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The End of Physics

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

The end of physics has been predicted several times. For example, Max Planck was famously advised (by one Prof. Jolly, who was quite eminent) of the fact when he was a graduate student. The forecasts have not abated in recent times. Famous scientists have given thought to the matter, even if not exactly forecasting the end of physics: George Gamow, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg.


I have never possessed the knowledge - and perhaps more importantly the gumption - to make such a forecast myself. But I have always experienced discomfort at the thought of someone claiming to know that the end of physics had come or was near. This discomfort became acute when I encountered the same philosophy more concretely at a lower level, with a physics colleague predicting the end of a subfield of physics.


For example in the early nineties, when I was an undergraduate, I heard people say that atomic physics was a dead field. This was based on the fact that spectroscopy had reached impressive levels of precision and the internal degrees of freedom of atoms had been explored quite extensively. The amazing thing of course was that the field was 'revived' as first laser cooling and trapping matured in the mid-nineties, then later optical lattices and then Bose and Fermi degenerate gases came along, creating an excitement for the next 30 years that shows no sign of abating. In fact a couple of Nobel prizes were also generated along the way. This is a line of work that I have been personally involved with.


Another example, one that I have no direct experience of, is electromagnetics. A fellow postdoc once told me in the late nineties that there was nothing new to be found in Maxwell's equations. This was just before metamaterials, theoretically predicted by researchers like Veselago in the 1960s - I attended a superb talk by him in 2007 - exploded on the experimental scene. This field included fascinating topics like electromagnetic cloaking (Harry Potter style!) and negative refractive indices. Likewise, the wisdom that quantum mechanical observables had to be represented by Hermitian operators - and that was that - has been upended by Carl Bender's recent pioneering explorations of non-Hermitian physics.


This type of doomsday attitude persists even now, of course. Very recently, I was told by a bright young scholar who had just completed his doctorate, that he was very worried that everything had been done in quantum optics (the field I work in). In fact he was concerned that there would not be any projects remaining to give to students by the time he became a professor! I suspect he was too polite to say that I would soon be left without a job. (In this context I should admit that I do jokingly tell students that in a million years there would be no jobs left in astronomy - because the rest of the universe would have receded so far from us that even light will not be able to reach us from those bodies. This is not an entirely correct description of the expansion of the universe, but makes for a reasonably good joke, I think.)


To me, claims of the death of physics or its subfields point to the shortcomings of our own imagination, rather than to the finitude of the subject. When we cannot think of a path to proceed on, we tend to think that we have discovered a dead end. Pointers in the direction opposite to this kind of thinking are provided by Arthur C. Clarke's First Law, John Bell's exhortation regarding proofs of impossibility (quote no.3) and Louis de Broglie's cautionary advice.


Personally, I like exploring well-worn topics in the hope of rescuing something that has been missed by others. (It's a little bit like looking for things where the light is, rather than in the darkness.) The advantage of doing this, versus doing something entirely new, is that a lot is known about the topic already. So we have a good deal of existing understanding of the subject to lean on. Of course, the disadvantage is that the 'low-hanging fruit' (discoveries which are novel but still easy to make) has already been plucked.


Nonetheless, it is often quite surprising what has been missed. I have never found anything earthshaking using this - or for that matter any other - technique, but a rather satisfying example was the extended use of discriminants in the analysis of level crossings, a phenomena ubiquitous in physics, and known for more than a century. Maybe one day I will have bigger results to report. Until then, I will keep looking for new things, even in familiar places.

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