Home
About
Us
People
Conferences
FAQ
Nonlinear Science
Science Education
Science
and Religion
Resources
Giving and Partnerships
|
FRANK POTTER INTERVIEW
February, 2007
What attracted you to physics?
Until I was a junior as an EE major at Caltech, I always wanted to be
an
engineer. From grade 7 onwards, I was repairing tube radios and TVs for
the family and for neighbors. In those days of the late 1950s and early
1960s, one simply had to open the back and tap some of the tubes with a
pencil and observe and listen. The culprit would usually reveal itself
by a corresponding sound volume change or a different roll of the
vertical stabilization, and then I would take the marginal tubes to the
tube tester at a local store to double check their operating behavior.
So I learned the importance of cause-and-effect versus simply having a
correlation pretty well. Also, I picked up some electronic kits for
building a crystal radio and other very simple circuits. But I really
should have taken the clue to become a physicist when I was a senior in
high school when, very early in the school year, my Physics teacher
wanted me to take the regional physics exam for Southern California
high school students. Surprisingly, I finished high enough on this
regional exam to receive an automatic A grade for both semesters of
high school Physics. However, I did all the Physics class work for the
next 8 months anyway, because I wanted to really learn physics.
My
enthusiasm for physics and my gradual change-over to physics as a
career was strongly stimulated by Richard Feynman at Caltech. Along
with another Caltech student, I had the opportunity to go with him to
his physics lectures at Hughes Malibu one afternoon each week. The
discussions of physics and other things on the road to and from Malibu
as well as his two-hour lectures were a great inspiration. For several
years I had this opportunity for which I have been ever thankful. I
learned to have a very positive approach toward struggling with physics
ideas, and I also learned how little I understood when compared to one
of the great theoretical physicists of the 20th century. The crossover
from EE to physics was difficult for me, but Prof. Feynman encouraged
me by saying that I seemed to think more like a physicist than an
engineer, and then he was kind enough to recommend me for graduate
study in physics.
As a physicist, my weakest abilities lie in formal
mathematical details, a real handicap because mathematics is the
language of physics. However, about 10 years after earning a Ph.D. in
Physics under the incredibly precise x-ray experimentalist K. DasGupta,
I began thinking about how I would make the physical world from
scratch. So I developed a feedback type of mechanism for particle
motion, with the electron sending out feedback signals and the vacuum
acting as a transponder, etc., and, to my surprise, I was able to
derive special relativity and could make a strong connection to
Feynman's path integral approach to quantum mechanics. In better words,
I had developed a fundamental approach to physics that might be the
origin of the laws of classical and quantum mechanics! I was able to
understand that each type of fundamental particle in my approach must
be geometrically unique, but when I examined the Standard Model of
leptons and quarks, no such geometrical information was included.
So I
spent years trying to re-derive the Standard Model from pure geometry,
and by the early 1990s I had succeeded, and I could predict two new,
undiscovered quarks that should make their appearance in the Large
Hadron Collider in early 2008. My geometrical approach to leptons and
quarks resolved many questions that the Standard Model does not answer
in its present interpretation, but physicists have not yet accepted my
modification because it uses finite subgroups of the Standard Model
gauge group, an unexpected twist that suggests that spacetime is
discrete instead of continuous. Until I achieved this new approach to
the leptons and quarks, I considered myself a marginal physicist at
best. Now I really enjoy doing physics and struggling to understand the
behavior of Nature. My approach to the leptons and quarks may be right
or may be wrong, but I know that I can tackle the hard problems if I
put my mind to them. And I learned how to do this struggle by being
part of the Caltech environment of the 1960s. For me, it has taken
almost a lifetime to learn what "thinking like a physicist" actually
means!
You were at Caltech
in the 1960s
when there were many famous physicists on the faculty and many others
who were on the verge of becoming famous. What was that like?
As freshman undergraduates, we knew about some of the famous names on
campus, for we had met them at freshman orientation at which we also
learned that a B grade would be considered very good because few A
grades would be given. Otherwise, they seemed like normal people. After
a few years at Caltech, I think that our reverence for their abilities
grew with each passing year. I remember Nobel Prize winners Carl
Anderson and Linus Pauling very well. Pauling would give every third
introductory Chemistry lecture, and he would end each class with a
calculation for which he would pull off his slide rule tie clasp to
calculate the result! And Pauling would occasionally roam through
our Chem lab looking for students to work on some of his many research
projects. Anderson, who had discovered the positron 30 years earlier,
could be seen in the hallways always talking to students, and he came
through the Physics Advanced Lab many times to talk to us. Then there
was Murray Gell-Mann, whom I never saw except at the Physics Department
Colloquium talks, and Jesse Greenstein, the astronomer, whose voice
could be heard in the hallways and who came to the astronomy related
Colloquium talks. Carver Meade from EE was always around. He helped
design the first microprocessor, the first artificial eye, and was the
first to publish a paper on the possibility of a discrete spacetime.
