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Sunday Physics and Metaphysics Blogging: Theories of Everything and Press Criticism Too
By Daniel Koffler / November 18, 2007
Via Radley Balko, a couple of articles in the Daily Telegraph about the prospects for a Theory of Everything — this is a technical term — piqued my interest. The first, a personality-driven piece about a semi-employed surfer who happens to have a Ph.D and has spent years working on a ToE that was inspired by correspondences between the E8 polytope and the workings of nature, is notable for confirming that work done at the apex of theoretical physics looks rather like an artistic project. Take a look at how Garrett Lisi, the theoretician, was moved to his conclusions:
E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."
What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.
Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
You can see something similar in The Double Helix: At least if James Watson is to be believed, he and Crick realized, prior to testing, that the double helix had to be the shape of DNA simply by modeling the shape and observing the simple beauty of it. Not to get too sentimental, though, Lisi will need to demonstrate the existence of 20 heretofore unobserved particles to grant his ideas evidential credence.
Second comes this article on the ongoing work of USC physicist Itzhak Bars, who began work on the applicability of gauge symmetries to M-theory as early as 1995 — very, very briefly, a physical symmetry is a system whose features do not undergo observable change in spite of mathematical transformation, such as a circuit whose electric potential is raised uniformly at all points, so that no change in voltage differential occurs and hence no change in the operation of the circuit; and M-theory, according to which there are 10 dimensions of space and one of time, is the current de rigeur theory on the spacetime maniforld — and proposed a two-dimensional (2T) time. Apparently, Bars is not only ready to propose a 2T hypothesis, but to test it. (Subscribers to the New Scientist can read more here.)
What actually caught my eye from the Bars piece is the following:
Changing our picture of time from a line to a plane (one to two dimensions) means that the path between the past and future could loop back on itself, allowing you to travel back and forwards in time and allowing the famous grandfather paradox, where you could go back and kill your grandfather before your mother was born, thereby preventing your own birth.
The idea seems to be that Bars' hypothetical gauge symmetry resolves grandfather paradox-like problems by proposing a manifold of plain old vanilla 3+1 spacetimes, each subsumed within a broader 4+2 framework. Well, here's the thing. There's this temptation that high-powered physicists are often unable to resist, and journalists who write about high-powered physicists are simply incapable of resisting, of going beyond the bounds of data modeling and prediction, and playing around with speculative metaphysics. And the result is usually something that makes philosophers cringe.
So while I have no reason to doubt that Bars' work is a novel and potentially groundbreaking insight into the dimensionality and shape of spacetime, it's sort of laughable that he (and the author of the piece, who doesn't have a byline) seems ingenuously worried that the mathematics of temporal dimensionality could pose insuperable philosophical problems. In fact, no doubt in part because metaphysicians tend to grok science fiction, the problems and paradoxes of multi-dimensional and/or multi-directional time are a fairly well-worn subject in metaphysics, and the current going theories resolve such problems as there are in ways that defuse wild-eyed wonder over Back to the Future scenarios.
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François Blumenfeld-Kouchner, are you now going to reject Quantum Mechanics because Warner Heisenberg worked for the Nazis?
1. Garrett Lisi is easily demonstrated to be a crackpot. see this critique by former Harvard physics professor Lubos Motl http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-theory-of.html
2. That study cited by Al Gore which claim that global warming is unanimous accepted in peer-reviewed journals, is itself not peer-reviewed! the irony!
3. opinion on global warming is split about 50-50 in the popular press because of the excellent works by scientists such as Richad Lindzen and Steve McIntyre.  See http://www.climateaudit.org/
Unless I'm missing something, Francois, it wasn't Lisi whose work had anything to do with time travel, but Bars, so I'm not sure which one Sean Carroll is criticizing (do you have a link?). That said, I also don't see what you're taking issue with. I wrote the post initially to criticize the lack of substantive scientific content in science journalism, and though I got into some other issues, I thought that point came through.
Anyway,
1) I'm aware of Watson's shortcoming, which is why I demurred.
