Jonathan Hockey’s Reviews > Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics > Status Update

Particles being transformed into each other via gauge bosons is not a victory for reductionism. Fields and particles being interchangeable is not a victory for reductionism. This whole approach lends itself to an informational account or relational account, with no physical basis. The information transmitted by the bosons has no physical explanation.

Very strange here how he tries to talk of gravitons as established entities known to exist when one has never been observed, and to be frank, if one were observed it would mean relativity is wrong, because it would mean that gravitational force acts relative to some fixed background, which would go against the core point of the relational, general covariance.

It's also another nail in the coffin for atomism, when fundamental particles can be turned into different particles depending on how you look at them. It shows there is no independent entity in the void, and of course, going to the next level of quarks as your fundamental atoms would be even more problematic due to properties of them, such as the inability to isolate them and strange masses they have.

This isospin symmetry whereby Neutrons and Protons become interchangeable. is interesting, and not something I had read up on before. But this fact that the experimental values determine the theory rather than theory predicting the values for the strong force, due to inability to use perturbation methods, is highly dubious for the status of any theory in this area.