The problem at the origins of physics

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There is a curious fact in modern physics: we know how to calculate almost everything, but we understand less and less what we are describing. Theories work, often in extraordinary ways. Forecasts coincide with experiments with measurements at an impressive number of figures. Yet, if we ask what is really happening, the answer becomes vague, fragmented, sometimes circular.

Interactions without a mechanism

In the standard story: particles interact because there are fundamental interactions, interactions exist because they are described by fields, fields exist because they work mathematically. But what happens physically during an interaction? What does it mean, in concrete terms, that two entities “exchange” something during interaction? Energy? Quantity of motion? Information? Above all: why does that exchange have that value and not another? Here the first problem emerges: the physical mechanism is replaced by formalisation.

Constants that don't tell a story

Mating constants are an emblematic example. They are numbers: measured, inserted in the equations, refined experimentally but they do not arise from a process, but from an adjustment. They do not tell how the interaction takes place, but how strong it is once it exists and the original question remains suspended and when a theory does not answer this question, it is not "wrong", but it is mute on a fundamental level.

The fragmentation of the physical framework

Another sign of the problem is the very structure of knowledge. There is a theory for electromagnetism, one for strong interaction, one for weak, one (incomplete) for gravity. Each one written with different languages, different entities, different principles and in any case they work but the overall theory is not unitary; above all, it is not obvious why it should not be. Physics, which was born as a description of nature, ends up resembling a set of local regulations, each valid in its own domain.

Time, energy, event

There is also a more subtle, but deeper difficulty. Theories treat time as a parameter energy as a preserved quantity, events as points in an already given space-time but the real physical experience is made of processes, transfers, events that happen, not that they simply "are" there. Here a tension is born: mathematics describes states, physics lives on events and this tension, sooner or later, asks to be addressed.

The real level zero

The zero level is not "what does not work" in contemporary physics, it is something more radical: Bridge Theory is born here, before any formula, at the exact point where you decide to return again to ask yourself what is really the physical process that is happening, this also at the cost of getting out of the languages already ready of the acquired knowledge that cost years and years of work. On the other hand, not asking this question means not wanting to know, how could we therefore expect to progress?

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