The past two days I’ve been at a conference here in Lisbon organized by the Gulbenkian Foundation on the ostensible topic of Is Science Near Its Limits? The Gulbenkian is probably the most well-known and best-funded cultural organization in Portugal, and it includes a world-famous museum housing the wonderful art collection of its founder, Calouste Gulbenkian, who made his fortune in the oil business early during the last century.
The conference was extremely well-run and well-attended, filling a large lecture hall where there was simultaneous translation of the talks into Portuguese. It was organized by literary critic, writer and polymath George Steiner, who gave the introductory talk. I hadn’t known that Steiner had originally started out studying mathematics, but was discouraged from pursuing a career in the subject at the University of Chicago by Irving Kaplansky, which led to his turning to the study of literature and philosophy. Steiner had quite a lot to say provocative to scientists, including questioning whether they had been able to justify to the public the large sums of money being spent on the LHC, and characterizing the lack of testability of string theory as strong evidence that science had hit a limit beyond which it could not progress.
On the whole the rest of the speakers actually didn’t have much to say about limits of science, taking the standard view of most scientists that their own field had a bright future, with no limits in sight. The final talk of the conference did return to the limits issue, with John Horgan giving an uncompromising defense of the thesis of his 1996 book The End of Science (although he did allow that possible advances in neuroscience such as the decoding of a neural code, could be as revolutionary as previous advances). While the scientists in the audience took Steiner’s attacks in stride, partly because he was our host, they were less charmed by Horgan, who got a rather hostile reaction from many of them. I hope he’ll write about his point of view on the conference at his blog, or discuss it in one of his Bloggingheads discussions with George Johnson.
I was one of the few other speakers discussing the question of limits, with my talk emphasizing that particle physics is now in a new, different environment than that of the past, one in which progress, even revolutionary progress, is possible, but much more difficult. A written version of my talk is available here. I was paired with string theorist Dieter Lust, who gave a presentation of the case for string theory unification and the Landscape. We were introduced by Gustavo Calstelo Branco of the IST, who emphasized recent advances in our understanding of neutrinos. Also speaking in another session was Luis Alvarez-Gaume of CERN, who gave a very upbeat talk on the prospects for particle physics, taking the point of view on string theory that, like any idea, string theorists will give up on it if it doesn’t work out. He already sees a diminishment of interest in string theory among particle physicists, with people moving instead towards subjects that promise some sort of interaction with experimental data. The three of us were brought together later for an interesting small and very lively discussion of the issues surrounding string theory and recent media attention to it. This was taped, and may appear in some form or other in the future.
Update: There’s an entertaining conversation between John Horgan and George Johnson about the Lisbon conference now up at Bloggingheads.
“My critique of string theory over the past few years has made me many fans who are convinced that sophisticated mathematics is not needed to understand fundamental physics correctly, and that this is why string theory must be wrong. They’re often unhappy to hear that I strongly disagree with them, that I think particle physics probably needs even more mathematics of a high level of abstraction and intellectual difficulty.”
– http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/lisbontalk.pdf (page 5)
Way to go, man!
Pythagoras: “Numbers rule the universe”.
Plato: “God ever geometrizes”
Kepler: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”
Poincaré: “If God speaks to man, he undoubtedly uses the language of mathematics.”
Peter Woit’s paper excerpt quoted by anon. is indeed something to which people (especially policy-making physicists) should pay close attention. A few more excerpts describe his position in more detail:
“… Humanity may sooner or later reach the limits of what it can understand about the universe, but there is no evidence that we are there yet. …
In 1993 Andrew Wiles announced his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem … Just five years ago, Grigori Perelman posted on the arXiv
preprint server a set of papers outlining a proof of the Poincaré Conjecture …
Both Wiles and Perelman worked intensively by themselves for
seven years or more to come up with the advances needed in their work. …
Wiles and Perelman … showed what kind of long-term effort is
generally needed to make a fundamental advance against a difficult problem.
The current organization of research in physics puts the best young people in a position of needing to quickly prove themselves, to produce results on time-scales of a year or two at most if they want to remain employed.
At later stages of their career, even with tenure, the pressure of grant applications continues to discourage many from making the kind of commitment to an unpopular speculative research program that may be needed to make progress. …”.
As to what sort of physics institutions might be consistent with Peter Woit’s recommendations, maybe Alain Connes’s remarks made in a Tehran interview might be relevant:
“… I [Connes] believe that the most successful systems so far were these big institutes in the Soviet union, like the Landau institute, the Steklov institute, etc.
Money did not play any role there, the job was just to talk about science. It is a dream to gather many young people in an institute and make sure that their basic activity is to talk about science without getting corrupted by thinking about buying a car, getting more money, having a plan for career etc …”,
and
it may also be relevant that such institutes were the environment that produced Perelman.
With respect to the USA, I am not sure that it would be politically realistic to get government funding for such institutes, whose freedom for pursuit of unconventional ideas would make them different from current North American “institutes for advanced study” that are smaller and more directed toward currently fashionable approaches such as superstring theory or loop quantum gravity.
Maybe a newly rich nation, such as China, could establish such institutes and so become the source of future major advances in physics based on sophisticated mathematics.
