QUANTUM WAR

Atom-smashing CERN lab ratchets up measures against Russia


A technician works in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) tunnel of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, during a press visit in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016. CERN, the sprawling Geneva-area research center that houses the world’s largest atom smasher, is grappling with how to best join international action against Russia for its allegedly inhumane invasion of Ukraine without sacrificing science that serves humanity. A decision on the right balance to strike looms this week because CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is about to get running again after a more than three-year hiatus.

 (Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP, File) 


Fri, March 25, 2022, 12:24 PM·2 min read

GENEVA (AP) — The sprawling European science lab that houses the world’s largest atom smasher is taking new steps that will further limit its cooperation with Russian research institutes in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The CERN Council, the governing body of the Geneva-based lab with 23 member states, announced Friday that its scientists will suspend participation in all scientific committees in Russia and neighboring Belarus, a Russian ally that facilitated the Feb. 24 invasion.

CERN, the historic acronym for what is now the European Organization for Nuclear Research, had grappled with its response to the invasion because nearly 7% of its 18,000-odd researchers from around the world are linked to Russian institutions. On March 8, the council suspended new collaborations with Russia and stripped Russia of its observer status at the organization.

The issue of whether to further sanction Russia became pressing because the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, is set to start its third-ever run next month.

The machine propels particles through an underground, 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring of superconducting magnets in and around Geneva, generating science that can help elucidate mysteries like dark matter or the standard model of particle physics. Russian scientists have been involved in planning multiple experiments.

Under the new measures approved Friday, CERN will suspend all joint events with Russian institutes and pause considering any new candidates from Russia and Belarus to join the organization's staff.

The council also announced that it will suspend all collaboration with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, an international grouping of 19 member nations based in Dubna, Russia. More than half of the members are former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, but they also include Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, North Korea, and Vietnam.

Pakistan: River Ravi project draws ire from environmental activists

The Pakistani government wants to spend billion of dollars on the Ravi River Urban Development Project. But the plan has left opponents counting the cost to the environment in nearby Lahore.


Farmers protest the Ravi River Urban Development Project at Sheikhupura, Punjab


Pakistan's Ravi River Urban Development Project (RRUDP) is envisioned by the current ruling government, Pakistan Tekreef-i-Insaf, as an innovative and efficient solution to the country's exponentially growing population in one its major urban center's ⁠— Lahore. However, the project has been met with criticism from environmentalists and activists as well as being involved in a legal tussle between the provincial Punjab Judiciary and the country's apex judiciary, the Supreme Court.

The Ravi River is a 720-kilometer transboundary river crossing northwestern India and eastern Pakistan.

The RRUDP is envisioned as a 41,308-hectare (102,074-acre) planned city, which would make it Pakistan's second planned city after the country's capital, Islamabad. The project boasts rehabilitation of the Ravi River into a perennial freshwater body and is expected to be the largest riverfront of the world when finished.
An idea dating back 75 years

The idea of an urban development on the Ravi riverfront was first conceived in 1947 and in 2013, the Government of Punjab began considering the project but it was not inaugurated until August 2020 by the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan. While construction began in December 2020, not much progress has been made since as the project has been embroiled in legal cases

Watch video 03:07Pakistan: Child activist goes on a climate education mission

The provincial judiciary and Supreme Court have been at odds when it comes to judgments regarding RRUDP.

On January 25 of this year, the Lahore High Court (LHC) scrapped the ambitious RRUDP, declaring several provisions of the Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA) Act 2020 unconstitutional.

In an uncharacteristically quick-fire response, just six days later the Supreme Court suspended the LHC's initial order to halt the RRUDP until RUDA rectified and amended their legal lacunas. The RRUDP has, in-effect, been given the green-light for implementation, which has garnered a range of criticism from environmentalists, human rights activists and the farming community that reside along the Ravi River.
Pakistan's Land Acquisition Act pushes boundaries

In Pakistan the government can purchase and acquire land from residents for public interest projects. However, the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 is seen by many as antiquated and against article 9 of the Constitution (Security of person. No person shall be deprived of life or liberty save in accordance with law).

This point was raised by the LHC in the hearing regarding RRUDP and advised that the government should elaborate further on farming and agricultural land in the Act to protect vulnerable farmers, the country's food security and ecological health.

Speaking to DW, environmental lawyer Rafay Alam, who was one of the petitioners on behalf of the farmers against RRUDP, commented: "This project is ​​an unashamedly green-washed land grab. There needs to be a limit and regulation to the government's acquisition of agricultural land otherwise where does it end?"

A farmer couple sowing and tilling the land for potato crop

In rebuttal, the CEO of RUDA, Imran Amin maintains that the RRUDP project is well within the purview of the constitution as it is the government's duty to provide amenities and housing to its population, and if it was not for the Land Acquisition Act, the government would not be able to proceed with planned urbanization and development.

Is RRUDP going to endanger Ravi's agriculture?

In 2021, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) launched a fact-finding report on RRUDP and one of the primary concerns was the impact the project may have on Punjab's ecology, food security and farmers' livelihoods.

According to the report, almost 77% of the site area is agricultural land while the remainder comprises of a delicate ecosystem of community and flora. The HRCP fears that the agricultural land of over 76,000 acres could be affected under the 30-year project.

The HRCP'S Chairperson, Hina Jilani, told DW: "Such so-called development projects are favoring concrete over agricultural land which is problematic as the land around Ravi is supplying much of Lahore's fruits and vegetables and especially the farmers themselves, who live and feed off this land, this project is impinging on their social and economic rights."

Watch video 03:10 Offsetting polluted air in Karachi

Mazhar Abbas, a spokesperson for the Ravi Farmers' Movement, who have been protesting the RRUDP's actions, told DW that there are several reasons farmers who are skeptical about the project.

"Farming is all these people know, they don't want to give up their lands because it is their livelihood and community," said Abbas. Further, he shared that even if farmers were amenable to giving up their land, under the Land Acquisition Act, farmers receive very little settlement rates per acre (€1,008) which gives them less security.

However, RUDA CEO Imran Amin maintains that the RRUDP is a means to conserve the Ravi river and increase agricultural efficiency. "There is a misconception that we want to remove all farmers and agriculture from the area. In our plan we have given a 40% allotment to forest cover and agriculture. Right now, the Ravi river is acidic and we are not producing crops, fruits and vegetables we could be. As this project helps improve the river and ecology that we are committed to, we will also improve farmer livelihoods and produce."

