Insights from Science

My father, Dr. John H. Gardner, was the Department Chair of the B.Y.U. Physics Department for 15 years and was a member of the prestigious American Physical Society. He is now suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and has lost not only his short-term memory but also any memory of his work as a physicist.

 

As a child growing up in Dr. Gardner’s home, I found the insights he learned from studying physics to be profound and inspiring. He would frequently apply these insights to normal, every day life, providing greater understanding for ordinary things. For example, he pointed out that the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) is an example of an exchange symmetry — if you swap two objects the laws remain unchanged.

 

Many of the articles in this section are based on the ideas I learned from my father and his writings.

 

Modern physics is based on relativity and quantum mechanics. While Einstein was able to provide derivations of relativity based on symmetry principles and thought experiments, most physicists today believe that Schroedinger’s equation, the foundation of quantum mechanics, cannot be derived from fundamental principles. My father, however, believed that he could derive both relativity and quantum mechanics from observations of symmetry. He had great difficulty getting other physicists to accept his derivations, however. I showed them to some of the physics professors at Stanford University while I was a Ph.D. student there and found that, in general, they declined to even read his work. They accepted as given that quantum mechanics could not be derived and did not want to make the effort to explore the possibility. I do not know if Dad’s derivation is correct. He published his work in “Encyclia the Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences Arts and Letters” in 1988. I have searched and cannot find any means of obtaining the article, so I am posting it here.