Posted by
Rob on Friday, October 27, 2006 10:50:45 AM
A year ago, or maybe two, my seminary teacher and mentor, Vern Poythress, showed me a copy of the student newspaper at Cal Tech. He had graduated from Cal Tech, and sent his oldest son there. Me, on the other hand, greatly discourage any of my kids from going to my christian college alma mater. Go figure. BTW, Vern has a new book out, "
Redeeming Science" that might be worth reading, purchasing even.
So I'm reading this Cal Tech article about a recent talk by Stephen Hawking, you know, the guy in the wheelchair. He had been working on the unification of quantum mechanics with gravity, known as "quantum gravity". He concluded that it couldn't be done. Yup. One of the brightest and best of them, concluded it couldn't be done and was advising Cal Tech graduates not to go into that field.
Okay, why do physicists give up trying to solve a problem? - a) they don't have the mathematical tools to solve it
- b) they recognize the problem is stated incorrectly
- c) they admit they are too stupid
If you answered (d) then obviously you should be in management. Hawking, on the other hand, probably doesn't think he's gifted for management, at least, not until the disease progresses a little further.
So what is his reason?He would never admit, like every true physicist, to (c), even were it true. And that leaves the debate to (a) vs (b).
Lee Smolin (
recent book) evidently thinks that the answer is (a), and is willing to ask for lots of money and bright graduate students until they solve it. Once again, Hawking needs neither money nor graduate students, so he probably feels the answer is (b).
What does this mean? This means that the problem is metaphysical. When lots of bright people, working for lots of time = centuries of man-years cannot solve a problem or even "make progress" in solving a problem, then they have a different problem on their hands, direction. That was what
Crick was supposedly good at. That is what Hawking would like to think he is good at. What us philosopher types like to call metaphysics.
And what are the metaphysical barriers? Three-fold. First, QM tells us that nature is inherently not point-like materialism. Gravity, on the other hand, is inherently point-like materialism. String-theory (and quantum-loop theory) try to finesse the problem by taking gravity from a 0-D point to a 1-D string, hoping to approach the full 3D QM wave theory in dimensional "steps". Think of it as explaining the Trinity by using an egg as an illustration. It didn't work.
Why do I know this?Because 3D is topologically different than 1D. If you have never read "Flatland" by Edward Abbott, it is well worth the Victorian prose. You can't tie knots in 1D, 2D or 4D. But you can in 3D. Maxwell's equations don't work in 1,2,4,5,6-Dimensions. There is something unique about 3D, topologically, mathematically, spiritually and physically. Dimensionality has to be trinitarian, it cannot be anything else. And if you don't think that isn't a deep metaphysical statement, then stop reading now.
When "field theory" was introduced by Michael Faraday, an uneducated brilliant Christian experimentalist, he was scorned by his contemporaries for being all the above. Yet Faraday believed in the existence of invisible fields that were not 0D point-like because, not in spite of, but because he was a Christian who believed in the existence of the Spirit. And it was Faraday's discoveries and metaphysics that convinced another Christian, James Clerk-Maxwell to formulate his famous equations. Faraday is up in heaven probably laughing himself silly at the string theorists for not going to full 3D, because they are so wedded to their materialist roots. Yet for all the success of field theory, you would be surprised at how many of these guys don't believe in their specialty, but see the fields as somehow mediated by "virtual particles". Why? Because they are unconverted metaphysically materialist dolts, that's why.
So what is the way forward?Well, I would go back to QM and try to undo the mess of the Copenhagen Interpretation. I'd rethink the whole Schroedinger-Bohm pilot wave argument and ask if there weren't a solution that predicated the existence of the Spirit. Then from that ansatz, I'd sit down and try to reformulate gravity in terms of the same wave, rather than the "metric" of 4D spacetime, there ought to be a 4D pilot wave generalization too. Then we work our way down to smaller scales from there, recognizing that the 3D nature (or 4D if you want to invoke time) is something irreducible, like Behe's mousetrap.
And all that requires metaphysics to be our guide, the one thing all these scientists avoid at all costs. It isn't that hard to be a genius, really, just search the web for anti-gravity and count the hits, but it does reveal your metaphysical dirty laundry. The trick to being a genius who is right, is knowing which of the many metaphysics is right, which means knowing the Metaphysician.