Tony Smith
For people who think they can do fundamental physics without much math, the correct answer is not “no!” so much as “I doubt it, but go ahead and try”. Most such people are crackpots and will produce nothing but nonsense, but someone might succeed, and only time will tell.
It’s quite possible that right now theoretical physicists are stuck, not mainly for lack of math, but for lack of a bright new idea that fits together the puzzle pieces that have been handed to us: dark matter (or some failure in our understanding of gravity), dark energy (or some failure in our understanding of gravity), inflation (or whatever makes the background radiation display the patterns it has), the precise detailed structure of the Standard Model, and various other open questions. Right now these puzzle pieces don’t seem to form a nice picture.
«This was taped, and may appear in some form or other in the future.»
More that taped, I think it was broadcasted live via the Internet (at least Friday it was) and I can’t see why the video isn’t available after the conference’s end.
I was only as the conference on Friday afternoon.
I saw John Horgan’s presentation and can’t agree with your characterization «they were less charmed by Horgan, who got a rather hostile reaction from many of them».
He mainly got a “verbally violent” reaction to his claim that anti-depressants are as effective for the treatment of depression as talk therapies by someone who objected loudly without giving any reason why it was wrong. The others were anything but hostile and the last long rambling in Portuguese was just silly and vacuous.
Horgan’s ideas regarding the end of war seemed out of place in a scientific context but he did do a good job overall.
Unfortunately I didn’t see your lecture and I appreciate that you post the link to the video feed if it ever becomes available.
Dyson gave a very optimistic account but curiously never even glanced over global-warming, a topic that might have had some relevance to the conference. Given his “unorthodox” views it could have been interesting.
As a final note, the Portuguese title was ridiculous meaning “does Science have limits?” which is a milder question than “*IS* Science near its limit?”. The organizers did a very poor job on this account.
I would like to ask Baez to please refrain from saying things such as, “Most such people are crackpots and will produce nothing but nonsense, but someone might succeed, and only time will tell.”
Saying things such as “Most such people are crackpots,” just because they might value logic, reason, and truth over math, does not advance the culture nor physics.
Arxiv.org is filled with papers that are in turn filled with math–math that has never born any fruit. Reading Woit’s and Smolin’s books, a strong case could be made that today’s crackpots prefer math. Why is it that government-funded mathematical nonesense is deemed superior to truth, logic, physics, and reason?
I hope that Baez someday has an opportunity to read the original papers of Faraday, Boltzman, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, Newton, Wheeler, DeBroglie, and Einstein.
You will notice that the simple logic, reason, and motivation are all contained in beautiful words which far eclipse the presence of math. Read Penrose’s THE ROAD TO REALITY, and you will find far more math, but Penrose hasn’t done much in the realm of physics, other than The Emporer’s New Mind.
Indeed, Faraday’s notebooks and papers barely contain any math–he lead with logic, reason, and physics, as did Einstein, and then they both sought out the math that captured the physical reality. Same with Ludwig Von Boltzman, who many called a “crackpot” in his day.
At any rate, none of the Great’s papers nor notebooks nor books spent that much time talking about who were and who weren’t the crackpots of their age. In fact, I have found no mention of the word “crackpot” throughout all their noble, lasting work. And all of their eras produced far more noble and enduring advancements in the realm of physics than has the last thirty years of our era.
Perhaps the time Baez invests in his crackpot contemplations could be better spent advancing physics. There is no need for ad hominem attacks and name-calling, and we should all be humble with regards to the mysterious nature of science. We do not know where tomorrow’s revolution will come from–curiosity cannot be dictated nor legislated; and thus it should never be castigated nor impugned with snarky namecalling. Curiosity must remain free.
And while Baez’s cataloging of “big questions” is fun, all great scientists have ever asked their own questions, following their own curiosity; from Kepler, to Newton, to Einstein, to Feynman.
One certainity is this–those who find the big answers get to ask the big questions. And the questions are ultimately asked in words–not in numbers.
Peter:
In your beautiful and convincing Lisbon talk you state:
“The main thing that distinguishes mathematics from physics and other sciences is the different role of experiment”.
“As particle theory enters a new environment in which experimental results are much harder to come by, it may need to learn from mathematicians how to work in a much more painstaking way, taking care to see what can be built solidly without reliance on validation by experiment.”
“Lacking inspiration from experiment, physicists may find that searching for it in mathematics is one of the few avenues left open.”
This seems to reveal your fundamental Platonic Idealism.
But, as you argue, this is pretty much the path that most string theorists now pursue, and you usually criticize them with such arguments as:
“For such a conjecture to deserve to be called scientific, it must come with the standard sort of scientific evidence, or a plausible idea about how one might someday find such (empirical?) evidence.”
This seems a bit schizophrenic. Can you clarify this apparent inconsistency with some argument, other than the possible criticism, that string theorists’ efforts are simply not “painstaking” enough?
That’s funny, my objection to
“Most such people are crackpots and will produce nothing but nonsense, but someone might succeed, and only time will tell”
was that it might encourage those crackpots with the “but someone might succeed” caveat.
(Sorry for posting this twice). first time, message did not go through.
