Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
A Unified Theory, Inside or Outside of Physics, is Impossible
For over a century (and for millennia, if one includes Aristotle), physicists have been looking for a Unified Field Theory, an overarching set of concepts and equations that ties all of physics together. I am oversimplifying, but this goal can be described as classical unified field theory, a “Theory of Everything” [3] or a Grand Unified Theory[4].The concept remains the same: produce a theory of everything, one that explains nature’s fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism and nuclear interactions.
This attempt has stalled in the past few decades. I read an interesting book review in the WSJ yesterday on this. The author concludes that the task is just very hard to achieve. But I think there is a much more plausible explanation: it cannot be done, and for reasons that physicists are not trained to comprehend.
Every branch of science has its own language, and that language, even in pedestrian arenas like arithmetic, comes with its own sets of assumptions and presuppositions. Because it is very mind-bending to do so, very few people try to critically think about those underlying pieces. Instead, they use the tools at hand, assuming that the foundation is sound. The person holding a hammer looks for nails, just as a physicist examines the world through the lenses of their own tools and language.
A hammer is certainly a useful tool; there is nothing inherently wrong with it. But there is also nothing necessarily universally right about the hammer or the tools of a physicist, either. The assumptions underlying particle physics and microbiology and organic chemistry all work pretty well. But they are fundamentally incompatible with each other. “Force” in Newtonian Mechanics is not the same thing as “Force” in Einsteinian mechanics. And to try to work with both at the same time is a bit like the Scottish Enlightenment trying to talk to French Philosophes of the age: “Equality” to Hume meant something very different than “Equality” did to Rousseau.
Chemistry is useful. So is biology. And so is physics. But between them – and within them – there are so many different assumptions and presuppositions that there is basically no crossover: we cannot effectively use mathematics to treat liver disease, or electromagnetism to make a better moisturizer.
We all assume that other people speak the same language as we do when we describe the world, even though this assumption is obviously and laughably wrong. Husbands and wives spend a lifetime just trying to understand the other person, so it is hardly surprising that communication is much harder to achieve across larger distances.
When someone sees a sunrise, they translate it immediately into what it means for them, and so the very same sunrise means radically different things to physicists, global warming activists, poets, chemists, painters, night-shift workers, Muslims… ad infinitum. None of these people is wrong – they are all just describing different parts of the same elephant. We do not speak the same language, and so we do not perceive or experience the same sunrise.
In Physics, this is precisely what has happened. Each sub-branch of physics has its own philosophy, though almost all physicists are blithely unaware of it. Because they are unaware, they cannot even engage with other sub-branches because, like Hume and Rousseau, or Vox and National Review, physicists from different arenas are talking past each other.
The failure to have common assumptions extends to every part of humanity and endeavor. There is a reason Western-style human rights don’t exist in places that do not think man is made in the image of G-d. It has become impossible for those of us who value individuals and the content of their character to even have conversations with those who only see skin color and oppression. Our languages are different because our assumptions and presuppositions are different. There can be no grand unifying theory of politics or economics or anything else with cultures that have radically different assumptions about the value and purpose of human existence.
We have this same problem with Ricochet when we talk about language and the Bible. Entire mountains have been built off of translations in biblical exegesis. But words, especially not in a freighted and contextually-rich language like Biblical Hebrew cannot be perfectly translated to a different language. So G-d’s Word cannot be 100% faithfully translated to a different language any more than you can use Newtonian Force to predict the path of sunlight. It is no wonder that there are so many different strains of thought, practice, and belief from a single canon!
I submit to you that all of this is actually a good thing, a feature, not a bug. Misunderstanding leads to discourse and development. And specialization within a language has also been incredibly productive. The world has come a very long way in the past few centuries, and we have done so not because we have unified, but because we have generally accepted and embraced different cultural and technical and scientific languages and cultures. We are better at learning and growing and creating than ever before, and it is a result of this diversity of thought. The attempt to unify under any overarching political, scientific, economic, technical or any other kind of language is not only doomed: it is misguided.
Mechanical engineering works not despite the fact that it shares little common language with physics or molecular biology, but because it speaks its own unique language with its own assumptions. The same is true for every human enterprise we can think of. Great marriages are not all the same as each other; each great marriage is the product of the two people in that marriage and the unique investment they make. Civilization flourishes when artists of every kind compete, when companies and people, and the products and goods and services they create are all as customized as possible.
The sooner we come to applaud and embrace this approach, the better.
Published in General
My favorite phrase from Ayn Rand is “check your premises”. It is universally valuable in trying to understand your or someone else’s point of view.
I like this post because it talks about ideas in an interesting way, and invites all kinds of thoughts about meaning and language and empathy and understanding.
