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# Assuming this universe...
- URL: https://balaustine.mymagic.page/assuming-this-universe/
- Published: 2012-08-15T11:39:20.000Z
- Updated: 2012-08-15T11:39:20.000Z
- Author: VM
- Tags: Uncategorized, bosons, compactification of extra dimensions, gluons, Millennium Prize, non-perturbative string theory, quantum chromodynamics, quantum field theory, Yang-Mills theory, #Migrated-1787483357778, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-08-23 11:09

Accomplished physicists I have met or spoken with in the last four months professed little agreement over which parts of physics were set-in-stone and which parts simply *largely*\-corroborated hypotheses. Here are some of them, with a short description of the dispute.

![](http://astrohep.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/what-is-string-theory-1.jpg "whaaa")

1. Bosons - Could be an emergent phenomenon arising out of fermion-fermion interaction; current definition could be a local encapsulation of special fermionic properties
2. Colour-confinement - 'Tis held that gluons, mediators of the colour force, cannot exist in isolation nor outside the hadrons (that are composed of quarks held together by gluons); while experimental proof of the [energy required to pull a quark free being much greater than the energy to pull a quark-antiquark pair out of vacuum](http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/quark.html?ref=balaustine.mymagic.page#c6) exists, denial of confinement hasn't yet been conclusively refuted (ref: [lattice formulation of string theory](http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-lat/9802008.pdf?ref=balaustine.mymagic.page))
3. Massive gluons - [A Millennium Prize problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang%E2%80%93Mills%5Fexistence%5Fand%5Fmass%5Fgap?ref=balaustine.mymagic.page)
4. Gravity - Again, could be an emergent phenomenon arising out of energy-corrections of hidden, underlying quantum fields
5. [Compactified extra-dimensions](http://theory.caltech.edu/people/jhs/strings/str142.html?ref=balaustine.mymagic.page) & string theory - There are still many who dispute the "magical" mathematical framework that string theory provides because it is a perturbative theory (i.e., background-dependent); a [non-perturbative definition](http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9802051v2.pdf?ref=balaustine.mymagic.page) would make its currently divergent approximations convergent

If you ever get the opportunity to listen to a physicist ruminate on the philosophy of nature, don't miss it. What lay-people would daily dispute is the macro-physical implications of a quantum world; the result is the all-important subjective clarification that lets us think better. What physicists dispute is the constitution of the quantum world itself; the result is the more objective phenomenological implications for everyone everywhere. We could use both debates.