Peter have you you looked at the slides and talks of the recent QG conference
in Uruguay?
http://qgsciv.fisica.edu.uy/program.html
I recall when Horgan’s End of Science book came out. Most striking was the strong, emotional, and yet poorly reasoned response from the bulk of scientists who publicly voiced their opinions on the matter. They trotted out the same tired, hoary notions such as the throwback to the state of physics in the late 19th century or the apocryphal ‘the patent office shall soon be closed’ story. Even worse were the ones who chose to discount the opinion of a mere journalist. Just embarrassing.
Somewhat better, but still wide of the mark, was John Maddox’ response book. I don’t really understand why Horgan’s thesis wasn’t met and argued fairly, rather than hysterically. Then again, I don’t understand why people like Kurzweil get a free pass for promoting absurd concepts like the ‘singularity’ in book after book.
Anyway, this conference sounds like it would have been fascinating to attend.
Cool Hand Luke wrote:
“Saying things such as ‘Most such people are crackpots,’ just because they might value logic, reason, and truth over math, does not advance the culture nor physics.”
But math is logic…and “truth over math”? You mean math isn’t true?!
Math is a collection of tautologies, how in the hell can’t it be true?
Cool Hand Luke: What we classify as “mathematics” versus what we classify as “logic and reason” is a purely cultural distinction, which varies from place to place and time to time, and to which physics itself is indifferent.
It would be wonderful if everything in the universe could be explained by means of simple imagery, common sense and everyday language, but there’s no good reason to expect this to be the case. Feynman did an amazing job explaining most of QED and much of the Standard Model in simple terms in QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, and many people have produced nice, intuitive accounts of much of General Relativity (included John Baez, here). But everyday language and intuition are shaped by a relatively small subset of physical reality, and there is a limit to how far beyond that subset we can reach without the tools of formal mathematics.
I do not know whether those who say that you can do fundamental physics without mathematics are trolling (trawling?) or not, but let us assume that they are not.
How, I ask them, are you going to get a cross-section (a number) for e+e–>γγγ (a number) if your theory has no numbers in it?
Take your time about answering.
John Horgan had an article (available here) in the October 2006 issue of Discover Magazine that updated his views on the limits of science.
For people who think they can do fundamental physics without much math, the correct answer is not “no!” so much as “I doubt it, but go ahead and try”. Most such people are crackpots and will produce nothing but nonsense, but someone might succeed, and only time will tell.
It’s quite possible that right now theoretical physicists are stuck, not mainly for lack of math, but for lack of a bright new idea that fits together the puzzle pieces that have been handed to us
Many of us were attracted to physics, and foundations in particular, by the proposition that some simple order underlies and explains reality. Mathematics in physics bolsters that hope, by reducing apparent complexity, to simply stated physical laws. Who, who understands them, can fail to be moved by Maxwell’s equations’, or Einstein’s field equation’s, elegance and explanatory power?
But that’s the rub – who understands them? At some point, the mathematics required by physics has ceased to be in any sense simple. For me, the boundary came between QM and QFT – the former seems to satisfy the need for simplicity, the latter to defy it.
All this is relevant, because at some point, I think we have to contemplate the possibility that the human ability to imagine or manipulate the mathematics required to describe physical reality may simply be insufficient. Insufficient imagination may mean that the fundamental operations our brains can adeptly manipulate, are not the most appropriate fundamental operations for understanding deep physics. Insufficiency of doing may mean that even if we’ve got the right ideas, too many computations of too great complexity are required to take those “simple” ideas, and make them describe a big universe.
This would be a sad conclusion for physics, of course, but the incredible quantity of talent thrown at finding a unification of GR and the standard model, with little obvious fundamental progress, suggests that we at least entertain the possibility.
This was very interesting, Peter.
My objection to John Horgan’s book was for each discipline, he came up with a different argument about why we’ve reached the end of science. For some disciplines, he said that we’ve reached the limit because we’ve worked everything out, and all that remains is filling a few details (e.g., what many physicists thought was the state of physics at the end of the 19th century). For other disciplines, he said that we understood a lot of the basic ideas, but fitting them together to reach the next level of understanding was impossible (maybe the state of physics in the years before the Standard Model was discovered). For other disciplines, he said that we had no idea how anything worked, but it was too complicated to figure it out (this was for neuroscience).
So basically, you can make the same argument about nearly any science at most periods of history (excepting the few years after a fundamental breakthrough), and only in retrospect can you discover when you were right.
Shantanu,
Thanks for pointing out the link. I haven’t had time to look at the talks carefully, but they appeared to be good summaries of what is going on, if nothing really surprising.
Leonard,
Yes, sometimes I describe my philosophy of mathematics as radical Platonism…
There is a common perception that the problem with string theory is its reliance on mathematics, and for some reason people get the idea that this is what I believe. What I actually think is that this is just completely wrong and I have argued this point many times, most at length in my book: the problem has nothing to do with mathematics, it’s that using a string theory in higher dimensions to try and get a unified theory is just a speculative idea that turned out to be wrong. What is needed is other, different speculative ideas, which may involve just as much mathematics, but turn out to be right. The only way to be sure they are right will be if they, unlike string theory, show signs of making progress towards telling us something about particle physics that the standard model itself doesn’t tell us.
Alface,
The negative response to Horgan wasn’t so much from people who spoke publicly during the question session, but privately from people near me in the front part of the room. I think he evokes a strong negative reaction from most scientists, since he is challenging one of their most deeply held beliefs of most scientists, who are doing what they are doing typically because of their belief in the possibility of dramatic future progress in their field.
