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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
I’m glad I got a chuckle out of you. And I was being deliberately chauvinistic, with the gratuitous “merely.” Poking the bear.
Different domains of… knowledge, let’s say… share different aspects of technique, rigor, formality, testability. Poetry is wide open; physics, not so much. History is somewhere in between. I think these are distinctions that actually matter.
Among the natural sciences, physics is king, in that everything which we believe can be explained can be explained in terms of it. The universe is composed, we believe, of energy and matter, structured by the rules of their interaction: physics is the branch of science concerned with those things. Everything else in the natural sciences is built on that foundation, and in theory could be, given an impractically large computer and oodles of grant money, decomposed into its underlying physics.
But not history. Interestingly, I think history is one of the fields least amenable to scientific analysis. With poetry, music, art, language, psychology, and even economics, we can imagine finding explanations, albeit imperfect and incomplete, for preferences and behavior — for observed patterns and structures — buried deep in the brain’s wiring. History, because it represents the confluence of so many driving forces, and because its details are often lost to time, does not lend itself to such decomposition.
Your original observation about language is certainly true in some abstract sense. Communication is imperfect, our sense of reality is imperfect, there’s a difference between knowing and knowing for sure, and philosophers like to make hay with that; noting the imperfection of communication is one way they do that.
The pursuit of science is predicated on a belief in a single, observable, testable truth. That perhaps naive (though I think it isn’t) assumption is a necessary virtue of the practicing scientist. Historians should also believe in a single truth; history was what it was, after all. But it no longer exists, and it may not have left an unambiguous mark.
On the contrary. If you take a history course you’ll rarely discuss anything that happened over 10,000 years ago. Cosmologists and astronomers, on the other hand, are routinely looking at events that are millions or even billions of years old. Now that’s history!
You’re right that physicists aren’t going to make much contribution to understanding human emotions like love and joy or what makes one society thrive while another collapses. Physics is the study of the physical universe, but we also live in a spiritual universe that physics makes no attempt to describe. There is no mathematical description possible for a soul, or for free will. or human emotion. There are sciences that study the spiritual universe – philosophy, theology, and so on. The “hard” sciences like physics and chemistry are restricted to the physical domain. Any science that studies humanity, such as history or economics, will be operating in both universes. Anthropologists will routinely rely on physics for techniques like carbon dating for example, but must also understand human motivation. The primary difference between these domains is that we may be capable of fully comprehending the physical universe, and have a single language – math – for that purpose. We are not, however, anywhere close to being capable of truly understanding the spiritual universe. At least not in this lifetime. We live in the physical, but we were made for the spiritual.
This is correct only if you are critiquing overly narrative historians. Narrative history is very popular with lay readers and writers, and with academics who have a flair for it, but the further down the Historian rabbit hole you go, the less bearing narrative history actually has. As with explaining physics to lay people, narrative histories are really only ever just models that attempt to simplify the complex, and as such are fought over, discarded, dredged back out and rehabilitated, modified, and shelved depending on whether or not they are at all useful to understanding events from particular points of view.
But quite a lot of historical study is more than just crafting narratives, it is attempting to build webs and bring out the nuances and complexities of times and peoples. A narrative is a less imperfect model when it’s a biography, or an isolated event, but veers further and further out over longer timelines or larger events. Just try writing a narrative history of WWII – you’re bound to leave out quite a lot of critical information and find you can only focus on large scale events and the top brass. Or you can zoom in a unit’s particular history, or you can zoom in on the logistical history of the war (itself endlessly fascinating in its own right).
Sez you. Depends on the course. The advances in archeology, linguistics, genetics, paleontology, and geology have given us a lot more to talk about in those distant times.
Fair enough. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a classroom, and even then the focus was usually military history. Still, make it 100,000 years and my point still stands.
Hmm. I think that’s pushing the definition of “history” just a bit. If “prehistoric” is to have its generally recognized meaning of “predating written records,” then the trail gets pretty cold as recently as 6,000 years ago.