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Physicists War Over a Unified Theory
beggs writes: "I was looking through the New York Times and came across an article which talks about a new front in the war to find a unified theory, but this one does not come from the particle physicists, it comes from the solid state physicists. Here is a little quote for wet your appetite: 'some solid-state physicists are trying to show that the laws of relativity, long considered part of the very bedrock of the physical world, are not platonic truths that have existed since time began.'"
If you don't feel like using the "archives" link, use the goatse:goatse account.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
i'm glad to see the theory of everything crowd take a hit. their absolutism can be compared to religious fundamentalism.
;-P
the solid staters talking about the universe being nothing but noise from which various descriptive rules emerge, but dependent on no other larger organizing principle, is satisfying to me.
allow me to be a crank about something that always bothered me: i never liked the big bang theory. it stinks of creationism. it seems out of line with the trend of what humanity has been learning from science over the last thousand years: that the universe is random, trivial, makes little sense, and we are not anywhere near the center of it.
it doesn't all boil down to an equation on a t-shirt? woop-de-friggin'-doo. just because us humans are reductionist thinkers and anal-retentive "everything in my world has to make sense" psychological types doesn't mean the universe has to fit that template. there does not have to be a theory of everything for the universe to work. it doesn't need a beginning, it doesn't need an end. the universe can be timeless, static, and random. what's wrong with that?
expansion of the universe? why can't the expansion we see be local, temporary. like being on the trough of a wave in the ocean, only able to look around in the trough we're in and see the trough expanding, unaware of the tips of the waves to our right and left. or unaware of the overall picture of us being in an endlessness ocean, infinite through space and time, backwards and forwards.
background microwave radiation? merely the effects of only being able to see a certain distance. the night sky may not be glowing white even though there might be infinite stars in every direction, but after a certain distance, light can be lost through means beyond our understanding, or through merely mundane reasons we already understand: absorption? dark matter? gravity lensing?
entropic death of the universe? or a big crunch in our future? why the absolutism? perhaps this might happen locally, and an as-of-yet unforeseen restoking of the entropy balance happening through processes we are not even aware of yet. black holes? they are singularities of some sort. i wonder what kind of bedrock rules we take for granted are broken in them. maxwell's demon indeed.
do i sound quasi-rational, like i'm grasping at straws? maybe so, i'm no cosmologist. but the big bang stinks of creationism to me, and if anything we have learned historically trend-wise, through galileo, kepler, hubble, etc., is that our place in the universe is vanishingly small, pointless,and trivial. to speak of a creationistic big bang seems vaguely anthropomorphic and self-centered, like how we used to think the sun revolved around the earth.
same with a theory of everything. why does gravity have to be united with any other forces? to satisfy a psychological urge? "it just is" sounds ok with me.
just because us little humans have a beginning and an end does not imply the universe does. and just because we have to make little reductionist rules up to govern how we live our lives and make sense of it all does not mean the universe has to conform to our psychology.
bravo to the solid staters. the dudes who gave us the silicon chip are telling us that the universe begins and ends with local rules dependent on nothing else. now that's a theory of everything i can live with: everything begins and ends with my computer.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
These are, IMHO, the key points in the whole article:
"Like Aristotle, they [(the emergent propossers)]lean toward the notion that it is the equations that flow from nature instead of the other way around. Mathematics is just a tool for making sense of it all."
"[...]he ventured that the universe may have begun not in a state of pristine symmetry but in one of lawlessness. The laws of relativity and perhaps quantum mechanics itself would have emerged only later on."
"Ultimately, though, the two sides know that they are talking across a divide. Taken to its extreme, emergence suggests that all the fundamental laws, even quantum mechanics, may be secondary -- that at the base of reality is random noise."
I dislike this thinking. What ever happened to truth and reason? Why can't I walk outside and know that a rock will never turn into a bird?