Forecasting The Fate Of Mysteries

Our modern answer to the Pyramids
Frank Wilczek, MIT, Nobel laureate (2004)
As a project, it's magnificent—i like to say it's our civilization's answer to the Pyramids of Egypt, but much better because it's driven by curiosity rather than superstition, and built on collaboration, not command. The scale isn't just vanity—everything has to be as big as it is. But it's not only big in physical size; it's extremely sophisticated, extremely delicate. It's probably the most complex thing we've ever done—we being humanity.

We have now a very well-established, highly tested, highly rewarded-with-Nobel-Prizes theory of the weak interaction that's based on a concept that's never been directly proved. The concept is that the universe is a kind of cosmic superconductor, not for electricity but for weak charges: what appears as empty space is anything but empty. Another way of saying that is we're living in a kind of ocean, surrounded by—something. But we've never isolated a water molecule; we don't know what the ocean consists of. The LHC [the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva] will discover what that is. That's the minimal achievement.

But I expect much more. We have a description of the world that's potentially magnificent and beautiful—in part—but has pieces missing. We have four fundamental forces—strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravity—and lovely ideas for how to tie them together. And when you try to follow that inspiration out, you find a lot of things work out very nicely, but it doesn't really work in detail, unless you expand the equation to include more stuff. Some of that stuff should be within the range of the LHC. So ideas about unification—that go by the name of supersymmetry—are really in play. We'll have a much more unified description of the world than we've had before, many more particles to play with [whose] properties will be a window into a vast new physics—a whole new world of fundamental behavior.

If you just take the particles we have and extrapolate their known behavior, you run into contradictions—you start to contradict basic principles of quantum mechanics or common sense. There has to be a deviation of some kind from the laws we have at present when you go up to high energy: if there's not a new particle, then we'll need different laws. That would be maybe even more profound than finding new particles—if we have to give up quantum mechanics or change what we mean by the laws. So finding new particles is much more conservative than the alternative. We'd have to unlearn a lot of what we know.

There will be less room for religion
Steven Weinberg, University of Texas, Nobel laureate (1979)
As science explains more and more, there is less and less need for religious explanations. Originally, in the history of human beings, everything was mysterious. Fire, rain, birth, death—all seemed to require the action of some kind of divine being. As time has passed, we have explained more and more in a purely naturalistic way. This doesn't contradict religion, but it does takes away one of the original motivations for religion.

If we put together something like a final theory in which all the forces and the particles are explained, and that theory also throws light on the origin of the big bang and gives us a consistent picture of cosmology, there will be a little less for religion to explain. But religion has evolved along with science. It is something created by human beings, and as human beings learn more and more, their religion changes. Today, especially in the more established religious sects in the West, they've learned to stop trying to explain nature religiously and leave that to science.

The more we learn about the universe, the fewer signs we see of an intelligent designer. Isaac Newton thought that an explanation of how the sun shone would have to be made in terms of the action of God. Now we know that the sun shines because of the heat produced by the conversion of hydrogen into helium in its core. People who expect to find evidence of divine action in nature, in the origin of the universe or in the laws that govern matter are probably going to be disappointed.