Has Physics Become the New Alchemy?

The science of physics was back in the headlines recently, as scientists contended that a subatomic particle discovered in July 2012 is now confirmed to have been a Higgs boson, or what has been called the "God particle".  This "landmark discovery" in physics will be celebrated by many, to be sure, but I won't be among their number.

A couple of years ago, some coworkers and I were talking about physics.  We weren't arguing about any particular theories in physics, but rather about the science in general: where it's come from and where it's going.  Physics has had a tumultuous century, as its practitioners have contended with observations that have made it increasingly difficult to maintain a coherent model that makes sense of everything.  One of my coworkers argued that this is all in the past: that the science has weathered these rough patches and come through in very good shape.  He referred me to a book entitled How Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival.  When I looked up the book in Amazon.com, I came across an interesting reader review, which included the following excerpt:

I haven't completely given up on entanglement signaling using the non-orthogonal Glauber coherent states with a pair of interferometers, Faraday rotators, phase plates et-al. I mean within orthodox quantum theory bearing in mind of course Stapp's general proof based on linearity, unitarity and implicitly orthogonality of the base states - the latter being the possible loop hole.

Of course, beyond that motivated by Daryl Bem's latest "feeling the future" data in people, both Stapp and I do agree that a more general non-orthodox extension of quantum theory - as general relativity is to special relativity as an analogy - with "signal nonlocality" violating Abner Shimony's "passion at a distance" and the Born rule that probability ~ squared modulus of complex Feynman histories quantum amplitude (e.g. Antony Valentini) is warranted by the facts.

A clue is that (ODLRO) spontaneous broken ground state symmetry ("More is different" emergent order) with Higgs amplitude and Goldstone phase quanta excited out of the Bose-Einstein c-number condensate does not obey the nonlocal linear unitary Schrodinger equation in entangled configuration space 3N + N. Rather, it obeys a low energy effective field local nonlinear non-unitary Landau-Ginzburg equation in single-particle ordinary 3D + 1 spacetime. Indeed, the gravitational field tetrads and spin connections for local inertial frames LIFs can emerge from such a Higgs-Goldstone field precipitated at the moment of creation of our observable universe sandwiched between our past particle horizon and our future de Sitter dark energy event horizon that may well be a Seth Lloyd computer and indeed the "hologram screen" invented by 't Hooft and Susskind. This would necessitate the Wheeler-Feynman-Hoyle-Narlikar-Cramer-Aharonov ideas of retro-causal advanced signal "transactional" "post-selections on the final cause hologram screen cosmic computer (e.g. P.K. Dick's VALIS & Teilhard de Chardin's "Omega Point."). Crazy idea to be sure, but is it crazy enough to be true? ;-)

It so happens that this particular comment was actually made by one of the hippie "saviors" of physics that the book is writing about.  Some might find his remarks to be a testament to the level of intellectual sophistication and brilliance that the science of physics has risen to.  I find them to be a bunch of nonsense.

I remember hearing similar nonsense when I was an undergraduate student in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in the mid-1980s, after I had enrolled in a class which discussed some of the modern problems of physics - I think it was called "Space, Time, and Matter" - as one of my electives.  The professor began the first class by saying something like: "We have discovered, in physics, that either one of three things is true: either the physical universe doesn't exist, or we (I assume he meant intelligent beings) don't exist, or there is nothing linking the first two."  Now this disheartening opening statement, along with a particularly heavy course load that semester, prompted me to drop the class.  I did, however, retain the textbooks that had accompanied the class, and made a point of reading them on my own.  These were Space, Time, and Spacetime by Lawrence Sklar, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by E.A. Burtt, The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman, and Causality and Chance in Modern Physics by David Bohm.  While I highly recommend these books to anyone interested in the history of science, and the development of physics in particular, and can say that I came away with a high regard for their authors, I must also say that collectively they did little to change my low appraisal of the current condition that physics is in.

I'm not sure exactly when it was that I had given up on physics.  It may have been earlier in my undergraduate education, when I took the required sequence of core courses in that science.  Early in this sequence of courses, which covered the discovery of fundamental physical laws that made sense of the universe around us, including Newton's theory of gravitation, Boltzmann's kinetic theory of gases, Maxwell's equations that linked electricity and magnetism, and of course Einstein's theories that related energy to matter, I had a genuine admiration for the pioneers of this science, and their accomplishments.  But at some point, as the courses moved on to developments around the early part of the twentieth century, everything just seemed to get weird.  Things could be both waves and particles at the same time, and seemingly objective phenomena could change simply based upon whether they were being observed or not.  Atoms were found not to be the building blocks of the universe, and so a relentless search for smaller and smaller "subatomic" particles was conducted.  As I read through the catalog of these subatomic particles, broken down into family trees of successively smaller and more basic particles, I grew increasingly suspicious that - rather than real substances - these are merely creative fictions that try to preserve coherence in a paradigm that is becoming increasingly impossible to hold together.

