the multiverse (there are many) are not science, but speculations, because it is impossible to design an experiment that demonstrates the existence or non-existence of these multiverses.

In an article published in May 2023 in the journal Springer Nature, entitled Is Everyone Probably Elsewhere?, the authors claim that it would at least be possible to distinguish between the following two hypotheses:

1. Our universe is unique, it does not belong to any multiverse.
2. Our universe belongs to some multiverse. Of course, we would have no idea what type of multiverse it would belong to.

The end of the universe

Will the cosmos expand indefinitely, or will its expansion stop one day? What could stop it? It is clear only gravity could do it. The expansion of the universe, which makes galaxies separate, goes against the gravitational attraction, which tries to hold all bodies together.

If we look at Einstein's cosmic equation of general relativity, the question of whether gravity will succeed in stopping the expansion of the universe depends on the relative values and signs of the three terms in the equation. Depending on them, three things can happen:

Harry Potter and the multiverse

In the previous post in this blog, I discussed the current absence of great men in many fields of human activity; in particular, in science. Shortly after writing that post, an interview with Sabine Hossenfelder in a major Spanish newspaper (La Vanguardia) made me see that I’m not alone in denouncing the crisis of science, at least in the field of theoretical physics, which includes theories about the multiverse, about which, a few weeks ago, I published another post.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist. She has lately become news by publishing a book: Lost in Maths: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018), where she asserts that theoretical physics has progressed practically nothing in the last 60 years, and advocates dedicating public funds to research the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, rather than squandering them on colossal particle accelerators or in research on baseless lucubration, such as string theory and multiverses.

The theory of everything

In Joe Dacy’s science fiction novel Esquelle and the lost enclave (2015), which belongs to the hard science fiction genre, skillfully combined with espionage, adventure and political fiction, and covers 1500 years of future history, including the invention of time travel and the manipulation of the past, one can find the following quotation:

At this point, the Theory of Everything is actually the Theory of Not Very Much

Is Joe Dacy II right? Do we think we know a lot, but we know very little? What is this Theory of Everything, with such a grandiose name?

This name has been invented by a few physicists and cheered by the press, on the same line as the name of the God particle applied to the Higgs boson, possibly discovered in 2012. Yes, I say possibly, as it is not certain. Although the particle discovered had the predicted mass and decomposed in some of the predicted particles (not all of them), it has not yet been proved that the Higgs field exists.

What is meant by the name of Theory of Everything is that we know everything about the physical fundamentals of matter, that we do not need God.

The God Particle

Peter Higgs

With the discovery of Higgs boson, two years ago, the media and a few scientists have presented the discovery as the final completion of the standard theory of particle physics, in such a way that we now know everything and do not need God. Hence the nickname given to Higgs boson, the God particle, a name, by the way, that Higgs does not like.

The discovery of a particle whose existence was predicted nearly a half century ago is a spectacular success of the standard theory, comparable to the success achieved in 1846 by Newton’s theory of universal gravitation with the discovery of Neptune, whose existence had been predicted by Le Verrier and Adams. Then it was also said that we now know everything. 

Urbain Le Verrier

True, there was still a loose end, a very small discrepancy of just 43 seconds of arc per century in the precession of the orbit of Mercury. Le Verrier tried to repeat his success and predicted that this discrepancy was due to an unknown planet between Mercury and the Sun. He even gave it a name: Vulcan. For 60 years, many astronomers tried to find the mysterious planet in vain, for the problem in this case was in Newton’s theory, which eventually came to be just a first approximation of a new better theory that explained the discrepancy: Einstein's general relativity.

Could something similar happen to the standard theory of particle physics? Will its great success be followed by its first failure? Are there any loose ends still remaining in the theory?

The answer to the last question must be affirmative. The standard theory of particle physics has the following outstanding issues: