Surprises in the Physical Realm--UNCERTAINTY, the Unk-Unk's of Nature
There are two wonderful books by Peierls on Surprises in Theoretical Physics. Here I want to mention some surprises in discoveries. These surprises are examples of uncertainty where we haven't a clue ahead of time.
What inspires this note is the frustrations in finding new physics at the Large Hadron Collider. There are lots of proposals and indicators of new physics, but so far nothing has proved out to be beyond the Standard Model. There are phenomena such as dark matter/energy that defy our understanding, and I suspect they fully qualify as surprises. Historically, I think of I. I. Rabi's comment, when the particle that turned out to be the pion, so revealing that the earlier pion candidate was in fact the unexpected muon (a heavy electron): Who ordered that?
CP violation in K decay, that you expected only three pion decay but there was a small fraction of the CP violating two pion decay, or the original discovery of parity violation in K decay surely qualify as such surprises. The various topological structures in two dimensional materials (actually layered materials) that led to the quantum Hall effect, and the fractional Hall effect, and other such structures, were not expected. Many discoveries are anticipated, such as the W/Z and Higgs bosons, and many of the later elementary particles are also anticipated albeit with no assurance that such anticipation will prove out. The three degree Kelvin blackbody radiation was at first thought to be a matter of crap in the antennas; there may have been speculation in cosmology (Dicke?), but for the discoverers it was a surprise.
My point here is that some discoveries are beyond the pale of anticipation, although once they are made;discovered there may well be promptly-developed explanations for them. We had hints of the Lamb shift, but those hints were not enough to force calculation of their size--until Lamb actually measured the shift, and soon after Bethe made a back of the envelope (albeit a large and beautiful envelope) calculation that was quite good.
Now some of the time we find unanticipated phenomena, such as superconductivity, and only after decades do we have a sense of why these surprises actually make sense.
What inspires this note is the frustrations in finding new physics at the Large Hadron Collider. There are lots of proposals and indicators of new physics, but so far nothing has proved out to be beyond the Standard Model. There are phenomena such as dark matter/energy that defy our understanding, and I suspect they fully qualify as surprises. Historically, I think of I. I. Rabi's comment, when the particle that turned out to be the pion, so revealing that the earlier pion candidate was in fact the unexpected muon (a heavy electron): Who ordered that?
CP violation in K decay, that you expected only three pion decay but there was a small fraction of the CP violating two pion decay, or the original discovery of parity violation in K decay surely qualify as such surprises. The various topological structures in two dimensional materials (actually layered materials) that led to the quantum Hall effect, and the fractional Hall effect, and other such structures, were not expected. Many discoveries are anticipated, such as the W/Z and Higgs bosons, and many of the later elementary particles are also anticipated albeit with no assurance that such anticipation will prove out. The three degree Kelvin blackbody radiation was at first thought to be a matter of crap in the antennas; there may have been speculation in cosmology (Dicke?), but for the discoverers it was a surprise.
My point here is that some discoveries are beyond the pale of anticipation, although once they are made;discovered there may well be promptly-developed explanations for them. We had hints of the Lamb shift, but those hints were not enough to force calculation of their size--until Lamb actually measured the shift, and soon after Bethe made a back of the envelope (albeit a large and beautiful envelope) calculation that was quite good.
Now some of the time we find unanticipated phenomena, such as superconductivity, and only after decades do we have a sense of why these surprises actually make sense.
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