As regards physics, and science in general, I think it’s probably mistaken. I don’t believe that confusion of terms and concepts impairs actual science, though i agree it plays havoc in the public spaces. Mathematicians use words a particular way, physicists use them a slightly different way, but each understands the other’s meaning or, at least, that the other’s meaning might not be exactly the same. I think only scientists who are very poor communicators get derailed by jargon.
It may well be that no grand unified theory is possible, but I suspect one probably is, and I won’t be surprised if we get there during my lifetime. (Not that it will change anything, of course. It’s so far down in the weeds of physics that it almost certainly doesn’t matter.)
I thought you might actually be going in a different direction when you spoke of language. There’s a lot of theory — theory I frankly don’t understand — about the inability of systems to completely describe themselves, Gödel’s incompleteness theories being the classic examples. I don’t think those deny the possibility of a grand unified field theory either, for what that’s worth.
Interesting and enjoyable post. Thank you.
Thanks for that, @iWe. My very Democrat-liberal grandson and I have been having a long conversation about just that thing — we each speak a slightly (sometimes not so slightly) different language.
I don’t know about the unified field theory (Einstein spent the rest of his life on it after relativity), but I’m convinced time travel is impossible. Forget all the fancy paradoxes and cocktail party “what if” games (killing baby Hitler). If time travel were real, I believe the universe would cease to exist because some idiot liberal would go back and snuff out the Big Bang.
Nonetheless, some of my novels involve time travel, and it was a b*tch inventing physics to eliminate the paradoxes . . .
I’m not invested in finding universal “anything”; it’s sometimes fascinating to see the relationships of ideas, but I’m so fascinated by the many different directions that learning can take us that I’m in for the long ride–regardless of where it goes!
This seems awfully contradictory.
I want an intellectual free-for-all. I want to be able to market my beliefs and convince others that, for example, every person is deserving of respect because we all contain a spark of the divine. I want this to happen through free speech and persuasion, not diktat.
But I also know that language, in order to be productive, needs to also be specialized and work without reference to other languages, or being checked by them. Language needs to be useful, and usefulness can be defined as making progress, not necessarily communicating with others or cross-translating to the specialized languages of other expertises.
All that means that many conversations are impossible. In engineering, this blockage does not necessarily hinder progress. But when it comes to SJWs or BLMs or LGBTBBQs, I accept your point: the lack of shared assumptions which makes meaningful conversation impossible, is not a good thing. We no longer have a shared social language which means our society is becoming hopelessly riven.
I think the problem is more one of character than language.
Time travel into the past is impossible.
Get yourself a near-lightspeed craft and you can travel into the future (farther than you already would, anyway – we’re all traveling into the future all the time).
I do advocate we study the nature of time. I for one would love to know why the last two minutes of a football game takes twenty minutes to play . . .
In the BBC radio comedy series Old Harry’s Game, Satan makes a deal with a college professor to reveal the Grand Unified Theory. After the deal is done the professor is awed that it is, in reality, simple and beautiful.
”Sure,” says the devil, “as long as you remember to carry the seven.”
Not really. You’d be correct if physicists limited themselves to just using words to discuss concepts, but once you get beyond the first-year undergraduate level of any physics specialty it’s mostly described mathematically just to avoid the problems with language that you describe.
This is not to say that physicists are all in complete agreement about how everything works. The questions not what different terms like “force” and “energy” mean but are about whether the math used to describe those concepts is an accurate description of reality.
Ehhh, sort of. But once you translate the concepts into the mathematical descriptions, it’s actually pretty simple to work between the two frameworks. If you’re not dealing with relativistic velocities (or other complex frames of reference) then the equations from Einstein’s theories will simplify into their Newtonian forms. Newton and Einstein get along rather well. Where we run into problems is when we try and mix General Relativity (Einstein) and the Standard Model (aka quantum) theories together. In some ways they’re highly compatible. During the search for the Higg’s boson, the correct mass for the elementary particle was estimated by looking at cosmological features like the distribution of galaxies. We sometimes study the biggest features of the universe to understand the smallest.
The big discrepancy between the two theories is gravity. GR does an excellent job of describing the effects of gravity as a feature of spacetime. The Standard Model explains the other fundamental forces (electricity, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear) very precisely. It also explains mass, which is tied to gravity, but doesn’t provide any means for gravitational interaction between particles. It may be that there’s a missing particle (the graviton), or that we need to use strings instead of particles, or that we just aren’t including all the dimensions in our math. Lot’s of ideas, not much proof.
Basically, both GR and SM are useful and correct… with limitations. Just like Newton’s theories are correct up to a point. As long as you don’t need the precision that Relativity provides, Newtonian mechanics work just fine. The same is true for Relativity and the Standard Model.