I actually hope the talk itself isn’t available on the internet, I wish people would instead read the written version of the presentation. I ended up having only about half as much time to talk as I had prepared material for, so, was just improvising much of the talk on the fly, which didn’t work that well. The written version is much more carefully thought out and I hope much clearer.
Cool Hand Luke wrote:
I have! I haven’t read them all, of course, but I like looking at original papers.
Hmm. Let’s consider Newton’s Principia. It’s interesting to read about contemporary reactions when this book came out around 1687.
According to Richard Westfall’s biography, the philosopher John Locke tried to read it, but “since he was not a mathematician, he found it impenetrable. Not to be denied, he asked Christiaan Huyghens if he could trust the mathematical propositions”.
The mathematician DeMoivre tried to read it at the age of 21. “But he was surprised to find it beyond the range of his knowledge and to see himself obliged to admit that what he had taken for mathematics was merely the beginning of a long and difficult course that he had yet to undertake”.
Of course, nowadays calculus is taught in high school, in a far simpler style than one will find in the Principia. But, in its day, it was the peak of mathematical achievement.
Of course Newton also had good ideas in physics, not just math. For him the two went hand in hand, inseparable.
I think the same is true of most of the authors you list. Bohr and Faraday may be the two exceptions. Faraday, of course, was an experimentalist. He interrogated Nature directly.
It only took me a few minutes to write that post. Surely I’m entitled to a little break from advancing physics now and then? If you wanted me to get back to work, you shouldn’t have written something else for me to reply to. This one took a lot longer.
But: my main point was not to lambast crackpots! It was to suggest that physicists may be stuck “not mainly for lack of math, but for lack of a bright new idea that fits together the puzzle pieces that have been handed to us.”
So, it’s sort of weird for you to reply as if I’d been arguing in favor of the importance of math.
There was a very entertainig interview of OMNI mag with Feynman, I think in 1978 or so – and the journalist specifically asked if a matemacically unsophisticated person like Faraday could make a significant contribution nowadays – and Feynman said no.
(To paraphrase: We got out of simple mechanical models as much as we could have already – and since the natural rules and language of universe is so strange and remote from the everyday experience, we need careful abstraction to translate it into things we comprehend, hence lots of math is needed.) In that interview Feynman also said that math can be threatening to somebody who didn’t study it but it is no harder than a normal person can handle.
I don’t think C H Luke wants actually ban mathematical physics but he doesn’t believe an advancement in the foundations of physics has to be expected from mathematical “problem puzzling” but requires a conceptual advancement originating from ideas which can be explained without formalism.
As far as Horgan is concerned, it’s like a Pascalian bet: he might be correct but it is more promising when he is wrong. After all it’s just a journalist hypothesis and the only way he tries to “proof” it is leading interviews with prominent researchers. He just made unambigously clear what he thinks about scientific speculation which goes on and on and leads to an increasing heap of subsequent speculations and interpretations – being mathematical or not.
It’s funny that the topic of mathematics has come up at this time. I always believed since the beginning that String Theory was off. Peter and John are right it’s not the math, we do need more of it. Maxwell won the Nobel Prize because he formulated the mathematical model of light, not Faraday.
I’ve always argued that current String Theory is at the same stage as astronomers were thousand of years ago when they created epicycles to describe the movement of the pkanets. Was the mathematics wrong? No, what was wrong was the model was built around the assumption that the earth was the center of the universe. The epicycle universe was a very complex mathematical model built on the philosophical view of the universe at the time. Shifting the sun to the center of the solar system created a much simpler, but still mathematical, model of the way the planets moved. It wasn’t until Kepler finally changed the model from epicycles to ellipses that the model began to match observation. But, even though Kepler’s model was simple it was still wrong. It wasn’t until General Relativity that the observations and mathematical equations finally agreed. General Relativity not only agreed, but predicted the motion of all the planets.
Like the Ancient Greeks and Kepler, current String Theorists are basing their model on various assumptions. Like the ancients we can’t make any direct observations to build a model around. Kepler had Brahe’s detailed observations of Mars to help him formulate his theory. Will LHC help us? And, like the Greeks the more we try to make the string model reflect reality the more complex it becomes. For the Greeks the math wasn’t wrong it was the original philosophical assumptions that were false.
So, is the math of String Theory wrong? No it’s not. Is the fundamental model wrong? Only time will tell. Like relativity, we need a model that predicts nature not mimic it.
Now stop this and let that slacker Baez get back to work.
“It’s funny that the topic of mathematics has come up at this time. I always believed since the beginning that String Theory was off. Peter and John are right it’s not the math, we do need more of it. Maxwell won the Nobel Prize because he formulated the mathematical model of light, not Faraday.”
Maxwell died in 1879, more than twenty years before the first Nobel Prizes were awarded.
Look, I hope I’m not judged off-topic, but I just couldn’t let this one pass.
I don’t know if Lee Smolin and Peter Woit are right or not. I’ve been reading this blog for a couple of years now, read Smolin’s “Three Roads
” in around 2002, read their more recent books in the past year, and am for various reasons fairly glad I decided not to further theoretical physics way back in 1974. (I instead entered industry, specifically, Intel, and did a kind of applied physics for a while, retiring in 1986 to pursue whatever interested me.)
