|
|
SCIENCE STUDIES EVENTS
LAWS, SYMMETRIES AND REALITY
Jeeva Anandan
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of South Carolina
February 18, 2003
Tuesday, 12:30pm
Preston Seminar Room
The nearly four-century old paradigm of laws will be critically
examined. It will then be shown that the question of why the world is
quantum mechanical may be understood on the basis of the following
assumptions: (1) There are no causal laws, but only probabilities for
physical processes that are constrained by symmetries, and (2) reality is
not absolute but relational in the sense that an object exists only in
relation to another object that it interacts with. In particular, an
argument will be made for why there are complex probability amplitudes
for physical processes from which the quantum probabilities are obtained
by the Born rule. This argument generalizes the standard formulation of
quantum mechanics to include all possible terms in the action that are
allowed by the symmetries, but only the lowest order terms are
observable at the presently accessible energy scales, which is
consistent with observation.
 |
|
