The Future of Physics
Dennis Overbye of the Times had a beautiful article today about Dr. David Gross posing 25 questions about the future of physics. Gross, a recent Nobel Prize winner, talks heroically about the intertwined disciplines in which physicists are interested. He's talking to his “dream conference” of physicists, and he says the conference could have lasted a week — because they only took two and a half days, everyone had to talk very quickly, and there was no time for questions. He has a picture of a curve to describe the quality of talks: “If you have no time to talk at all, the quality is zero; if you talk for a month, the quality is pretty small…length of time for the highest quality talk is between 10 and 30 minutes — no more. … After five minutes, you either understand everything and don't want to hear any more, or you understand nothing and don't want to hear any more.”
He stresses that the most important product of knowledge is ignorance. Science is shaped by ignorance. So what questions do we still have to answer that are driving the field of physics? Gross got a lot of help from his fellow physicists in creating this list.
The first four questions:
1. How did the universe begin? how far back can we probe? can string theory determine what happened at the point at which the universe was created? was there a time before the big bang? is time itself an emergent concept — so that we're formulating the question incorrectly?
2. Dark matter — 25% of the universe is dark, and we don't know what it is. What is the nature of dark matter? how does dark matter interact with ordinary matter? is it wimpy (this must be a physicist term of art)? can we detect it in the laboratory? what's its distribution in the universe? what does this tell us about structure formation?
3. Dark energy — which is 70% of the universe — what is the nature of the dark energy? Is it just a cosmological constant?
4. Astrophysics. How do stars form? How do planets form? (this is the growth area in astrophysics, based on average age of the attendees) What is the frequency of planets that can support life?
Gross really seems to be having fun giving this talk.
So: for the cyberlaw/IP world, what 25 questions would we ask?