Physics has been in a tough time for a long while. Feynman commented more that 35 years ago that physics was looking increasingly like smashing watches together at ever greater speeds and seeing more and more little pieces.
This is not too surprising. The energies available to build accelerators scale with technology, but at factors greater than the energies achieved, even as “interesting events” are probably falling off faster than the energies are increased.
So a lot of stuff was discovered in the 1 MeV to 100 MeV range, when basically a few thousand (up to hundreds of thousands, maybe) of bucks could equip a lab. And then a bunch of stuff was found in the BeV/GeV range, a la the Bevatron in the 1950s. A matter of tens of millions of bucks.
And so on, with the last 30 years seeing sparse discoveries in a couple of accelerators, each costing many billions of dollars. (I don’t have the energy, no pun intended, to make up a graph of energy of accelerators in billions of electron-volts versus cost of accelerators in billions of dollars.
I hear the usual name for this is the “desert.” Meaning, not nearly as many discoveries in the TeV range as in much cheaper, much lower energy accelerators. Which has implications for how much longer the politicians will fund bigger accelerators. (I’m too far out of things to know how likely supersymmetry/Technicolor findings are likely to be at the LHC. If there’s some big surprise, maybe more generations will be funded. if not, maybe things slow down for a long while.)
I have a sneaking hunch one of the contributors here has it about right, namely, Greg Egan. Even though his “Diaspora” is science fiction, he anticipate that some of the accelerators needed to really answer some of the key questions–probing a dozen orders of magnitude closer to the Planck scale–won’t happen for many centuries. I think he has it about right.
It just costs too damned much–and will cost civilization-sized amounts of money and energy in about 3 or 4 generations of accelerator energy regimes–to resolve niggling questions about the unification of the very large and the very small.
Put another way, there likely won’t be funding beyond about 1.5 generations from now unless some new kind of bombs or some new kind of energy production seems likely…and neither of these seem at all likely.
Meanwhile, math research doesn’t cost a lot and may yield some striking discoveries.
Cosmology, too. I’m all for building dozens of new and more powerful telescopes. I think new physics is much likelier to emerge from seeing what’s out there than from hoping that a 300-km accelerator costing the GNP of Spain for 18 years reveals some new charmicle or coloron or whatever.
I enjoy this blog. I am saddened by what the debate has done to some of the partisans, though. And I think a certain Czech threw away his career in a misguided political frenzy. (I’m sort of sympathetic with his views, but physics is physics, not politics. I saw a department member get so wrapped up in fighting the war in Vietnam, through campus protests, that he was no longer doing any physics. This was in 1971-73. He left physics completely, as near as I can tell. Sad, as he had no effect on the war in Vietnam, and he threw away everything for it.)
Sorry for the length here. My first comment. Hopefully Dr. Woit will be tolerant.
–Tim May
The question is whether you expect to get a sound theory out of the math or get the math into the theory. I don’t think the latter has to be disputed at all. Physical theories which can’t be expressed in a mathematical language shall not be considered as science. Without putting mathematics into the theory it’s all just philosophy if not fraud.
What’s left? I see following options:
a) Current theories don’t have to be extended a lot conceptually but the math has to be “cleaned up” which requires obviously more math. This is the “normal science” viewpoint.
b) New concepts are primary mathematical inventions such as strings + extra dimensions that don’t have any obvious physical purpose but can be interpreted as physical entities or background properties and they might help to patch the mathematical machinery. Despite violating Occams razor those inventions can often be justified when they are not too exaggerated and cause more problems than they solve. Otherwise they turn out to be phlogiston.
c) Some essential concepts, experimental links and observations are still missing and every attempt to make signifcant progress at the foundations without them is just a footnote in the history of illusions. Maybe we just have to be more patient with mother nature?
John Baez said:
“But, in its day, it [Principia] was the peak of mathematical achievement.”
hmm, or perhaps the pinnacle of obscurantism. Isn’t Newton known to have said that he purposely made it difficult “to avoid being bated by little smatterers in mathematics”
Spiro Zafiratos
“Maxwell won the Nobel Prize because he formulated the mathematical model of light, not Faraday”
huh? the first Nobel prize was awarded in 1901. Faraday died in 1867, Maxwell in 1879. Posthumous nominations are not permitted. When did Maxwell win the Nobel prize ?
Good post on and responses to “Is Science Near Its Limits?”, which as Peter says was a fascinating meeting. I just posted on it yesterday. http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/csw/?p=75 I focused on the suggestion of the eminent German neuroscientist Wolf Singer that researchers study parapsychology. Another speaker, Freeman Dyson, professed belief in psychic phenomena in a New York Review of Books Essay a few years ago. He reiterated this view to me in Lisbon. He said, however, that he doubts whether ESP can be scientifically validated, because it is usually only manifested in people under severe stress. Singer’s suggestion about ESP seemed to be received with far more equanimity than my end-of-science schtick. My only regret is that, during my speech on the end of science, I didn’t suggest that string theorists attempt to resolve their problems by postulating a new particle, the “psychon.”
still, Spiro Zafiratos has a point
all the essential elements of Newton’s theory of gravitation appear in several of Newton’s predecessors, and all of them appear in the work of Hooke [Hesse, Mary B. (1962): Forces and Fields The Concept of Action at a Distance in the History of Physics, Dover, p. 133]
Unfortunately, Hooke lacked the mathematical technique to represent the complete theory in all its mathematical inevitability, so Newton received all the credit.