Conflicting urbanization strategies

At the center of the RRUDP debate between opponents and proponents is conflicting strategies to tackle urban sprawl. According to Alam, the RRUDP represents a "a fixed housing template" that favors the more affluent and adds distances and vehicular use in the city, further exacerbating Lahore's smog crisis.

However, Amin argues that Lahore and many of Pakistan's urban areas are in trouble because cities have not been planned and views the RRUDP as an antidote to Pakistan's rampant "housing society boom" and urbanization problem.

"RRUDP is not a housing society, we are making a planned city that is anticipating the population rise taking into consideration economic factors, pollution air index, forest cover, etc. We are planning for all segments of society and low cost housing is a compulsion in the plan."

Amin shared that in the initial plan, they are making a labor colony of 3000 apartments that will increase on need basis. This housing model, Amin hopes, will lead to a less informal sprawl and bad living conditions for the labor class.
Feasibility studies controversy

Another criticism hurled at the RRUDP is that the feasibility study is not robust, as per the LHC's ruling. In 2014, the Lahore Development Authority hired Singapore based urban development firm Meinhardt Group to run a feasibility study. This study also formed a significant part of the Environmental Protection Authority's Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).

However, eyebrows have been raised regarding the efficacy of the study as Meindhart Group was allegedly blacklisted by the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) in early 2022. The group has publicly denied this and is pursuing arbitration/defamation cases against the LDA.

Also, Amin, now CEO of RUDA, served as Director Operations at Meinhardt Pakistan from 2012-2020 which petitions against RRUDP, and this has been deemed as a "conflict of interest."

Amin shared with DW, that the conflict of interest claims are baseless as he was not involved with RUDA at the time Meinhardt was consulted. "When anyone goes to a job interview, having experience and knowledge with the project is an asset. Since I was already experienced with the Ravi project, I had an added advantage and relevant experience. How is that a conflict of interest?" said Amin.

Edited by: John Silk

Kerstin Perez is searching the cosmos for signs of dark matter

“There need to be more building blocks than the ones we know about,” says the particle physicist.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office
Publication Date: January 2, 2022
PRESS INQUIRIES

“We measure so much about the universe, but we also know we’re completely missing huge chunks of what the universe is made of,” Kerstin Perez says.
Credits:Photo: Adam Glanzman


Kerstin Perez is searching for imprints of dark matter. The invisible substance embodies 84 percent of the matter in the universe and is thought to be a powerful cosmic glue, keeping whole galaxies from spinning apart. And yet, the particles themselves leave barely a trace on ordinary matter, thwarting all efforts at detection thus far.

Perez, a particle physicist at MIT, is hoping that a high-altitude balloon experiment, to be launched into the Antarctic stratosphere in late 2022, will catch indirect signs of dark matter, in the particles that it leaves behind. Such a find would significantly illuminate dark matter’s elusive nature.

The experiment, which Perez co-leads, is the General AntiParticle Spectrometer, or GAPS, a NASA-funded mission that aims to detect products of dark matter annihilation. When two dark matter particles collide, it’s thought that the energy of this interaction can be converted into other particles, including antideuterons — particles that then ride through the galaxy as cosmic rays which can penetrate Earth’s stratosphere. If antideuterons exist, they should come from all parts of the sky, and Perez and her colleagues are hoping GAPS will be at just the right altitude and sensitivity to detect them.

“If we can convince ourselves that’s really what we’re seeing, that could help point us in the direction of what dark matter is,” says Perez, who was awarded tenure this year in MIT’s Department of Physics.

In addition to GAPS, Perez’ work centers on developing methods to look for dark matter and other exotic particles in supernova and other astrophysical phenomena captured by ground and space telescopes.

“We measure so much about the universe, but we also know we’re completely missing huge chunks of what the universe is made of,” she says. “There need to be more building blocks than the ones we know about. And I’ve chosen different experimental methods to go after them.”

Building up

Born and raised in West Philadelphia, Perez was a self-described “indoor kid,” mostly into arts and crafts, drawing and design, and building.

“I had two glue guns, and I remember I got into building dollhouses, not because I cared about dolls so much, but because it was a thing you could buy and build,” she recalls.

Her plans to pursue fine arts took a turn in her junior year, when she sat in on her first physics class. Material that was challenging for her classmates came more naturally to Perez, and she signed up the next year for both physics and calculus, taught by the same teacher with infectious wonder.

“One day he did a derivation that took up two-thirds of the board, and he stood back and said, ‘Isn’t that so beautiful? I can’t erase it.’ And he drew a frame around it and worked for the rest of the class in that tiny third of the board,” Perez recalls. “It was that kind of enthusiasm that came across to me.”

So buoyed, she set off after high school for Columbia University, where she pursued a major in physics. Wanting experience in research, she volunteered in a nanotechnology lab, imaging carbon nanotubes.

“That was my turning point,” Perez recalls. “All my background in building, creating, and wanting to design things came together in this physics context. From then on, I was sold on experimental physics research.”

She also happened to take a modern physics course taught by MIT’s Janet Conrad, who was then a professor at Columbia. The class introduced students to particle physics and the experiments underway to detect dark matter and other exotic particles. The detector generating the most buzz was CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. The LHC was to be the largest particle accelerator in the world, and was expected imminently to come online.

After graduating from Columbia, Perez flew west to Caltech, where she had the opportunity to go to CERN as part of her graduate work. That experience was invaluable, as she helped to calibrate one of the LHC’s pixel detectors, which is designed to measure ordinary, well-known particles.

“That experience taught me, when you first turn on your instrument, you have to make sure you can measure the things you know are there, really well, before you can claim you’re looking at anything new,” Perez says.

Front of the class

After finishing up her work at CERN, she began to turn over a new idea. While the LHC was designed to artificially smash particles together to look for dark matter, smaller projects were going after the same particles in space, their natural environment.

“All the evidence we have of dark matter comes from astrophysical observations, so it makes sense to look out there for clues,” Perez says. “I wanted the opportunity to, from scratch, fundamentally design and build an experiment that could tell us something about dark matter.”

With this idea, she returned to Columbia, where she joined the core team that was working to get the balloon experiment GAPS off the ground. As a postdoc, she developed a cost-effective method to fabricate the experiment’s more than 1,000 silicon detectors, and has since continued to lead the experiment’s silicon detector program. Then in 2015, she accepted a faculty position at Haverford College, close to her hometown.

“I was there for one-and-a-half years, and absolutely loved it,” Perez says.

While at Haverford, she dove into not only her physics research, but also teaching. The college offered a program for faculty to help improve their lectures, with each professor meeting weekly with an undergraduate who was trained to observe and give feedback on their teaching style. Perez was paired with a female student of color, who one day shared with her a less than welcoming experience she had experienced in an introductory course, that ultimately discouraged her from declaring a computer science major.