Amnon Yariv was there also, the person whose quantum electronics book
essentially transformed quantum mechanics for use by engineers working
on lasers. All of them sat in the front row at the Physics Colloquium
talks. Another physicist, working on biological problems, was Max
Delbrück, a physics colleague of Werner Heisenberg before WWII.
Delbrück later was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with
mutants, particularly his creation of hundreds of mutant strains in the
fungus Phycomyces, on which with three photo-mutants I did a 10 weeks
research project as a Junior.
All these famous people were also in the
Caltech environment when I was there as an undergraduate. Then Feynman
was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 and Gell-Mann in 1967. The campus
was buzzing with rumors each Fall. In the Physics Department the
emphasis was on particle physics, also called high energy physics, and
the majority of the Physics faculty were doing research at the
frontiers of particle physics. Almost all the visiting faculty were
particle physicists. Paul Dirac was there one year, and many other well
known physicists came by to give Colloquium talks or visit for a
quarter or more. Various pieces of the Standard Model of quarks and
leptons were always being discussed. Several co-discoverers of quarks,
Yuval Ne'eman and George Zweig come to mind, but they were about to
leave or to switch to biological research problems. Of course Rudolf
Mössbauer was there as were many more future Nobel Prize winners,
including William Fowler, Roger Sperry, the split-brain physiologist,
and my classmate Doug Osheroff, whom I knew only as a fellow student in
a few classes. Other fellow students whom I knew and who have become
famous in their fields are mathematicians Robert J. McEliece and
Michael Aschbacher, the former in coding theory and the latter in
finite simple groups.
We all loved the challenges hurled at us each
week by the instructors, just pouring on the workload as if we could
drink water from a firehose! All the famous faculty and visitors made
the campus come alive with the desire to learn. These famous people
often taught the beginning classes. Some were good teachers, others
were inspirational teachers. Their greatest effect on us may have been
having an open door to their offices so that an undergraduate could
walk in anytime to ask questions or to get equipment to do a
self-designed experiment. I took advantage of this unique opportunity
many times while a student at Caltech. I also had the unique
opportunity to work during several summers at UCLA for Nobel Prize
winner Willard Libby and for Edward Teller on fascinating projects, but
that is another story.
I suspect that many more famous and
to-become-famous people were at Caltech during the 1960s, but I tend to
forget most of the past and concentrate on the present. It's a habit I
picked up from Richard Feynman, although he denied revealing it. I had
heard him say that he wished that he could forget how he had previously
solved a problem for then he would be free to find a new approach to a
solution. To this day, my physics colleagues do not understand why I
take so long to reach a conclusion about something I must have analyzed
numerous times, but I start from ground zero each time whereas they
recall what they did before. I think my way is quite exciting and often
leads to new questions. Many theoretical physicists say that finding a
new and appropriate question to think about is the most difficult
aspect of doing physics. I do not have their difficulty, for I have
always had an abundance of fascinating research questions to
ponder.
Why are you not
working on some
aspect of string cosmology at this time?
I have never worked on string cosmology, but I am aware of several of
its features. However, I do not think that superstrings nor
string cosmology are required in order to better understand the
Universe and its cosmology. Let me tell you why. A physics colleague
Howard G. Preston and I have developed a new approach to gravitation
from Einstein's general theory of relativity (GTR) which we now call
quantum celestial mechanics (QCM). QCM dictates that all
gravitationally bound systems are in quantization states determined by
two physical quantities only: the total mass of the system and its
total angular momentum. We know that QCM works for the satellites of
the Jovian planets and it works for the Solar System when the
dominating angular momentum of the Oort Cloud is taken into account.
That is, QCM predicts particular equilibrium radial distances for
planetary orbits whereas Newtonian gravitation says that all orbits are
equilibrium orbits. Our linear regression fit for the planetary orbits
is better than 0.999! Consequently, there is a repulsive effect from
gravitation that can be checked in a table top experiment.
