Last year Physics Today ran an essay competition called "Physics in 2116." The idea was to write a science article that might appear in Physics Today 100 years from now. Motivated largely by the enormous prize money, I entered the competition but, alas, mine was not among the winning entries. As the article itself is not really suitable as either a science fiction story or a nonfiction article, I am presenting it here for your amusement. Be sure to read the footnotes.
Improved theory
of quantum gravity
XNEWTON
has modified the current theory of quantum gravity and has proposed tests to be
carried out at the Center for Experimental Relativity.
ROBERT
SCHERRER
For
most of the 20th and 21st centuries, a quantum theory of
gravity remained an elusive goal. Much
of the problem lay with the difficulty of testing general relativity in the
strong field regime, and even weak-field tests were all but impossible to
verify in the laboratory. All of this
changed in 2077 with the detection of relic kiloton-mass black holes,[1]
and the discovery that they emitted Hawking radiation at a much lower rate than
originally predicted.[2]
While numerous theories of quantum
gravity were proposed in the wake of this discovery, it was the advent of
practical quantum computing in the past 20 years that led to the first genuine
breakthroughs. Modern computer programs
capable of doing theoretical physics can trace their roots all of way back to
Hod Lipson’s Eureqa program at the turn of the 21st century.[3] With the development of deep-learning
programs running on quantum computers, these engines achieved the ability to
generate physical theories to account for any given set of input data. XGALILEO, the precursor to XNEWTON at the Tata
Institute for AI Theoretical Physics (TIAITP) in Mumbai, was the first to
produce a theory of quantum gravity that explained the modified Hawking
radiation rate. This new theory allowed
scientists to understand the processes that occurred in the very early
universe, well above the Planck energy.
As Padma Gupta at TIAITP explains,
“With access to all of the world’s published experimental data, XNEWTON is
always updating its theoretical models.
Recently, some new set of data – and we’re not really sure which data
this was – caused a significant change in its model for quantum gravity. XNEWTON has now proposed a number of
experimental tests of the new theory, and we’ll send those over to the Center
for Experimental Relativity (CER) so they can set up the experiments. Of course, we’ll follow the Melbourne
Protocol – nobody wants a repeat of the Princeton disaster.” [4] (The Melbourne Protocol prohibits direct
control by a deep-learning computer program of experiments proposed by that
same program.[5] It was instituted following the results of
the insertion of malicious code into XGALILEO in 2103.)
The Center for Experimental
Relativity is located at the L2 Earth-Sun Lagrange point. The heart of the laboratory consists of two
black holes, with masses of 1.2 million kilograms and 1.4 million kilograms, respectively,
orbiting their common center of mass. At
a separation of 1 cm, the period of the orbit is 0.5 seconds. The two black holes carry small electric charges
of opposite sign. “This serves a dual purpose,” explains CER Director Tobias
Schmidt. “It allows for electromagnetic
confinement of the black holes, and by measuring the oscillating electric field
near the black holes we can determine their trajectories with exquisite
precision.”
FIGURE
1. THE CENTER FOR EXPERIMENTAL RELATIVITY
is
located at the L2 Earth-Sun Lagrange point. (Courtesy of NASA.)
The
Center for Experimental Relativity relocated into space six years ago from its
original site in Potsdam following the public outcry over the loss of one of
its black holes. According to Schmidt, “Space
is really a much better location for these kinds of experiments. We’ve got a built-in vacuum for our
long-baseline interferometers, and we don’t have to support the black holes
against the Earth’s gravitational pull. And
just to be clear – we never lost a black hole.[6] When you ‘lose’ something, you don’t know
where it is. We know exactly what
happened to that black hole when our electromagnetic confinement system
unexpectedly failed. It sank down to the
center of the Earth’s core, where it poses no danger.” While the black hole continues to consume
material in the core, the rate is so slow that it will have no appreciable
effect on the Earth over many times the current age of the universe.
Once the results of the experiments
proposed by XNEWTON are relayed back to TIAITP, XNEWTON will determine whether
the new theory is supported or refuted by the new data. Over the past decade, XNEWTON’s success rate
has exceeded 90%; fewer than one in ten of its new proposed theories have been
falsified by subsequent experiments.
Gupta
and the other TIAITP computer scientists continue working to improve the
deep-learning software. “Our aim is to
drive the success rate for new theories above 99%,” says Gupta. She rejects recent claims that XNEWTON has
made human theoretical physicists redundant.
“Theorists? Of course we still
need them,” she says. “We need people to
interpret XNEWTON’s theoretical constructions and explain them to the rest of
the scientific community. But if you’re
talking about human physicists coming up with original theories on their own –
of course that’s obsolete now. Computers
just do some things better than we do, and we’ve had no trouble delegating
those responsibilities to them. Do we
still do arithmetic with pencil and paper? Or drive our own cars? Or let
people perform surgery? Or raise our own
children? And don’t forget the mess we
made of things when humans still ran the government.”
The experiments requested by XNEWTON
will begin next month, and scientists are expecting the new theory to be confirmed
or rejected by the end of the year.
Robert Scherrer is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37205, Independent Southern States
of America
[1] J.W.
Hoerner, et al., “Discovery of 106
kg relic black holes,” Nature DAI:033234882
(2077).
[2]M.J.
Javier and C.D. Maxvill, “Upper limit on the decay rate of kiloton-mass black
holes,” Phys. Rev. Lett. DAI:033255020
(2078).
[3] M.
Schmidt and H. Lipson, “Distilling free-form natural laws from experimental
data,” Science 324, 81 (2009).
[4]
T.M. Shannon, “When will central New Jersey be habitable again?” Physics Today 157, 23 (2104).
[5]
R.C. Washburn, “The Melbourne Protocol promises improved safety,” Nature DAI:098351844 (2108).
[6] R.
Gibson and D.W. Ricketts, “How did the Center for Experimental Relativity lose
a black hole?” Physics Today 163, 47 (2110).
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