Category Archives: Uncategorized
Temporal relationalism
Lee Smolin
Because of the non-locality of quantum entanglement, realist approaches to completing quantum mechanics have implications for our conception of space. Quantum gravity also is expected to predict phenomena in which the locality of classical spacetime is modified or disordered. It is then possible that the right quantum theory of gravity will also be a completion of quantum mechanics in which the foundational puzzles in both are addressed together. I review here the results of a program, developed with Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Marina Cortes and other collaborators, which aims to do just that. The results so far include energetic causal set models, time asymmetric extensions of general relativity and relational hidden variables theories, including real ensemble approaches to quantum mechanics. These models share two assumptions: that physics is relational and that time and causality are fundamental.
Read more at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.12468.pdf
Physics Needs Philosophy. Philosophy Needs Physics
Carlo Rovelli
Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had damaging effects on the fertility of science. I also suggest that recent important empirical results, such as the detection of the Higgs particle and gravitational waves, and the failure to detect supersymmetry where many expected to find it, question the validity of certain philosophical assumptions common among theoretical physicists, inviting us to engage in a clearer philosophical reflection on scientific method.
Read more at https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1805/1805.10602.pdf
Is Dark Matter Made of Primordial Black Holes?
Astronomers studying the motions of galaxies and the character of the cosmic microwave background radiation came to realize in the last century that most of the matter in the universe was not visible. About 84% of the matter in the cosmos is dark matter, much of it located in halos around galaxies. It was dubbed dark matter because it does not emit light, but it is also mysterious: it is not composed of atoms or their usual constituents like electrons and protons.
Meanwhile, astronomers have observed the effects of black holes and recently even detected gravitational waves from a pair of merging black holes. Black holes usually are formed in the explosive death of massive stars, a process that can take many hundreds of millions of years as a star coalesces from ambient gas, evolves and finally dies. Some black holes are inferred to exist in the early universe, but there is probably is not enough time in the early universe for the normal formation process to occur. Some alternative methods have been proposed, like the direct collapse of primordial gas or processes associated with cosmic inflation, and many of these primordial black holes could have been made.
CfA astronomer Qirong Zhu led a group of four scientists investigating the possibility that today’s dark matter is composed of primordial black holes, following up on previously published suggestions. If galaxy halos are made of black holes, they should have a different density distribution than halos made of exotic particles. There are some other differences as well – black hole halos are expected to form earlier in a galaxy’s evolution than do some other kinds of halos. The scientists suggest that looking at the stars in the halos of faint dwarf galaxies can probe these effects because dwarf galaxies are small and faint (they shine with a mere few thousand solar luminosities) where slight effects can be more easily spotted. The team ran a set of computer simulations to test whether dwarf galaxy halos might reveal the presence of primordial black holes, and they find that they could: interactions between stars and primordial halo black holes should slightly alter the sizes of the stellar distributions. The astronomers also conclude that such black holes would need to have masses between about two and fourteen solar masses, right in the expected range for these exotic objects (although smaller than the black holes recently spotted by gravitational wave detectors) and comparable to the conclusions of other studies. The team emphasizes, however, that all the models are still inconclusive and the nature of dark matter remains elusive.
Reference(s):
“Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Constraints from Compact Ultra-faint Dwarfs,” Qirong Zhu, Eugene Vasiliev, Yuexing Li, and Yipeng Jing, MNRAS 476, 2, 2018 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05032)
Exploring evidence of interaction between dark energy and dark matter
One of the most important problems of theoretical physics is to explain the fact that the universe is in a phase of accelerated expansion. Since 1998 the physical origin of cosmic acceleration remains a deep mystery. According to general relativity (GR), if the universe is filled with ordinary matter or radiation, the two known constituents of the universe, gravity should slow the expansion. Since the expansion is speeding up, we are faced with two possibilities, either of which would have profound implications for our understanding of the cosmos and of the laws of physics. The first is that 75% of the energy density of the universe exists in a new form with large negative pressure, called dark energy (DE). The other possibility is that GR breaks down on cosmological scales and must be replaced with a more complete theory of gravity. In this paper we consider the first option. The cosmological constant, the simplest explanation of accelerated expansion, has a checkered history having been invoked and subsequently withdrawn several times before. In quantum field theory, we estimate the value of the cosmological constant as the zero-point energy with a short-cut scale, for example the Planck scale, which results in an excessively greater value than the observational results….
read more at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03296.pdf
