The endless complexity of nature

Nature really can be a swirling, contradictory mess; her simplicity so often a facade propped up by savage complexity. While a well-honed theory can cut through to reveal perfect clarity, dig deeper and the facade slips leaving us once again holding an empty cup.

Never is this starker than at the cutting edge of physics. This page, for example – and indeed the computer upon which it was typed – shouldn’t exist. Nor, as it happens, should you be here to read it. You are very much testing the known laws of physics simply by having the audacity to exist.

According to current physics, matter and antimatter created at the Big Bang should have long since obliterated each other in a fit of energetic pique. If there were equal amounts of both, as the theories suggest, then everything should be in a perfect state of non-existence. Yet, quite plainly, it is not. Safe to say then there is an asymmetry in the universe – an imbalance between matter and antimatter.

Why this should be no one quite knows. There are theories of course but they need to be tested – tricky to do when there is so little antimatter on which to do the testing. Something CERN knows only too well – which is why they have invested heavily in new technology to produce more antimatter than we have ever had before.

Once again, a deeper dig will leave us holding an empty cup

But it will cost them – and more than just financially. Developing even a rudimentary handle on the nuances of matter and antimatter means, in all likelihood, we’ll have to abandon – or at least rethink – the central pillars of current physical law. Once again, a deeper dig will leave us holding an empty cup. This is, of course, incredibly exciting – empty cups can once again be filled by the brilliant physics minds of CERN and beyond with something new.

Yet, if and when this can be achieved, one can always go deeper and burrow into the mathematical bedrock of the understanding. In the 60’s, physicist Eugene Wigner wrote an essay called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. In it he essentially worries out loud as to why nature is so accurately described by mathematics. It is odd isn’t it? That the maths used to describe the interactions of, well, everything we have yet described should add up at all.

Perhaps matter and antimatter are simply signs of the underlying maths

Cosmologist Max Tegmark says he might know why. He thinks that external physical reality is not only described by mathematics, but that it is mathematics. It’s a mind warping idea, and one which I feel woefully inadequate to fully comprehend. This is why I adopt the humblest of positions when I suggest that it seems to me this is particularly relevant to antimatter. Perhaps matter and antimatter are simply signs of the underlying maths. The difference between the two is simply the charge – one positive and one negative. What is that if not the physical embodiment of abstraction? Maths as a physical entity – could that be the ultimate simplicity underlying it all?

Phil Prime, Editor