Time and space are relative.
The rate at which time passes is particular to the observer and depends upon things like one's speed and the strength of the gravitational field that one is in. Likewise, the laws of physics are fundamentally "background independent" with the form of space-time being different for each observer although in all cases consistently translatable between observers.
A central aspect of the translation rules is the insight that nothing in the universe goes faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, causing weird distortions from one's intuition when something is moving very fast.
There are surprisingly few laws of physics (e.g., the second law of thermodynamics, the Standard Model weak force that governs things like nuclear radiation) that have a form that is not symmetric between going forward in time and going backward in time. The Standard Model asymmetries, moreover, all adhere to a deep symmetry called CPT symmetry that states that processes and the reverse of those processes proceed in exactly the same way except that a quantity called "charge parity" (CP) is flipped at precisely defined rates where there is not perfect time reversal symmetry.
Everything is made of randomly interacting fundamental particles which are in turn made from the same mass-energy stuff.
Matter and energy are ultimately interchangeable version of the same mass-energy stuff which are related by E=mc^2.
At the deepest level, everything boils down to interactions between fundamental particles of which there are a couple of dozen kinds, and these particles behave and interact with each other in a manner that is profoundly random. Some of the random ways that these particles behave in isolation is contrary to our common sense about what is physically possible that is based on real world scale phenomena immensely bigger than the size scale of these particles.
In particular, there are three fundamental forces in addition to gravity, there are twelve kinds of massive particles that are not force carriers (six quarks, three charged leptons and three neutrinos), there are nine kind of massless force carriers (photons and gluons), and there are four kinds of massive force carriers (W+, W-, Z and Higgs bosons).
But, the universe if far less complex than it would seem because the vast majority of Standard Model fundamental particles and composite particles made up of Standard Model fundamental particles are extremely unstable, and/or operate only at very short ranges. Protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos and photons are the only things in the Standard Model that have any meaningful kind of stability that operate outside atomic nuclei in real life, and only a modest percentage of theoretically imaginable combinations of protons and neutrons form stable isotypes of periodic table elements.
The laws of physics are extremely accurate and there is virtually no controversy within physics regarding the theoretical predictions of those laws, and scientific effort to refine this consensus continues.
There is an essentially perfect consensus of physicists on the theoretical predictions of the laws of physics as set forth in the theory of general relativity and the Standard Model in the conditions found in all experiments that have been conducted and replicated to date and the theory matches the experimental result to within reasonable levels of experimental imprecision (including so called "mysterious" dark energy) with one exception. The precision of the match between theoretical expectations and experimentally measured results is exquisitite.
There are a number of theoretical constants in the Standard Model that are not known with much accuracy which are the subject of ongoing investigation.
Scientists still haven't figured out dark matter although there are some good theories out there to describe its effects.
The one exception to the consensus is that there is no consensus on the theoretical basis for the phenomena observed by astronomers that is described as "dark matter". Dark matter effects most certainly exist and are observed in every galaxy and galactic cluster and in other respects as well. And, the controversies over what dark matter effects have been observed are practical and technical experimental measurement and theoretical calculation method controversies, not deep scientific differences of principle over the laws of nature or epistomology or the like.
But, dark matter effects have not been described by applying general relativity to observed luminous matter, and the Standard Model does not seem to include any particle that would behave as dark matter appears to behave. No single consensus dark matter theory describes all observed dark matter effects, has accurately predicted new dark matter effects, and has a mechanism that has been directly measured.
The majority view is that there is some kind of dark matter than is not made up of protons and neutrons and is not simply a bunch of neutrinos, the lacks electromagnetic charge and is distributed more or less in filiments at a large scale and in halos around galaxies, made up of some unobserved type of particle with properties that are not precisely known that accounts for these effects without any modification of general relativity.
A minority view is that some or all of dark matter is accounted for by a slight inaccuracy of general relativity in weak gravitational fields (probably due to quantum gravity effects) and that the remaining dark matter effects are caused by unobserved but basically ordinary types of matter that are already known to science but can't be seen because they don't generate light or heat.
Active astronomy observations and direct dark matter detection experiments are trying to bring more evidence to bear on the question so that we can determine which theory is right.
We don't perfectly understand the laws of nature, but the gaps in our knowledge are in places we can't examine experimentally.
General relativity and the Standard Model are theoretically inconsistent with each other, but this doesn't have much practical impact because it is usually clear that one or the other theory provides the dominant explanation and that the other has negligible relevance to a problem. But, these theories may not be valid in extreme circumstances such as those involving very high energies and extreme masses, for example, around black holes and the Big Bang. Many of the unsolved problems of physics (other than dark matter) involve cosmology (i.e. the theoretical description of how the Big Bang gave rise to the universe.
There is a cottage industry in pursuing various strategies for resolving the known inperfections in the existing theories of physics and considering if there are alternatiive versions that could also be consistent with experimental evidence. But, the vast weight of experimental evidence highly constrains what kinds of theories could be viable. The predicted deviations from existing theories must happen in domains that we can't currently explore experimentally or relate to dark matter.
So far, these beyond the Standard Model theories are regularly being cut down by new experimental results disproving or constraining them, while new definitive beyond the Standard Model experimental results have cropped up in the last fifty years (apart from the discovery that neutrinos have mass).
All other legitimate controversies in modern physics involve matters where experimental results have not been replicated or are not yet available with sufficient certainty, where different theories are experimentally indistinguishable (at least to date), or where theoretical predictions are not possible to generate due to uncertainty about the theory or because the math is too hard. In short, other legitimate controversies in modern physics do not undermine a near universal consensus on the nature of the laws of physics insofar as they apply to what can be measured experimentally.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Take Away Lessons From Modern Physics
What are the take away lessons about natural philosophy that an educated lay person should glean from reading about modern physics?
1. The universe and everything in it can (in principle) be described in every way that we are able to observe by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and the Standard Model of Particle Physics (generally abbreviated to the "Standard Model" or "SM"). Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, set forth a few years before General Relativity, is embedded in both General Relativity and the Standard Model
General Relativity theory is essentially unchanged from its form a century ago, although the measured values of its three key constants (the gravitational constant, the speed of light, and the cosmological constant) have been refined over the last century.
The Standard Model was formulated about 50 years ago, although the process of measuring it couple dozen physical constants is ongoing (no meaningful measurement has yet been made at all of one of them, the CP violation parameter for neutrinos), the last of the particles it predicts called the Higgs boson, was only formally discovered this year, and the Standard Model was revised once in the last fifteen years or so to reflect the discovery that neutrinos have a low, but non-zero rest mass.
2. Special relativity provides that the speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute speed limit on everything in nature. Massless particles such as photons move at the speed of light in a vacuum and do not experience time in their frame of reference. As massive particles move close to the speed of light it takes increasingly more energy to achieve the same increase in speed, time slows down for the particles, and space is warped on the particle in motion. Thus, the rate at which time passes is not uniform but instead depends upon the speed of the person measuring it, although there are formulas to precisely determine the relative rate at which time passes for one observer relative to another one.
3. General relativity describes gravity more accurately than Newton's law which provides that the attractive force of gravity between two objects is equal to the product of the masses of two objects divided by the square of their distance from each other times the gravitational constant G.
General relativity states that all mass and energy are equivalent to each other via the equation E=mc^2 where m is mass and c is the speed of light in a vacuum. In general relativity, gravity influences massless particles like photons rather than only influencing matter. Even empty space has a low uniform level of mass-energy described completely by the cosmological constant and called "dark energy." Gravity, in general relativity, is a function not just of the aggregate distribution of mass-energy in the universe, but also of the motion of those mass-energy particles. For example, a planet in motion relative to something else (e.g. the Sun) has a different gravitational field than a planet at rest. Time slows down in strong gravitational fields relative to weak gravitational fields. Gravitational effects propogate in waves moving at the speed of light in a vacuum. Gravity has an effect in General Relativity by altering the shape of space-time which is perfectly smooth and continuous (apart from singularties) in the theory.
General relativity does not have a preferred reference frame, but there are formulas by which the location and direction of movement of everything in the universe relative to one observer with one rate of time progression can be converted consistently into the location and direction of movement of everything in the universe relative to another observer with another rate off time progression.
General relativity's formulas, when applied to the distribution of stars and other matter and radiation observed by astronomers, imply two important phenomena which are called singularities. One is that we live in an expanding universe that is about 13.7 billion years old (and has a radius of about 13.7 billion light years) whose stages of expansion can be described consistently back to the first few seconds after the "Big Bang".
The other singularities in General Relativity arise when mass-energy is concentrated in a sufficiently small space and are called "Black Holes" because particles that cross the "event horizon" of a black hole cannot return from it (there is such a thing as black hole radiation caused by the behavior of particles right on the event horizon).
General relativity is a deterministic, field based theory, rather than a probabilistic particle based theory like thte Standard Model.
4. The Standard Model describes all of the stuff in the universe as being made up of quarks, leptons and bosons, all of which are assumed to be point-like with zero volume.
There are six kinds of quarks that are the core constituents of protons, neutrons and a variety of unstable quark composite particles called hadrons that are bound together by the strong nuclear force via the exchange of eight kinds of massless paticles called gluons (which can also form unstable gluon only composite particles called glueballs). The nuclear strong force holds atomic nuclei together (albeit somewhat indirectly). The quarks that make up a proton or neutron or other exotic hadron make up only a small percentage of the composite particle's rest mass; most of it can be attributed to the gluons which add mass to the composite particle via the strong nuclear force energy that they exchange even though the gluons themselves are massless. Quarks cannot exist in isolation; they are always "confined" by gluons in composite particles (except for top quarks which decay so fast via the weak force discussed below that they have no time to form composite particles). Quarks, in addition to having electromagnetic charges, have one of three kinds of "color charge" and all composite particles must be color neutral. Gluons each have two color charges.
There are six kinds of leptons as well - the electron and two identical but heavier and unstable version of the electron, and three kinds of neutrinos which are very light, lack electrical charge and don't interact with other matter very strongly.
In addition to gluons, there are three other kinds of bosons, which are the means by which forces are carried between particles in the Standard Model.
The first is the massless, electrically neutral photon carries the electromagnetic force between particles with electric charges (all quarks, electrons and their two heavy cousins, and a couple kinds of bosons we haven't discussed yet). We understand the interactions of photons and charged particles essentially perfectly via a subpart of the Standard Model known as QED. Mostly, QED reduces in complex, many particle situations to the pre-20th century theory of electricity and magnetism called "Maxwell's Equations" but QED have a very different mechanism than Maxwell's Equations that permits some kinds of electromagnetic interactions such as the "tunnelling" phenomena exploited in every transistor, that are not permitted by Maxwell's equations.
The second set of bosons are the W+, W- and Z boson which collectively make up the "weak force" that is most comonly observed as the source of nuclear radiation. These bosons are massive, travel at less than the speed of light, are unstable, and operate only at short ranges. The W+ and W- bosons are emitted from time to time by quarks and leptons and when this happens, these particles change into different kinds of particles - up type quarks turn into some kind of down type quark; down type quarks turn into some kind of up type quark, electron-like leptons turn into neutrinos, and neutrinos turn into electron-like leptons. Z bosons act sort of like short range heavy photons and do not change an emitting or receiving particles type. Usually, heavier versions of quarks and leptons very swiftly emit W bosons and decay into lighter quarks or leptons. These decays closely follow a very precisely understood theoretical formula.
Every particle in the Standard Model has an antiparticle which is identical to the ordinary particle except that it is reserved in charge and parity (think of this as direction of rotation about an axis of motion, although this is merely a heuristic way of understanding it) while having an identical mass. Antimatter has been observed and is routinely generated in certain weak force decays.
The Standard Model formulas are completely symmetric going forward and backward in time, except for certain W boson interactions which exhibit "CP violation" which is to say that these processes and the antiparticle version of these processes progress at different rates.
The last kind of boson is the Higgs boson, which is part of the unified Standard Model understanding of the weak force and the electromagnetic force, both of which are nearly perfectly understood. The Higgs boson is also very heavy and its interactions with massive particles is the source of fundamental particle mass (although as noted above, most of the mass in the universe comes from gluons exchanged in protons and neutrons).
The movement of particles in the Standard Model, particle decays, and force particle emissions are fundamentally probabilistic. The Standard Model's formulas tells us precisely the probability of certain outcomes being observed in particular experiments but the outcome is fundamentally unknowable until it is observed, and there is only a specific well defined level of precision with which it is theoretically possible to observe particles. Prior to being observed called "collapsing the wave function" quantum mechanical behavior is essentially in limbo made up of a probability field of all possible outcomes in the proper proportions at the same time.
5. The Standard Model has a great many measured constants that most people believe have some deeper relationship to each other that could be revealed with a more fundamental theory. There are many Standard Model constants that have been measured only fairly inaccurately, particularly in the area of neutrino physics. The math involved in understanding quark-gluon interactions (described by a part of the Standard Model called quantum chromodynamics or QCD for short) is much harder than the math involved in electromagnetic and weak force interactions and while experimental results and theoretical predictions from QCD consistent, the theoretical predictions are numerical approximations of the actual equation results that are precise only to about +/- 1%.
6. Conservation laws are important in both General Relativity and the Standard Model. For example, the total amount of mass-energy is conserved, and mass and energy are separately conserved except in nuclear interactions. The amount of net electromagnetic charge in the universe is neutral and conserved in all interactions. The net QCD color charge in the universe is conserved. Every interaction perserves CPT, which is to say a combined combination of electromagnetic charge sign, parity, and time direction (thus a CP violation is equivalent to a time reversal). The number of quarks and leptons net of anti-quarks and anti-leptons in an interaction is conserved subject to very specific and narrow exceptions. Net momentum, both angular and linear are conserved.
7. While we are close to understanding all of the laws of nature, we aren't there yet.
There are deep theoretical inconsistencies between General Relativity and the Standard Model that have not been resolved. General relativity does not have a quantum mechanical description and the Standard Model does not have a background independent description. For example, if Standard Model particles were truly point-like, then General Relativity would declare that each of them was a "black hole."
The very early instants of physics after the Big Bang (called "inflation") and a phenomena seen in astronomy called "dark matter" do not have explanations that fit neatly into General Relativity and the Standard Model.
Fortunately, the circumstances where both theories are needed at once to understand nature are few and involve extreme situations. You simply know which theory to use when.
There are hints from the relationships of various theoretical constants in physics that distances less than a certain exceedingly tiny length (much, much smaller, for example, than the theoretical "electron radius" of non-quantum physics) called the Planck length, may be ill defined or not exist as the fundamental make up of space-time may be made up of tiny grains rather than being truly smooth and continuous.
In general, there are strong suspicions that General Relativity and the Standard Model may not be completely accurate in extreme situations such as in describing the physics of the events shortly after the Big Bang, and the interaction of particles at extremely high energies and in the immediate vicinity of black holes.
A variety of beyond the Standard Model theories and variations on General Relativity have been proposed and all of the serious ones would be consistent with all measured experimental data but differ in some other way, or to explain dark matter. There are perhaps dozens classes of credible beyond the Standard Model or General Relativity variants with some serious basis that aren't ruled out by experiment. Theoretical physicists publish endlessly on these and huge physics experiments try to determine if any of them might be right. Many theories propose that seemingly absolute laws of nature are actually broken in some sort of rare or hard to measure circumstance.
Some of leading variants under consideration are "Cold Dark Matter", "Warm Dark Matter", "Inflation", various versions of "Loop Quantum Gravity", various versions of Supersymmetry, Supergravity, various versions of String Theory, various version of "Modified Gravity", some very subtle technical tweaks to General Relativity, enthropic gravity, holographic gravity, Kaluza-Klein theories, various grand unified theories based on Lie algebras and Lie groups, Majorana mass neutrino variants on the Standard Model, sterile neutrino theories, "Technicolor", Linear Sigma models, and more. Each of these predicts paticles and/or forces not found in the Standard Model or General Relativity to explain some not well understood part of it or just to explore what other theories could work to explain nature. But, the bounds of current experiment mean that all of them must be very subtle tweaks to the existing core theories.