Sorry my error on Maxwell. Johan made my point. Hooke, Brahe, and Faraday did the work, but the mathematicians received the fame.
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On math & physics — a direct example from my work: I have a spreadsheet with over 65,000 data points for 8 devices. I can’t make any sense out of that data without math — statistics, Fourier, etc. But before I gathered that data or placed those instruments, I had to understand what & why I was measuring. The concepts came first but without the math I just have a collection of numbers. A physicist trying to discover “the rules of the universe” is working at a deeper level but the basic method is similar. And in one case — involving airflow & pressure change — the math came first & suggested the key idea.
I made a mistake in moderation here, allowing a comment from “Cool Hand Luke” = “Elliot McGucken”, because I initially didn’t realize who this was. It became clear after he posted many more comments to the thread, which I deleted. Leaving the initial one was a mistake, since it has led to a mostly off-topic and unenlightening discussion, and he keeps posting large numbers of comments here which I have to deal with.
Please, no more comments on the thread inspired by “Cool Hand Luke”.
Peter:
You didn’t address my main question; the seeming contradiction in the two following quotes:
“…to see what can be built solidly without reliance on validation by experiment.”
“For such a conjecture to deserve to be called scientific, it must come with the standard sort of scientific evidence, or a plausible idea about how one might someday find such (empirical?) evidence.”
You usually seem to believe Science requires “validation by experiment”.
So what’s the value your talking about in the first quote?
Only the pragmatic value that comes from building what appear to be self-consistent models…to be accepted or rejected AFTER empirical test?
Is that you definition of scientific radical Platonism?
That’s fine, but it hardly fits Platonic ideology!
This may seem to be a straw man; it’s just that many scientists DO believe that empirical testing…and testability…is what distinguishes science from math, logic, and all other ‘purely tautological ideologies’. Blurring the definitional line between induction and deduction, isn’t helpful, especially in discussions of strings and the future of science.
And when you label math as science, it also adds to the confusion; vive la difference.
I’m in no way trying to denigrate math or logic!
Leonard,
In the end, any physical theory definitely needs validation by experiment, or it’s not science. My comments were about what physicists should do along the way towards this ultimate goal. When I wrote about working “without reliance on validation by experiment”, I was referring to the work done with the ultimate goal of coming up with something experimentally testable, but where that goal may still be far away. If you start investigating a very speculative idea, you often generally don’t initially have experimental tests. It there is a lot of experimental data out there, you should be able to soon make contact with it. My point was that, if relevant experimental data is much harder to get than in the past, you often can’t rely on it until much later, so need to be very careful about the consistency of what you are doing along the way.
Given Peter’s analysis of the prospects for accelerator progress, why isn’t the community trying to direct substantial sums at wakefield research? That appears to be the only technology on the horizon that could give big jumps in performance/cost, but it seems like fairly small amounts of people/money are working on it. As a taxpayer, I’d rather spend a few hundred million dollars on basic R&D for a breakthrough accelerator technology, even though it might not pan out, than devote billions to a scaled-up version of existing tech (ILC, anyone?) that doesn’t seem likely to do that much.
So I’m a little confused about one thing about this conference. The comments here seem to largely cover the question of whether physics is near its limits– reasonably, since this is a physics blog– but the conference title itself and the vague comments about “neuroscience” seem to imply that this was a conference about the limits of science in general.
I understand the “desert” problem people are worrying about with respect to physics– the fear that all the questions are turning out to be either trivially resolved or way out of reach– but it seems to me that this is in no way a worry which is applicable to all sciences at the present point in time. Science is larger than just physics and the crisis does not seem to be shared. The various biological sciences, for the first thing that comes to mind, seem to be in at a point where research is making measurable advances on a wide variety of fronts, with one entire promising type of research being seemingly held back primarily by U.S. laws concerning embryo disposal. I have not read John Horgan’s book, so I don’t know what his argument concerning the state of biology research was, but if the book was published in 1996 then it doesn’t seem like it could have possibly taken into account the potential avenues of research opened up by stem cells– which to my understanding weren’t even isolated in humans until 1998!
Meanwhile I’m not finding it too hard to list off growth areas off the top of my head even outside biology. Astronomy seems to have been having a really good decade, once the Hubble got fixed. Atmospheric science seems to have had a very productive last few decades, with its primary problem being to get anyone to listen to the results of its research… it seems that even if science stalls out on certain fundamental questions, there can still be niches where this doesn’t stop one from being very very busy.
Meanwhile I’m not sure that we can even judge the progress of “physics” based on the troubles with the sort of physics discussed on this particular blog— which is to say, high-energy particle physics and fundamental theoretical physics. These are of course critically important areas, and with the LHC looming this is a good time to be focusing on those areas of physics. But they’re not the only areas of physics, are they? Quantum computing, for example seems to be in the midst of a string of significant breakthroughs which shows no sign of stopping (though there are other commenters in this thread who would clearly know more about that than me…). For another example, I semifrequently hear Chad Orzel complain on his blog along the lines that lack of progress for HEP is judged to be lack of progress for “physics”, while meanwhile potentially interesting advances in Orzel’s own field, quantum optics, continue at a steady pace– but without much attention being paid to them, because they’re not as dramatic.
