Jokes Help Solve ‘Strange’ Science

By DYKES, Mervyn

To begin to get a handle on the unimaginable vastness and strangeness of the universe, physics focuses down to its tiniest sub- atomic components. A visiting genius made it look simple in Palmerston North’s Te Manawa this week. ——————– There is much more to the universe than meets the eye, said Nobel Physics laureate Professor Frank Wilczek in Palmerston North this week.

“There are a lot of great ideas coming together. Theories dealing with the nature of matter are being articulated which will be put to the test in the next few years.”

He said that in the late 20th century it was thought that the world was close to a full understanding of normal matter.

However, astronomers had discovered that “normal” matter made up only 5 percent of the universe as a whole. The rest was the mysterious dark matter (25 percent) and dark energy (70 percent) that were thought to hold everything together.

” ‘Empty’ space is anything but empty,” he said. “The entity that appears to us as empty space is in reality a very dynamic medium.”

Prof Wilczek, who was in Palmerston North to deliver the fourth Sir Neil Waters Lecture for the Massey University Foundation, received the Nobel Prize for work he did as a 21-year-old graduate student at Princeton.

He is known for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, a development considered of vital importance in understanding the theory how nature ties together quarks and other tiny pieces of matter.

“Over the course of the 20th century we have constructed a very successful fundamental theory of the behaviour of matter,” he said.

“Viewed from this perspective, the world looks very different from our everyday reality.”

His lecture, entitled The Universe is a Strange Place, packed out the meeting room at Te Manawa museum.

He outlined the developments in the understanding of the nature of matter in the 20th Century and then expounded developments which had expanded knowledge dramatically since then.

There were two approaches that could be taken when venturing into unknown areas such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which weren’t really dark at all, he said.

One was to experiment, but the disadvantage for the experimenters was in not knowing when they could expect to see something. Another method was to improve equations and maybe predict the presence of new forms of energy.

As an example he cited British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, who developed what was now known as the “Dirac equation”, describing the behaviour of fermions (subatomic particles) and which led to the prediction of the existence of antimatter.

Dirac shared the Nobel Prize in physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrodinger, “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”.

However, said Professor Wilczek, some equations were now so near perfect that to tamper with them risked degrading them.

His presentation also outlined efforts to develop a unified field theory that allowed all of the fundamental forces between elementary particles to be written in terms of a single field.

“I sometimes wonder, is nature teaching us or is nature teasing us. It is a very exciting time to be a physicist.”

In spite of the complex nature of the material he was presenting, Prof Wilczek was well received by the over-capacity audience which remained in good spirits throughout.

When he was presented with a plaque by the head of Massey University’s Institute of Fundamental Science, Prof Peter Derrick, he again displayed the sense of humour that had lightened the heavy going.

As he accepted the plaque he said: “I can assure you it will be displayed more prominently than the Nobel Prize Medal – which we are afraid people will steal.”

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(c) 2008 Evening Standard; Palmerston North, New Zealand. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.