1. The universe and everything in it can (in principle) be described in every way that we are able to observe by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and the Standard Model of Particle Physics (generally abbreviated to the "Standard Model" or "SM"). Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, set forth a few years before General Relativity, is embedded in both General Relativity and the Standard Model
General Relativity theory is essentially unchanged from its form a century ago, although the measured values of its three key constants (the gravitational constant, the speed of light, and the cosmological constant) have been refined over the last century.
The Standard Model was formulated about 50 years ago, although the process of measuring it couple dozen physical constants is ongoing (no meaningful measurement has yet been made at all of one of them, the CP violation parameter for neutrinos), the last of the particles it predicts called the Higgs boson, was only formally discovered this year, and the Standard Model was revised once in the last fifteen years or so to reflect the discovery that neutrinos have a low, but non-zero rest mass.
2. Special relativity provides that the speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute speed limit on everything in nature. Massless particles such as photons move at the speed of light in a vacuum and do not experience time in their frame of reference. As massive particles move close to the speed of light it takes increasingly more energy to achieve the same increase in speed, time slows down for the particles, and space is warped on the particle in motion. Thus, the rate at which time passes is not uniform but instead depends upon the speed of the person measuring it, although there are formulas to precisely determine the relative rate at which time passes for one observer relative to another one.
3. General relativity describes gravity more accurately than Newton's law which provides that the attractive force of gravity between two objects is equal to the product of the masses of two objects divided by the square of their distance from each other times the gravitational constant G.
General relativity states that all mass and energy are equivalent to each other via the equation E=mc^2 where m is mass and c is the speed of light in a vacuum. In general relativity, gravity influences massless particles like photons rather than only influencing matter. Even empty space has a low uniform level of mass-energy described completely by the cosmological constant and called "dark energy." Gravity, in general relativity, is a function not just of the aggregate distribution of mass-energy in the universe, but also of the motion of those mass-energy particles. For example, a planet in motion relative to something else (e.g. the Sun) has a different gravitational field than a planet at rest. Time slows down in strong gravitational fields relative to weak gravitational fields. Gravitational effects propogate in waves moving at the speed of light in a vacuum. Gravity has an effect in General Relativity by altering the shape of space-time which is perfectly smooth and continuous (apart from singularties) in the theory.
General relativity does not have a preferred reference frame, but there are formulas by which the location and direction of movement of everything in the universe relative to one observer with one rate of time progression can be converted consistently into the location and direction of movement of everything in the universe relative to another observer with another rate off time progression.
General relativity's formulas, when applied to the distribution of stars and other matter and radiation observed by astronomers, imply two important phenomena which are called singularities. One is that we live in an expanding universe that is about 13.7 billion years old (and has a radius of about 13.7 billion light years) whose stages of expansion can be described consistently back to the first few seconds after the "Big Bang".
The other singularities in General Relativity arise when mass-energy is concentrated in a sufficiently small space and are called "Black Holes" because particles that cross the "event horizon" of a black hole cannot return from it (there is such a thing as black hole radiation caused by the behavior of particles right on the event horizon).
General relativity is a deterministic, field based theory, rather than a probabilistic particle based theory like thte Standard Model.
4. The Standard Model describes all of the stuff in the universe as being made up of quarks, leptons and bosons, all of which are assumed to be point-like with zero volume.
There are six kinds of quarks that are the core constituents of protons, neutrons and a variety of unstable quark composite particles called hadrons that are bound together by the strong nuclear force via the exchange of eight kinds of massless paticles called gluons (which can also form unstable gluon only composite particles called glueballs). The nuclear strong force holds atomic nuclei together (albeit somewhat indirectly). The quarks that make up a proton or neutron or other exotic hadron make up only a small percentage of the composite particle's rest mass; most of it can be attributed to the gluons which add mass to the composite particle via the strong nuclear force energy that they exchange even though the gluons themselves are massless. Quarks cannot exist in isolation; they are always "confined" by gluons in composite particles (except for top quarks which decay so fast via the weak force discussed below that they have no time to form composite particles). Quarks, in addition to having electromagnetic charges, have one of three kinds of "color charge" and all composite particles must be color neutral. Gluons each have two color charges.
There are six kinds of leptons as well - the electron and two identical but heavier and unstable version of the electron, and three kinds of neutrinos which are very light, lack electrical charge and don't interact with other matter very strongly.
In addition to gluons, there are three other kinds of bosons, which are the means by which forces are carried between particles in the Standard Model.
The first is the massless, electrically neutral photon carries the electromagnetic force between particles with electric charges (all quarks, electrons and their two heavy cousins, and a couple kinds of bosons we haven't discussed yet). We understand the interactions of photons and charged particles essentially perfectly via a subpart of the Standard Model known as QED. Mostly, QED reduces in complex, many particle situations to the pre-20th century theory of electricity and magnetism called "Maxwell's Equations" but QED have a very different mechanism than Maxwell's Equations that permits some kinds of electromagnetic interactions such as the "tunnelling" phenomena exploited in every transistor, that are not permitted by Maxwell's equations.
The second set of bosons are the W+, W- and Z boson which collectively make up the "weak force" that is most comonly observed as the source of nuclear radiation. These bosons are massive, travel at less than the speed of light, are unstable, and operate only at short ranges. The W+ and W- bosons are emitted from time to time by quarks and leptons and when this happens, these particles change into different kinds of particles - up type quarks turn into some kind of down type quark; down type quarks turn into some kind of up type quark, electron-like leptons turn into neutrinos, and neutrinos turn into electron-like leptons. Z bosons act sort of like short range heavy photons and do not change an emitting or receiving particles type. Usually, heavier versions of quarks and leptons very swiftly emit W bosons and decay into lighter quarks or leptons. These decays closely follow a very precisely understood theoretical formula.
Every particle in the Standard Model has an antiparticle which is identical to the ordinary particle except that it is reserved in charge and parity (think of this as direction of rotation about an axis of motion, although this is merely a heuristic way of understanding it) while having an identical mass. Antimatter has been observed and is routinely generated in certain weak force decays.
The Standard Model formulas are completely symmetric going forward and backward in time, except for certain W boson interactions which exhibit "CP violation" which is to say that these processes and the antiparticle version of these processes progress at different rates.
The last kind of boson is the Higgs boson, which is part of the unified Standard Model understanding of the weak force and the electromagnetic force, both of which are nearly perfectly understood. The Higgs boson is also very heavy and its interactions with massive particles is the source of fundamental particle mass (although as noted above, most of the mass in the universe comes from gluons exchanged in protons and neutrons).
The movement of particles in the Standard Model, particle decays, and force particle emissions are fundamentally probabilistic. The Standard Model's formulas tells us precisely the probability of certain outcomes being observed in particular experiments but the outcome is fundamentally unknowable until it is observed, and there is only a specific well defined level of precision with which it is theoretically possible to observe particles. Prior to being observed called "collapsing the wave function" quantum mechanical behavior is essentially in limbo made up of a probability field of all possible outcomes in the proper proportions at the same time.
5. The Standard Model has a great many measured constants that most people believe have some deeper relationship to each other that could be revealed with a more fundamental theory. There are many Standard Model constants that have been measured only fairly inaccurately, particularly in the area of neutrino physics. The math involved in understanding quark-gluon interactions (described by a part of the Standard Model called quantum chromodynamics or QCD for short) is much harder than the math involved in electromagnetic and weak force interactions and while experimental results and theoretical predictions from QCD consistent, the theoretical predictions are numerical approximations of the actual equation results that are precise only to about +/- 1%.
6. Conservation laws are important in both General Relativity and the Standard Model. For example, the total amount of mass-energy is conserved, and mass and energy are separately conserved except in nuclear interactions. The amount of net electromagnetic charge in the universe is neutral and conserved in all interactions. The net QCD color charge in the universe is conserved. Every interaction perserves CPT, which is to say a combined combination of electromagnetic charge sign, parity, and time direction (thus a CP violation is equivalent to a time reversal). The number of quarks and leptons net of anti-quarks and anti-leptons in an interaction is conserved subject to very specific and narrow exceptions. Net momentum, both angular and linear are conserved.
7. While we are close to understanding all of the laws of nature, we aren't there yet.
There are deep theoretical inconsistencies between General Relativity and the Standard Model that have not been resolved. General relativity does not have a quantum mechanical description and the Standard Model does not have a background independent description. For example, if Standard Model particles were truly point-like, then General Relativity would declare that each of them was a "black hole."
The very early instants of physics after the Big Bang (called "inflation") and a phenomena seen in astronomy called "dark matter" do not have explanations that fit neatly into General Relativity and the Standard Model.
Fortunately, the circumstances where both theories are needed at once to understand nature are few and involve extreme situations. You simply know which theory to use when.
There are hints from the relationships of various theoretical constants in physics that distances less than a certain exceedingly tiny length (much, much smaller, for example, than the theoretical "electron radius" of non-quantum physics) called the Planck length, may be ill defined or not exist as the fundamental make up of space-time may be made up of tiny grains rather than being truly smooth and continuous.
In general, there are strong suspicions that General Relativity and the Standard Model may not be completely accurate in extreme situations such as in describing the physics of the events shortly after the Big Bang, and the interaction of particles at extremely high energies and in the immediate vicinity of black holes.
A variety of beyond the Standard Model theories and variations on General Relativity have been proposed and all of the serious ones would be consistent with all measured experimental data but differ in some other way, or to explain dark matter. There are perhaps dozens classes of credible beyond the Standard Model or General Relativity variants with some serious basis that aren't ruled out by experiment. Theoretical physicists publish endlessly on these and huge physics experiments try to determine if any of them might be right. Many theories propose that seemingly absolute laws of nature are actually broken in some sort of rare or hard to measure circumstance.
Some of leading variants under consideration are "Cold Dark Matter", "Warm Dark Matter", "Inflation", various versions of "Loop Quantum Gravity", various versions of Supersymmetry, Supergravity, various versions of String Theory, various version of "Modified Gravity", some very subtle technical tweaks to General Relativity, enthropic gravity, holographic gravity, Kaluza-Klein theories, various grand unified theories based on Lie algebras and Lie groups, Majorana mass neutrino variants on the Standard Model, sterile neutrino theories, "Technicolor", Linear Sigma models, and more. Each of these predicts paticles and/or forces not found in the Standard Model or General Relativity to explain some not well understood part of it or just to explore what other theories could work to explain nature. But, the bounds of current experiment mean that all of them must be very subtle tweaks to the existing core theories.
Is It Possible To Popularize Physics Well?
Lubos Motl has an interesting post inspired by the nomination of the Higgs boson to be a "person of the year" in 2012, notwithstanding the fact that it isn't a person, and reacting to physics blogger Matt Strassler's rant on the inaccuracy of the five sentence story in a magazine directed at general audiences.
He acknowledges that points that Strassler makes are technically correct but goes on to qualify his criticism, in light of the Fool's Errand that any popularizer of physics for the general public faces. In his view, there are fundamental reasons why popularizing physics for a lay audience is essentially impossible to do well.
There are a fair number of people trained as physicists, engineers or mathematicans, who aren't practicing physicists who can understand new developments at a deep level (and the Internet makes it far easier for these people to participate in the discussion of the developments and get good primary source information), but there aren't all that many.
Needless to say, most lawyers seek out of the profession because they aren't mathematically inclined and I can read physics papers in their original form and make sense of them only because I was an undergraduate mathematics major who spent a couple of years studying physics and have devoted considerable time from late elementary school onward keeping abreast of new scientific developments on a regular basis - and I absolutely acknowledge my limitations in understanding some of the work being done. As Motl notes, "genuinely interested laymen", like myself, "aren't too much more widespread than the actual scientists."
Still, there are definitely fundamental concepts of natural philosophy embedded in modern scientific knowledge about physics that are knowable, even by mere educated laypeople without advanced mathematical training, and I belive that there are benefits to making this level of understanding widely known. The task of conveying this knowledge is one of the missions of this blog.
He acknowledges that points that Strassler makes are technically correct but goes on to qualify his criticism, in light of the Fool's Errand that any popularizer of physics for the general public faces. In his view, there are fundamental reasons why popularizing physics for a lay audience is essentially impossible to do well.
In some cases, I would argue that the mistake wasn't "too bad". . . . There must be a moment at which one gives up certain pedagogical ambitions that are utterly unrealistic. While I think that the image of the world as painted by theoretical physics is a major part of the culture of our epoch (and knowing nothing about the W-boson or the genes is as bad as knowing nothing about Shakespeare), I find it obvious that an overwhelming majority of the mankind just can't understand its basics. The reason is an insufficient intelligence, insufficient motivation to follow these things, or both.
Journalists don't have any significant advantage. The average IQ of undergraduate students of communication/journalism is around 112 (compare with physics with 130 at the top). Among the college students, only education (109) and public administration (106) are closer to the average IQ (100). You simply can't expect too visible differences between journalists and average people on the street. They're not elite in any sense. In fact, this "mediocrity" of the writers is imposed upon us because if the journalists were too much smarter than the readers, the readers wouldn't be capable of reading the articles or they wouldn't be willing to do so. . .
In fact, even if I restrict my attention to people who have dedicated a significant part of decades of their lives to studying physics at home and following events in modern physical sciences, the results are pretty weak. I would say that if most of these people were forced to learn a 2-hour introductory physics lecture in the same way they had to learn at school (otherwise they would be spanked), they would know much more than they know after 20 years of "being interested" in physics. In spite of that, many people are very proud about their "unusual extra knowledge of physics". . .
A major reason behind this unreasonable ineffectiveness of the "home learning" of physics is that almost all these people pick sources that are full of garbage and myths spread by similarly confused and deluded average people. . . . Authors of popular books usually contribute to this situation, too – even if they're good experts in their fields. . . .I am not nearly so downbeat in my assessment. If I was, I wouldn't be a physics blogger. But, obviously, there are difficulties inherent in trying to explain a discipline that involves at a very fundamental level mathematics that is incomprehensible in the form it is ordinary presented in, even to people who use math professionally like economists, actuaries, commodity traders, criminologists, biologists, physicians, high school math teachers, pharmacists, geologists, and baseball analysts.
So physics is interesting as a source of potential miracles, magic, telepathy, superluminal warp drives, and so on. But what about a solid proof that some of these things can't exist? Those insights just don't sell well. People are not interested in genuine physics; they are not interested in the truth whatever it is. They are interested in statements that pander to their prejudices and their special role among their peers. Either this sad fact or the reduced intelligence – or some superposition; it's often hard to disentangle what is at the very beginning – is the primary reason why we don't see any positive progress in the public's understanding of science. The public just doesn't want to understand those things well.
I believe that Matt Strassler still holds totally unrealistic ambitions. It's great to struggle for a better understanding of physics in the general public but if you want too much, you will be fighting the windmills. Various more or less inclusive parts of the public only have a chance to understand physics up to various levels of depth and sensible explanations of physics are likely to be a waste of time if they completely deny this distribution. That's why various types of simplifications (and various degrees of tolerance for certain misconceptions) have to be designed for variously inclusive target groups.
After all, the number of people in the general public who read (close to fundamental/particle/cosmology) physics blogs at least once a week – and redistribute tweets etc. going to physics blogs – is just totally tiny. It's really at most tens of thousands of people in the world. Even if we talk just about "interested laymen", it is just a few parts per million! The genuinely interested laymen aren't too much more widespread than the actual scientists. A larger group follows (and retweets!) science in the "mainstream media" and the distortions of science inevitably follow from this fact because the journalists usually don't know much more than the readers (and can't really know much more, for the communication to work efficiently).
We should think whether the public's belief in the "authority of the mainstream media" is inevitable, whether it brings more advantages or disadvantages, and whether we should struggle to undermine it in some way or not. Of course that there are many events after which I am tempted to think that the answer is a resounding Yes. But when I see what kind of much worse junk may be written in – and read from – some totally non-mainstream sources, I often change my mind again. In most cases, one has to choose between the bad, worse, and worst. ;-)
There are a fair number of people trained as physicists, engineers or mathematicans, who aren't practicing physicists who can understand new developments at a deep level (and the Internet makes it far easier for these people to participate in the discussion of the developments and get good primary source information), but there aren't all that many.