Okay, so worst case scenario, the LHC finds one Higgs and nothing else, all the new physics looks to be at the planck scale and we still don’t have any idea how to probe that. This is a serious crisis, to be sure, but all the people doing quantum optics and bioinformatics and climate modelling will just keep quietly chugging along anyway. Even in the worst case scenario, are we approaching the end of science, or just the end of “sexy” science?
Peter wrote:
What’s “radical” Platonism? There are many kinds of Platonism, and a lot of them are pretty radical if we take metaphysical naturalism as our standard of a boring ordinary worldview. I’m some sort of Platonist, but I want to know if I’m radical.
As for being “near the limits of science”, does anyone here actually think we are? About the only scenario I can imagine where science ends anytime soon is one where our current civilization falls apart and is replaced by one much less interested in science.
Regarding the ‘limit of science’…is this suppose to mean an intrinsic limit of our ability to understand nature? or does it mean the limit due to unavailable of suitable technology or some other practical reasons? or maybe it just reflects a limit of our imagination of how science should advance within the current paradigm?
I always thought Horgan failed to make a distinction between several related notions: can sciences end, do all sciences end at the same time, and is this time now? The answers to these questions are obvious once you consider (terrestial) geography: it peaked around 1500 and was essentially over by 1900, well before the golden age of other sciences.
However, I do think that Horgan has a legitimate point when it comes to physics, but the extrapolation to other sciences is not valid. My opinion is colored by the fact that I started out in the statistical physics of critical phenomena in the early 1980s, and for various reasons I mainly worked with 2D models. A few years later, CFT came along and literally wiped out my chosen field of research. I was too young and unexperienced to jump onto this bandwagon (and I didn’t notice the bandwagon until 1986), but it left me with the realization that physics, or at least subfields of physics, can end. Mine did.
Of course, 2D phase transitions is not a very important subfield, and physics as a whole can not come to an end before QM and gravity coexist happily. But the question is whether this unification requires new physics, or if all that is needed is to take the ideas from QM and gravity seriously. I vote for the latter.
John,
I just made up the “radical” modifier to “Platonism” because I liked the sound of it, there’s probably a more conventional terminology. What I mean by it is roughly the idea that not only is mathematics the investigation of certain fundamental objects that “exist” (not a study of formalisms freely created by the human mind), which is how I’d characterize “Platonism”, but these objects are the same fundamental objects as the fundamental objects of physics (that’s the “radical” part).
So, we want not just a grand unified theory of physics, but a grand unified theory of physics AND mathematics.
Max Tegmark goes on in a similar vein sometimes I think, although this leads him to something rather different (to me, he seems to treat math as kind of a black box).
John Baez wrote:
“About the only scenario I can imagine where science ends anytime soon is one where our current civilization falls apart and is replaced by one much less interested in science.”
This has already happened, you’ve just missed the evolution. This is something typical of “science after the end of science”: mainstream, very well supported scientists working and even living in a world of their own (a “Platonic universe”?) separated by the growing gap from the real world where the majority of other people, Earth civilisation as such, is actually living. Yes, they still allocate the necessary billions for your fruitless searches in purely abstract, over-simplified structures and technical tools, but already almost nobody except scientists themselves (and related interested bureaucracy) is really excited about the emerging or even expected advances. If you compare with the situation we had in the middle of the last century, you’ll see the difference. And the change concerns not only fundamental physics. People are more directly interested in the ready-made practical results, in technology, but not in the “fascinating process of research” and related “promises” as it was all the time before (who knows, maybe indeed “one cannot fool all the people all the time” about “quantum computers” and other “nanotechnologies” that strangely fail to definitely demonstrate their real powers?). The shift is quite visible and ignoring it makes just another aspect of the real end of science. This is the “internal structure of death” of any system: it first becomes increasingly detached from any environment it used to intensely interact with during its life, which is the “first death” so to say, and then the actual, definite disappearance comes as the “second death”. It remains to hope that another kind of knowledge can take the place of disappearing mechanistic science. If not, it can well be mere technology, or “applied science” (largely today’s situation), but this one can hardly be “sustainable” beyond the very immediate future.
..one could wonder at this point, if this dichotomy ‘purely abstract’ vs. ‘technology/practical results’ could be more likely interpreted being a growing ‘cultural prejudice’ than marking an inherent evolution that one could associate to ‘the end of science’, i.e. regarding the above discussions. In this sense, I do not see why a failure of string theory as a ‘TOE’ could exclude the possibility of very concrete links of some of its mathematical concepts to reality, the problem is probably to a less degree the lack of ‘fruitfulness’ of concepts involved but the growing prejudice to explore ‘cross-cultural’ communication, on both sides.
Quite recently, I discovered a not-so-recent paper by A. Pnueli linking the index theorem, notably the eta-invariant, to adiabatic charge transport and Hall conductance on surfaces with cylindrical ends, this application might be obvious, still there seems to be little research in that direction. I do not see why for instance mirror symmetry couldn’t have long-term applications in, supposingly, material science, linking the ‘symplectic/lagrangian’ picture to purely algebraic concepts on the complex side, maybe one has to be courageous to cross (growing) ‘cultural gaps’, but this condition is not in any sense equivalent to the ‘end of science’.