As for the other sciences, they’re all really just very specific applications of physics. Chemistry is applied electron physics, biology is applied organic chemistry, and so on. It’s all physics when you get down into it. In other words, the universe is a spherical cow.
This is a good point. I do with that Rand had done so herself. I was a big fan of her work in my early 20s, for a year or so, before I noticed that her premises were unsupported.
I think a lot of us were big fans of her work in our early 20s, for a year or so (or, in my case, a decade or so, since I’m a slow learner).
I think that problem is more one of the contents of the competing ideologies, rather than character or language.
I think that we are witnessing the rise of the new religion of Wokeism, though it is a strange religion. I think that it is another variant of the tragic and terrible rise of two similar religions in the 20th Century, Communism and Nazism, which turned out to be quite similar to each other. Wokeism seems quite similar to both.
You have the good people and the bad people, with the bad people oppressing the good people. The goal is to destroy the bad people and end the oppression of the good people, after which the Utopia will emerge. The difference between Communism, Nazism, and Wokeism seems to be the specific identification of the good people.
Wokeism isn’t really new, by the way. It traces back at least to the 1960s. The BLM variant is actually quite similar to Black Liberation Theology.
Thank you for so perfectly demonstrating how a physicist sees things. You have made my point!
And yet he has spoken the truth. Physicists see things as they are, or as close to how they are as we’re able to see things. Chemists and biologists and economists and anthropologists and sociologists and [insert your favorite -ists], in comparison, see through a glass darkly.
It is interesting to me that this is the same claim that many Muslims make about the Koran — that it can only be understood in the original language, Arabic.
I am not as skeptical about the possibility of translation as you seem to be. It is true that translation can be tricky, between any two languages.
I do not agree with this, in the unlimited way that it is stated.
Taken literally, this is an argument for allowing drug pushers at middle schools, porn on every screen, and prostitutes on every corner. Much of the art world, including music, film, and television, has descended into an orgiastic sewer. I think that this has a great deal to do with the terrible ideology of Wokeism that is now advancing, and the breakdown of society that we see, most clearly, in heavily black communities. I think that the extreme libertarianism apparently advocated in this portion of the OP has been a major contributor to societal breakdown.
Everything written is a translation from whatever form(s) ideas take when they’re chemically and electrically encoded in our brains. While specific words may offer no direct translation — at least not to other specific words — it must be true that ideas are amenable to translation. The alternative is that there are thoughts that can be thought only in certain languages, and yet that can be encoded in the chemistry and electricity of the brain which, at some level, it seems we must all share as a common “language.” I’m skeptical that there are thoughts which can be thought in only a single language.
Communication is hard. I don’t think it’s impossible.
And I love that I am not the most pedantic person in the room, just for this moment.
@Iwe
This was interesting. Thank you for brining it up! This is a fascinating topic and it’s given me a potential book to read and some added context.
If I don’t insert something humorous into my comments, how would anyone know it’s really me?
I think you are taking a direction of travel (toward more diversity) all the way to the wall of maximized extreme diversity. As I am sure you already know, I do not embrace anything that suppresses our creative potential, including drugs and other activities that destroy the soul (including prostitution).
I agree 100%. Communication is crucial and good. But we should not lie to ourselves by thinking that it can (or even should) be perfect.
This is just silly. Physicists do not see anything in the field of history. Their tools and instruments and language are entirely unsuited for other sciences.
Try it another way. Ideas and thoughts and ambitions all exist within our minds, but have little or no physical existence. Which means that to a physicist the concepts of love or freedom do not exist. So I disagree with the assertion that physicists see things as they are. Any specialist only sees a very limited number of facets of the diamond that is the world as we know it.
I write about the Torah using English – but the source text is Hebrew. I am not skeptical about translation: I am deeply skeptical about perfect translation.
Except quantum physics is usually taught as an analog to Newtonian physics. The new nomenclature invented to go with it introduces the new concepts in an understandable way. Just like Newtonian physics is taught as if it were just more complicated geometry with a few added concepts tacked on.
Same language just with an expanded vocabulary.
I’m speaking only of science. History isn’t science. It’s merely a cataloging of events.
This actually made me laugh out loud! Your understanding of history is even worse than my understanding of physics!
Historians never, ever, just catalog events. Any more than physicists merely record data. Instead, both fields have a lot in common: historians and physicists, consciously or unconsciously, decide what is data, and what is noise. They have a narrative in their heads, and they see if the data fits that narrative. Both are capable of massaging the data and the narrative.
I agree that history is not science inasmuch as it does not seek to understand the natural world. History instead seeks to understand human beings, a task which is, to me at least, far more interesting and important.
Physics does have predictive power – at least it should. Historians cannot similarly predict the future, in no small part because many people, unlike atoms, do not behave in ways that can be modeled mathematically.