Needless to say, most lawyers seek out of the profession because they aren't mathematically inclined and I can read physics papers in their original form and make sense of them only because I was an undergraduate mathematics major who spent a couple of years studying physics and have devoted considerable time from late elementary school onward keeping abreast of new scientific developments on a regular basis - and I absolutely acknowledge my limitations in understanding some of the work being done. As Motl notes, "genuinely interested laymen", like myself, "aren't too much more widespread than the actual scientists."
Still, there are definitely fundamental concepts of natural philosophy embedded in modern scientific knowledge about physics that are knowable, even by mere educated laypeople without advanced mathematical training, and I belive that there are benefits to making this level of understanding widely known. The task of conveying this knowledge is one of the missions of this blog.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Ancient Lemming DNA Reveals Local Extinctions
Ancient lemming DNA from the North-West European tundra reveals a series of apparently climate change driven regional extinction events in the same time period that modern humans were expanding out of Africa. It also provides better resolution of what was going on in terms of the survival of smaller animals during the era of megafauna extinction in Europe.
Implications For Our Understanding Of The Upper Paleolithic Megafauna Extinctions
This study disfavors the crude "overhunting hypothesis" of megafauna extinction as a sole explanation for it. Instead, it suggests that modern human predator activity may have been just one factor that lead to megafauna extinctions of species already weakened by climate change driven impairments of the extinct species environments, which smaller species survived to recolonize their old range in refugia which were not available to larger species for some reason.
On the other hand, the abstract for this study, at least, doesn't discuss the role that predators play in helpfully regulating prey species population levels. So, a scenario in which ecological collapse works its way from the top of the food pyramid to the bottom driven by climate change, rather than from the bottom up, isn't excluded.
A Technological Miracle
As an aside, the ability of the researchers to secure and sequence ancient lemming DNA from tens of thousands of years ago is itself a technological marvel. This is one of a number of ancient animal DNA studies that while not providing direct evidence regarding modern human population history, does provide very solid evidence to distinguish between plausible and implausible inferences from the limited available ancient hominin DNA evidence about what happened in human prehistory.
Many magical legends about people who could learn things about the past from touching objects that were there have been less ambitious.
The Relevance Of Ancient Animal DNA More Generally
Animals have always outnumbered humans and all but a few animals have shorter lifespans on average. So, it is very likely that there are more recoverable ancient animal DNA sequences out there than there are ancient hominin DNA sequences.
Ancient animal DNA studies have focused on domesticated animals, such as pigs and cattle, and this has provided valuable insights about human prehistory since the Neolithic revolution. But, those studies can't inform the tens of millenia during which modern humans were exclusively hunters and gatherers. Wild lemmings, in contrast, can tell us quite a bit about the environment in which pre-Neolithic revolution modern humans lived.
For example, this study would suggest that any model of modern human demographic prehistory that assumes stability or steady, slow expansion, as opposed to instability with periods of regional extinctions followed by recolonizations (possibily in addition to the one known case at the last glacial maximum) may be deficient in accurately modeling human prehistory.
The Late Pleistocene global extinction of many terrestrial mammal species has been a subject of intensive scientific study for over a century, yet the relative contributions of environmental changes and the global expansion of humans remain unresolved. A defining component of these extinctions is a bias toward large species, with the majority of small-mammal taxa apparently surviving into the present.
Here, we investigate the population-level history of a key tundra-specialist small mammal, the collared lemming (Dicrostonyx torquatus), to explore whether events during the Late Pleistocene had a discernible effect beyond the large mammal fauna. Using ancient DNA techniques to sample across three sites in North-West Europe, we observe a dramatic reduction in genetic diversity in this species over the last 50,000 y. We further identify a series of extinction-recolonization events, indicating a previously unrecognized instability in Late Pleistocene small-mammal populations, which we link with climatic fluctuations.
Our results reveal climate-associated, repeated regional extinctions in a keystone prey species across the Late Pleistocene, a pattern likely to have had an impact on the wider steppe-tundra community, and one that is concordant with environmental change as a major force in structuring Late Pleistocene biodiversity.Via John Hawks referencing Brace, S, Palkopoulou, E, Dalén, L, Lister, AM, Miller, R, Otte, M, Germonpré, M, Blockley, SPE, Stewart, JR, Barnes, I, "Serial population extinctions in a small mammal indicate Late Pleistocene ecosystem instability." (2012).
Implications For Our Understanding Of The Upper Paleolithic Megafauna Extinctions
This study disfavors the crude "overhunting hypothesis" of megafauna extinction as a sole explanation for it. Instead, it suggests that modern human predator activity may have been just one factor that lead to megafauna extinctions of species already weakened by climate change driven impairments of the extinct species environments, which smaller species survived to recolonize their old range in refugia which were not available to larger species for some reason.
On the other hand, the abstract for this study, at least, doesn't discuss the role that predators play in helpfully regulating prey species population levels. So, a scenario in which ecological collapse works its way from the top of the food pyramid to the bottom driven by climate change, rather than from the bottom up, isn't excluded.
A Technological Miracle
As an aside, the ability of the researchers to secure and sequence ancient lemming DNA from tens of thousands of years ago is itself a technological marvel. This is one of a number of ancient animal DNA studies that while not providing direct evidence regarding modern human population history, does provide very solid evidence to distinguish between plausible and implausible inferences from the limited available ancient hominin DNA evidence about what happened in human prehistory.
Many magical legends about people who could learn things about the past from touching objects that were there have been less ambitious.
The Relevance Of Ancient Animal DNA More Generally
Animals have always outnumbered humans and all but a few animals have shorter lifespans on average. So, it is very likely that there are more recoverable ancient animal DNA sequences out there than there are ancient hominin DNA sequences.
Ancient animal DNA studies have focused on domesticated animals, such as pigs and cattle, and this has provided valuable insights about human prehistory since the Neolithic revolution. But, those studies can't inform the tens of millenia during which modern humans were exclusively hunters and gatherers. Wild lemmings, in contrast, can tell us quite a bit about the environment in which pre-Neolithic revolution modern humans lived.
For example, this study would suggest that any model of modern human demographic prehistory that assumes stability or steady, slow expansion, as opposed to instability with periods of regional extinctions followed by recolonizations (possibily in addition to the one known case at the last glacial maximum) may be deficient in accurately modeling human prehistory.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Does Prehistory Influence Modern Law?
A new law review article argues that prehistory civilization continues to have a meaningful impact on modern law. In particular, this article argues that the Harappan civilization of the Indus River Valley and the civilizations of its BMAC trade partners were important in understanding Western legal prehistory and the larger context of global legal thought.
This article's interpretation of the prehistoric record is deeply out of touch with mainstream scholarship regarding these parts of pre-history and ancient history. When Kar states in the abstract that "I will be arguing that these ancient developments most likely had a much closer and much more intimate relationship to some of the earliest precursors of Western tradition than has commonly been recognized," Kar is greatly understating the extent to which the conclusions reached are not accepted by scholars whose primary fields of research are more closely aligned with the study of this part of prehistory.
Kar also fails to give sufficient credit to the fact that we know, even with the latest developments in this fast advancing branch of research, very, very little about the social structure and laws of these ancient civilizations, even though we know much more than we once did about their genetics, their tools and technologies, the chronologies and geographic range of their civilizations, and their linguistic affiliations.
The Abstract
The paper (open access) is Robin Bradley Kar (University of Illinois College of Law) Western Legal Prehistory: Reconstructing the Hidden Origins of Western Law and Civilization (University of Illinois Law Review, Vol. 2012, No. 5, p. 1499, 2012). The lengthy abstract is as follows:
The Mainstream View Is That The Harappans Did Not Influence Western Civilization
The mainstream view, which is widely held, would see the Proto-Indo-European civilization of the Pontic-Caspian steppe that really expanded in territory during the Bronze Age (or in a minority view that reaches the same conclusion on Harappan influences, a Proto-Indo-European civilization that originated in Anatolia and was the source of the earliest Neolithic migrants to Europe) as the most direct ancestor of Greco-Roman civilization.
The mainstream view in the field is that Harappan civilization had only a minimal influence on non-Indo-Aryan parts of the Indo-European cultural tradition (with the possible exception of an indirect influence of the recently rediscovered Tocharian civilization of the Tarim basin in China that Indo-Europeanist Mallory believes may have received some of its irrigated agriculture concepts from via Bactrian trade partners).
Thus, the mainstream view is that the Indo-European cultures of the Greeks, the Celts, the Romans, the Germanic peoples, the Slavs, the Hittites, the Armenians, and even the Persians, probably received virtually no Harappan influences.
Hebrew Culture Had No Harappan Influences
There is also an almost a universal consensus that Harppan civilization had no influence or connections at all with the ancient Hebrews. The earliest Hebrew states and the ethnogenesis of a people who saw themselves as "Hebrews" or "Jews" in what is now called Israel arose in the Iron Age (i.e. after 1200 BCE and before the fall of Rome), centuries after Harappan civilization had ceased to exist. The language shift of the Sumerian empire of Mesopotamia that coincided with the rise of the Semitic language speaking Akadian Empire in Mesopotamia ca. 2000 BCE, following one of the worst droughts in recorded history in the region, came at a time when the Harappan civilization was in its final centuries and trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley had declined.
The branch of the Semitic language family (which is part of the Afro-Asiatic language macro-family rather than the Indo-European language macro-family) that gave rise to both the Arabic and Hebrew languages was a sister language to Akkadian, rather than a descendant of Akkadian, and probably broke off to be a distinct branch of the Semitic languages at all sometime after the Harappan empire collapsed.
There are strong identifiable Sumerian cultural influences in the Torah, and in particular, in much of the book of Genesis (for example, the Creation story, the Garden of Eden, Noah's flood, and the Tower of Babel), and in the story of the birth and early childhood of Moses (which closely parallels an earlier legend of the birth and early childhood of one of the more famous Sumerian kings). But, there is no reason to think that the Sumerian influences on Western Civilization that were received via the adoption of Christianty which adopted the Torah as part of its scripture, had a Harappan source that was incorporated into Sumerian civilization and from there into linguistically Semitic Mesopotamian civilization and from there into the Torah. Moreover, there is even less reason to believe that these residual Mesopotamian cultural contributions that were incorporated into the Torah have had any actual impact on law or legal theory in Western Civilization (indeed, most of the formative period for the parts of legal thinking in Western Civilization that survived the fall of the Roman Empire, with the possible exception of family law, pre-date any meaningful Hebrew cultural contribution to Western culture).
Hebrew cultural influence on Western Civilization was quite minor prior to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, when the Jewish diaspora gave rise to a mass migration of Jews from their modest Levatine kingdoms to places across the Roman Empire. Most of the Hebrew cultural influence on Western Civilization comes from the branch of early Rabbinic era Judaism that became Christianity which grew rapidly in popularity in various Rome Empire cities in the 100s and 200s CE, and was adopted by Roman Emperor Constantine as the empire's state religion in 325 CE. But, Christianity was syncrenistic and incorporated into its Rabbinic Jewish core rituals and concepts from other sources some of the most notable of which are the Platonic philosophy, practices from the cult of Mithras, and practices from the cult of Dionysis. The particular branch of Judaism that became Christianity also reflects Zoroastrian religious influences that had accreted to this particular sect member's theology and dualistic worldview in the period between the writing of the last books of the Hebrew Bible and the earliest writing of the Christian New Testament.
There Is No Harappan Legal Tradition To Draw Upon
A huge problem with any effort to gain insight into modern legal legacies from Harappan culture, even if there were any, is that we simply have no idea from any historical accounts what the laws of this civilization were like at a level of detail sufficiently great and sufficiently reliable to make any real inferences relevant to law then or now. There are some short Harappan written materials out there to be read, although we don't know if they had any legal content, but none of them have been deciphered. And, the Harappan writings that we do have are overwhelmingly too short to have been very useful surviving legal texts or literature.
In the somewhat analogous field of Minoan language documents, we are further along in making some sense of what the ancient writings mean, and those mostly consist of accounting records.
Moreover, even in places that could plausibly have been influenced by Harappan legal culture at some point in time, intervening civilizations have had such profound cultural impacts that any deep substrate influence of a Harappan legal culture would be nearly impossible to discern.
For example, in the area from Bactria to the Indus River Valley that the law review article argues for as a locus through which Harappan influence could have impacted the formative period of Indo-European culture, there have been Uralic hunter-gatherer, Pre-Indo-European pastoralist, Indo-Iranian pastoralist, East Asian Turkic, Byzantine, Mongolian, Muslim, pre-Soviet Russian, and Soviet Russian waves of cultural influences that virtually eliminated or almost completely diluted any cultural impact of a hypothetical very old strata of Harappan cultural influences in the area.
This area was at the very fringe of the literate world in the early historic era, so the earliest written accounts from ancient Greek and Roman writers are often brief, vague, fuzzy, inaccurate and confused.
The Mainstream View of Harappan Civilization
The mainstream view of Harappan civilization is that it is one of the earliest offshoots of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic revolution (i.e. invention of farming, herding and pottery), reaching the Indus River Valley around the same time that the Neolithic revolution was extended to Egypt, about a thousand years after it appears in the Fertile Crescent (i.e. the Levant, Southern Anatolia and Mesopotamia).
The mainstream view is that its language survives only in undeciphered written impression, many of which were seals that may have been only a proto-script and not a full literary language, and that the Harappan language had very little substrate influence on the Indo-Aryan languages, i.e. Sanskrit and its many modern descendants such as Hindi and Urdu. It is acknowledged, however, that Harappan worldviews and religious concepts may have had meaningful influences on the Hindu religion in the early Vedic period around 1500 BCE when Indo-European populations conquered their collapsed civilization and imposed their language and some of their religious and cultural ideas on the remnants of the Harappan people.
It is generally assumed that the Harappan language was not part of the Indo-European language family. Some people speculate that the Harappan language may have been a source for the Dravidan languages and possibly also related to the Elamite languages of ancient Southwestern Iran, but the case that the Dravidan languages are an isolate not related to any other known living or extinct language, or has some other source, is at least as solid.
Sumerian records indicate that there was regular maritime commerce between the Indus River Valley and Sumeria via the Persian Gulf during the Copper Age, that they spoke a non-Sumerian language, and that there were Harappan expatriate communities of traders in the Sumerian cities closest to the Persian Gulf.
Archaeological records from the Indus River Valley strongly suggest that the entire civilization experienced little intra-community warfare and may have been a unified country or federation of city-states until it collapsed. For example, apart from a few frontier trading posts, Harappan cities were not walled. Recent research has revealed evidence of social stratification, active trading networks between its cities and into the neighboring Bactria and Sumeria and Western Deccan Pennisula regions that employed at least a proto-script of abstract seals with semantic meaning for commercial purposes, and some evidence of what may have been criminal violence, domestic violence or mercy killing of individuals with sickness (interpretations vary). Harappan cities showed evidence of considerable urban planning, perhaps even on the level of early Roman cities.
Many Harappan cities were along a river near the Pakistan-India border which was probably called by its Vedic name, the Sarvasti River, that dried up rapidly not long before the Indo-European Aryan peoples arrived ca. 1500 BCE. This ecological catastrophe was probably pivotal in the collapse of Harappan civilization and probably opened the door to their conquest.
The mainstream view is that the cultural legacy of Harappan civilization, to the extent that there is one at all that is distinguishable in modern civilization, manifests itself in those aspects of South Asian Hindu culture that differ from those cultural characteristics that were shared by all of the Indo-European societies.
For example, while the Hindu Brahmin caste has been shown with genetic evidence to have had a disproportionate Indo-European superstrate influence relative to other castes in India, the underlying caste system structure of Hindu India may very well be a Harappan cultural legacy that the conquering Indo-Europeans (more specifically, the conquering Indo-Aryans), grafted themselves onto at the top.