Listening to the student, Perez, who has often been the only woman of color in advanced physics classes, labs, experimental teams, and faculty rosters, recognized a kinship, and a calling. From that point on, in addition to her physics work, she began to explore a new direction of research: belonging.

She reached out to social psychologists to understand issues of diversity and inclusion, and the systemic factors contributing to underrepresentation in physics, computer science, and other STEM disciplines. She also collaborated with educational researchers to develop classroom practices to encourage belonging among students, with the motivation of retaining underrepresented students.

In 2016, she accepted an offer to join the MIT physics faculty, and brought with her the work on inclusive teaching that she began at Haverford. At MIT, she has balanced her research in particle physics with teaching and with building a more inclusive classroom.

“It’s easy for instructors to think, ‘I have to completely revamp my syllabus and flip my classroom, but I have so much research, and teaching is a small part of my job that frankly is not rewarded a lot of the time,’” Perez says. “But if you look at the research, it doesn’t take a lot. It’s the small things we do, as teachers who are at the front of the classroom, that have a big impact.”

 

'Ghost Particles' Were Detected at the Large Hadron Collider For the First Time

Bringing us closer to uncovering the role of these 'elusive particles' in the universe.

Nov 26, 2021By  Chris Young

The FASER equipment at the LHC.UCI

Physicists from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) found never-before-seen "ghost particles", or neutrinos, in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during an experiment called FASER, a report from New Atlas reveals. 

Neutrinos are electrically neutral elementary particles with a mass close to zero. The reason they're known as ghost particles is that, though they are incredibly common, they have no electric charge, meaning they are difficult to detect as they rarely interact with matter.

'Ghost particles' could carry immense amounts of information

Alongside the FASER experiments at the LHC, a series of in-development neutrino observatories, designed to detect neutrino sources in space, have the potential to reveal many of the universe's mysteries. Despite their name, ghost particles might actually provide a wealth of information due to the fact that they don't interact with other matter as they travel through the universe — unlike light particles, photons, which are distorted by interactions as they traverse space. The problem, so far, has been our ability to detect these ghost particles or neutrinos.

Neutrinos are produced in stars, supernovae, and quasars, as well as in human-made sources. It has long been believed, for example, that particle accelerators such as LHC should also produce them, though they have likely gone undetected. Now, a paper published in the journal Physical Review D, provides the first evidence of neutrinos, in the form of six neutrino interactions, at the LHC.

"Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider," study co-author Jonathan Feng said in a press statement. "This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe."

The FASER experiment will be expanded by 2022

Back in 2018, the FASER experiment installed an instrument to detect neutrinos, some 1,575 ft (480 m) down from where particle collisions occur in the LHC. The instrument uses a detector composed of plates of lead and tungsten, which are set apart by layers of emulsion. When neutrinos smash into nuclei in the metals, they produce particles that then travel through the layers of emulsion. This creates marks that are visible following a processing procedure that's somewhat similar to film photography. During the experiments, six of these marks were spotted after processing.

According to Feng, the team is "now preparing a new series of experiments with a full instrument that's much larger and significantly more sensitive," so as to collect more data. This larger version will be called FASERnu. It will weigh 2,400 lb (1,090 kg) — a lot more than the first version's 64 lb (29 kg) — allowing it to detect many more of the elusive ghost particles. David Casper, another co-author of the study, says the UCI team expects FASERnu to "record more than 10,000 neutrino interactions in the next run of the LHC, beginning in 2022."

For the First Time Ever, Physicists Detect Signs of Neutrinos at Large Hadron Collider

By UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - IRVINE NOVEMBER 27, 2021

Scientific first at CERN facility a preview of upcoming 3-year research campaign.

The international Forward Search Experiment team, led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, has achieved the first-ever detection of neutrino candidates produced by the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility near Geneva, Switzerland.

In a paper published on November 24, 2021, in the journal Physical Review D, the researchers describe how they observed six neutrino interactions during a pilot run of a compact emulsion detector installed at the LHC in 2018.

“Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider,” said co-author Jonathan Feng, UCI Distinguished Professor of physics & astronomy and co-leader of the FASER Collaboration. “This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe.”

He said the discovery made during the pilot gave his team two crucial pieces of information.

The FASER particle detector that received CERN approval to be installed at the Large Hadron Collider in 2019 has recently been augmented with an instrument to detect neutrinos. The UCI-led FASER team used a smaller detector of the same type in 2018 to make the first observations of the elusive particles generated at a collider. The new instrument will be able to detect thousands of neutrino interactions over the next three years, the researchers say. Credit: Photo courtesy of CERN

“First, it verified that the position forward of the ATLAS interaction point at the LHC is the right location for detecting collider neutrinos,” Feng said. “Second, our efforts demonstrated the effectiveness of using an emulsion detector to observe these kinds of neutrino interactions.”

The pilot instrument was made up of lead and tungsten plates alternated with layers of emulsion. During particle collisions at the LHC, some of the neutrinos produced smash into nuclei in the dense metals, creating particles that travel through the emulsion layers and create marks that are visible following processing. These etchings provide clues about the energies of the particles, their flavors – tau, muon or electron – and whether they’re neutrinos or antineutrinos.

According to Feng, the emulsion operates in a fashion similar to photography in the pre-digital camera era. When 35-millimeter film is exposed to light, photons leave tracks that are revealed as patterns when the film is developed. The FASER researchers were likewise able to see neutrino interactions after removing and developing the detector’s emulsion layers.

“Having verified the effectiveness of the emulsion detector approach for observing the interactions of neutrinos produced at a particle collider, the FASER team is now preparing a new series of experiments with a full instrument that’s much larger and significantly more sensitive,” Feng said.

The FASER experiment is situated 480 meters from the ATLAS interaction point at the Large Hadron Collider. According to Jonathan Feng, UCI Distinguished Professor of physics & astronomy and co-leader of the FASER Collaboration, this is a good location for detecting neutrinos that result from particle collisions at the facility. Credit: Photo courtesy of CERN

Since 2019, he and his colleagues have been getting ready to conduct an experiment with FASER instruments to investigate dark matter at the LHC. They’re hoping to detect dark photons, which would give researchers a first glimpse into how dark matter interacts with normal atoms and the other matter in the universe through nongravitational forces.

With the success of their neutrino work over the past few years, the FASER team – consisting of 76 physicists from 21 institutions in nine countries – is combining a new emulsion detector with the FASER apparatus. While the pilot detector weighed about 64 pounds, the FASERnu instrument will be more than 2,400 pounds, and it will be much more reactive and able to differentiate among neutrino varieties.