2) I stand by my description of science. Dawkins and Harris are self-consciously engaged in philosophical projects — projects which I happen to agree with. I did not say, and did not mean to imply, that science cannot provide useful data in constructing philosophical theories. Of course it can, and should. Here is Harris in Jewcy: "Let me assure you that even very accomplished scientists can be terrible philosophers," referring to Francis Collins' conversion to Christianity. I agree. Science is predictive, not interpretive, and likewise, metaphysics is not a cloistered discipline, but something that everybody engages in, and it is hardly a put-down to call some investigation metaphysical. The question is, is it cogent metaphysics or not?
I don't know much about science. You're talking to someone with two English degrees and a Communication degree here. But from reading most of your post (I confess I couldn't make it all the way), the undercurrent of what you're describing reminds me of a movement propogated by an author I used to work for—Ken Wilber. A theory of everything may technically invoke the uber-mission of physics—but it also conjures the dreamy wishes of many intellectual traditions. One of Wilber's books even uses the theory for its title.
Inadequacies of the Philosophical Profession
Here’s the problem I have with your post: it addresses stuff that is barely called science by scientists. Maybe the journalists’ pick is bad, but I don’t think the philosopher’s is any better.
In the words of the “I Postdoc, therefore I am” blogger, talking about time travel: “What bothers me, is that both journalists and the public seem to be so much more interested in, ahem, improbable science than in the usual garden variety.” I would include philosophers in this statement.
The same question -”Is it a good idea for physicists to promote to the public their work on time travel? Or might this also give the public some misleading ideas about science?”- is broached by Peter Woit, who spends some time on his blog defending Lisi because -well, because he’s happy to see diversity of research in science. At the same time, he’s realising that most of the attention to Lisi in the popular media comes from his surfing career, and he doesn’t seem to happy about this.
Sean Carroll over at Cosmicvariance.com is quite a bit more radical:
“So I’m sufficiently pessimistic about the prospects for this idea that I’m going to spend my time reading other papers. I could certainly be guessing wrong. But you can’t read every paper, and my own judgment is all I have to go on. Someone who understands this stuff much better than I do will dig into it and report back, and it will all shake out in the end. Science! It works, bitches.”
Now, besides those technical questions on physics that is, I assume (wrongly?) way beyond my comprehension or yours, or the average Jewcy reader’s, it seems to me you try to make two points in your post: one on the nature of creativity/discovery in the sciences, and another on the epistemological reach of the sciences.
1) You write “…At least if James Watson is to be believed”. In a recent post on Jewcy (“Racism and its future downfall”), I reminded the reader of the fraud that is Watson. He certainly isn’t to be believed -neither on his sanctimonious affirmations of aesthetic discovery of the shape of the DNA nor on his factually wrong racist assertions- and to take a master of intellectual theft as a model for the process of scientific discovery seems to me thoroughly misplaced.
2) You write: “Science is a process of designing and testing predictive models. It is not simultaneously an interpretation of those models.” -Who said reductionism didn’t come from the philosophers either?
First point: it is perfectly satisfying IMHO to claim, as do e.g. Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, that science actually does reach into what you call metaphysics and demonstrates that there is no such thing as a god -nor a celestial teapot.
Second point: even if you don’t agree with my previous point, I find it difficult to swallow that science is not “an interpretation of those models.” For instance, “Biological evolution has no privileged line of descent and no designated end.” (Dawkins) I don’t know if you want to consider that an interpretation or part of the model, but in either case it makes a powerful statement that is entirely supported by scientific evidence and does not need the succour of philosophy to have an explanatory power. Moreover, while evolution might not be a prescriptive “moral…theory”, it certainly can provide elements of a descriptive one, which combined with anthropology can account for far more of our ethical behaviour than metaphysicians of the past or current philosophers have ever done.
With all this, I find it to be no surprise that the latest recipient of the Templeton prize, a $1.5 million recompense for those willing to muddle theology and science, was attributed to Charles Taylor, a… philosopher.
Regrettably, this means that the humanities are still no closer (and I would argue, ever further) to bringing anything useful to the ethical debates generated by technical advances (not hypothetical B.S. about time travel, but current and emerging bioethical questions, for example).
Fortunately, the scientists are doing a much better job at thinking through the consequences of their discoveries than the humanists.
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