Why is there anytthing at all? (Introduction)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Tuesday, September 09, 2008, 15:53 (5918 days ago) @ David Turell

Personally I rather hope that the Higgs boson is not found, since this will mean that the current "standard model" of particle physics, and associated big bangery, are all wrong and everyone will have to get back to the drawing board. - What has always seemed wrong to me in modern physics, since I first studied the subject fifty years ago, is its continued dependence on ancient Greek continuum geometry and real-number arithmetic. Instead what needs to be developed is some new basis for describing phenomena which initially makes no use of these concepts, but which derives them as a limiting result when dealing with the human and larger scales. To some extent quantum theory does this, but it is still formulated using the methods of continuum mathematics (e.g. Schrodinger's equation). - The work of Lee Smolin and his friends on quantum gravity seems to me to point in the right sort of direction, but I suspect there is a long way yet to go. When the right approach is eventually found it will be a radical paradigm shift and a lot of misapprehensions will fall away. These are of course just my personal intuitions based on what I've read and thought about the subject over the years. I'm not a prophet, I could be quite wrong. (Back in the fifties I thought Fred Hoyle's Steady State theory had a lot going for it.)