“Given the power of our new detector and its prime location at CERN, we expect to be able to record more than 10,000 neutrino interactions in the next run of the LHC, beginning in 2022,” said co-author David Casper, FASER project co-leader and associate professor of physics & astronomy at UCI. “We will detect the highest-energy neutrinos that have ever been produced from a human-made source.”

What makes FASERnu unique, he said, is that while other experiments have been able to distinguish between one or two kinds of neutrinos, it will be able to observe all three flavors plus their antineutrino counterparts. Casper said that there have only been about 10 observations of tau neutrinos in all of human history but that he expects his team will be able to double or triple that number over the next three years.

“This is an incredibly nice tie-in to the tradition at the physics department here at UCI,” Feng said, “because it’s continuing on with the legacy of Frederick Reines, a UCI founding faculty member who won the Nobel Prize in physics for being the first to discover neutrinos.”

“We’ve produced a world-class experiment at the world’s premier particle physics laboratory in record time and with very untraditional sources,” Casper said. “We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Simons Foundation, as well as the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and CERN, which supported us generously.”

Reference: “First neutrino interaction candidates at the LHC” by Henso Abreu et al. (FASER Collaboration), 24 November 2021, Physical Review D.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.104.L091101

Savannah Shively and Jason Arakawa, UCI Ph.D. students in physics & astronomy, also contributed to the paper.

How Many Dimensions Does Our Universe Really Have?

Does our Universe have extra dimensions, and how do they influence our reality?

By Matthew S. Williams

Oct 16, 2021 (Updated: Oct 16, 2021 12:06 EDT)

StockByM/iStock

Theoretical physics is a fascinating and (at times) amusing field. While most people would not claim to know much about this field of research, many of its more advanced concepts come up in popular culture all the time. In fact, words like "nuclear," "quantum," and "multiverse" are often key to the plot of our favorite TV shows and movies.

On the other hand, some of the more advanced concepts in theoretical physics (when described) sound more like philosophy and metaphysics than science. In fact, some theories even manage to blur the lines between science and religion and are generally met by either awe or dismissal (depending upon who's listening).

Consider the idea of "extra dimensions," which many people would assume refers to the existence of dimensions parallel to our own where things are slightly or vastly different — aka. "multiverse" theory. In truth, the theory of extra dimensions deals with the possible existence of extra dimensions beyond the ones we are immediately aware of.

While this kind of talk may sound like something farfetched or purely speculative, it is actually a vital part of our understanding of how our Universe works. If and when we determine how many dimensions our Universe has (and what each of them does), we will finally have a Theory of Everything (ToE) and know how it all fits together.


Dimensions 101

To break it down, the term "dimension" refers to any mathematical measurement. This can generally refer to a physical measurement (an object or space) or a temporal measurement (time). There are three dimensions that we experience daily, which define the length, width, and depth of all objects in our Universe (the x, y, and z-axis, respectively).

However, scientists maintain that to understand the laws of nature, one must include a "fourth dimension," which is time. Without this coordinate, the position, velocity, and acceleration of objects in our Universe cannot be properly measured. It's not enough to know where an object is in terms of three spatial coordinates. You also need to know when the object was where.


Beyond these four dimensions, theoretical physicists have ventured that there may be more at play. The number of dimensions varies, but the purpose behind extra dimensions is to find ways of unifying the known laws of the Universe, which theoretical physicists have been trying to do for about a century.

The reason has to do with two very interesting fields of study: Quantum Mechanics (QM) and General Relativity (GR). These fields emerged during the early 20th century and were almost concurrent with each other. Whereas QM has many forebears (Planck, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, et al.), GR owes its existence, at least initially, to Albert Einstein — though many of his ideas were refinements on earlier theories.

For the record, Einstein also contributed to the development of QM through his research on the behavior of light. In any case, whereas Quantum Mechanics (QM) describes how energy and matter behave at the atomic and subatomic levels, General Relativity (GR) describes how matter, energy, and spacetime behave on larger scales in the presence of gravity.


The funny thing is, our greatest scientific minds have been trying to figure out how these two fields fit together for almost a century. Both appear to work just fine on their own, but where they come together into a single coherent system, that remains largely a mystery.
Four fundamental forces

After thousands of years of research into nature and the laws that govern it, scientists have determined that four fundamental forces govern all matter-energy interactions. These forces, and the fundamental particles that make up all matter (quarks, leptons, gauge bosons, and scalar bosons), are part of The Standard Model of particle physics. These forces are:
Electromagnetism
Weak Nuclear Force
Strong Nuclear Force
Gravitation

The first three forces are all described by the field of Quantum Mechanics and are associated with specific subatomic particles. Electromagnetism is associated with electrons (a lepton), which are responsible for electricity, magnetism, and all forms of electromagnetic radiation. That includes visible light (color), heat, microwaves, radio waves, ultraviolet radiation, and gamma rays.

Source: NASA

The weak nuclear force deals with interactions between subatomic particles responsible for the radioactive decay of atoms and is associated with particles smaller than a proton (bosons). At higher energies, this force merges with electromagnetism, which has given rise to the unified term "electroweak force."

The strong nuclear force governs particles that are the size of protons and neutrons (hadrons) and is so-named because it is approximately 137 times as strong as electromagnetism, millions of times stronger than the weak nuclear force, and 1038 times as strong as gravitation. It causes quarks to come together to form larger protons and neutrons and binds them to create atomic nuclei.

Finally, there is gravitation, which is the weakest of the four forces and deals with interactions between massive objects (asteroids, planets, stars, galaxies, and the large-scale structure of the Universe.) Unlike the other three forces, there is no known subatomic particle that describes gravitation or gravitational interactions.


This is why scientists are forced to study physics in terms of QM or GR (depending on the scales involved), but generally not both combined. Because of this, scientists have been trying to come up with a theoretical framework for unifying gravity with the other forces. Attempts to do so generally fall under the heading of "quantum gravity" or a Theory of Everything (ToE).
How many dimensions are there?

Attempts to create a unified field theory of gravitation and electromagnetism can be traced to German physicist Theodor Kaluza (1885–1954). In 1921, he published a paper where he presented an extended interpretation of Einstein's Field Equations. This theory was built on the idea of a 5D Universe, which included a dimension beyond the common 4D of space and time.