In the area of religion, the polytheistic Hindu religion differs from other Indo-European pagan religions (e.g. Celtic, Greek, Roman, Norse and Hittite deities), in having had many deities who had forms that were not basically "super"-human. This may have been a legacy of Harappan religious beliefs that were integrated into the polytheistic religion of the Indo-Aryans to form Hinduism.
The furthest historically documented extent of specifically Indo-Aryan (as opposed to the broader Indo-Iranian) branch of Indo-European cultures, that may have carried with them Harappan cultural legacies, was as the ruling class of the Mittani Empire that was contemporaneous with the Bronze Age Indo-European Hittite Empire in Anatolia (ca. 2000 BCE to 1200 BCE), that was located in a region in the general vicinity of the border of modern Turkey with modern Iran. But, this dynasty and its Indo-Aryan cultural influences (particularly in the areas of horse husbandry and chariot driving) had disappeared by around the time of the Bronze Age collapse (1200 BCE), give or take a century or two, and was long gone by the time that the Iron Age classical Greek civilization that is normally seen as foundation to Western Civilization began to emerge.
Out of India Theories and Variants On Them
A not very widely held minority view on Indo-European origins (except among politically motivated Hindu nationalists) sees this language family and the larger proto-Indo-European culture of the people who spoke early version of the languages that subsequently diversified into the Indo-European language families as having been much more profoundly influenced by Harappan civilization.
The law review article appears to be adopting the "Influenced By India" theory in the described below.
Out of India Theories Of Indo-European Origins
Out of India theories of Indo-European linguistic origins have a somewhat undeserved reputation that verges on crackpot status in the field, as the evidence does not so definitively rule them out. But, there are also good reasons to be skeptical of these theories.
But, the law review article referenced below does do its readers unfamiliar with this field a disservice by apparently failing to make clear just how non-mainstream the view that Harappan culture has had an important cultural contribution of any kind to Western Civilization is among linguistics, archaeologists, and other experts in ancient history, prehistory and historical population genetics.
In the most extreme version, the "Out of India" theory of Indo-European origins argues that the Proto-Indo-European language was the Harappan language, and that the Indus River Valley civilization's territory was the urheimat of the Indo-European language family.
In one version of this narrative, the collapse of the Harappan civilization produced a diaspora of Harappans in all directions including the cities of its trade partners in Bactria. These Harappan exiles became a ruling class of the neighboring central Asian pastoralists in a task made easier by their advanced large scale civilization and agricultural knowledge, and this brought about language shift to the Harappan Proto-Indo-European language. Invigorated by the direction of this new ruling class, the resulting Indo-European civilization spread far and wide to eventually become the dominant language family of Europe, India, Anatolia, Central Asia, and South Asia.
An origin of the Indo-European languages in Harappa which was a cultural sphere relatively isolated from other advanced civilization for a very long time, would help to explain the relative lack of an obvious source of a related language from which proto-Indo-European could have split off in the proto-Indo-European place of origin, and would explain the relatively complete compliment of agricultural and maritime words in the proto-Indo-European lexicon that seem out of place in a society of nomadic pastoralists of the European steppe.
An Out of India theory would help explain why the Vedic tradition does not include any allusion to a migration from outside the region or a conquest of their people by outsiders, unlike many other Indo-European legendary histories. This omission is particularly notable given that the Vedic tradition does famously refer to the archaeologically observed transition of peoples in North India from inhumation to cremation of the dead which is often seen as a key marker of the point in time of the arrival of the Indo-Aryans in South Asia.
Similarly, an Out of India theory would explain why it has been impossible to identify a Harappan substrate in early Vedic Sanskrit (by comparison, for example, there is a clear pre-Mycenean Greek Aegean language substrate in Greek). If Harappan is the source language of Indo-European, there would not be a non-Indo-European substrate in Sanskrit, the most direct descendant of Harappan in an Out of India hypothesis.
Ancient DNA and the population genetics of modern populations has shown a strong link between Y-DNA haplogroup R1a, which is passed from father to son, regions of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, the European Steppe and Central Asia that were Indo-European linguistically prior to Bronze Age collapse, and in Brahmin populations of South India where an Indo-European introgression is inferred. Both Y-DNA haplogroup R1 and Y-DNA haplogroup R2 are found in the Indus River Valley, with R2 rather closely tracking areas that would have had strong demographic influence from the Harappans. In an Out of India narrative, Y-DNA haplogroup R originates in the Indus River Valley (or at least has its first major expansion there) and Y-DNA haplogroup R1 is characteristic of the founding population of Harappans who migrate from the Indus River Valley to the Central Asian and European Steppe and come to form the bulk of the expanding population of Proto-Indo-Europeans, with Y-DNA R1b populations branching away and expanding into Western Europe at some point from this source. There are problems with this narrative and the more conventional view is to put the point of the R1a v. R1b divide further back in time and closer to the Pontic-Caspian steppe, but they aren't insurmountable issues.
Autosomal DNA from modern populations in South Asia also reveals that the "Ancestral North Indian" (ANI) component of modern DNA in South Asia, and the "Ancestral South Indian" (ASI) component of modern DNA in South Asia, while largely coinciding with the boundaries of historically Indo-Aryan linguistic areas and historically Dravidian linguistic areas in South Asia, seem to be much older than the hypothetical 1500 BCE event of an Indo-Aryan invasion of South Asia. To the extent that the ANI autosomal genetic component reflects an Indo-Aryan contribution (presumably from outside South Asia in the Kurgan hypothesis and Anatolian hypothesis of Indo-European origins), at least to some extent, the time depth of the ANI component is hard to understand. But, a great time depth of the the ANI contribution to South Asian population genetics is easier to understand if that contribution can be traced through the entire history of the Indus River Valley civilization's presence in South Asia.
Influenced By India Theories
A more moderate variation on the Out of India theory would be an "influenced by India" theory, in which people who were culturally Harappan or Harappan influenced in places like Bactria and Iran added key ingredients to the mix of cultural elements in the Proto-Indo-European culture of the European Steppe or Anatolia (depending upon whose Indo-European Urheimhat theory one adheres to) which helped to propel a previously marginal pastoralist steppe culture into a dominant cultural influence on Western Civilization and beyond. For example, the Proto-Indo-Europeans might have been influenced in agricultural techniques and social organization by Harappan influenced Bactrians early on in a way that spread with the expanding Indo-European culture, without undergoing language shift.
Criticisms of Out Of India and Influenced By India Theories
Some of the early criticism of Out of India theories have origins in a Eurocentric view of the world that was dominant when linguists first began to discover that many modern languages were related to each other in a large, mostly branching linguistic family tree that is now called the Indo-European language family in the 19th century at the height of the European colonial era. Attributing any great cultural accomplishments to the "lesser" peoples whom Europeans ruled seemed unnatural, so cognitive biases prevented a fair condideration of out of India theories.
But, in our current and more enlightened era, there are still solid reasons to be skeptical of both out of India theories and Influenced By India theories.
Most theories of Indo-European linguistic and cultural influences would put the formative region of Indo-European culture to far West to be much influenced by the Westernmost extent of cultural influences from Harappan civilization via its trade partners in Bactria, which may very well not itself have been truly Harappan but merely Harappan influenced. Bactria may have been influential for some of the more eastern branches for Indo-European civilization once it started to expand from a central urheimat, but would likely have had far less influence on the western branches of Indo-European civilization that eventually evolved in the cultures that historians describe as "Western Civilization."
India is at one geographic extreme of the Indo-European linguistic territory, and all other things being equal, one would expect a proto-Indo-European urheimat to be closer to the center of the early Indo-European world. For example, a recent statistical model that attempted to piece together phylogenies of the Indo-European language from scratch (largely mirroring conventional classifications by other methods) have suggested Anatolia as a most likely origin for the Indo-European languages.
Archaeological evidence of strong cultural continuity between ancient civilizations known to have been Indo-European language speaking from historically attested records (e.g. the Hittites, Tocharians and Mycenean Greeks) and prehistoric civilizations whose linguistic affiliations are otherwise unknown support what is known as the Kurgan Hypothesis that trace this chain of cultural continuities back to archaeological civilizations of the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 5,500 years ago, that were early adopters of horse domestication, wheeled transportation, and of metallurgy.
The metallurgical innovations associated with the Bronze Age wave of Indo-European expansion appears from the archaeological record to have been borrowed from non-Indo-European civilizations neighboring the proto-Indo-Europeans and to have their earliest origins in the Caucuses although they do very quickly spread to the Northern outskirts of the Harappan territory and to Anatolia. But, admittedly, it wouldn't take more than a couple of new, very old discoveries of metallurgy technologies somewhere else to invert the apparent direction of technology spread in the archaeological record.
In sum, while the evidence against an Out of India theory of Indo-European origins is not so overwhelming that is is absolutely definitive, and it is possible that an Influenced by India theory could have some thread of truth to it, both theories are on balance disfavored by the available evidence for quite solid reasons.
This article's interpretation of the prehistoric record is deeply out of touch with mainstream scholarship regarding these parts of pre-history and ancient history. When Kar states in the abstract that "I will be arguing that these ancient developments most likely had a much closer and much more intimate relationship to some of the earliest precursors of Western tradition than has commonly been recognized," Kar is greatly understating the extent to which the conclusions reached are not accepted by scholars whose primary fields of research are more closely aligned with the study of this part of prehistory.
Kar also fails to give sufficient credit to the fact that we know, even with the latest developments in this fast advancing branch of research, very, very little about the social structure and laws of these ancient civilizations, even though we know much more than we once did about their genetics, their tools and technologies, the chronologies and geographic range of their civilizations, and their linguistic affiliations.
The Abstract
The paper (open access) is Robin Bradley Kar (University of Illinois College of Law) Western Legal Prehistory: Reconstructing the Hidden Origins of Western Law and Civilization (University of Illinois Law Review, Vol. 2012, No. 5, p. 1499, 2012). The lengthy abstract is as follows:
Western legal prehistory aims to reconstruct some of the earliest proto-legal and cultural developments that gave rise to Western legal systems and the rule of law. So construed, our understanding of Western legal prehistory is currently highly undeveloped. One reason for this fact is methodological: without the aid of written sources, reconstructions of human prehistory can prove difficult. Recent advances in a broad range of cognate fields have, however, now accumulated past a critical tipping point, and we are now in a secure enough position to begin to reconstruct important aspects of Western legal prehistory.
This Article draws upon and develops these contemporary findings to reconstruct the most plausible genealogical shape of Western legal prehistory. In the process, it reaches a somewhat surprising conclusion. On the traditional view, the most important traditions relevant to the rise of Western law and Western Civilization are said to have originated in ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. This traditional view is, however, based primarily on historical sources, and the reconstructions in this Article suggest that important precursors of these traditions very likely emerged much earlier and much further to the East. In fact, some of the most important traditions relevant to the emergence of large-scale civilizations with the rule of law in the West would appear to represent just one branch a much larger and richer family of traditions, which began to emerge around 4500 BC in the Eastern-Iran-Bactria-Indus-Valley region. Beginning at this early time, this region began to produce one of the very first ancient civilizations to arise within our natural history as a species (viz., the “Harappan” or “Indus Valley” Civilization), and the people in this region must have therefore developed some of the very first cultural traditions that were specifically adapted to sustaining large-scale civilizations with incipient law.
I will be arguing that these ancient developments most likely had a much closer and much more intimate relationship to some of the earliest precursors of Western tradition than has commonly been recognized because these precursors of Western tradition ultimately originated closer to ancient Bactria — which is an area directly adjacent to the Indus Valley — during this very same time period. The reconstructions developed in this Article will thus allow me to decipher what I take to be the most plausible early genealogical shape of our legal family tree, and to suggest a number of important but underappreciated relationships that obtain between our modern Western traditions and a range of other Eurasian traditions with which the West has typically been contrasted.
In today’s world, it is, moreover, especially important that we try to reconstruct the genealogical structure of Western legal prehistory and obtain a better understanding of our deep past. There is now an accumulating body of empirical work, which suggests that we can explain a broad range of features of modern societies in terms of the origins of their laws. This literature suggests that legal origin variables can have strong effects on issues as diverse as corporate governance structure, labor regulations, the robustness of capital markets, and even literacy and infant mortality rates. Whether and how a modern society functions best would thus appear to depend at least in part on the origins of their legal traditions. At the same time, however, both the present legal origins literature and much comparative law scholarship distinguish primarily between the civil versus common law origins of a nation’s legal system, or between both of these types of Western law and various non-Western legal systems; and the findings of this literature have not yet been fully harmonized with the swath of known difficulties that many developing nations have faced in transitioning to large-scale societies with the rule of law regardless of their civil- or common-law origins. The family trees that are employed in the current literature are, moreover, typically identified from the historical record and therefore fail to detect any relevant relations that might have arisen in human prehistory. They tend to focus on a conception of law as a set of publicly stated rules and procedures that are largely exogenous to the underlying cultural traditions and psychological attitudes that tend to support flourishing legal systems. They therefore fail to detect the kinds of emergent cultural traditions (including the culturally emergent psychological attitudes) that first allowed humans to transition from hunter-gatherer forms of life into larger-scale civilizations with the rule of law.
The reconstruction offered here will, by contrast, allow us to see almost half of the large-scale megaempires that have arisen throughout world history — including all those that have arisen in the modern West — as having a shared cultural origin that goes much further back in time. The tradition in question first emerged with some of our very first human forays out of hunter-gatherer living and into settled agricultural living with large-scale civilizations and incipient legal traditions. An understanding of this deeper family tree should therefore have important empirical implications. This work can, for example, be used to help explain why certain exportations of Western-style legal institutions have worked so well while others have not. This work can also be used to identify a number of important but underappreciated features of Western traditions that are shared with these broader Eurasian traditions and have been playing a critical — if underappreciated — role in helping to sustain various forms of social complexity and economic development over the course of world history. Hence, this work can help us understand better some of the full causes and conditions of our modern success in the West. Inquiries of this kind should have special urgency today, given the massive exportations of Western law and Western legal institutions to so many other parts of the world and given the increased pressures toward Westernization that are being felt around the globe.
The Mainstream View Is That The Harappans Did Not Influence Western Civilization
The mainstream view, which is widely held, would see the Proto-Indo-European civilization of the Pontic-Caspian steppe that really expanded in territory during the Bronze Age (or in a minority view that reaches the same conclusion on Harappan influences, a Proto-Indo-European civilization that originated in Anatolia and was the source of the earliest Neolithic migrants to Europe) as the most direct ancestor of Greco-Roman civilization.
The mainstream view in the field is that Harappan civilization had only a minimal influence on non-Indo-Aryan parts of the Indo-European cultural tradition (with the possible exception of an indirect influence of the recently rediscovered Tocharian civilization of the Tarim basin in China that Indo-Europeanist Mallory believes may have received some of its irrigated agriculture concepts from via Bactrian trade partners).
Thus, the mainstream view is that the Indo-European cultures of the Greeks, the Celts, the Romans, the Germanic peoples, the Slavs, the Hittites, the Armenians, and even the Persians, probably received virtually no Harappan influences.
Hebrew Culture Had No Harappan Influences
There is also an almost a universal consensus that Harppan civilization had no influence or connections at all with the ancient Hebrews. The earliest Hebrew states and the ethnogenesis of a people who saw themselves as "Hebrews" or "Jews" in what is now called Israel arose in the Iron Age (i.e. after 1200 BCE and before the fall of Rome), centuries after Harappan civilization had ceased to exist. The language shift of the Sumerian empire of Mesopotamia that coincided with the rise of the Semitic language speaking Akadian Empire in Mesopotamia ca. 2000 BCE, following one of the worst droughts in recorded history in the region, came at a time when the Harappan civilization was in its final centuries and trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley had declined.
The branch of the Semitic language family (which is part of the Afro-Asiatic language macro-family rather than the Indo-European language macro-family) that gave rise to both the Arabic and Hebrew languages was a sister language to Akkadian, rather than a descendant of Akkadian, and probably broke off to be a distinct branch of the Semitic languages at all sometime after the Harappan empire collapsed.
