Reference: http://pirsa.org/displayFlash.php?id=13080001
Perimeter Institute and the crisis in modern physics also see http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/09/05/perimeter-institute-and-the-crisis-in-modern-physics/ Theoretical physics is at a crossroads right now…In a sense we’ve entered a very deep crisis. You may have heard of some of these models…There’ve been grand unified models, there’ve been super-symmetric models, super-string models, loop quantum gravity models… Well, nature turns out to be simpler than all of these models. If you ask most theorists working on particle physics, they’re in a state of confusion. The extensions of the standard model, like grand unified theories, they were supposed to simplify it. But in fact they made it more complicated. The number of parameters in the standard model is about 18. The number in grand unified theories is typically 100. In super-symmetric theories, the minimum is 120. And as you may have heard, string theory seems to predict 10 to the power of 1,000 different possible laws of physics. It’s called the multiverse. It’s the ultimate catastrophe: that theoretical physics has led to this crazy situation where the physicists are utterly confused and seem not to have any predictions at all. The data just fits so perfectly with Perimeter’s mission. If it had turned out to be complicated and messy — 10 new particles at CERN and all kinds of funny evidence for models of inflation and stuff in the sky — one would have to say the future of theoretical physics does look pretty messy and complicated. Perimeter would be just one of 100 such institutes. But given that everything turned out to be very simple, yet extremely puzzling — puzzling in its simplicity — it’s just perfect for what Perimeter’s here to do. We have to get people to try to find the new principles that will explain the simplicity LENR is coming along at just the right time to take Physics to the next level.