In 1926, Swedish theoretical physicist Oskar Klein offered a quantum interpretation of Kaluza's 5D theory. In Klein's extension, the fifth dimension was curled up, microscopic, and could take the form of a circle that had a 10-30 cm radius. In the 1930s, work was undertaken on the Kaluza field theory by Einstein and his colleagues at Princeton. By the 1940s, the theory was formally completed and given the name Kaluza-Klein theory.

The work of Kaluza and Klein predicted the emergence of String Theory (ST), which was first proposed during the 1960s. By the 1990s, multiple interpretations emerged, including Superstring Theory, Loop-Quantum Gravity, M-theory, and Supergravity. Each of these theories entails the existence of "extra dimensions," "hyperspace," or something similar.

To summarize, ST states that the point-like particles of particle physics are actually one-dimensional objects called "strings." Over distances larger than the string scale, they resemble ordinary particles, though their mass, charge, and other properties are determined by the string's vibrational state. In one state, the string corresponds to the graviton, which is what causes gravitation.

Source: NASA

Superstring theory, a variation on ST, requires t spacetime dimensions. These include the four dimensions immediately apparent to us (length, width, depth, time) and six more that are not.

These extra six dimensions are curled up into a compact space. On order the string scale (10-33 cm) we wouldn't be able to detect the presence of these extra dimensions directly because they're just too small.

According to the theory, the fifth and sixth dimensions deal with possible worlds that began with the same initial conditions.

The fifth dimension encompasses worlds with slightly different outcomes than ours, while the sixth is where a plane of possible worlds would be visible. The seventh dimension is where one could see possible worlds that started with different initial conditions and then branched out infinitely — hence why the term "infinity" is used to describe them.

The eighth dimension would similarly give us a plane of these "infinities," while in the ninth dimension, all possible Universes and laws of physics could be seen. In the tenth dimension, anything and everything possible in terms of cosmic evolution are accessible. Beyond that, nothing can be seen by living creatures that are part of the spacetime continuum.


M-theory, which combines five distinct superstring theories, posits the existence of 11 dimensions — ten spatial and one time. This variation on superstring theory is considered attractive because of the phenomena it predicts. For one, M-theory predicts the existence of the graviton, which is consistent with string theory as a whole and offers an explanation for quantum gravity.

It also predicts a phenomenon similar to black hole evaporation, where black holes emit "Hawking radiation" and lose mass over time. Some variations of superstring theory also predict the existence of Einstein-Rosen bridges — aka. "wormholes." Another approach, Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), posits that gravity is completely different from the other fundamental forces and that space-time itself is made of quantized, discrete bits, in the form of tiny, one-dimensional loops.


Some versions of supergravity theory also promote an 11-D model of spacetime, with 4 common dimensions and 7 hyperspace dimensions. There's also "brane theory," which posits that the Universe is made up of multidimensional vibrating "membranes" that have mass and a charge and can propagate through spacetime.

To date, there is no experimental evidence for the existence of "extra dimensions," "hyperspace," or anything beyond the four dimensions we can perceive.
Why can't we see them?

Alas, the question remains. If additional dimensions are required for the laws of physics to make sense, why can't we confirm their existence? There are two possibilities: one, what we think we know about physics is wrong, or two, the dimensions of spacetime beyond the 4D we experience are so subtle or tiny that they are invisible to our current experiments.


On its face, the first possibility seems highly unlikely. After all, ongoing particle experiments — like those conducted with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — have confirmed that the Standard Model of particle physics is correct. Similarly, General Relativity has been confirmed many times over since Einstein formally proposed it in 1915.

Source: Wikimedia Commons/Jbourjai

That leaves us with the second possibility: that extra dimensions cannot be measured or characterized using current methods and experiments. A well-studied possibility is that dimensions are "curled up" at tiny scales, which means their properties and influence on spacetime could only be measured at subatomic levels.

Another possibility is "compactification," where certain dimensions are finite or temporal in nature. In short, this theory posits that curled-up dimensions become very small or close in on themselves to form circles. If this is true, then the six extra dimensions would likely take the form of a Calabi–Yau manifold (these are shapes that satisfy the requirement needed for the six "unseen" spatial dimensions of string theory).

For astrophysicists and theoretical physicists, compactification and the idea that extra dimensions are tiny explains why the Universe still exists billions of years after its emergence. If these dimensions were larger, they would accommodate enough matter to trigger gravitational collapses and the formation of black holes (which would consume the rest of the Universe).

The fact that the cosmos still exists after 13.8 billion years, and shows no sign of being torn apart, would suggest that this theory is sound. Alternatively, the laws of physics may operate differently in these extra dimensions. Either way, there's still the unanswered question of how we might observe and study them.

How do we find them?

So if the Universe really does have extra dimensions that are imperceptible to us, how are we going to find evidence of their existence and determine their properties? One possibility is to look for them through particle physics experiments, like those conducted by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) — the operators of the LHC — and other particle accelerator labs.

At CERN, scientists boost particles to high energies before smashing them together and measuring the resulting cascade of subatomic particles. Detectors gather clues about the particles, such as their speed, mass, and charge, which can be used to work out their identity.

Theories involving extra dimensions predict that there must be heavier versions of standard particles recurring at higher and higher energies as they navigate smaller dimensions. These would have exactly the same properties as standard particles (and so be visible to detectors like those at CERN) but at a greater mass. If evidence of these were to be found, this might suggest the presence of extra dimensions.

Another way is to look back through time towards the period known as "Cosmic Dawn," roughly 100 to 500 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies formed. Even if extra dimensions are imperceptible to detection today, they would have influenced the evolution of the Universe from the very beginning.

To date, astronomers have been unable to see this far back in time since no telescopes have been sensitive enough. This will change in the near future, thanks to next-generation instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST), the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT).

Source: Suvendu Giri

This coincides nicely with existing Dark Matter and Dark Energy surveys that are observing early comic history in the hopes of measuring their influence on cosmic evolution. Since some theorists venture that the existence of extra dimensions could help explain the "Dark Universe," these observations could address several mysteries at once.

This dual approach is not unlike our current understanding of the Universe, which scientists can only understand in one of two ways — the largest (GR) and tiniest of scales (QM). By observing the Universe with a very wide and very tight-angle lense, we may be able to account for all the forces governing it.

* * *

Much like other ToE candidates, the belief that the universe is made up of ten dimensions or more is an attempt to take all the physical laws we understand and find out how they fit together. In that respect, it's like assembling a puzzle, where each piece makes sense to us, but we are unaware of what the bigger picture looks like.

It's not enough to put pieces together wherever they appear to match. We also need to have an overall idea of what the framework is, a mental picture of what it will look like when it is finished. This helps to guide our efforts so we can anticipate how it will all come together.