There are strong identifiable Sumerian cultural influences in the Torah, and in particular, in much of the book of Genesis (for example, the Creation story, the Garden of Eden, Noah's flood, and the Tower of Babel), and in the story of the birth and early childhood of Moses (which closely parallels an earlier legend of the birth and early childhood of one of the more famous Sumerian kings). But, there is no reason to think that the Sumerian influences on Western Civilization that were received via the adoption of Christianty which adopted the Torah as part of its scripture, had a Harappan source that was incorporated into Sumerian civilization and from there into linguistically Semitic Mesopotamian civilization and from there into the Torah. Moreover, there is even less reason to believe that these residual Mesopotamian cultural contributions that were incorporated into the Torah have had any actual impact on law or legal theory in Western Civilization (indeed, most of the formative period for the parts of legal thinking in Western Civilization that survived the fall of the Roman Empire, with the possible exception of family law, pre-date any meaningful Hebrew cultural contribution to Western culture).
Hebrew cultural influence on Western Civilization was quite minor prior to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, when the Jewish diaspora gave rise to a mass migration of Jews from their modest Levatine kingdoms to places across the Roman Empire. Most of the Hebrew cultural influence on Western Civilization comes from the branch of early Rabbinic era Judaism that became Christianity which grew rapidly in popularity in various Rome Empire cities in the 100s and 200s CE, and was adopted by Roman Emperor Constantine as the empire's state religion in 325 CE. But, Christianity was syncrenistic and incorporated into its Rabbinic Jewish core rituals and concepts from other sources some of the most notable of which are the Platonic philosophy, practices from the cult of Mithras, and practices from the cult of Dionysis. The particular branch of Judaism that became Christianity also reflects Zoroastrian religious influences that had accreted to this particular sect member's theology and dualistic worldview in the period between the writing of the last books of the Hebrew Bible and the earliest writing of the Christian New Testament.
There Is No Harappan Legal Tradition To Draw Upon
A huge problem with any effort to gain insight into modern legal legacies from Harappan culture, even if there were any, is that we simply have no idea from any historical accounts what the laws of this civilization were like at a level of detail sufficiently great and sufficiently reliable to make any real inferences relevant to law then or now. There are some short Harappan written materials out there to be read, although we don't know if they had any legal content, but none of them have been deciphered. And, the Harappan writings that we do have are overwhelmingly too short to have been very useful surviving legal texts or literature.
In the somewhat analogous field of Minoan language documents, we are further along in making some sense of what the ancient writings mean, and those mostly consist of accounting records.
Moreover, even in places that could plausibly have been influenced by Harappan legal culture at some point in time, intervening civilizations have had such profound cultural impacts that any deep substrate influence of a Harappan legal culture would be nearly impossible to discern.
For example, in the area from Bactria to the Indus River Valley that the law review article argues for as a locus through which Harappan influence could have impacted the formative period of Indo-European culture, there have been Uralic hunter-gatherer, Pre-Indo-European pastoralist, Indo-Iranian pastoralist, East Asian Turkic, Byzantine, Mongolian, Muslim, pre-Soviet Russian, and Soviet Russian waves of cultural influences that virtually eliminated or almost completely diluted any cultural impact of a hypothetical very old strata of Harappan cultural influences in the area.
This area was at the very fringe of the literate world in the early historic era, so the earliest written accounts from ancient Greek and Roman writers are often brief, vague, fuzzy, inaccurate and confused.
The Mainstream View of Harappan Civilization
The mainstream view of Harappan civilization is that it is one of the earliest offshoots of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic revolution (i.e. invention of farming, herding and pottery), reaching the Indus River Valley around the same time that the Neolithic revolution was extended to Egypt, about a thousand years after it appears in the Fertile Crescent (i.e. the Levant, Southern Anatolia and Mesopotamia).
The mainstream view is that its language survives only in undeciphered written impression, many of which were seals that may have been only a proto-script and not a full literary language, and that the Harappan language had very little substrate influence on the Indo-Aryan languages, i.e. Sanskrit and its many modern descendants such as Hindi and Urdu. It is acknowledged, however, that Harappan worldviews and religious concepts may have had meaningful influences on the Hindu religion in the early Vedic period around 1500 BCE when Indo-European populations conquered their collapsed civilization and imposed their language and some of their religious and cultural ideas on the remnants of the Harappan people.
It is generally assumed that the Harappan language was not part of the Indo-European language family. Some people speculate that the Harappan language may have been a source for the Dravidan languages and possibly also related to the Elamite languages of ancient Southwestern Iran, but the case that the Dravidan languages are an isolate not related to any other known living or extinct language, or has some other source, is at least as solid.
Sumerian records indicate that there was regular maritime commerce between the Indus River Valley and Sumeria via the Persian Gulf during the Copper Age, that they spoke a non-Sumerian language, and that there were Harappan expatriate communities of traders in the Sumerian cities closest to the Persian Gulf.
Archaeological records from the Indus River Valley strongly suggest that the entire civilization experienced little intra-community warfare and may have been a unified country or federation of city-states until it collapsed. For example, apart from a few frontier trading posts, Harappan cities were not walled. Recent research has revealed evidence of social stratification, active trading networks between its cities and into the neighboring Bactria and Sumeria and Western Deccan Pennisula regions that employed at least a proto-script of abstract seals with semantic meaning for commercial purposes, and some evidence of what may have been criminal violence, domestic violence or mercy killing of individuals with sickness (interpretations vary). Harappan cities showed evidence of considerable urban planning, perhaps even on the level of early Roman cities.
Many Harappan cities were along a river near the Pakistan-India border which was probably called by its Vedic name, the Sarvasti River, that dried up rapidly not long before the Indo-European Aryan peoples arrived ca. 1500 BCE. This ecological catastrophe was probably pivotal in the collapse of Harappan civilization and probably opened the door to their conquest.
The mainstream view is that the cultural legacy of Harappan civilization, to the extent that there is one at all that is distinguishable in modern civilization, manifests itself in those aspects of South Asian Hindu culture that differ from those cultural characteristics that were shared by all of the Indo-European societies.
For example, while the Hindu Brahmin caste has been shown with genetic evidence to have had a disproportionate Indo-European superstrate influence relative to other castes in India, the underlying caste system structure of Hindu India may very well be a Harappan cultural legacy that the conquering Indo-Europeans (more specifically, the conquering Indo-Aryans), grafted themselves onto at the top.
In the area of religion, the polytheistic Hindu religion differs from other Indo-European pagan religions (e.g. Celtic, Greek, Roman, Norse and Hittite deities), in having had many deities who had forms that were not basically "super"-human. This may have been a legacy of Harappan religious beliefs that were integrated into the polytheistic religion of the Indo-Aryans to form Hinduism.
The furthest historically documented extent of specifically Indo-Aryan (as opposed to the broader Indo-Iranian) branch of Indo-European cultures, that may have carried with them Harappan cultural legacies, was as the ruling class of the Mittani Empire that was contemporaneous with the Bronze Age Indo-European Hittite Empire in Anatolia (ca. 2000 BCE to 1200 BCE), that was located in a region in the general vicinity of the border of modern Turkey with modern Iran. But, this dynasty and its Indo-Aryan cultural influences (particularly in the areas of horse husbandry and chariot driving) had disappeared by around the time of the Bronze Age collapse (1200 BCE), give or take a century or two, and was long gone by the time that the Iron Age classical Greek civilization that is normally seen as foundation to Western Civilization began to emerge.
Out of India Theories and Variants On Them
A not very widely held minority view on Indo-European origins (except among politically motivated Hindu nationalists) sees this language family and the larger proto-Indo-European culture of the people who spoke early version of the languages that subsequently diversified into the Indo-European language families as having been much more profoundly influenced by Harappan civilization.
The law review article appears to be adopting the "Influenced By India" theory in the described below.
Out of India Theories Of Indo-European Origins
Out of India theories of Indo-European linguistic origins have a somewhat undeserved reputation that verges on crackpot status in the field, as the evidence does not so definitively rule them out. But, there are also good reasons to be skeptical of these theories.
But, the law review article referenced below does do its readers unfamiliar with this field a disservice by apparently failing to make clear just how non-mainstream the view that Harappan culture has had an important cultural contribution of any kind to Western Civilization is among linguistics, archaeologists, and other experts in ancient history, prehistory and historical population genetics.
In the most extreme version, the "Out of India" theory of Indo-European origins argues that the Proto-Indo-European language was the Harappan language, and that the Indus River Valley civilization's territory was the urheimat of the Indo-European language family.
In one version of this narrative, the collapse of the Harappan civilization produced a diaspora of Harappans in all directions including the cities of its trade partners in Bactria. These Harappan exiles became a ruling class of the neighboring central Asian pastoralists in a task made easier by their advanced large scale civilization and agricultural knowledge, and this brought about language shift to the Harappan Proto-Indo-European language. Invigorated by the direction of this new ruling class, the resulting Indo-European civilization spread far and wide to eventually become the dominant language family of Europe, India, Anatolia, Central Asia, and South Asia.
An origin of the Indo-European languages in Harappa which was a cultural sphere relatively isolated from other advanced civilization for a very long time, would help to explain the relative lack of an obvious source of a related language from which proto-Indo-European could have split off in the proto-Indo-European place of origin, and would explain the relatively complete compliment of agricultural and maritime words in the proto-Indo-European lexicon that seem out of place in a society of nomadic pastoralists of the European steppe.
An Out of India theory would help explain why the Vedic tradition does not include any allusion to a migration from outside the region or a conquest of their people by outsiders, unlike many other Indo-European legendary histories. This omission is particularly notable given that the Vedic tradition does famously refer to the archaeologically observed transition of peoples in North India from inhumation to cremation of the dead which is often seen as a key marker of the point in time of the arrival of the Indo-Aryans in South Asia.
Similarly, an Out of India theory would explain why it has been impossible to identify a Harappan substrate in early Vedic Sanskrit (by comparison, for example, there is a clear pre-Mycenean Greek Aegean language substrate in Greek). If Harappan is the source language of Indo-European, there would not be a non-Indo-European substrate in Sanskrit, the most direct descendant of Harappan in an Out of India hypothesis.
Ancient DNA and the population genetics of modern populations has shown a strong link between Y-DNA haplogroup R1a, which is passed from father to son, regions of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, the European Steppe and Central Asia that were Indo-European linguistically prior to Bronze Age collapse, and in Brahmin populations of South India where an Indo-European introgression is inferred. Both Y-DNA haplogroup R1 and Y-DNA haplogroup R2 are found in the Indus River Valley, with R2 rather closely tracking areas that would have had strong demographic influence from the Harappans. In an Out of India narrative, Y-DNA haplogroup R originates in the Indus River Valley (or at least has its first major expansion there) and Y-DNA haplogroup R1 is characteristic of the founding population of Harappans who migrate from the Indus River Valley to the Central Asian and European Steppe and come to form the bulk of the expanding population of Proto-Indo-Europeans, with Y-DNA R1b populations branching away and expanding into Western Europe at some point from this source. There are problems with this narrative and the more conventional view is to put the point of the R1a v. R1b divide further back in time and closer to the Pontic-Caspian steppe, but they aren't insurmountable issues.
Autosomal DNA from modern populations in South Asia also reveals that the "Ancestral North Indian" (ANI) component of modern DNA in South Asia, and the "Ancestral South Indian" (ASI) component of modern DNA in South Asia, while largely coinciding with the boundaries of historically Indo-Aryan linguistic areas and historically Dravidian linguistic areas in South Asia, seem to be much older than the hypothetical 1500 BCE event of an Indo-Aryan invasion of South Asia. To the extent that the ANI autosomal genetic component reflects an Indo-Aryan contribution (presumably from outside South Asia in the Kurgan hypothesis and Anatolian hypothesis of Indo-European origins), at least to some extent, the time depth of the ANI component is hard to understand. But, a great time depth of the the ANI contribution to South Asian population genetics is easier to understand if that contribution can be traced through the entire history of the Indus River Valley civilization's presence in South Asia.
Influenced By India Theories
A more moderate variation on the Out of India theory would be an "influenced by India" theory, in which people who were culturally Harappan or Harappan influenced in places like Bactria and Iran added key ingredients to the mix of cultural elements in the Proto-Indo-European culture of the European Steppe or Anatolia (depending upon whose Indo-European Urheimhat theory one adheres to) which helped to propel a previously marginal pastoralist steppe culture into a dominant cultural influence on Western Civilization and beyond. For example, the Proto-Indo-Europeans might have been influenced in agricultural techniques and social organization by Harappan influenced Bactrians early on in a way that spread with the expanding Indo-European culture, without undergoing language shift.
Criticisms of Out Of India and Influenced By India Theories
Some of the early criticism of Out of India theories have origins in a Eurocentric view of the world that was dominant when linguists first began to discover that many modern languages were related to each other in a large, mostly branching linguistic family tree that is now called the Indo-European language family in the 19th century at the height of the European colonial era. Attributing any great cultural accomplishments to the "lesser" peoples whom Europeans ruled seemed unnatural, so cognitive biases prevented a fair condideration of out of India theories.
But, in our current and more enlightened era, there are still solid reasons to be skeptical of both out of India theories and Influenced By India theories.
Most theories of Indo-European linguistic and cultural influences would put the formative region of Indo-European culture to far West to be much influenced by the Westernmost extent of cultural influences from Harappan civilization via its trade partners in Bactria, which may very well not itself have been truly Harappan but merely Harappan influenced. Bactria may have been influential for some of the more eastern branches for Indo-European civilization once it started to expand from a central urheimat, but would likely have had far less influence on the western branches of Indo-European civilization that eventually evolved in the cultures that historians describe as "Western Civilization."
India is at one geographic extreme of the Indo-European linguistic territory, and all other things being equal, one would expect a proto-Indo-European urheimat to be closer to the center of the early Indo-European world. For example, a recent statistical model that attempted to piece together phylogenies of the Indo-European language from scratch (largely mirroring conventional classifications by other methods) have suggested Anatolia as a most likely origin for the Indo-European languages.
Archaeological evidence of strong cultural continuity between ancient civilizations known to have been Indo-European language speaking from historically attested records (e.g. the Hittites, Tocharians and Mycenean Greeks) and prehistoric civilizations whose linguistic affiliations are otherwise unknown support what is known as the Kurgan Hypothesis that trace this chain of cultural continuities back to archaeological civilizations of the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 5,500 years ago, that were early adopters of horse domestication, wheeled transportation, and of metallurgy.
The metallurgical innovations associated with the Bronze Age wave of Indo-European expansion appears from the archaeological record to have been borrowed from non-Indo-European civilizations neighboring the proto-Indo-Europeans and to have their earliest origins in the Caucuses although they do very quickly spread to the Northern outskirts of the Harappan territory and to Anatolia. But, admittedly, it wouldn't take more than a couple of new, very old discoveries of metallurgy technologies somewhere else to invert the apparent direction of technology spread in the archaeological record.
In sum, while the evidence against an Out of India theory of Indo-European origins is not so overwhelming that is is absolutely definitive, and it is possible that an Influenced by India theory could have some thread of truth to it, both theories are on balance disfavored by the available evidence for quite solid reasons.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
New Comment Rules
Almost all of the anonymous postings at this blog over the past few months have been spam and there has been a surge in spam postings that the spam filter is not catching any more. Therefore, I have banned comments by anonymous users at this blog. I apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.
English May Have Norweigan Roots
The linguistic orthodoxy that sees Old English as a direct descendant of Old Frisian and later dialects of English as descendants of Old English of the Angles and Saxons that arrived in Britain in the 5th century C.E., even as new loan words were incorporated from Old Norse and following the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE, French and Latin.
But, two academic linguists, Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo and Joseph Emmonds, visiting professor from Palacký University in the Czech Republic disagree.
They are now claiming that Middle English (traditionally designed as the dialect of English spoken in Britain after the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE) and subsequent dialects were descendants of the Old Norse language, and that this language replaced the Old English language that arrived in the 5th century CE in the roughly two and a half centuries before the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE. Old Norse is more similar to Middle English and subsequent languages grammatically, even though Middle English had heavy lexical borrowing (i.e. lots of loan words) from Old English during this transitional period.
