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Hawking: No 'Theory of Everything'
Flash Modin writes "In a Scientific American essay based on their new book A Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow are now claiming physicists may never find a theory of everything. Instead, they propose a 'family of interconnected theories' might emerge, with each describing a certain reality under specific conditions. The claim is a reversal for Hawking, who claimed in 1980 that there would be a unified theory by the turn of the century."
I'm reminded of a scene from DS9. Sure it's fiction, but it always held some sway with me:
Bashir: "Trevean was right. There is no cure. The Dominion made sure of that. But I was so arrogant, I thought I could find one in a week!"
Jadzia: "Maybe it was arrogant to think that. But it's even more arrogant to think there isn't a cure just because you couldn't find it."
Hawking a smart guy, but he by no means knows everything. Throwing in the towel and declaring that there is no right answer simply because he hasn't found it just doesn't hold much water with me. We might not figure it out for 100 years. We might figure it out tomorrow. We might NEVER figure it out, but simple logic says that there is a unified equation. It might not be simple or pretty, but if the universe operates on a consistent set of physical laws, it's out there.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Godel used the term "formal system" to specifically mean a recursive axiomatic system that can do arithmetic. I don't think it really applies here.
It happens. James Watson, who was part of the team that discovered the structure of DNA, has been saying crazier things for years.
My favorite was his presentation on why men liked butts. Certainly funnier than his comments on race.
Scientists sometimes don't age well. We probably age better on average than rock stars, but then again people pay don't take what rock stars say as seriously as scientists.
You're conflating blings with accomplishment. Should have listed his papers instead of awards given to him.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I don't know Godel as well as some other people here, but I do know physics and you're making a lot of assumptions there, starting with that the universe can be "derived" from a theory of everything. The name is a little unfortunate, but the goal of a theory of everything is to create a unified description of the fundamental forces, not a program to simulate the entire universe. If you wanted to simply say "the theory of everything won't be able to tell you absolutely everything about every particle in the universe," you'd be right, and probably that's where you're going with your incompleteness thing.
More fundamentally though, you're assuming the universe is a logical system. From a physicists point of view, it is a happy coincidence that rigorous mathematics is useful in describing the universe, but there is nothing that demands that this is the case (more practically: we're happy in physics to have assumptions about things like causality and time invariance, where needed).
This may sound crazy to most people, but why exactly mathematics has been so successful in physics is still a subject of debate among physicists: whether mathematics approximates an ultimately imperfect physical reality or mathematics *is* physical reality. I don't think it will be settled soon.
However, the halting problem (and all other semi-decidable and undecidable problems) exists in the Universe.
This is a HUGE assumption on which your entire argument hinges, so I think you need to define it more precisely, and provide some evidence that it is true.
Your argument seems to fall apart due to equivocation -- at the beginning you define a set of "problems" that the universe turing machine has to solve. For example, one of those "problems" might be "if you arrange mass in a certain configuration, in which direction will it accelerate?"
However, you then include "the halting problem" in this set. Bzzzt, full stop. This is a decidedly different sense of the word "problem." In this case, we're talking about an abstract idea that only exists as definitions on paper and in peoples' minds, but doesn't actually physically exist in the universe. In other words, our universe can talk about and consider and represent undecidable problems, but that doesn't mean it can actually solve them.
If you disagree, please describe a phyisical system that is "the halting problem" or some other undecidable problem and show that the universe can indeed resolve it.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.