PAKISTAN
LAW: PROTECTING WOMEN FROM VIOLENCE
Zofeen T. Ebrahim

Published September 12, 2021 - 

Despite hundreds of existing laws protecting children, women and transgender people, the justice system of Pakistan is unable to adjudicate cases of gender-based violence

Confronted with newer, more brutal and humiliating forms of inflicting pain, hurt and torture on women, the country’s response in proportion to it is dismal, and seemingly almost of nonchalance.

As psychiatrist Dr Ayesha Mian explains, gender-based violence (GBV) — ranging from verbal abuse, pushing and slapping to severe beating, burning, throwing acid, sexual harassment and rape — has increased globally (by 25 percent) since the pandemic began. The pandemic resulted in a “loss of employment, pay-cuts, being confined to small home spaces and an increase in stress, anxiety and depression.” In addition, an increase in substance abuse can also be attributed to the rise in GBV crimes, she says.

Moreover, perpetrators of these crimes often go scot-free. In Pakistan, for example, available data suggests the conviction for these crimes is not more than three percent.

“Until we send perpetrators to jail in large numbers and make examples of them, we will not make a dent in bringing the horrific GBV statistics down in our country,” says Oscar-winning documentarian and activist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, known for her work that highlights gender inequality.

But the problem is that not all women lodge a complaint. Even globally, less than 10 percent of women victims seek help from the justice system.

“They [women survivors] have little confidence in the system,” says Chinoy, referring to Pakistani women. “They tell me point blank there’s no point, saying the process is long and painful.” And because the women give up, the aggressor is never convicted, she adds.

In 2019, the Chief Justice of Pakistan announced the setting up of 1,000 specialised courts throughout Pakistan to deal with gender-based violence. Whatever became of them?

Back in 2019, just a few months before his retirement, the then Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP), Asif Saeed Khosa, had announced the setting up of more than 1,000 GBV courts across Pakistan, “at least one such court apiece in every district” to help “speed up prosecutions”, where the victims could “speak their heart without any fear.”

This proclamation was not made on a whim by a retiring judge.

Work on the establishment of these specialised courts had started back in 2016 when Irum Ahsan, a lawyer working with the Asian Development Bank, wanted to find out the “the root cause” of the extremely low rate of conviction. For example, in Punjab — “a hotbed for gender-based violence”, says Ahsan — only two percent of the accused were convicted. According to Dr Mian, “entrenched feudal systems, a tradition of honour killings, watta satta [exchange marriages between households],” could be some of the reasons behind it.

Another probable reason why Punjab recorded increased incidences of violence is “better access of the media” to the victims/survivors, which allows for more such crimes to get reported, says Zohra Yusuf, a human-rights activist and a council member of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

What confounded Ahsan during her research was that despite “hundreds of existing laws” protecting children, women and transgender people, the judges were unable to adjudicate using them.

Misogyny, mental health linked to violence

In her quest to find answers, Ahsan reached out to district-level judges. She found that “both men and women judges had unconscious blind spots when they were hearing GBV cases.”

“Many of them stated in survey responses that rape occurred because men were unable to control their sexual urges when provoked by a woman — such as by wearing provocative clothing or make-up, engaging in flirtatious behaviour or staying out late,” says Ahsan. Moreover, if the survivor resiled or compromised, the case was closed and the crime forgotten.

Many judges interviewed by Ahsan did not believe that marital rape was a reality and the judges proffered that women lied or concocted these cases for revenge.

At the same time, Ahsan and her team started studying the cases. “We found economic imbalance to be among the major reasons for reaching a compromise by male relatives of the victim. “It was not deemed necessary to seek the woman’s permission or free consent,” she says.

“The misogynistic attitude of the media, the clerics, as well as, to some extent, of state functionaries has played a role [in fanning GBV]”, according to Yusuf.

The recent murder of Noor Mukaddam in Islamabad, in June, highlighted the rise in gender-based violence in our society | AFP

Only recently, Prime Minister Imran Khan was quoted as saying in an interview that “if a woman is wearing very few clothes it will have an impact on men unless they are robots”.

Until we send perpetrators to jail in large numbers and make examples of them, we will not make a dent in bringing the horrific GBV statistics down in our country,” says Oscar-winning documentarian and activist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, known for her work that highlights gender inequality.

Referring to the recent wave of GBV crimes across the country, Dr Mian says the country’s youth suffers from significant risk factors to healthy emotional functioning. These may include, “toxic masculinity, entitlement, having poor role models, not being able to engage in sports and other co-curricular activities and lack of civic engagement.”

Sadly, due to a lack of health literacy, much of the patterns of pathological functioning go unrecognised. “The lack of awareness, poor understanding of mental health symptoms and stigma are further compounded by a general acceptance of the early signs of possible mental health disorders in boys as [we tend to accept that] they will be aggressive, loud, angry and given to temper outbursts,” she explains.

For her part, Ahsan decided she needed to work with judges and developed a detailed course with the help from a team of five women — experts in the field of gender, law, justice, human rights, anthropology and Islamic scholarship. They then went on to carry out several intensive week-long sessions of gender sensitisation training for lower-courts judges and prosecutors across Punjab and extended it nationwide.

“In the end we must have trained more than 600 judges and prosecutors nationwide,” she says.

For Ahsan, these workshops were a huge success. “We did not intend to bring a sea change, but even converting a few dozen judges was monumental for us,” says Ahsan. The evaluations were shared with the then Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court (LHC), Justice Mansoor Ali Shah, who mandated them to set up a model GBV courtroom within eight days.

Ahsan and her team immediately got to work and found a room in the Lahore district court building. It was a slightly larger room to accommodate more distance between the judge, victim and the lawyers.

They also put in a chair in the witness stand for comfort, along with a screen — so that the complainant did not have to face the accused directly. There was a side room for recording evidence electronically, in case the survivor did not want to face the court, or if she were accompanied by a child. The team also worked meticulously on a training manual to help the judge, which provided “court procedures based on national and international best practices and human rights norms; formal procedures in case the victim or the witnesses resile, and practice notes on evidence and other court matters.”

“Our courts are not easy for a woman who has been violated,” says Ahsan. “The way she is judged, the language used and the way she is questioned, it’s like she is being raped over and over.”

Back in 2019, just a few months before his retirement, the then Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP), Asif Saeed Khosa, had announced the setting up of more than 1,000 GBV courts across Pakistan, “at least one such court apiece in every district” to help “speed up prosecutions”, where the victims could “speak their heart without any fear.”

