By joining decades of experimental data with an abstract conceptual framework, physicists have developed a theory called the Standard Model that successfully describes the known properties of all matter in the universe.
On the other hand, through the contemporary search for a unified field theory, which would place three of the four types of interactions between elementary particles (the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force, excluding only gravity) within a single conceptual framework, physicists may be on the verge of explaining the origin of mass.
Moreover, a permanently accelerating universe would present deep conceptual problems, several physicists pointed out, including Dr. Thomas Banks of Rutgers and the University of California at Santa Cruz, Dr. Willy Fischler of the University of Texas, Dr. Susskind and Dr. Witten.
"The artist, with little or no awareness of what is going on in the field of physics, manages to conjur up images and metaphors that are strikingly appropriate when superimposed upon the conceptual framework of the physicist's later revisions of our ideas about physical reality.
More seriously, he argued that the comics writers of the 1930s beat future generations of quantum physicists to the conceptual breakthroughs that are now keeping us in MRI scanners and CDs.
Physicists say that conceptual holes in the standard model strongly suggest that the theory is incomplete.
"With the teleportation of a large object, you run up against a conceptual 'no,'" said Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist at Emory University in Atlanta.
However, these technical problems are closely related to a set of daunting conceptual difficulties, of interest to both physicists and philosophers.
Dr. Abraham Pais, a physicist who helped build the conceptual foundations of the modern theory of elementary particles, then became a science historian and wrote one of the most acclaimed of all biographies of Einstein, died on Friday in Copenhagen.
B7 Abraham Pais A physicist who helped build the conceptual foundations of the modern theory of elementary particles, then became a science historian and wrote one of the most acclaimed biographies of Einstein, he was 82.
Among the great ironies of quantum mechanics is not only that its conceptual foundations seem strange even to the physicists who use it, but that philosophers have largely ignored it.
