John Horgan (journalist): Force

John Horgan (journalist) is American science journalist. Explore interesting quotes on force.
John Horgan (journalist): 28 quotes0 likes

“Einstein had drawn attention to nonlocality in 1935 in an effort to show that quantum mechanics must be flawed. …Einstein proposed a thought experiment—now called the EPR experiment—involving two particles that spring from a common source and fly in opposite directions.
According to the standard model of quantum mechanics, neither particle has a definite position or momentum before it is measured; but by measuring the momentum of one particle, the physicist instantaneously forces the other particle to assume a fixed position… Deriding this effect as "spooky action at a distance," Einstein argued that it violated both common sense and his own theory of special relativity, which prohibits the propagation of effects faster than the speed of light; quantum mechanics must therefore be an incomplete theory. In 1980, however, a group of French physicists carried out a version of the EPR experiment and showed that it did indeed give rise to spooky action.”

John Horgan (journalist)

The reason that the experiment does not violate special relativity is that one cannot exploit nonlocality to transmit information.
Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 83

“In Theories of Everything… John Barrow argued that Gödel's incompleteness theorem undermines the very notion of a complete theory of nature. Gödel established that any moderately complex system of axioms inevitably raises questions that cannot be answered about the axioms. The implication is that any theory will always have loose ends. Barrow also pointed out that a unified theory of particle physics would not really be a theory of everything, but only a theory of all particles and forces. The theory would have little or nothing to say about phenomena that make our lives meaningful, such as love or beauty.”

John Horgan (journalist)

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 66

“Our descendants will learn much more about nature, and they will invent gadgets even cooler than smart phones. But their scientific version of reality will resemble ours, for two reasons: First, ours… is in many respects true; most new knowledge will merely extend and fill in our current maps of reality rather than forcing radical revisions. Second, some major remaining mysteries—Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?—might be unsolvable.”

John Horgan (journalist)

“In the early 1990s, I came to suspect that the quest for a unified theory is religious rather than scientific. Physicists want to show that all things came from one thing: a force, or essence, or membrane wriggling in eleven dimensions, or something that manifests perfect mathematical symmetry. In their search for this primordial symmetry, however, physicists have gone off the deep end, postulating particles and energies and dimensions whose existence can never be experimentally verified.”

John Horgan (journalist)

(2002 wager, 18 year duration) [Bet 12 (John Horgan vs. Michio Kaku), longbets.org, http://longbets.org/12/]