This hypothesis suggests that the transition from "early Old English" to "late Old English" ca. 900 CE, rather than Norman Conquest, really marks the transition from Old English, an Anglo-Saxon West Germanic language, to Middle English, a North Germanic Scandinavian language.
In their theory, Anglo-Saxon derived West Germanic Old English endured for about 450 years rather than 700 years. As the Wikipedia article on Old English notes, the preceding Celtic language of the region was more or less completely displaced in a process that started with Old English.
Another reason to suspect language shift from Anglo-Saxon Old English to an Old Norse derived Middle English is that many of the toponymn in the region are Norse rather than Anglo-Saxon. Toponyns are often thought to be among the most resiliant evidence of a language that would not replace older usages unless the language shift was particularly complete. Toponymns are like words relavant to words in daily usage for existing concepts that are less prone to be borrowed than are word for newly acquired ideas expressed in a language (e.g. words for imported products or technologies).
The authors argue that this is one of the reason that Scandinavians have such an easy time learning to speak English as a second language relative to speakers of other languages.
For what it is worth, I find their proposal, despite the fact that it contradicts long time linguistic orthodoxy, to be very convincing both as a matter of linguistics and as a fit to a historically documented narrative.
As a native speaker of English with roughly equal parts German and Swedish speaking Finnish descent who is aware of relatives living in both places, who has virtually no ability to speak or write or read either language, and as someone who has read Old and Middle English works and is familiar with the history of the period from his education, I am arguably in a position to be a relatively neutral evaluator of this claim (free of nationalistic bias).
In the larger scheme of language evolution, this thesis is yet another data point to suggest that something like Newton's second law of motion (i.e. inertia) applies to languages as well. Rather than changing over time mostly due to random linguistic drift within a particular culture, a far larger share of language change than has historically been appreciated happens for specific historical reasons involving colliding cultures. Transitions like the transition between Old English and Middle English happen not simply due to the passage of time, but because a distinct superstrate culture imposed new linguistic standards on the general population.
This analysis also illustrates the point that it pays to be skeptical of extremely deep cultural legacies. Britain received a major cultural reboot from the Norwegians just 1200 years ago that wiped away much of its cultural legacy from the early Middle Ages, Roman Period, iron age, bronze age, and earlier Neolithic eras.
This linguistic claim also implies a larger cultural claim. The cultural legacy of the English people may be more Scandinavian than German and Dutch, and the strong Anglo-Saxon cultural influences on English culture (relative to Scandinavian influences) may be an ahistorical myth.
In the context of American culture, the Yankee culture sourced to the English Midlands according to Fischer's Albion's Seed and adopted regionally by Scandinavian immigrants may have in fact itself have been the most Scandinavian of English regional cultures to make it to the new world in the first place. Hence, similarity due to common cultural origins between English and Scandinavian immigrants, rather than similarity due to transmission of local regional culture to new immigrants, may be important in the cultural formation of these parts of the United States' cultural heritage.
Notably, many "grammar myths" which are commonly viewed as prescriptive rules of formal modern English grammar, but are not in fact observed in literature and other writing and speaking by educated native English language speakers in formal settings, involve situations where Norweigan and English grammar differ from West Germanic and Latin grammatical rules.
The university's press release did not reference a new publication by these linguists that has made this case.
UPDATE November 29, 2012:
The researchers conclusions don't change the mainstream classification of English as a Germanic language. They merely reassigns English from one of the two surviving subfamilies of the Germanic languages to the other one.
The linguistic structure of the Germanic languages is outlined below for context. I also distinguish some neighboring non-Germanic language and describe their place in the overall classification scheme for languages.
Old Norse
As Maju notes in the comments and as can be discerned from the link in the text above, "Old Norse" is the language ancestral to Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, i.e. to all Northern Germanic languages. It also influenced many other languages and is ancestral to both Middle English and modern English if the researchers discussed above are correct. Modern Icelandic is the modern language that has changed the least from Old Norse in the last thousand years. As Wikipedia explains in its article on Old Norse:
All of the other living Germanic languages belong to the West Germanic language family, the most notable representatives of which are German, Dutch, Frisian, Luxembourgish and Pennsylvania German (spoken by the Amish), Yiddish and Afrikaans. The Angles and Saxons who invaded England in the 5th century were speakers of a West Germanic language which is most similar to the modern Friscian language.
East Germanic Languages
There was once an East Germanic language family, but all of the languages in that language family are now extinct. "The East Germanic languages were marginalized from the end of the Migration period [ca. 400 CE to 800 CE]. The Burgundians, Goths, and Vandals became linguistically assimilated by their respective neighbors by about the 7th century [CE], with only Crimean Gothic lingering on until the 18th century." Another extinc Germanic language may also have belonged to the East Germanic family. "The 6th-century Lombardic language . . . may be a variety originally either Northern or Eastern, before being assimilated by West Germanic as the Lombards settled at the Elbe."
Germanic Languages In General
All of the Germanic languages are descendants of the "Proto-Germanic [language] (also known as Common Germanic), which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. . . . common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo-European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age." (Personally, I suspect that the pre-Proto-Germanic speakers arrived only around 1100 BCE in the late Nordic Bronze Age, rather than around 1700 BCE when the early Nordic Bronze Age begins.)
Proto-Germanic was a written language starting around the 2nd century CE when a runic script was used. Prior to about 750 BCE, the Germanic languages were spoken in an area roughly corresponding to modern Denmark and southern coastal Norway and Sweden. It only expanded into the modern boundaries of the Netherlands, German and other Germanic language speaking countries later on, reaching something fairly close to the current extent of Germanic languages in continental Europe by the 1st century CE.
Non-Germanic Languages In The Region and the Indo-European Languages Generally
The Non-Indo-European Languages Of Europe
All of the languages of Europe except Basque (a language isolate), Maltese (a derivative of Arabic) and the Uralic languages are part of the larger Indo-European language family.
The national language of the Scandinavian country of Finland is not a descendant of Old Norse and is not even Germanic or Indo-European. It is a member of the Uralic language family, the indigeneous language family of some of Northern Europe's last indigenous hunter-gatherers that also includes the Estonian and Hungarian languages. The Hungarian language is notable because this Uralic language is the result of language shift by a small Uralic language speaking elite that has left almost no genetic trace in the Hungarian population.
Baltic and Slavic Languages
The languages of Russia, Ukraine, Czeck Republican, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Serbo-Croatian, in contrast, are Slavic languages. This Indo-European language family existed in the form of a single proto-language until about 500 CE (about the time that the Western Roman Empire collapsed), and then expanded from the general vicinity of the Balkans, replacing previous Indo-European and Uralic languages in the areas where Slavic languages are spoken now. They were differentiated into multiple distinct languages starting in the 7th century CE.
The languages of Lithuania and Latvia (and the now-extinct Old Prussian languages) are part of the Indo-European family of Baltic languages.
"All Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic, their immediate parent language, ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of all Indo-European languages, via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE."
Romance and Celtic Languages
Many of the other major languages of Europe (e.g. French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Catalan, Occitan, and Romanian) are Romance language, i.e. languages descended from dialects of Latin that became distinct languages after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE. The Romance languages are part of a larger Italic language family that also includes a number of extinct languages of the Italian pennisula. The Italic language family probably arrived on the Italian Pennisula from Central Europe sometime in the vicinity of Bronze Age collapse (i.e. about 1200 BCE).
The Celtic languages (e.g. Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, the Irish language, Bretton, Cornish and Manx) are more closely related to the Romance languages than any other living languages and the two language families combined are a genetic subfamily of Indo-European languages. Celtic languages were once spoken in territories that are now part of France, Spain, Portugal. The subdivisions of the Celtic languages started to emerge sometime between 1200 BCE and 800 BCE. The language of the late Bronze Age Urnfield culture of central Europe through about 1250 BCE was probably Proto-Celtic. The Iron Age Hallstatt culture was definitely Celtic.
These languages are often lumped together as part of a larger Italo-Celtic language family, perhaps with a proto-language in the Urnfield culture of its immediate predecessor.
Other Indo-European Language Families
The other living Indo-European language families are the Hellenic languages (i.e. a few Greek languages and many extinct languages), Armenian, Albanian, and Indo-Iranian. The Indo-European language family also includes the extinct Anatolian (e.g. Hittite), Tocharian and Paleo-Balkan language families. The Indo-Iranian languages are made up of:
* the Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia (and nowhere else except by recent migrants, by Balinese Hindu priests, and by the people colloquially described as gypsies) except in the Southern Indian areas where only Dravidian languages are spoken,
* the Iranian languages of Iran and neighboring areas the most widely spoken of which are Persian (75 million speakers), Pashto (50 million speakers), Kurdish (32 million speakers), Balochi (15 million speakers) and Lori (2.3 million speakers), and
* the Nuristani languages of about 130,000 mountain people of Eastern Afganistan and neighboring Pakistan.
Albanian is considered to have evolved from an extinct Paleo-Balkan language, usually taken to be either Illyrian or Thracian. While Armenian is not a Hellenic language, it is more closely related to Greek than any other living language.
Indo-European Language Expansion
Indo-European languages arrived in Western Europe only in the Iron Age or perhaps a century or two earlier in some cases. Prior to around 2500 BCE, in my view, which is generally in line with the leading Kurgan hypothesis (the field has many competing hypothesizes about Indo-European linguistic origins), the Indo-European languages were probably absent from the Tarim Basin, from South Asia, from Anatolia, from Greece, and from Armenia. They were confined to the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
My personal and informed, but non-expert, opinion is that prior to Bronze Age collapse there was a copper age language expansion effected by the Bell Beaker civilization and its cultural descendants of languages that were part of the same language family as Basque, all of which (except Basque) were routed starting around the time of Bronze Age collapse by Indo-European languages. This copper age expansion probably caused the extinction of most of the pre-Copper Age languages of Western Europe and roughly corresponds with the geographic area where Y-DNA haplogroup R1b is common in modern European populations.
But, two academic linguists, Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo and Joseph Emmonds, visiting professor from Palacký University in the Czech Republic disagree.
They are now claiming that Middle English (traditionally designed as the dialect of English spoken in Britain after the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE) and subsequent dialects were descendants of the Old Norse language, and that this language replaced the Old English language that arrived in the 5th century CE in the roughly two and a half centuries before the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE. Old Norse is more similar to Middle English and subsequent languages grammatically, even though Middle English had heavy lexical borrowing (i.e. lots of loan words) from Old English during this transitional period.
"Modern English is a direct descendant of the language of Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles in the course of many centuries, before the French-speaking Normans conquered the country in 1066," says Faarlund. He points out that Old English and Modern English are two very different languages. Why?
"We believe it is because Old English quite simply died out while Scandinavian survived, albeit strongly influenced of course by Old English," he says.
The 'cohabitation' between the British and the Scandinavians was largely hostile. Both fought for political hegemony. The descendants of the Vikings gained control of the eastern and northern parts of the country. The Danelaw was under the control of Scandinavian chiefs for half a century [ed. according to Wikipedia Danish mass migration became around 880 CE, Danelaw proper was in place from 886 CE to 954 CE, and this followed by rule by Scandinavian monarch again from 1016 CE until 1044 CE when Edward the Confessor returned the throne to non-Scandinavian rule until the Normans defeated him.]
Like most colonists, the Scandinavian-speaking inhabitants found no reason to switch to the language of the country they had arrived in.
"One especially important, geographic point in our study is that the East Midlands region, where the spoken language later developed into Modern English, coincides almost exactly with the densely populated, southern part of the Danelaw," says the professor.
The language adopted many words from the Danelaw's inhabitants who were of Norwegian and Danish descent. For example, all the lexical words in this sentence are Scandinavian: He took the knife and cut the steak. Only he, the and and come from Old English.
"What is particularly interesting is that Old English adopted words for day-to-day things that were already in the language. Usually one borrows words and concepts for new things. In English almost the reverse is true – the day-to-day words are Scandinavian, and there are many of them," says Faarlund.
Here are some examples: anger, awe, bag, band, big, birth, both, bull, cake, call, cast, cosy, cross, die, dirt, dream, egg, fellow, flat, gain, get, gift, give, guess, guest, hug, husband, ill, kid, law, leg, lift, likely, link, loan, loose, low, mistake, odd, race, raise, root, rotten, same, seat, seem, sister, skill, skin, skirt, sky, steak, though, thrive, Thursday, tight, till, trust, ugly, want, weak, window, wing, wrong.
The researchers believe that Old English already had 90 per cent of these concepts in its own vocabulary.
But the Scandinavian element was not limited to the vocabulary, which is normal when languages come into contact with each other. Even though a massive number of new words are on their way into a language, it nevertheless retains its own grammar. This is almost a universal law.
"But in England grammatical words and morphemes - in other words the smallest abstract, meaningful linguistic unit - were also adopted from Scandinavian and survive in English to this day."
The two researchers show that the sentence structure in Middle English - and thus also Modern English - is Scandinavian and not Western Germanic.
"It is highly irregular to borrow the syntax and structure from one language and use it in another language. In our days the Norwegians are borrowing words from English, and many people are concerned about this. However, the Norwegian word structure is totally unaffected by English. It remains the same. The same goes for the structure in English: it is virtually unaffected by Old English." . . .
"We can show that wherever English differs syntactically from the other Western Germanic languages -- German, Dutch, Frisian -- it has the same structure as the Scandinavian languages."From here.
This hypothesis suggests that the transition from "early Old English" to "late Old English" ca. 900 CE, rather than Norman Conquest, really marks the transition from Old English, an Anglo-Saxon West Germanic language, to Middle English, a North Germanic Scandinavian language.
In their theory, Anglo-Saxon derived West Germanic Old English endured for about 450 years rather than 700 years. As the Wikipedia article on Old English notes, the preceding Celtic language of the region was more or less completely displaced in a process that started with Old English.
Traditionally, and following the Anglo-Saxon preference prevalent in the nineteenth century, many maintain that the influence of Brythonic Celtic on English has been small, citing the small number of Celtic loanwords taken into the language. The number of Celtic loanwords is of a lower order than either Latin or Scandinavian.The displacement of the Celtic languages that were dominant for a far longer period of time prior to the arrival of Old English, than Old English had been in use as of 800 CE, may have cleared the way for an easier language shift to another language that was still in the Germanic language family four and a half centuries later.
Another reason to suspect language shift from Anglo-Saxon Old English to an Old Norse derived Middle English is that many of the toponymn in the region are Norse rather than Anglo-Saxon. Toponyns are often thought to be among the most resiliant evidence of a language that would not replace older usages unless the language shift was particularly complete. Toponymns are like words relavant to words in daily usage for existing concepts that are less prone to be borrowed than are word for newly acquired ideas expressed in a language (e.g. words for imported products or technologies).
The authors argue that this is one of the reason that Scandinavians have such an easy time learning to speak English as a second language relative to speakers of other languages.
For what it is worth, I find their proposal, despite the fact that it contradicts long time linguistic orthodoxy, to be very convincing both as a matter of linguistics and as a fit to a historically documented narrative.
As a native speaker of English with roughly equal parts German and Swedish speaking Finnish descent who is aware of relatives living in both places, who has virtually no ability to speak or write or read either language, and as someone who has read Old and Middle English works and is familiar with the history of the period from his education, I am arguably in a position to be a relatively neutral evaluator of this claim (free of nationalistic bias).
In the larger scheme of language evolution, this thesis is yet another data point to suggest that something like Newton's second law of motion (i.e. inertia) applies to languages as well. Rather than changing over time mostly due to random linguistic drift within a particular culture, a far larger share of language change than has historically been appreciated happens for specific historical reasons involving colliding cultures. Transitions like the transition between Old English and Middle English happen not simply due to the passage of time, but because a distinct superstrate culture imposed new linguistic standards on the general population.
