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Don Lincoln on Physics and Discovery

3:01:52 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Physics advances by unification, and Don Lincoln argues the theory of everything remains centuries of measurement away.

  1. Unification is the engine of physicsGravity, then electromagnetism, then the electroweak force: each step showed two phenomena were one.
  2. An idea without a measurement is worthlessLincoln likes the vibrating-string concept but will not believe it until an experiment validates it.
  3. The theory of everything is very far offThe unification scale is a quadrillion times above today's accelerators, which gain a factor of seven every twenty years.
Executive Summary AI
  • Don Lincoln tells the history of physics as a history of unifications, starting around 1650 when celestial gravity and terrestrial gravity were still two separate things until Newton saw the moon as falling and missing the Earth.10:34
  • In the 1860s James Clerk Maxwell gathered fifty years of experiments into the laws of electromagnetism, showing that a lightning bolt and a refrigerator magnet are the same thing, and that the waves the equations predict travel at the speed of light.13:26
  • In 1967 Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg unified electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force into the electroweak force, with the 1964 Higgs field explaining why the photon is massless while the W and Z particles are heavy and the weak force is short-range.43:22
  • Lincoln describes hunting the Higgs at Fermilab's Tevatron, where two days before CERN's July 4th, 2012 announcement his team could only say the Higgs must lie between about 120 and 145, while the LHC had ten times the collisions per second and three and a half times the energy.1:10:16
  • On a theory of everything he is pessimistic, since the unification scale is a quadrillion times higher than today's accelerators, and argues that practical progress means chasing what we cannot explain now, such as dark matter, dark energy and whatever is smaller than quarks.1:34:13
Key Quote
“So forgetting all of the mathematical symbols, you have electricity side equals a magnetism side, electricity equals magnetism.”
— Don Lincoln13:53
Key Quote
“Society has to figure out how we wish to apply that or not apply that.”
— Don Lincoln22:47
Key Quote
“Just to take a small tangent, how weird is it in the full ranking of weirdness that is physics?”
— Lex Friedman29:46