“If we want women to pursue these cases and if we want to show real commitment towards eliminating violence against women, then our legal system will need GBV courts,” says Chinoy, adding that there is a need to sensitise the police as well.

PATRIARCHY

Asma Rani (above) was shot dead near her home in Kohat in 2018 for refusing a marriage proposal; earlier this month, her killer was pardoned by her father

In October 2017, the new GBV court in Lahore began its work.

Ahsan and her team also got permission to review the cases for a full year. They analysed that, by the end of the year, the two percent conviction rate of 2016 had jumped to 16 percent by 2019.

This evidence led to the National Judicial Policy Making Committee, under the leadership of the then CJP Asif Saeed Khosa, approving in November 2019, the establishment of specialized GBV courts in each of Pakistan’s then 116 districts.

“The course material we developed on gender sensitization can be used to train the entire judicial machinery,” says Ahsan, who feels gender studies should be institutionalised by making it mandatory. “All it needs is an order signed by the chairman of the National Judicial Policymaking Committee,” she says.

Today few know what became of the administrative order and how many more such courts have actually been set up.

However, Nida Usman Chaudhary, founder of the Women in Law Initiative Pakistan, which works for equality of opportunity and connectivity of female lawyers in Pakistan, has been following up on news on GBV courts. According to her, the 2019 judicial policy around setting up a GBV court in every district of Pakistan never got implemented.

“Under the new anti-rape bill, special courts are to be designated as GBV courts, but those shall be notified once the anti-rape bill 2021 is passed and becomes an act,” says Chaudhry.

Presently the GBV court in Lahore, set up in November 2017 by then LHC Chief Justice Mansoor Ali Shah, is the only GBV court in practice in the city. “The special court in Faisalabad that was designated under the anti-rape ordinance 2020 now appears to have no legal cover after the lapse of the anti-rape ordinance 2020,” says the lawyer. In addition, there is one GBV court in Islamabad and one in Quetta.

However, Sindh has done much better. Last year, the Karachi-based Legal Aid Society (LAS) and the Sindh Commission on the Status of Women (SCSW) found 27 dedicated GBV courts in Sindh alone.

While not all the specialised courts were found to be working efficiently or having the basic infrastructure required for a GBV court — 74 percent did not have a separate waiting room for the complainant, another 74 percent were without screens and 64 percent were without the separate room to record the victim’s testimony using video-link facilities — Sindh still stands out as the only province that has these specialised courts in all its districts. “I think that’s a huge positive,” says Maliha Lari, associate director at LAS.

Chaudhary agrees. “Sindh is the most progressive in terms of the number of functional operative GBV courts,” she says.

While it was largely left to the discretion of the provincial courts what all a GBV court should entail, one important provision was special protection measures for both the victim(s) and witnesses. The LAS found this missing in the GBV courts in Sindh. Their assessment revealed this could be an important factor in the higher rates of victims and witnesses resiling.

In addition, the review and study of 50 disposed-off cases in six GBV courts in Sindh pointed to innumerable other factors for why the conviction rate was as low as 3.1 percent, as per the LAS survey.

For example, the delay was happening at the magisterial level. “It is important to sensitise and strengthen the noting [down] of reporting at that level,” says Lari. Similarly, despite the emphasis laid on using medical evidence, there was limited understanding of it among the police, the prosecution and even the judiciary.

The LAS carried out a user-satisfaction survey about GBV courts in Karachi East and Hyderabad, in September 2020 and repeated it in February 2021. The surveys found that the satisfaction of people using these courts had risen by 14 percent. While this is a substantial improvement, Lari adds there is room for further improvement. “Minimising waiting times in case of combined waiting areas, sensitisation of courtroom staff on interaction between the victim and the accused, availability of interpreters/translators inside the courtroom” can all help in betterment of the user-satisfaction score, according to Lari.

It may have taken the highest judiciary 65 years to notice that the Supreme Court of Pakistan never had a female judge and make amends; it must not take this long to set up the promised 1,000 courts. It is time to build the eroding trust of society so that the clamour for swifter, extrajudicial justice does not get stronger.

The writer is an independent journalist based in Karachi

Published in Dawn, EOS, September 12th, 2021

RIP

UT Austin Mourns Death of World-Renowned Physicist Steven Weinberg


Physicist Steven Weinberg, January 28, 2008. Credit: Larry Murphy, The University of Texas at Austin

Jul 24, 2021

AUSTIN, Texas — Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a professor of physics and astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, has died. He was 88.

One of the most celebrated scientists of his generation, Weinberg was best known for helping to develop a critical part of the Standard Model of particle physics, which significantly advanced humanity’s understanding of how everything in the universe — its various particles and the forces that govern them — relate. A faculty member for nearly four decades at UT Austin, he was a beloved teacher and researcher, revered not only by the scientists who marveled at his concise and elegant theories but also by science enthusiasts everywhere who read his books and sought him out at public appearances and lectures.

“The passing of Steven Weinberg is a loss for The University of Texas and for society. Professor Weinberg unlocked the mysteries of the universe for millions of people, enriching humanity’s concept of nature and our relationship to the world,” said Jay Hartzell, president of The University of Texas at Austin. “From his students to science enthusiasts, from astrophysicists to public decision makers, he made an enormous difference in our understanding. In short, he changed the world.”

“As a world-renowned researcher and faculty member, Steven Weinberg has captivated and inspired our UT Austin community for nearly four decades,” said Sharon L. Wood, provost of the university. “His extraordinary discoveries and contributions in cosmology and elementary particles have not only strengthened UT’s position as a global leader in physics, they have changed the world.”

Weinberg held the Jack S. Josey – Welch Foundation Chair in Science at UT Austin and was the winner of multiple scientific awards including the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics, which he shared with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Lee Glashow; a National Medal of Science in 1991; the Lewis Thomas Prize for the Scientist as Poet in 1999; and, just last year, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, Britain’s Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, which presented him with the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2004.

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands receives Nobel laureates: Paul Berg, Christian de Duve, Steven Weinberg, Queen Beatrix, Manfred Eigen, Nicolaas Bloembergen. Photo taken on 31 August 1983. Credit: Rob C. Croes / Anefo. Creative Commons Netherlands license.

In 1967, Weinberg published a seminal paper laying out how two of the universe’s four fundamental forces — electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force — relate as part of a unified electroweak force. “A Model of Leptons,” at barely three pages, predicted properties of elementary particles that at that time had never before been observed (the W, Z and Higgs boson) and theorized that “neutral weak currents” dictated how elementary particles interact with one another. Later experiments, including the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, would bear out each of his predictions.

