Book review: Fields Apart Print Physics, past and future
The Infinity Puzzle, By Frank Close Physics on the Fringe, By Margaret Wertheim
The Infinity Puzzle brims with charming anecdotes about particle physics between the 1950s and 1980s, when breakthroughs came almost too fast to be comprehended and every scientist seemed to be maneuvering (and occasionally begging) for Nobel prizes. But the book also plumbs the origins of modern physics, especially troubles with the concept of infinity... Real objects cannot have infinite charge or mass or whatever. But when scientists in the 1950s started calculating those quantities with their latest and fanciest theories, infinities kept sprouting up and ruining things. Rather than abandon the theories, though, a few persistent scientists realized that they could do away with the infinities through mathematical prestidigitation. (Basically, they started calculating with and canceling out infinity like a regular old number, normally a big no-no.)
No one liked this fudging, but because it led to such stunningly accurate answers, scientists couldn’t dismiss it. In fact, the reigning paradigm in physics today—which describes the workings of invisible “fields” (similar to magnetic fields)— would not exist without this hand waving. And now physics is stuck with fields: they’ve become more fundamental to understanding the universe than mass or charge. Fields have become the very fabric of reality—even if our understanding of them relies on some unrealistic assumptions. Close explains how and why physicists resigned themselves to this tension and came to trust— even celebrate—how much smarter their equations were than they were.
Nevertheless, despite the imprimatur of scientists, some laypeople look at modern science and have a fit. Indeed, as Margaret Wertheim explains in her delightful Physics on the Fringe, some laypeople simply cannot stand the idea that the average person is shut out from grasping the deep nature of reality.
These “outsider scientists” are not Luddites who reject the very idea of science. Instead, they care almost too much: they love science but feel it has strayed. And rather than just bellyache, outsiders often channel their discontent into creating their own, independent theories of physics, rewriting Newton and Einstein from top to bottom...
