I just watched the film “Zootropolis” with the family. These things happen in the holidays.
I quite enjoyed it, in fact, although it is a bit too heavy in its use of allegory for my taste: A vibrant city where all animals mingle in freedom and diversity is threatened when a few of them start going insanely violent. One thing the crazies have in common is they are all carnivores – a minority compared to the herbivores – and this leads to a rise in prejudice against all carnivores. Carniphobia, maybe. No further spoilers but you get the idea¹.
Zootropolis is accomplished and entertaining, much like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, also heavily laden with moral instruction. This irritated Lewis’ friend J. R. R. Tolkien, who said in a foreword to The Lord of the Rings
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.
He resisted any attempt to map the events of his Middle Earth on to the horrors and heroics of the mid-20th century.
I’m with Tolkien on this generally, and especially the reasoning he gives – that allegory forces a particular interpretation, and it is better to leave the reader free to make connections.
But analogy – allegory’s close relative – is a powerful tool when trying to explain concepts in physics to a lay audience. In fact many physicists, including me, use analogy a lot as an aid to our own understanding. It can be helpful, it might even be essential, but it is dangerous too. We have keep the distinction between analogy and actuality clear – a difficult task when the actuality is far removed from everyday experience and is sometimes only really properly described using mathematics.
A well-known example is the confusion over whether light is a wave or a particle. In fact it is neither. Both concepts are classical analogies which describe some properties of light but not others. Light itself is an excitation in a quantum field. Different quantum fields gives rise to electrons, the Higgs boson, and all the other fundamental objects in the Standard Model of particle (or should it be wave?) physics. To think of them as tiny grains of sand, or ripples in a surface, is helpful sometimes and misleading at others.
We had some excitement over the summer in particle physics. We thought we might have found a new and unexpected particle at the Large Hadron Collider, about six times heavier than the Higgs boson, or about 800 times heavier than a proton. Unfortunately, new data released at the beginning of August revealed it to be a coincidence of statistical noise.
In fact, so far nothing startlingly new has shown up in the data from CERN this year, despite new regions of the landscape of physics being revealed to us by a big increase in the energy of the beams in the collider. This isn’t the end of the story, of course. To use a favourite analogy of mine, we have had a flyby of the landscape, and have not seen any huge cities or towering volcanoes. But this doesn’t mean there isn’t important and interesting stuff going on in the undergrowth. We need to get down there and survey it carefully, and that means more collisions, more analysis, more time.
A perverse urge makes me want to use this as an allegory for some political event or something. Perhaps it’s a desire to retaliate for all the times such things have been inflicted on me by BBC Radio 4’s dreadful “Thought for the day”, before I manage to turn the damned thing off.
I will never get to use a physics allegory in that slot, since they only allow thoughts involving supernatural beings. But if I did, it might go something like this:
This summer, there was a mini-crisis in the Standard Model.
Some people are huge fans of this theory, finding it beautiful and inspiring. Others acknowledge that it is flawed, and leaves many important questions unanswered, but appreciate it as the best we have at present. But some dislike it intensely, and long to see it consigned to history.
Unfortunately no two of this third group seem to agree on what the replacement should be. What bits of the Standard Model, if any, should be retained? Most of the new theories suggested are mutually incompatible.
Over the first half of this year, a statistically-marginal anomaly looked like it might bust the Standard Model right open, and at least 500 proposals for its replacement were produced, though still no really convincing plan was laid down. Some people got a bit silly and overexcited on all sides.
However this summer more data were accumulated, and physicists, being experts, respect data. It became clear that when confronted with reality, all the alternatives were much worse than what we already had.
So we’re left with the Standard Model. Still imperfect, and still very much not the answer to everything. But also possibly improveable.
Unfortunately – tragically, even – I just can’t think of anything that happened in British politics over the summer that works with this.
¹ And just in case you don’t, if you watch the film it is laid on with a trowel in a moral at the end delivered by a rabbit. Who is also a police officer.
Jon Butterworth’s book Smashing Physics is available as “Most Wanted Particle” in Canada & the US.