Weinberg leveraged his renown and his science for causes he cared deeply about. He had a lifelong interest in curbing nuclear proliferation and served briefly as a consultant for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He advocated for a planned superconducting supercollider with the capabilities of the LHC in the United States — a project that ultimately failed to receive funding in the 1990s after having been planned for a site near Waxahachie, Texas. He continued to be an ambassador for science throughout his life, for example, teaching UT Austin students and participating in events such as the 2021 Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative in April and in the Texas Science Festival in February.

“When we talk about science as part of the culture of our times, we’d better make it part of that culture by explaining what we’re doing,” Weinberg explained in a 2015 interview published by Third Way. “I think it’s very important not to write down to the public. You have to keep in mind that you’re writing for people who are not mathematically trained but are just as smart as you are.”

By showing the unifying links behind weak forces and electromagnetism, which were previously believed to be completely different, Weinberg delivered the first pillar of the Standard Model, the half-century-old theory that explains particles and three of the four fundamental forces in the universe (the fourth being gravity). As critical as the model is in helping physical scientists understand the order driving everything from the first minutes after the Big Bang to the world around us, Weinberg continued to pursue, alongside other scientists, dreams of a “final theory” that would concisely and effectively explain current unknowns about the forces and particles in the universe, including gravity.

Weinberg wrote hundreds of scientific articles about general relativity, quantum field theory, cosmology and quantum mechanics, as well as numerous popular articles, reviews and books. His books include “To Explain the World,” “Dreams of a Final Theory,” “Facing Up,” and “The First Three Minutes.” Weinberg often was asked in media interviews to reflect on his atheism and how it related to the scientific insights he described in his books.

“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art,” he once told PBS. “Although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves.”

Weinberg was a native of New York, and his childhood love of science began with a gift of a chemistry set and continued through teaching himself calculus while a student at Bronx High School of Science. The first in his family to attend college, he received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a doctoral degree from Princeton University. He researched at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, before serving on the faculty of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, since 1982, UT Austin.

He is survived by his wife, UT Austin law professor Louise Weinberg, and their daughter, Elizabeth.


With Steven Weinberg’s death, physics loses a titan

He advanced the theory of particles and forces, and wrote insightfully for a wider public


By Tom Siegfried
Contributing Correspondent


Steven Weinberg in his office at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018.

Mythology has its titans. So do the movies. And so does physics. Just one fewer now.

Steven Weinberg died July 23, at the age of 88. He was one of the key intellectual leaders in physics during the second half of the 20th century, and he remained a leading voice and active contributor and teacher through the first two decades of the 21st.

On lists of the greats of his era he was always mentioned along with Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann and … well, just Feynman and Gell-Mann.

Among his peers, Weinberg was one of the most respected figures in all of physics or perhaps all of science. He exuded intelligence and dignity. As news of his death spread through Twitter, other physicists expressed their remorse at the loss: “One of the most accomplished scientists of our age,” one commented, “a particularly eloquent spokesman for the scientific worldview.” And another: “One of the best physicists we had, one of the best thinkers of any variety.”

Weinberg’s Nobel Prize, awarded in 1979, was for his role in developing a theory unifying electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. That was an essential contribution to what became known as the standard model of physics, a masterpiece of explanation for phenomena rooted in the math describing subatomic particles and forces. It’s so successful at explaining experimental results that physicists have long pursued every opportunity to find the slightest deviation, in hopes of identifying “new” physics that further deepens human understanding of nature.

Weinberg did important technical work in other realms of physics as well, and wrote several authoritative textbooks on such topics as general relativity and cosmology and quantum field theory. He was an early advocate of superstring theory as a promising path in the continuing quest to complete the standard model by unifying it with general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Early on Weinberg also realized a desire to communicate more broadly. His popular book The First Three Minutes, published in 1977, introduced a generation of physicists and physics fans to the Big Bang–birth of the universe and the fundamental science underlying that metaphor. Later he wrote deeply insightful examinations of the nature of science and its intersection with society. And he was a longtime contributor of thoughtful essays in such venues as the New York Review of Books.

In his 1992 book Dreams of a Final Theory, Weinberg expressed his belief that physics was on the verge of finding the true fundamental explanation of reality, the “final theory” that would unify all of physics. Progress toward that goal seemed to be impeded by the apparent incompatibility of general relativity with quantum mechanics, the math underlying the standard model. But in a 1997 interview, Weinberg averred that the difficulty of combining relativity and quantum physics in a mathematically consistent way was an important clue. “When you put the two together, you find that there really isn’t that much free play in the laws of nature,” he said. “That’s been an enormous help to us because it’s a guide to what kind of theories might possibly work.”

Attempting to bridge the relativity-quantum gap, he believed, “pushed us a tremendous step forward toward being able to develop realistic theories of nature on the basis of just mathematical calculations and pure thought.”

Experiment had to come into play, of course, to verify the validity of the mathematical insights. But the standard model worked so well that finding deviations implied by new physics required more powerful experimental technology than physicists possessed. “We have to get to a whole new level of experimental competence before we can do experiments that reveal the truth beneath the standard model, and this is taking a long, long time,” he said. “I really think that physics in the style in which it’s being done … is going to eventually reach a final theory, but probably not while I’m around and very likely not while you’re around.”

He was right that he would not be around to see the final theory. And perhaps, as he sometimes acknowledged, nobody ever will. Perhaps it’s not experimental power that is lacking, but rather intellectual power. “Humans may not be smart enough to understand the really fundamental laws of physics,” he wrote in his 2015 book To Explain the World, a history of science up to the time of Newton.

Weinberg studied the history of science thoroughly, wrote books and taught courses on it. To Explain the World was explicitly aimed at assessing ancient and medieval science in light of modern knowledge. For that he incurred the criticism of historians and others who claimed he did not understand the purpose of history, which is to understand the human endeavors of an era on its own terms, not with anachronistic hindsight.

But Weinberg understood the viewpoint of the historians perfectly well. He just didn’t like it. For Weinberg, the story of science that was meaningful to people today was how the early stumblings toward understanding nature evolved into a surefire system for finding correct explanations. And that took many centuries. Without the perspective of where we are now, he believed, and an appreciation of the lessons we have learned, the story of how we got here “has no point.”

Future science historians will perhaps insist on assessing Weinberg’s own work in light of the standards of his times. But even if viewed in light of future knowledge, there’s no doubt that Weinberg’s achievements will remain in the realm of the Herculean. Or the titanic.



 Tom Siegfried is a contributing correspondent. 

He was editor in chief of Science News from 2007 to 2012 

and managing editor from 2014 to 2017.


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