Searching for the Wrong Answers

The history of science is a long and winding road, but when we study it, we often take the straight and narrow path. Classes rarely touch on the dead ends and false starts that make up most of scientific history. In physics, the path often seems particularly linear, in part because it is dominated by big names—Copernicus established that the sun was at the center of the solar system, Galileo investigated the heliocentric model empirically, Newton codified basic laws of motion, Einstein realized that Newton’s laws broke down at very high speeds, and Heisenberg proved that uncertainty, not order, reigned at the smallest scales. In reality, of course, it took many more than five steps—and more than five (white, Western, and male) scientists—to get from a geocentric theory of the universe to quantum mechanics. But this linear trajectory also covers up something bigger: our mistakes.

As much as we’d like to avoid them, wrong answers are often more interesting and productive than right ones. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn argues that the history of science is marked by paradigm shifts, or periodic realizations that most of we thought we knew was wrong. A full paradigm shift usually takes decades or even centuries to complete, and often it’s an uphill battle the whole way. Copernicus’ new vision of the universe contradicted church doctrine, but he managed to avoid any controversy by conveniently dying soon after publishing his findings. Some of his successors, however, were burned at the stake for their heretical ideas, and Galileo was famously tried by the Inquisition and spent years under house arrest.

Generally, when scientists are comfortable with an existing paradigm they do not actively seek to disprove it. When American scientists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley set out to measure the speed of light in 1887, they expected their results to prove the existence of ether, the mysterious medium through which light waves were believed to propagate. Most types of waves do not exist without a medium through which to move—ocean waves propagate in water, sound waves in air—so it seemed logical that light waves would also be moving through a medium. Scientists believed that ether permeated space, and that the earth was racing through the mysterious substance in its orbit around the sun. The earth’s movement would produce an “ether wind” that would affect how fast beams of light traveled. Michelson and Morley built an incredibly accurate device called an interferometer to measure the minute changes in the speed of light caused by the ether wind.

Over and over again, they found no variation. The speed of light always came out the same—about 186,000 miles per second. Other scientists improved and repeated the experiment, but got the same results. Wrong answers kept piling up. Einstein’s breakthrough was realizing that it wasn’t the answer that was wrong, but the idea of ether itself. He argued that ether does not exist, light propagates in vacuum, and it always travels at 186,000 miles per second. Suddenly, all those wrong answers became right. It took decades, several papers, and many more ground-breaking experiments for Einstein’s new ideas to be confirmed, but eventually the theory of relativity became the new paradigm.

The progression of physics in the 20th century was remarkably quick. In 1905, Einstein published his first paper on relativity. Only 90 years later, physicists at Fermilab observed the top quark and filled in the last gap of the Standard Model, the set of equations that describes all the subatomic particles we have observed and their interactions. The Standard Model has held up remarkably well—in fact, no experimental evidence has ever contradicted it. Still, most physicists are convinced that it isn’t the whole story. For one, it has some fundamental flaws: it doesn’t describe gravity, and it doesn’t seem to apply to dark matter or dark energy, which together make up 95 percent of the universe. But in experiment after experiment, the Standard Model holds strong. Physics is in “crisis” because we are getting too many right answers.

Almost all hope we have of ever getting beyond the Standard Model rests on the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous particle accelerator scheduled to open in Switzerland later this year. It is very likely that we haven’t been able to see beyond the Standard Model because our current experiments cannot achieve energy scales that are high enough and that the LHC, which is seven times more powerful than our current accelerators, would solve the problem. But it remains possible that the LHC will not see anything out of the ordinary. It seems unlikely that physicists will ever admit that the Standard Model is the end of the road, especially considering its flaws. Unfortunately, it is possible that the experiments we need to perform to move beyond it are simply out of our reach.

High energy physics is eager for a paradigm shift that seems to be just beyond our grasp. Only time—and more experiments—will tell if it will come to pass. But for now, we should be encouraged that scientists are not resting on their laurels. If there is progress to be made, we’re going to make it. Now we just have to wait for the first wrong answer.

Elizabeth Wade is a Barnard College senior majoring in comparative literature. Fear of Physics runs alternate Mondays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com