We also have
shown that QCM works for more than
100 galaxies, essentially for any galaxy where modified Newtonian
gravity (MOND) applies. No 'dark matter' is required to keep the fast
revolving stars from flying off into space because all the disk stars
are in the same QCM energy quantization state, for example. One only
needs the total baryonic mass of a galaxy and its total angular
momentum in order to determine the galactic quantization states. Our
recent 2007 paper also demonstrates that QCM applies successfully where
MOND fails, for clusters of galaxies, where more than 95% of the
baryonic mass is plasma. Now I come to the almost unbelievable part of
QCM. The angular momentum contribution leads to a repulsive
gravitational potential term in addition to the normal attractive
gravitational potential! When QCM is applied to the
Universe, QCM says that light from distant sources is actually
suffering a gravitational redshift because the distant clock rates are
slower than our observer clock rates. What people have been calling a
cosmological redshift for light, i.e., attributed to an expansion of
space during the light transit time, is really a gravitational redshift
because QCM says that the sources are in a more negative gravitational
potential that the observer. And each and every observer experiences
this same gravitational redshift effect. We even derived a new Hubble
relation that agrees remarkably well with the Supernovae 1A data.
There
is no need for an accelerated inflationary Big Bang and no need for
'dark energy'. QCM in its present interior metric approximation for a
static Universe predicts reasonable results. Our Universe has always
been in equilibrium -so there is no horizon problem - but we cannot see
it all. There is more Universe beyond the farthest we can presently
see. Now you may appreciate why I do not think that string cosmology is
fundamental to understanding the Universe.
However, there is one more
reason for me to ignore string cosmology. The Universe is
4-dimensional, not 10-dimensional. In 2006 I wrote a paper connecting
my geometrical approach to leptons and quarks, which involves
particular finite subgroups of the continuous gauge group SU(3)c x
SU(2)L x U(1)Y of the Standard Model, to the superstring approach. I
connected my 4-D discrete spacetime for leptons and quarks to a
superstring discrete10-D spacetime via icosians and showed how the
particular finite subgroup of E8 x E8 called Weyl E8 x Weyl E8 is the
unique connection. The overall result is that Nature needs only a 4-D
discrete spacetime to unify the interactions and that the nice
mathematics in 10 or more dimensions simply mimics the 4-D results. If
the b' quark shows itself at around 80 - 100 GeV in the Large Hadron
Collider in 2008 as predicted by my geometric approach, then all my
struggles over the past two decades will be the beginning of several
decades of new physics research! There will also be an end to
speculations about many different universes, about time travel, and
about the evolution of fundamental constants, for fundamental
mathematics will dictate the fundamental physics!
One occasionally
hears comments
to the effect that Nature is becoming more resistant to our efforts. Is
it your sense that the pace of discovery in fundamental physics is
slowing down?
I certainly do not see any slowing down in experimental physics.
Nanotechnology and other new experimental regimes seem to be gathering
momentum. As far as my own theoretical research, I have many
fundamental areas to investigate. And when the Large Hadron Collider
turns on completely this Fall of 2007, I expect that new particles will
be discovered and that some expected particles will not be discovered!
I think that the Higgs, for example, is not needed and will not show
up. My b' quark has the same decay signature into a b quark and a
photon as would a Higgs, so I am realizing that most physicists will
think that the Higgs has been discovered, until the spin state of the
decaying particle is determined. What a surprise the new discovery
promises to be!
Fundamental problems for the 40% of physicists who work
in condensed matter physics are certainly not being exhausted.
But I do
agree that the 25 years after WWII were special years for physics
research, when there was a flurry of experimental and theoretical
activities encouraged by ample government funding and a backlog of
expertise delayed by the war, and now research has returned to normal
again. I suppose the past few decades of physics can be compared to the
present apparent lull in home sales after the first five years of this
millennium when the U.S. housing market went crazy in many parts of the
country and now has returned to normal. I suppose those who do not
remember the normal times in the past are destined to suffer through
them in the present! Besides, recent astrophysics problems have
stimulated new fundamental physics research such as MOND and our QCM
approach, such as questions about star synthesis and the presence of
antimatter in galactic jets, etc. The new telescopes promise to bring
us even more mysteries that may require new physics. The new tools to
investigate the nanoscale and smaller will certainly bring new
questions. As you can sense, I am very optimistic about the future of
fundamental physics, more so now than ever in my past.
