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ULTIMATE SIMPLICITY - ULTIMATE COMPLEXITY
The physicist's dream is that we will find a unified theory of all fundamental particles and the forces between them. Einstein unified space and time. We seek to unify relativity and quantum theory. The more than 100 different elements are built from only three different particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. At a deeper level the constituents are still three: up-quarks, down-quarks, and electrons. Unstable matter particles were discovered, together with neutrinos making a 3 x 4 table of 12 particles with different masses. Perhaps at a deeper level these are all different manifestations of a single "uniparticle" with an underlying simplicity, or with a symmetry that is broken, giving rise to that variety. Was the unification of electricity and magnetism a step towards a Grand Unification of the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces? Is the Higgs boson the key to the puzzle? That particle is simplicity itself, just a tiny piece of vacuum - no electric charge, no spin, just mass. It may be a key to the ultimate simplicity physicists seek.
If we could quantify complexity - put it on a scale - the brains of humans and other animals are the most complex things we know. Their hundreds of billions of interconnected neurons transmit signals, electrical and ions of different types in complex ever-changing patterns. Somehow - and this is called "the hard problem" - consciousness, self-awareness, feelings, emotions, emerge from this complexity. Somehow those brains arose from a single fertilized egg containing the coded instructions in one huge molecule, the twisted ladder of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid.
Can those brains ever really understand themselves? |