Related papers: The Emperor's Last Clothes?
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
After more than a century since its birth, Quantum Theory still eludes our understanding. If asked to describe it, we have to resort to abstract and ad hoc principles about complex Hilbert spaces. How is it possible that a fundamental…
While the Standard Model of particle physics is a very successful theory and has been tested to hold with great precision in numerous experiments, it still leaves a number of open questions. Among those are the matter-antimatter asymmetry…
The progress of Particle Physics is closely linked to the progress in the understanding of the fundamental constants, like the finestructure constant, the mass of the electron or nucleon, or the electroweak mixing angle. The relation…
String theory and supersymmetry are theoretical ideas that go beyond the standard model of particle physics and show promise for unifying all forces. After a brief introduction to supersymmetry, we discuss the prospects for its experimental…
Many advances in physics have in common that some idea which was previously accepted as fundamental, general, and inescapable was subsequently seen to be consequent, special, and dispensable. The idea was not truly a general feature of the…
The currently accepted mathematical description of the fundamental constituents and interactions of matter is the Standard Model of particle physics. Its last missing particle, the famous Higgs boson, was observed at the Large Hadron…
Quantum foundations are still unsettled, with mixed effects on science and society. By now it should be possible to obtain consensus on at least one issue: Are the fundamental constituents fields or particles? As this paper shows,…
The Standard Model of particle physics encapsulates our current best understanding of physics at the smallest distances and highest energies. It incorporates Quantum Electrodynamics (the quantised version of Maxwell's electromagnetism) and…
There exist dozens of interpretations of quantum theory, but they do not seem to contribute much to understanding the theory. This paper attempts to clarify some issues that are discussed in those interpretations. The main keywords are:…
From what is known today about the elementary particles of matter, and the forces that control their behavior, it may be observed that still a host of obstacles must be overcome that are standing in the way of further progress of our…
There has been significant recent progress in observational cosmology. This, in turn, has provided an unprecedented picture of the early universe and its evolution. In this review I will present a (biased) view of how one can use these…
In the framework of special relativity, all particles are point-like or string-like. This nature of particles has caused the divergence difficulties in quantum field, string and superstring theories. In the framework of special relativity,…
If a wave function does not describe microscopic reality then what does? Reformulating quantum mechanics in path-integral terms leads to a notion of "precluded event" and thence to the proposal that quantal reality differs from classical…
We believe that the hypothesis `it from bit' originates from the assumption that probabilities have a fundamental, irremovable status in quantum theory. We argue against this assumption and highlight four well-known reformulations /…
We consider a model of an elementary particle as a 2 + 1 dimensional brane evolving in a 3 + 1 dimensional space. Introducing gauge fields that live in the brane as well as normal surface tension can lead to a stable "elementary particle"…
There is noticeable consensus among physicists and philosophers that only gauge-invariant quantities can be physically real. However, this insight that physical quantities must be gauge-invariant is not well-reflected in standard approaches…
I present a concise review of where we stand in particle physics today. First, I will discuss the status of the Standard Model, its open problems and the expected answers from the LHC. Then I will briefly review the avenues for New Physics…
The status of string theory is reviewed, and major recent developments - especially those in going beyond perturbation theory in the string theory and quantum field theory frameworks - are discussed. This analysis helps better understand…
Quantum theory makes the most accurate empirical predictions and yet it lacks simple, comprehensible physical principles from which the theory can be uniquely derived. A broad class of probabilistic theories exist which all share some…