"First Principles" of Cosmic Aesthetics: Beauty Is Simplicity

The development of fundamental physics has entered a turning point, with powerful experiments revealing the structure of the universe with unprecedented clarity, revising people's previous understanding of the physical world, whether from the large-scale world - the entire visible universe, or from the small scale. The world - tiny particles such as atoms, protons and neutrons, photons and electrons, more phenomena that cannot be fully explained by existing theories and increasingly obvious features of simplicity have been discovered, between the two extreme worlds of super-scale and micro-scale. The structures and motions of objects are very complex, and new experimental techniques allow people to enter the frontiers of quantum physics.

In terms of exploring the basic laws of nature, quantum physics has opened a door to high precision for people. As people master more cutting-edge technologies, human beings stand on the threshold of double breakthroughs in theory and experiment, theoretical innovation and technology. Breakthroughs have changed people's view of the world picture and constantly pushed forward the development of human civilization. The researchers of the Canadian Perimeter Institute are full of the belief of "willing to win" in the future of physics, and they have launched a series of popular science week activities to the public.

The University of Waterloo in Ontario held a series of lectures on physics. The theoretical physicist Neil Turok, director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics Perimeter, served as the first keynote speaker at the popular science report. One lecture focused on the concise universe. Why did the ideological revolution in physics explain the simplicity of the universe? How did some of the great mysteries of nature happen and how did they become the main subject of physicists' exploration?

The universe in which people live is actually very simple, as if people like to make simple things very complicated in their interpersonal interactions to make their own practices appear different, some physicists in cosmology theory put the world in which people live. The description is extremely complicated, how to return to the origin of things or the true state of affairs? It is really unnecessary to interpret the way of deliberately complicated. Turok, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, proposed in his lecture that the concise and concise features of the universe seem to contradict people's intuitive feelings, and in order to fully explain the natural Reality and complexity, people ponder scientific questions on a larger scale, physicists add new variables to equations, and novel physics are conceived. People will eventually discover what dark matter is, will find a "hiding place" for gravitational waves, etc. The existing theoretical models seem to have become more advanced and more complex.

Turok's principles show that this is not the case, that the universe is actually surprisingly concise and clear on the largest and smallest scales, however, how to fully explain the meaning of simplicity and certainty is more expected from physics The advent of the learning revolution. In an interview broadcast on the Discovery TV channel, Turok repeatedly emphasized the physical significance of simplicity, which has made important discoveries in recent decades, confirming a concise cosmic structure on the cosmic and quantum scales.

Astronomers have drawn a map of the entire sky on the largest scale - the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has restored the evolution of the universe with precise measurements. Our universe has been in the process of changing and expanding. The results of cosmological discoveries show that, The universe presents amazing simplicity and clarity, in other words, people don't have to be intimidated by advanced mathematics and extremely abstract mathematical symbols, people can correctly draw the structure of the universe, the geometry of the universe and the density of matter, etc., people Even a single number can substantially describe all objects in space. The results of the reasoning are fascinating, and the geometry of the universe can be described with just one number, which is even simpler than the numerical description of the structure of the simplest known hydrogen atom. The geometry of the hydrogen atom can be described by three numbers, and in the quantum world of the hydrogen atom, its characteristics can be described by the rotation of an electron along the orbit of a neutron. Smoothness is one of the basic characteristics of the universe, but the universe produces quantum fluctuations or fluctuations of small magnitude, and only a set of numbers is enough to describe the structure of the universe, which shows that the universe is the simplest structure known to people.

At the opposite end of the large-scale structure of the universe, physicists have also discovered the simplicity of particles when exploring the microscopic world of the Higgs particle, using the most complex and largest machine ever built by humans—the Large Hadron Collider, 2012 In 2009, physicists discovered the Higgs particle or the Higgs boson, which is of great significance in the history of science, and is described in the Standard Model of particle physics as a simple type of Higgs particle. Turok's view is that nature walks the path of a "minimum solution", giving particles mass, charge, etc., in the minimization mechanism that one imagines. When pondering a bizarre question: How does the universe speak to humans? People seem to be in a strange situation, with complex scenes flooding into people, and people's "strongest brains" can't help it. The universe actually showed people its simplicity, and in the past 100 years, the system of physics has become more and more complex, arbitrary and unpredictable, and the system of theories people constructed has become larger and larger than nature itself. for complex.