NS: The imperfect universe: Goodbye, theory of everything

[bystander]

The imperfect universe: Goodbye, theory of everything
New Scientist: Opinion - 10 May 2010

FIFTEEN years ago, I was a physicist hard at work hunting for a theory of nature that would unify the very big and the very small. There was good reason to hope. The great and the good were committed. Even Einstein, who recognised that our understanding of reality is necessarily incomplete, had spent the last 20 years of his life searching for a unified field theory that would describe the two main forces we see acting around us - gravity and electromagnetism - as manifestations of a single force. For him, such a mathematical theory represented the purest and most elegant expression of nature and the highest achievement of the human intellect.

Fifty-five years after Einstein's death, the hunt for this elusive unified field theory continues. To physicist Stephen Hawking and many others, finding the "theory of everything" would be equivalent to knowing the "mind of God". The metaphor is not accidental.

Modern critics say that Einstein and other giants of 20th-century physics (including Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg) failed because their models didn't include all particles of matter and their fundamental interactions. Factor them in, they argue, and we stand a much better chance of success. Dreams of a final theory (as a book on the subject, by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, was titled) live on, stronger than ever.

But are we really getting any closer? Do we dare ask whether the search is fundamentally misguided? Could belief in a physical theory that unifies the secrets of the material world - a "hidden code" of nature - be the scientific equivalent of the religious belief in oneness held by the billions who go to churches, mosques and synagogues every day?

[bystander]

Our Weird Universe Not As 'Constant' As We Thought
Discovery News - 10 April 2010

There are some things in life that we just expect to be the same. The fundamental constants of physics, such as the speed of light, the strength of gravity, the mass of a certain particle, are just some things we've learned to accept as given. However, there is tantalizing evidence that favors the hypothesis that these so-called constants change with time, thanks to some clever techniques used by radio astronomers.

Theoretical physicists have been trying to come up with a "theory of everything" for some time now, and we hear about efforts to do so, such as string theory. These models make predictions that can only be detected with energies much higher than any device we can dream of today, so they lie mostly out of the range of scientific testability.

There is however one piece of evidence that we can search for today, a changing of the values of fundamental constants over the lifetime of the universe. Who is well suited to look back that far in time? Astronomers, of course! Since distant galaxies are SO far away, we see their light as it was emitted millions or billions of years ago, and can thus look back into time.

[bystander]

Is the Search for Immutable Laws of Nature a Wild-Goose Chase?
Discover Magazine - 10 May 2010

Four iconoclastic thinkers are challenging the assumption of scientists from Newton to Einstein: That there is one set of laws that perfectly describe the universe for all time.

If you want to build a star, start with the rules. That is the advice I give to my Ph.D. students at the University of Rochester. Using advanced supercomputers and programming, we simulate the complex interplay of gravity, radiation, and magnetic fields that constitutes the life of stars like the sun. Our goal is to better understand how stars are born, grow old, and die. Fundamentally, we start with the known laws of physics and take them wherever they lead us. The implicit understanding is that nature’s rules are eternal, unbreakable, and all-controlling. As Albert Einstein once said, learning to read the laws of physics is like reading the mind of God.

Such thinking has animated much of the enterprise of physics ever since Isaac Newton formulated his laws of universal gravitation in 1687: one set of laws for both the heavens and the earth. The idea took full root a century ago, when Einstein developed his general theory of relativity. If we work hard enough, he suggested, we will eventually find the elegant and simple rules that undergird the entire universe. Physicists have taken it as an article of faith that the bedrock laws are there to be discovered, if only we are clever enough in looking for them. The dogged pursuit of that ultimate truth has led to many great discoveries, but recently it has begun to seem like a promise unkept.

The problem is that physics appears to be leading us not to resolution but into an Alice in Wonderland world of increasingly bizarre theories, each farther removed than the last from our experience of the everyday world. In recent years cosmologists have posited that our universe is just one among an untold number of universes that bubble up constantly from quantum foam. Theoretical physicists have looked to the exotic mathematics of string theory, which suggests the existence of seven extra dimensions beyond the four we already know about. Experimentalists have built the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider in part to understand why we can observe only a portion of what our theories of matter predict.

If scientists have to dream up dimensions that nobody has ever seen and universes that nobody may ever find, perhaps it is a sign that we are headed down a blind alley. If we are indeed getting closer to knowing nature’s immutable laws, a few renegade physicists are now asking, why does each step we take only seem to send us deeper into the rabbit hole?

[The Code]

I been saying this for years and years. Dead End Science.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/10 ... oose-chase

What seems to solve the problems Now, just gives us new questions, New harder questions, that create a bizarre new universe.

So is a proved theory, A proved wrong, waiting to happen?

Mark

[Chris Peterson]

I been saying this for years and years. Dead End Science.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/10 ... oose-chase

What seems to solve the problems Now, just gives us new questions, New harder questions, that create a bizarre new universe.

So is a proved theory, A proved wrong, waiting to happen?

Your view of this situation is very different from mine. Fewer and fewer important theories are being found wrong, and I think it is likely that this trend will continue. The observation that new theory creates new questions does not argue that the theory is wrong. Nor is much of the important work being done today leading to dead ends.

The way I see it is that we are answering (to some extent, have already answered) most of the answerable questions. At a deep level, we are understanding the Universe in a fundamental way, and I don't think our current understanding is going to change much. The theories we now have will continue to be refined, but most will remain substantially the same. Some sort of grand unified theory is attractive from a philosophical standpoint, but it may not exist. Certainly, nothing we've observed seems to require it. And as far as questions about the ultimate origin of the Universe, multiverses, etc, that is closer to philosophy than science- and may always remain so.

[Ann]

So maybe there is no theory of everything. Then again maybe there is one, if we keep searching for it.

But in any case, whether there is a grand Theory of Everything or not, astronomers keep making new amazing discoveries about space all the time. That's enough for me. Just think of all the fantastic new knowledge about the universe that has been amassed since the days of Albert Einstein! It's really quite extraordinary!

So keep on searching for answers, all you astronomers down here (and out there, if there are any astronomers out there)!