The Lyrical Core of Man: Bits and Bells

From Sergio Bertolucci in yesterday's CERN press release: “Our Standard Model Higgs analysis with data collected so far leaves us in a very exciting position for 2012. With the data we collect this year, we will definitely be able to confirm or rule out a Standard Model Higgs.”

A bold statement ("definitely"!)--and indicative of how strong the December ATLAS/CMS results are. Clarifying whether the Higgs exists, and whether it's the Standard Model version, are two vastly different things, but it's still a huge endorsement for the LHC (and, hopefully, for string theory). 96% of the universe remains unexplained by the Standard Model, so results that don't point past it will be disappointing but still a coup for the collider. ATLAS won't even run at full speed until 2015, so there is a lot of good particle smashing ahead.

And speaking of the 96%, all kinds of tantalizing theories have emerged to explain it. Einstein's much-maligned "cosmological constant" theory has rebounded among some physicists, hinting at reconciliation between cosmology and quantum mechanics, and supersymmetry remains the holy grail of theorists. Plus: Craig Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center, has proposed that space is actually composed of discrete bits of information, not a continuous field; in other words, that the universe is digital! This might sound radical, but it dovetails nicely with what recent theories have predicted about black holes and holograms (both of which rely on the existence of digital information in space to make any sense).

[An aside: NOVA is back on PBS, and it's pretty awesome (if you can stand a few terribly animated interludes). Brian Greene, science hero to the masses, is as engaging as ever and talks through some really tricky stuff.]

But back to digital space, and information theory, which Claude Shannon developed at Bell Labs in 1948. Information theory, in tandem with the transistor, another Bell invention, completely revolutionized electronics and communications and provided a conceptual space within which brilliant thinkers from all disciplines found purchase--most recently, quantum computing, the new frontier of super-fast data computation using QM phenomena like entanglement and superposition. (Check out The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner for more on the interdisciplinary wonderland that was Bell Labs. Full discolsure: my dad worked at Bell in the late '60s!)

Ontologically, conceptualizing human existence within information theory is intimidatingly abstract: how can we reconcile our perception of reality as 1s and 0s? Do photon packets carry digital information, and can we harness or control it? How does this trouble the disctinction between human and nonhuman? And my favorite question: can information theory explain our relationship to consciousness? I could think about this all day.

Death, too, is complicated when the corporeal is deemphasized. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault writes that, once death is understood as one of many manifestations of life, “death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.” If the brain is just a highly sensitive piece of receiving technology interpreting billions and billions of bits--themselves reverberations of subatomic loops--and converting them into emotion and intellect, the "invisible truth" reveals itself: what we think of as spiritual life is transient and unaffected by the death of bodies. The lyrical core of man is an eternity of vibrating strings.

The Neutrino Effect

Last week, science geeks everywhere awoke to potentially astonishing news: the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment, which analyzes subatomic particles as they travel unimpeded through miles of underground tunnels, has recorded a neutrino traveling (slightly) faster than the speed of light! It seems impossible according to everything current physicists know about quantum mechanics; in fact, if this result can be corroborated (Fermilab and others are already attempting this), Einstein's special theory of relativity may be thrown into doubt. (Probably not, but more on that in a minute.) Scientists everywhere are understandably dubious, and some even responded by saying that such tentative data shouldn't have been released to the public to begin with, since it's very likely that the experiment was affected by yet-unidentified human error. Additionally, science tends to be unfriendly (if excitable) toward data that doesn't support their existing paradigm--which, for now, rests solidly with the Standard Model and special relativity. But this finding exhibited a six-sigma deviation, which is suggestive enough to raise a lot of eyebrows.

There are a couple of reasons this is so exciting, and why prominent physicists are saying that this could re-write our fundamental understanding of the universe and the way it works. The speed of light, and its relationship to energy and mass, is one of the most revered equations in the history of science--to question it would result in chaos in cosmology, QM, QED, and other fields. However: it's possible that this result can be interpreted in a slightly different way; instead of assuming that the neutrino is literally moving faster than the speed of light, it could be that it found a shortcut by slipping through a different dimension. This idea is as revolutionary as exceeding the speed of light, but with completely different stakes: suddenly, theories that predict multiple dimensions via theoretical math (string theory/M-theory) have empirical evidence! It may not be the Higgs, but it's enough to allow critical analysis of the Standard Model to emerge into more mainstream scientific circles.

If (and right now, it reamins a massive "if") this result can be corroborated, we may be in the midst of what Thomas Kuhn would call a paradigm shift. In his seminal text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he argues that movement from one paradigm to another (in this case, possibly from the Standard Model to string theory) must be preceded by an evidential anomaly (the neutrino moving faster than the speed of light) which, if scientists are repeatedly unable to solve using current data problem sets, leads to a scientific crisis. A crisis in this case would result in physicists being forced to re-examine some of the aspects of science that they've long taken for granted--like our perception of only four dimensions, or the speed limit of light. A true paradigm shift would occur if the scientific community is able to change their world view (and attract enough scientists to that community) regarding how certain tenets can be re-interpreted in light of new data. The result is adoption of the new paradigm and scientific revolution.

My fingers are crossed that we'll get to experience this revolution in our lifetimes: if the neutrino effect proves accurate, and physics moves past the Standard Model--but importantly, retains Einstein's special theory of relativity--into a realm of competing multi-dimension theories, there could be some dramatic truths revealed about the universe and our role in it. Pursuit of a grand unifying theory may have gone out of fashion in the past quarter century, but it's still a romantic ontological goal. It could be that the string theory boom of the 1990s was the start of the paradigm shift, and with CERN and OPERA able to articulate experiments beyond the wildest imaginations of scientists fifty years ago, we're just now seeing data that has the kind of anomolous strength required to presage a true revolution.