• Question: If unified field theory was proved/found what effect would it have in your work?

    Asked by purplebug123 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      I don’t actually know what unified field theory is! Care to fill us in?

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      I went to a talk about this last month, and I found it fascinating, but as far as I could see, it wouldn’t affect my work at all!

      I’m not really a physicist, and I worry about things no smaller than a carbon atom, so sub-atomic particles and their interactions don’t worry me at all! We know that physics works – without the field theory, we just have quite a messy explanation for why it works. With it, it would be neater, but at the moment we just can’t make it fit. Just because we don’t have a neat theory for something, doesn’t mean we don’t understand it 🙂

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      None, the physics we use is based a lot on 19th century theory which is sufficient for what we do.

      But if a grand unified theory was found, then I imagine that could influence technology like advanced quantum computers or better ways of controlling matter (for building small things) and that might help us out. So it would be the consequences of the theory, and not the theory itself, that could be helpful.

Comments

  • Photo: purplebug123

    purplebug123 commented on :

    Unified field theory, if discovered, would allow us to think of fundemental forces and elementry particles in the terms of a single field. There is no accsepted theory, so it still remainst a sudject in need of reserch.

  • Photo: Adam

    Adam commented on :

    So something like that would be really useful for a lot of scientists, but only where each part broke down. I think the main bit is that we really don’t understand how Gravity and Quantum physics can interact since they’re so different. But that only becomes an issue when you get to the boundary between and everything goes fuzzy.

    So I don’t think it would affect my work much. It might allow us to understand spectra a bit better I guess but probably not.