This analysis also illustrates the point that it pays to be skeptical of extremely deep cultural legacies. Britain received a major cultural reboot from the Norwegians just 1200 years ago that wiped away much of its cultural legacy from the early Middle Ages, Roman Period, iron age, bronze age, and earlier Neolithic eras.
This linguistic claim also implies a larger cultural claim. The cultural legacy of the English people may be more Scandinavian than German and Dutch, and the strong Anglo-Saxon cultural influences on English culture (relative to Scandinavian influences) may be an ahistorical myth.
In the context of American culture, the Yankee culture sourced to the English Midlands according to Fischer's Albion's Seed and adopted regionally by Scandinavian immigrants may have in fact itself have been the most Scandinavian of English regional cultures to make it to the new world in the first place. Hence, similarity due to common cultural origins between English and Scandinavian immigrants, rather than similarity due to transmission of local regional culture to new immigrants, may be important in the cultural formation of these parts of the United States' cultural heritage.
Notably, many "grammar myths" which are commonly viewed as prescriptive rules of formal modern English grammar, but are not in fact observed in literature and other writing and speaking by educated native English language speakers in formal settings, involve situations where Norweigan and English grammar differ from West Germanic and Latin grammatical rules.
The university's press release did not reference a new publication by these linguists that has made this case.
UPDATE November 29, 2012:
The researchers conclusions don't change the mainstream classification of English as a Germanic language. They merely reassigns English from one of the two surviving subfamilies of the Germanic languages to the other one.
The linguistic structure of the Germanic languages is outlined below for context. I also distinguish some neighboring non-Germanic language and describe their place in the overall classification scheme for languages.
Old Norse
As Maju notes in the comments and as can be discerned from the link in the text above, "Old Norse" is the language ancestral to Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, i.e. to all Northern Germanic languages. It also influenced many other languages and is ancestral to both Middle English and modern English if the researchers discussed above are correct. Modern Icelandic is the modern language that has changed the least from Old Norse in the last thousand years. As Wikipedia explains in its article on Old Norse:
Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300.
Proto-Norse developed into Old Norse by the 8th century, and Old Norse began to develop into the modern North Germanic languages in the mid- to late 14th century, ending the language phase known as Old Norse. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century
The 12th century Icelandic Gray Goose Laws state that Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders and Danes spoke the same language, dǫnsk tunga ("Danish tongue". . .). Today Old Norse has developed into the modern North Germanic languages (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish), and although distinct languages there is still considerable mutual intelligibility.West Germanic Languages
All of the other living Germanic languages belong to the West Germanic language family, the most notable representatives of which are German, Dutch, Frisian, Luxembourgish and Pennsylvania German (spoken by the Amish), Yiddish and Afrikaans. The Angles and Saxons who invaded England in the 5th century were speakers of a West Germanic language which is most similar to the modern Friscian language.
East Germanic Languages
There was once an East Germanic language family, but all of the languages in that language family are now extinct. "The East Germanic languages were marginalized from the end of the Migration period [ca. 400 CE to 800 CE]. The Burgundians, Goths, and Vandals became linguistically assimilated by their respective neighbors by about the 7th century [CE], with only Crimean Gothic lingering on until the 18th century." Another extinc Germanic language may also have belonged to the East Germanic family. "The 6th-century Lombardic language . . . may be a variety originally either Northern or Eastern, before being assimilated by West Germanic as the Lombards settled at the Elbe."
Germanic Languages In General
All of the Germanic languages are descendants of the "Proto-Germanic [language] (also known as Common Germanic), which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. . . . common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo-European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age." (Personally, I suspect that the pre-Proto-Germanic speakers arrived only around 1100 BCE in the late Nordic Bronze Age, rather than around 1700 BCE when the early Nordic Bronze Age begins.)
Proto-Germanic was a written language starting around the 2nd century CE when a runic script was used. Prior to about 750 BCE, the Germanic languages were spoken in an area roughly corresponding to modern Denmark and southern coastal Norway and Sweden. It only expanded into the modern boundaries of the Netherlands, German and other Germanic language speaking countries later on, reaching something fairly close to the current extent of Germanic languages in continental Europe by the 1st century CE.
Non-Germanic Languages In The Region and the Indo-European Languages Generally
The Non-Indo-European Languages Of Europe
All of the languages of Europe except Basque (a language isolate), Maltese (a derivative of Arabic) and the Uralic languages are part of the larger Indo-European language family.
The national language of the Scandinavian country of Finland is not a descendant of Old Norse and is not even Germanic or Indo-European. It is a member of the Uralic language family, the indigeneous language family of some of Northern Europe's last indigenous hunter-gatherers that also includes the Estonian and Hungarian languages. The Hungarian language is notable because this Uralic language is the result of language shift by a small Uralic language speaking elite that has left almost no genetic trace in the Hungarian population.
Baltic and Slavic Languages
The languages of Russia, Ukraine, Czeck Republican, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Serbo-Croatian, in contrast, are Slavic languages. This Indo-European language family existed in the form of a single proto-language until about 500 CE (about the time that the Western Roman Empire collapsed), and then expanded from the general vicinity of the Balkans, replacing previous Indo-European and Uralic languages in the areas where Slavic languages are spoken now. They were differentiated into multiple distinct languages starting in the 7th century CE.
The languages of Lithuania and Latvia (and the now-extinct Old Prussian languages) are part of the Indo-European family of Baltic languages.
"All Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic, their immediate parent language, ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of all Indo-European languages, via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE."
Romance and Celtic Languages
Many of the other major languages of Europe (e.g. French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Catalan, Occitan, and Romanian) are Romance language, i.e. languages descended from dialects of Latin that became distinct languages after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE. The Romance languages are part of a larger Italic language family that also includes a number of extinct languages of the Italian pennisula. The Italic language family probably arrived on the Italian Pennisula from Central Europe sometime in the vicinity of Bronze Age collapse (i.e. about 1200 BCE).
The Celtic languages (e.g. Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, the Irish language, Bretton, Cornish and Manx) are more closely related to the Romance languages than any other living languages and the two language families combined are a genetic subfamily of Indo-European languages. Celtic languages were once spoken in territories that are now part of France, Spain, Portugal. The subdivisions of the Celtic languages started to emerge sometime between 1200 BCE and 800 BCE. The language of the late Bronze Age Urnfield culture of central Europe through about 1250 BCE was probably Proto-Celtic. The Iron Age Hallstatt culture was definitely Celtic.
These languages are often lumped together as part of a larger Italo-Celtic language family, perhaps with a proto-language in the Urnfield culture of its immediate predecessor.
Other Indo-European Language Families
The other living Indo-European language families are the Hellenic languages (i.e. a few Greek languages and many extinct languages), Armenian, Albanian, and Indo-Iranian. The Indo-European language family also includes the extinct Anatolian (e.g. Hittite), Tocharian and Paleo-Balkan language families. The Indo-Iranian languages are made up of:
* the Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia (and nowhere else except by recent migrants, by Balinese Hindu priests, and by the people colloquially described as gypsies) except in the Southern Indian areas where only Dravidian languages are spoken,
* the Iranian languages of Iran and neighboring areas the most widely spoken of which are Persian (75 million speakers), Pashto (50 million speakers), Kurdish (32 million speakers), Balochi (15 million speakers) and Lori (2.3 million speakers), and
* the Nuristani languages of about 130,000 mountain people of Eastern Afganistan and neighboring Pakistan.
Albanian is considered to have evolved from an extinct Paleo-Balkan language, usually taken to be either Illyrian or Thracian. While Armenian is not a Hellenic language, it is more closely related to Greek than any other living language.
Indo-European Language Expansion
Indo-European languages arrived in Western Europe only in the Iron Age or perhaps a century or two earlier in some cases. Prior to around 2500 BCE, in my view, which is generally in line with the leading Kurgan hypothesis (the field has many competing hypothesizes about Indo-European linguistic origins), the Indo-European languages were probably absent from the Tarim Basin, from South Asia, from Anatolia, from Greece, and from Armenia. They were confined to the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
My personal and informed, but non-expert, opinion is that prior to Bronze Age collapse there was a copper age language expansion effected by the Bell Beaker civilization and its cultural descendants of languages that were part of the same language family as Basque, all of which (except Basque) were routed starting around the time of Bronze Age collapse by Indo-European languages. This copper age expansion probably caused the extinction of most of the pre-Copper Age languages of Western Europe and roughly corresponds with the geographic area where Y-DNA haplogroup R1b is common in modern European populations.
How Many Standard Model Constants Are There?
The Standard Model has lots of moving parts. They are categorized and described below, together with discussion of how the number of independent moving parts might be reduced.
I. Exact Standard Model Constants
Some of the moving parts, like the number of strong nuclear force colors, the quantum numbers for the four kinds of fermion charge, weak isospin, the number of generations of particles, the zero rest mass of photons and gluons, the conservation laws, the mass of particles relative to their antiparticles.
There are a number of abstract algebra concepts that can reproduce all of the particles of the Standard Model with the property exact Standard Model properties in a compact way described sometimes as SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) in the Standard Model, which can be embedded in an even more compact abstract algebra representation such as SU(5) or SU(10), but these more compact representations have their own difficulties when one tries to translate them into a "grand unified theory", rather than a patchwork of Quantum Chromodynamics (i.e. SU(3)) to describe the strong nuclear force, and Electroweak theory (i.e. SU(2) x U(1)) to describe the electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force.
Of course, the form of the Standard Model equations, such as the Lagrangians that describe the operation of the fundamental forces, the zero value of the strong nuclear force CP violation term, and the zero masses are set forth exactly by the Standard Model.
At the one loop level, at least, the running of the Standard Model coupling constants (aka the beta function) with the energy scale of the interaction, relative to the basic coupling constant value for that force is also exact. For example, the QCD beta function expressed to the "three loop" level depends only on the "unadjusted" strong force coupling constant and the number of QCD colors in the model. I have sometimes, confusingly stated that the beta function constants of the Standard Model are among the constants that are moving parts in the Standard Model, but this flows in part from my failure to really clearly deliniate between "exact" Standard Model constants that could turn out to be wrong when compared to the experimental evidence, and "measured experimental constants" in the Standard Model that can't even in principle be determined any other way if the Standard Model is correct.
The beta functions, while in principle exact within the Standard Model, have not been rigorously tested at high energies and are not necessarily worked out for arbitrarily many "loops" of corrections beyond the next to next leading order (i.e. three loop) level.
II. Measured Standard Model Constants
Other are experimentally measured and the theory does not describe them exactly, and the elements of the CKM and PMNS matrixes are the principle measured constants of the Standard Model (as well as the speed of light and Planck's constant).
But, the minimum number of measurements necessary to describe all of the experimentally measured constants is considerably less than the total number of the experimentally measured constants, because they are related to each other by a number of exact relationship.
A. The Three Measured Coupling Constants
There is a coupling constant for each of the three Standard Model forces that governs how strong the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, respectively, are in practice that must be determined experimentally.
One of the criticisms of electroweak unification in the Standard Model is that it is not possible to describe the electromagnetic coupling constant and weak force coupling constant with a single measured constant.
The Dim Prospects For A Single Measured Coupling Constant In The Near Future
Many theorists think that the three coupling constants actually converge to a single value (i.e. gauge coupling unification) at very high energy levels (the GUT scale). The Standard Model comes close to, but does not actually reach gauge coupling unification, although this could simply be because there is something wrong with the beta functions of the Standard Model such as a failure to take into account quantum gravity effects at high energy levels. SUSY models, generically, does have a gauge coupling unification.
If indeed a suitably modified exact Standard Model beta function did produce a gauge coupling unification, it would in principle be possible to express all three of the Standard Model coupling constants in the form of a single, measured, grand unified coupling constant at the GUT scale and the exactly stated beta function for each of the three Standard Model forces for sub-GUT energy scales. But, since one needs to know both the strength of the GUT level coupling constant and the precise energy level at which gauge coupling unification occurs, this doesn't actually reduce the number of measured coupling constants in the Standard Model - it just reparameterizes them.
Also, any quantum gravity correction to the beta functions would very likely introduce at least one gravitational constant, so it might not be possible to reduce the number of experimentally measured constants related to coupling strength in the Standard Model by these means, and even SUSY only reduced the number of measured coupling constant parameters for the three Standard Model forces from three to two while introducing other measured constants.
Less elegantly, even in the existing Standard Model, it is possible from the exact beta functions of the Standard Model at the point at which the coupling constant strength of any two of the three coupling constants are identical, to determine both of those coupling constants.
B. The Thirteen Independent Measured Masses
There are twelve non-zero masses of the fermions, and three measured weak force boson masses (the W, the Z and the Higgs boson mass).
According to electroweak unification theory, the photon, W+, W- and Z boson are linear combinations of two more fundamental massless electroweak bosons (the neutral W and neutral B) which are mixed according to the weak mixing angle (experimentally the sine of the weak mixing angle is about 0.24), that "eat" three of the four "Goldstone bosons" predicted by electroweak unification theory, with the fourth giving rise to the Higgs boson that imparts mass to the W and the Z and all other weakly interacting fundamental particles in the Standard Model.
The weak mixing angle that governs the relative masses of the W and Z bosons (and is also one of the major factor in computing W and Z boson branching fractions), is a function of the electromagnetic and weak force coupling constants (the cosine of the weak mixing angle is equal to one of the coupling constants divided by the square root of the sum of the two coupling constants, and the sine of the weak mixing angle is equal to the other electroweak coupling constant divided by teh square root of the sum of hte two coupling constants). Thus, for example, it is possible, in principle, to derive the weak mixing angle (aka the Weinberg angle) and the Z boson mass, from other exact and measured Standard Model constants. So, only one measured mass is necessary to describe both the W and Z boson masses.
Electroweak unification theory also claims that the Higgs boson mass is derived from all of the other masses, but in practice, the formula is not such that direct calculation of the Higgs boson mass from it is possible.
The original version of Koide's formula, which is widely believed to be true (although it isn't clear why), provides a way to determine all three charged lepton masses (apparently exactly) from any two charged lepton masses.
The neutrino masses are simply not known with sufficient accuracy to claim that any particular rule describes them and theoretical basis for Koide's rule is unknown. indeed, it isn't even known with any experimental certainty if the mass hierarchy of neutrino masses is "normal" (i.e. the third generation is heavier than the second generation is heavier than the first generation), or "inverted" (i.e. the rank order of the neutrino masses is not "normal").
Thus, there are eleven independent fermion mass parameters and two independent boson mass parameters (either the W or Z boson mass and the Higgs boson mass) that are measured parameters in the Standard model.
SUSY models, generically, have far more massive fermions and bosons than the Standard Model (none of which have been experimentally observed) but also has more comprehensive ways of deriving some of these masses in many versions of these theories.
Simple Proposals To Narrow The Measured SM Masses From Thirteen To Seven.
But, it appears that it may be possible with a simple extended version of Koide's formula to exactly derive the masses of the four of the six quarks as well as the masses of the three charged leptons from these two charged lepton masses as well (the up and down quarks' measured values do not match the extended Koide's formula predictions). There have also been proposals for versions of the Koide's formula that apply to neutrino masses that would allow a third neutrino mass to be derived from the other two neutrino masses, even though they have not yet been tested.
It also appears that the Higgs boson mass may have a much simpler functional relationship to other measured measures than previously supposed, and may be possible to derive exactly entirely from the masses of other fermion and/or boson masses via the simpler formula than the traditional one that gives rise to the hierarchy problem.
Thus, it is entirely plausible that the thirteen measured masses of the Standard Model may in fact be possible to calculate from just six fermion masses (the up, the down, the electron, the muon, the electron neutrino and the muon neutrino) and just one boson mass using already proposed theoretical formulas. This could reduce the number of independent measured mass constants in the Standard Model from thirteen to seven.
C. The Eight Parameters of the Mixing Matrixes.
The CKM matrix describes the probability that a W boson interaction will change any particular kind of quark into a particular different kind of quark. Any of the three up type quarks when it emits a W boson can become any of the three down type quarks and visa versa. The PMNS matrix describes the analogous probabilities for leptons.