Woit: What I mean by [Radical Platonism] is roughly the idea that not only is mathematics the investigation of certain fundamental objects that “exist” (not a study of formalisms freely created by the human mind).
This is a false dichotomy. The truth value of Mathematics can also be something in the middle, rather than purely ontological or purely “just in the head.” Instead, mathematics can be seen as fundamental interactive, in that it deals with our apprehension of the world. From this viewpoint, Mathematics gives the Projection of reality that we can apprehend. It is fundamentally incomplete, since information is almost always lost in a projection, but it still contains truth value, and it says as much about the subject as the object. Such an idea has been present in the history of thought since at least Plato’s Cave analogy, although its application to Mathematics is much newer.
Yes, they still allocate the necessary billions for your fruitless searches in purely abstract, over-simplified structures and technical tools, but already almost nobody except scientists themselves… is really excited about the emerging or even expected advances… People are more directly interested in the ready-made practical results, in technology, but not in the “fascinating process of research” and related “promises” as it was all the time before
Unless you’re seriously suggesting that new practical results are indefinitely possible without ongoing fundamental research into the “abstract” problems, it seems like what you’re describing here is really a problem of communication more than anything.
I sort of disagree with this, for two reasons. First, most physicists are not involved with such unification, and most likely not even aware of it. People working in condensed matter, plasmas, classical and quantum chaos, etc., etc., etc., will keep making progress in their respective fields regardless of what goes on in QG, be it good or bad.
Second, even assuming that the unification of QM and GR is actually the holy grail of physics, which I do not believe, finally finding it need not be the end of physics, just like discovering and decoding DNA has not been the end of biology. Biologists found their TOE decades ago, yet biology keeps making progress and growing, and getting most of the research money everywhere.
‘… but already almost nobody except scientists themselves… is really excited about the emerging or even expected advances…’ – Andrei Kirilyuk
‘… it seems like what you’re describing here is really a problem of communication more than anything. …’ – Coin
Coin, the lack of ‘communication’ (the political euphemism for ‘spin and hype’) which you perceive to be the problem is exactly what led string theorists into their mess. By trying to get media attention and massive funding ahead of any falsifiable theory let alone any experimental results (falsifiable theories are two a penny in physics), they ended up losing a grip on reality and ceasing to be skeptical (=scientific).
The problem is really a case of finding the simplest abstract theory that makes contact with physical reality, checking it experimentally, etc., not just generating more spin and hype (aka: communication).
Adud, you misunderstood the direction of my implication. I did not claim that QG implies the end of physics, but that the end of physics implies QG.
Peter:
The models (or Zathras’ “projections”) of math and theoretical science differ mainly in their motivation. Scientific theories usually ATTEMPT to model external reality. Most of those of math and logic (refinements of conventional language), don’t.
Establishing how much confidence scientific theories deserve, depends COMPLETELY on empirical realty checks, usually of experimental science. You usually appear to subscribe to this clear distinction.
Thus, your:
“What I mean by it is roughly the idea that not only is mathematics the investigation of certain fundamental objects that “exist” (not a study of formalisms freely created by the human mind), which is how I’d characterize “Platonism”, but these objects are the same fundamental objects as the fundamental objects of physics (that’s the “radical” part).”
fails to distinguish between many of the “formalisms freely created by the human mind” of math, from those supposedly designed specifically to model external reality. String theories belong in this second category. But separating the possible ‘truth’ of any physical theory from science fiction and pseudo science is at least, the line between purely deductive, “tautological” truth and inductive, empirical ‘truth’.
Science, tries to model reality in a more formal way than ‘straightforward’ communication with conventional language. It seeks to help us understand and somewhat control our possible destinies. There will always be unsolved problems important to comfort and/or survival. The formality of science often generates more precision and utility.
I believe THIS is why it’s hard to imagine an end to science…in rational societies.
We just need new kinds of science, revolutionary avenues of thought. It’s happened many times before. Technology will advance, the set of all human knowledge will expand in some ways, perhaps contract in others, but from that set someone will be able to pull something out of the background noise that no one has ever noticed before.
Science is just finding empirical data about the universe and analysing it. If you think there is a lack of data in the universe to analyse, then I think you’re kind of ridiculous.
There are certainly different “ways of knowing” about the world, and the crackpots might inadvertently hit upon some real theory about things, because the universe seems to be infinitely weirder than we’ve ever imagined.
You being the “royal” you, as it were, and not you specifically.
Coin and Adud, thanks for sobering remarks.
Finding out what’s inside the quarks (so to speak) is surely just one of the goals of physics. There are lots of issues that are at least as fundamental. One of them is, how do we make sense of quantum theory? (HEP builds on quantum theory, but I don’t see how it can actually advance the understanding of it the way that, e.g., experimental quantum optics does.) Another one is, how do we make sense of phase transitions? – that is, in the words of Laughlin, finding out the “principles of organization” for systems of particles, that seem to be quite independent of their microscopic laws of motion.
It is sad that the research programs that deal with these other kinds of fundamental question do not often get invited to conferences like the one we are discussing.
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