Last January 2006
Time magazine
had a cover story captioned "IS AMERICA FLUNKING SCIENCE? Our
superiority was once the envy of the world. But are we slacking off
just as other countries are getting stronger?" It seems that science in
the U.S. is going the way of grape picking, that is, it is increasingly
being left to people who weren't born in this country. What are your
thoughts in this regard?
Practically all Americans live and think in ways that do not require
any real understanding of science. Instead, we have a long history of
inventiveness, of finding a way to make a task easier or using a method
that is faster than before. But we seem to forget that the world has
become extremely competitive even in our strong suit of invention. For
example, during our first 150 years, agriculture was foremost in
America's heartbeat. But farmers did not need to learn much science.
They did not need to know the physics behind tilling the soil - how
breaking up the soil reduced capillary action and the subsequent water
evaporation. They simply learned how to do it with better and better
tools. In spite of science breakthroughs, we humans are intuitive.
Science conflicts with intuition, so learning science is a difficult
task. No one has yet invented an easy way to learn physics, for
example. However, it is estimated that less than 10% of Americans
historically have created the new ways and the new products, and there
is no reason to think that this 10% fraction has diminished. Now,
regarding science research itself, there seems to be some correlation,
if not cause and effect, between fundamental science funding and the
rate of the discovery of new scientific results.
America is still
a strong competitor, but the Europeans collectively have surpassed us.
The question becomes: Can the few percent of dedicated Americans in
science compete favorably with the world? I think so, but we will all
find out in the next few decades. Actually, I am more worried about
competing in engineering than in science. I am also worried about the
need for better teachers of science in grades K-12, particularly in
high school physics. Learning to be an engineer is a tough struggle,
but the monetary rewards tend to be greater than being a scientist.
Nevertheless, the decline of American born physical science and
engineering majors may indicate that the struggle to learn science and
engineering and mathematics may be too tough for the new American
psyche that now desires the opportunity for quick riches and/or quick
fame.
45% of Americans
believe that
"God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the
last 10,000 years," 84% of Americans believe in miracles, and 40% of
Americans believe the world will come to an end within their lifetime.
At the very least these figures seem to imply a profound disconnect
between science and religion. In your opinion, is this partly
responsible for the fact that fewer students are serious about pursuing
careers in science?
In most European countries, religion and government are tied together
in a healthy relationship, although it's obvious that religion plays a
very minor role in the politics and in the government decision-making.
Here in America, in contrast, the Constitution states that it is our
right to be free from religion, but in actual practice we have federal
representatives who often invoke religious arguments. My experiences
tell me that religious physicists are just as curious and capable of
discovering and discussing Nature's secrets as any non-religious
physicist.
Let's consider one extreme. In the ideal case, scientific
results and their interpretations are expected to be independent of
personal biases. In practice, we scientists are surely biased in our
selection of which questions to tackle, in the methods we use to
uncover Nature's answers, and in the ways we interpret those answers.
However, the scientific community as a whole does an excellent service
of ensuring that the end results are as close to the ideal case as
possible. In better words, science is unique in human endeavors because
Nature itself is the final judge of scientific truth, not some
committee.
With regard to students avoiding careers in science, I think
that many great students choose a non-science career because they
foresee the other career as interesting and it offers the opportunity
to make big money. Very few physicists make big money doing physics.
However, most of us physicists have a comfortable income and a good
family life. We are somewhat different than most people because we tend
to be skeptical about new ideas and methods until we understand them.
People say that we are often less sociable than most people - I don't
know whether that is a blessing or a detriment. We do not advertise our
profession very much because we know that to be a physicist takes a
special type of drive and enthusiasm for understanding the behavior of
Nature. But if you take a careful look around, you will find physicists
(and mathematicians and chemists) using some aspect of their physics
background in important roles in practically all human activities from
finance to sports to social behavior to teaching and to the development
of consumer products. What we probably do not need are more physicists
doing fundamental research, for we presently have an overabundance by
at least a factor of three in most research areas!
And finally, I think
that Americans can believe whatever they choose to believe about
miracles and humankind and our world's end. However, I am quite
disappointed that such a large fraction of Americans still hold on to
such beliefs that have been around for thousands of years in spite of
the tremendous increase in our scientific understanding of Nature. What
science teaching needs is a pedagogical method to make the science
"stick" in the minds of its students like the "stickiness" of Blue's
Clues or Sesame Street, but no such method exists today. I suppose that
I can only repeat that the laws of Nature are non-intuitive and it
takes a struggle, with persistence and guidance, to learn how to
properly apply them to the world.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