While the CKM and PMNS matrixes have nine elements each, since they are unitary matrixes (i.e. the probability of any given particle that emits a W boson becoming one of the three other possible particles is 100%), each can be perfectly described with four parameters that can be chosen in any number of ways. So, there are no more than eight measured Standard Model mixing matrix constants.
Proposals To Reduce The Number Of Measured Mixing Matrix Constants
It could be, however, that some of these mixing matrix elements may have currently unknown functional relationships either to each other or to the mass matrixes.
One proposal, called quark-lepton complementarity, would derive all three or four of the PMNS matrix elements exactly from the CKM matrix elements. Experimental evidence appears to disfavor this proposal in its naive form at the moment, but it is not definitively ruled out (since the PMNS matrix constants are not known very exactly).
Other proposals suggest other kinds of PMNS matrix structure, although experimental evidence also tends to disfavor these proposals.
Some of the proposals to reduce the number of measured mixing matrix constants do not include proposals that would eliminate the need to measure one or both of the CP violating parameters of the CKM matrix and PMNS matrixes respectively. They would only apply to the other three parameters of each of these matrixes.
Proposals Relating Mixing Matrix Contracts and Fermion Masses
Other proposals suggest that the CKM and PMNS matrix elements may, in fact, be functionally related to the twelve fermion masses. Thus, it might be possible to derive the twelve fermion masses either from the CKM and PMNS matrix elements and one or two "root masses" for fermions, or even from the CKM and PMNS matrix elements and a single weak force boson mass.
Many of these proposals suggest that the square root of fermion masses may be more transparently related to the mixing matrix elements than the measured fermion masses.
Of course, if a formula relates the CKM and PMNS matrix to the fermion mass matrix, the reverse is also possible. One ought to be able to derive the CKM and PMNS matrixes from the mass matrix.
If the Koide's formula extensions discussed above hold true and the Higgs boson mass can indeed be practicably derived from other Standard Model masses, this would reduce twenty-one independent mass and mixing matrix constants in the Standard Model to just seven.
III. Summary
There are twenty-four independent measured constants in the Standard Model that are not simply accepted as "exact" within the context of that model, plus the speed of light and Planck's constant.
There are reasonable theoretical proposals with a reasonable prospect of being confirmed in the lifetime of the readers of this blog that could reduce the number of independent measured constants in the Standard Model to as few as eight or fewer (if a comprehensive set of Koide's formula rules could be discerned for the entire mass matrix of the Standard Model).
IV. Future Research Prospects
Right now, one of the foremost issues in Standard Model physics are the ongoing efforts (1) to more accurately measure the quark masses (particularly for the quarks other than the top quark), (2) to more accurately measure the neutrino masses and PMNS matrix parameters, and (3) to experimentally confirm the accuracy of a handful of "exact" Standard Model constants such as the properties of the Higgs boson, the beta functions for the three Standard Model coupling constant, the zero value of the strong force CP violation constant, and the rules forbidding lepton number violations, proton decay, flavor changing neutral currents, and neutrinoless double beta decay (all of which are intertwined to some extent).
A very large share of the biggest gap in this knowledge, that isn't imminently about to be resolved in the next year or two at the LHC which is already well underway and more or less irrevocably so, is in the area of neutrino physics. With regard to unfinished Standard Model physics business, the LHC will mostly be relevant to confirming the properties of the Higgs boson and refining estimates of its mass, although it may somewhat refine top quark mass estimates and to a lesser extent refining other quark mass estimates and confirming the accuracy of the Standard Model beta functions at somewhat higher energies.
In QCD experimental measurements that are indirectly related to Standard Model constants like quark masses that are known not very accurately are far more accurate than the theoretically predicted theoretical expectations for those experimental measurements which are often precise only to +/- 1%. Particularly in the case of QCD and the beta functions of all three of the Standard Model forces, it is also critical to improve the provisions of the theoretical calculations of the Standard Model expectations so that quantities that can be measured experimentally like hadron masses, the infrared behavior of quarks and gluons, and predicted glueball composite particles, can be compared meaningfully to Standard Model predictions to determine fundamental Standard Model measured constants that can't be measured directly (e.g. due to quark confinement).
Until we have more data from neutrino physics and better calculations of the theoretically expected values in QCD for already precisely measured observables, none of the theoretical efforts to prune the twenty-four independent measurable Standard Model constants can be confirmed or ruled out definitively.
I. Exact Standard Model Constants
Some of the moving parts, like the number of strong nuclear force colors, the quantum numbers for the four kinds of fermion charge, weak isospin, the number of generations of particles, the zero rest mass of photons and gluons, the conservation laws, the mass of particles relative to their antiparticles.
There are a number of abstract algebra concepts that can reproduce all of the particles of the Standard Model with the property exact Standard Model properties in a compact way described sometimes as SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) in the Standard Model, which can be embedded in an even more compact abstract algebra representation such as SU(5) or SU(10), but these more compact representations have their own difficulties when one tries to translate them into a "grand unified theory", rather than a patchwork of Quantum Chromodynamics (i.e. SU(3)) to describe the strong nuclear force, and Electroweak theory (i.e. SU(2) x U(1)) to describe the electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force.
Of course, the form of the Standard Model equations, such as the Lagrangians that describe the operation of the fundamental forces, the zero value of the strong nuclear force CP violation term, and the zero masses are set forth exactly by the Standard Model.
At the one loop level, at least, the running of the Standard Model coupling constants (aka the beta function) with the energy scale of the interaction, relative to the basic coupling constant value for that force is also exact. For example, the QCD beta function expressed to the "three loop" level depends only on the "unadjusted" strong force coupling constant and the number of QCD colors in the model. I have sometimes, confusingly stated that the beta function constants of the Standard Model are among the constants that are moving parts in the Standard Model, but this flows in part from my failure to really clearly deliniate between "exact" Standard Model constants that could turn out to be wrong when compared to the experimental evidence, and "measured experimental constants" in the Standard Model that can't even in principle be determined any other way if the Standard Model is correct.
The beta functions, while in principle exact within the Standard Model, have not been rigorously tested at high energies and are not necessarily worked out for arbitrarily many "loops" of corrections beyond the next to next leading order (i.e. three loop) level.
II. Measured Standard Model Constants
Other are experimentally measured and the theory does not describe them exactly, and the elements of the CKM and PMNS matrixes are the principle measured constants of the Standard Model (as well as the speed of light and Planck's constant).
But, the minimum number of measurements necessary to describe all of the experimentally measured constants is considerably less than the total number of the experimentally measured constants, because they are related to each other by a number of exact relationship.
A. The Three Measured Coupling Constants
There is a coupling constant for each of the three Standard Model forces that governs how strong the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, respectively, are in practice that must be determined experimentally.
One of the criticisms of electroweak unification in the Standard Model is that it is not possible to describe the electromagnetic coupling constant and weak force coupling constant with a single measured constant.
The Dim Prospects For A Single Measured Coupling Constant In The Near Future
Many theorists think that the three coupling constants actually converge to a single value (i.e. gauge coupling unification) at very high energy levels (the GUT scale). The Standard Model comes close to, but does not actually reach gauge coupling unification, although this could simply be because there is something wrong with the beta functions of the Standard Model such as a failure to take into account quantum gravity effects at high energy levels. SUSY models, generically, does have a gauge coupling unification.
If indeed a suitably modified exact Standard Model beta function did produce a gauge coupling unification, it would in principle be possible to express all three of the Standard Model coupling constants in the form of a single, measured, grand unified coupling constant at the GUT scale and the exactly stated beta function for each of the three Standard Model forces for sub-GUT energy scales. But, since one needs to know both the strength of the GUT level coupling constant and the precise energy level at which gauge coupling unification occurs, this doesn't actually reduce the number of measured coupling constants in the Standard Model - it just reparameterizes them.
Also, any quantum gravity correction to the beta functions would very likely introduce at least one gravitational constant, so it might not be possible to reduce the number of experimentally measured constants related to coupling strength in the Standard Model by these means, and even SUSY only reduced the number of measured coupling constant parameters for the three Standard Model forces from three to two while introducing other measured constants.
Less elegantly, even in the existing Standard Model, it is possible from the exact beta functions of the Standard Model at the point at which the coupling constant strength of any two of the three coupling constants are identical, to determine both of those coupling constants.
B. The Thirteen Independent Measured Masses
There are twelve non-zero masses of the fermions, and three measured weak force boson masses (the W, the Z and the Higgs boson mass).
According to electroweak unification theory, the photon, W+, W- and Z boson are linear combinations of two more fundamental massless electroweak bosons (the neutral W and neutral B) which are mixed according to the weak mixing angle (experimentally the sine of the weak mixing angle is about 0.24), that "eat" three of the four "Goldstone bosons" predicted by electroweak unification theory, with the fourth giving rise to the Higgs boson that imparts mass to the W and the Z and all other weakly interacting fundamental particles in the Standard Model.
The weak mixing angle that governs the relative masses of the W and Z bosons (and is also one of the major factor in computing W and Z boson branching fractions), is a function of the electromagnetic and weak force coupling constants (the cosine of the weak mixing angle is equal to one of the coupling constants divided by the square root of the sum of the two coupling constants, and the sine of the weak mixing angle is equal to the other electroweak coupling constant divided by teh square root of the sum of hte two coupling constants). Thus, for example, it is possible, in principle, to derive the weak mixing angle (aka the Weinberg angle) and the Z boson mass, from other exact and measured Standard Model constants. So, only one measured mass is necessary to describe both the W and Z boson masses.
Electroweak unification theory also claims that the Higgs boson mass is derived from all of the other masses, but in practice, the formula is not such that direct calculation of the Higgs boson mass from it is possible.
The original version of Koide's formula, which is widely believed to be true (although it isn't clear why), provides a way to determine all three charged lepton masses (apparently exactly) from any two charged lepton masses.
The neutrino masses are simply not known with sufficient accuracy to claim that any particular rule describes them and theoretical basis for Koide's rule is unknown. indeed, it isn't even known with any experimental certainty if the mass hierarchy of neutrino masses is "normal" (i.e. the third generation is heavier than the second generation is heavier than the first generation), or "inverted" (i.e. the rank order of the neutrino masses is not "normal").
Thus, there are eleven independent fermion mass parameters and two independent boson mass parameters (either the W or Z boson mass and the Higgs boson mass) that are measured parameters in the Standard model.
SUSY models, generically, have far more massive fermions and bosons than the Standard Model (none of which have been experimentally observed) but also has more comprehensive ways of deriving some of these masses in many versions of these theories.
Simple Proposals To Narrow The Measured SM Masses From Thirteen To Seven.
But, it appears that it may be possible with a simple extended version of Koide's formula to exactly derive the masses of the four of the six quarks as well as the masses of the three charged leptons from these two charged lepton masses as well (the up and down quarks' measured values do not match the extended Koide's formula predictions). There have also been proposals for versions of the Koide's formula that apply to neutrino masses that would allow a third neutrino mass to be derived from the other two neutrino masses, even though they have not yet been tested.
It also appears that the Higgs boson mass may have a much simpler functional relationship to other measured measures than previously supposed, and may be possible to derive exactly entirely from the masses of other fermion and/or boson masses via the simpler formula than the traditional one that gives rise to the hierarchy problem.
Thus, it is entirely plausible that the thirteen measured masses of the Standard Model may in fact be possible to calculate from just six fermion masses (the up, the down, the electron, the muon, the electron neutrino and the muon neutrino) and just one boson mass using already proposed theoretical formulas. This could reduce the number of independent measured mass constants in the Standard Model from thirteen to seven.
C. The Eight Parameters of the Mixing Matrixes.
The CKM matrix describes the probability that a W boson interaction will change any particular kind of quark into a particular different kind of quark. Any of the three up type quarks when it emits a W boson can become any of the three down type quarks and visa versa. The PMNS matrix describes the analogous probabilities for leptons.
While the CKM and PMNS matrixes have nine elements each, since they are unitary matrixes (i.e. the probability of any given particle that emits a W boson becoming one of the three other possible particles is 100%), each can be perfectly described with four parameters that can be chosen in any number of ways. So, there are no more than eight measured Standard Model mixing matrix constants.
Proposals To Reduce The Number Of Measured Mixing Matrix Constants
It could be, however, that some of these mixing matrix elements may have currently unknown functional relationships either to each other or to the mass matrixes.
One proposal, called quark-lepton complementarity, would derive all three or four of the PMNS matrix elements exactly from the CKM matrix elements. Experimental evidence appears to disfavor this proposal in its naive form at the moment, but it is not definitively ruled out (since the PMNS matrix constants are not known very exactly).
Other proposals suggest other kinds of PMNS matrix structure, although experimental evidence also tends to disfavor these proposals.
Some of the proposals to reduce the number of measured mixing matrix constants do not include proposals that would eliminate the need to measure one or both of the CP violating parameters of the CKM matrix and PMNS matrixes respectively. They would only apply to the other three parameters of each of these matrixes.
Proposals Relating Mixing Matrix Contracts and Fermion Masses
Other proposals suggest that the CKM and PMNS matrix elements may, in fact, be functionally related to the twelve fermion masses. Thus, it might be possible to derive the twelve fermion masses either from the CKM and PMNS matrix elements and one or two "root masses" for fermions, or even from the CKM and PMNS matrix elements and a single weak force boson mass.
Many of these proposals suggest that the square root of fermion masses may be more transparently related to the mixing matrix elements than the measured fermion masses.
Of course, if a formula relates the CKM and PMNS matrix to the fermion mass matrix, the reverse is also possible. One ought to be able to derive the CKM and PMNS matrixes from the mass matrix.
If the Koide's formula extensions discussed above hold true and the Higgs boson mass can indeed be practicably derived from other Standard Model masses, this would reduce twenty-one independent mass and mixing matrix constants in the Standard Model to just seven.
III. Summary
There are twenty-four independent measured constants in the Standard Model that are not simply accepted as "exact" within the context of that model, plus the speed of light and Planck's constant.
There are reasonable theoretical proposals with a reasonable prospect of being confirmed in the lifetime of the readers of this blog that could reduce the number of independent measured constants in the Standard Model to as few as eight or fewer (if a comprehensive set of Koide's formula rules could be discerned for the entire mass matrix of the Standard Model).
IV. Future Research Prospects
Right now, one of the foremost issues in Standard Model physics are the ongoing efforts (1) to more accurately measure the quark masses (particularly for the quarks other than the top quark), (2) to more accurately measure the neutrino masses and PMNS matrix parameters, and (3) to experimentally confirm the accuracy of a handful of "exact" Standard Model constants such as the properties of the Higgs boson, the beta functions for the three Standard Model coupling constant, the zero value of the strong force CP violation constant, and the rules forbidding lepton number violations, proton decay, flavor changing neutral currents, and neutrinoless double beta decay (all of which are intertwined to some extent).
A very large share of the biggest gap in this knowledge, that isn't imminently about to be resolved in the next year or two at the LHC which is already well underway and more or less irrevocably so, is in the area of neutrino physics. With regard to unfinished Standard Model physics business, the LHC will mostly be relevant to confirming the properties of the Higgs boson and refining estimates of its mass, although it may somewhat refine top quark mass estimates and to a lesser extent refining other quark mass estimates and confirming the accuracy of the Standard Model beta functions at somewhat higher energies.
In QCD experimental measurements that are indirectly related to Standard Model constants like quark masses that are known not very accurately are far more accurate than the theoretically predicted theoretical expectations for those experimental measurements which are often precise only to +/- 1%. Particularly in the case of QCD and the beta functions of all three of the Standard Model forces, it is also critical to improve the provisions of the theoretical calculations of the Standard Model expectations so that quantities that can be measured experimentally like hadron masses, the infrared behavior of quarks and gluons, and predicted glueball composite particles, can be compared meaningfully to Standard Model predictions to determine fundamental Standard Model measured constants that can't be measured directly (e.g. due to quark confinement).
Until we have more data from neutrino physics and better calculations of the theoretically expected values in QCD for already precisely measured observables, none of the theoretical efforts to prune the twenty-four independent measurable Standard Model constants can be confirmed or ruled out definitively.
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