I suspected as much when I encountered a book entitled The Tao of Physics many years ago, which attempted to turn defeat into victory by suggesting that modern physics had merely proven that the religions and philosophies of the Eastern mystics were right after all:  We exist in a universe of paradoxes, where two opposite things can both be true, and where sometimes logic simply has to be abandoned to get at the real truth.  If the logic has failed, this suggests to me instead that the underlying premises are flawed.  I could not celebrate the idea that a coherent model of the universe was based upon fundamental incoherence.

The final blow, for me, was when I discovered "string theory" or what has sometimes ambitiously been called "a theory of everything", which represents an attempt by physicists to come up with a single theory that explains all of the forces that have been identified in the physical universe (gravity, magnetism, attraction of particles at the subatomic level, etc.).  The success of this new model entails that one believe that the ultimate building blocks of the universe are one-dimensional "strings" that oscillate in ten dimensions (twenty-six according to one variant), of which only three are visible to us.  The theory (or theories, as there are several variants of this) are awash in an impressive array of higher mathematics, but lack one hallmark of classical scientific theories: they do not lend themselves to any empirical tests that can refute them.

I had already heard of string theory when I was working as an engineer in the late 1980s, and had pretty much concluded even back then that it was a bunch of bunk.  Coincidentally, not long after that, one of my fellow engineers came across a series of articles in a magazine - I think it was Popular Mechanics - by an individual who was attempting to reconstruct the science of physics from first principles.  Apparently that author - like me - had concluded that physics had become a science in need of an overhaul.  I wish I had saved those articles, as I noticed just a few years ago that someone else had attempted to do the same thing, and had written a book about it.  I have no idea if this was the same author who had written the series of articles decades ago.  Perhaps there have been attempts by several scientists, in this contemporary, pseudoscientific era of physics, to get us back onto a solid scientific foundation.

And I have concluded that physics has become a pseudoscience.  Many intelligent men are producing extremely sophisticated mathematical equations describing exotic flights of fancy that have no meaningful link to reality, like the complicated systems of epicycles that were constructed to explain the seemingly erratic movements of planets in the night sky.  The epicycles were required because the underlying model was flawed: the planets - and the sun - did not revolve around the earth.  When this model was replaced with one that better comported with reality, the explanations for the planetary movements became much simpler.  I'm reminded, too, of those Scholastic philosophers in centuries past who supposedly engaged in heated debates about how many angels could fit on a pinhead.  No doubt many of these were genuinely intelligent men - though foolishly misguided.  And of course the ancient art of alchemy also attracted many intelligent devotees, providing them with an outlet through which to apply their intellectual skills, even if this outlet was based upon a fictitious foundation.  But alchemy produced many colorful flights of fancy, not unlike those that are featured in contemporary television programs and popular articles that purport to explain the "discoveries" of modern physics.

Growing up as a child in the 1960s, I was one of those who were captivated by television programs such as Star Trek, which envisioned a world that would - by the end of the twentieth century - have begun manned space exploration in earnest, and also discovered radically new sources of energy.  It is disheartening now - well into the 21st century, to realize that the vision has not come to pass.  We are still producing electricity pretty much the same way that Thomas Edison did when he built his first generating station in the late 19th century.  We are still getting into outer space by using rockets that rely upon controlled explosive reactions, not unlike those that were used in fireworks displays in China 1500 years ago.  Physics is failing us, because it has failed to satisfactorily address some paradoxes encountered in the mid-twentieth century.

Some will argue that the revolution that we have seen in information and communication technology in the past few decades refutes this - that we have gone far beyond the achievements envisioned by Star Trek and other works of science fiction.  But I would contend that these are more achievements based upon the development of technique rather than theory, along with some genuine advances in mathematics.  Like some of the tangible products of alchemy, or like hypnotism, when it was called "animal magnetism", we have learned to harness processes which we have observed but don't fully understand.  I contend that, with genuine understanding, we could do much, much more.

The world today is sorely in need of another Isaac Newton, or Albert Einstein: a true visionary who can help us to break free of the failed paradigm of physics which hampers us today and give us an entirely new one.  Perhaps this achievement has already been accomplished, but is lying, unread, ignored, or even suppressed, in an old series of magazine articles, a failed book, or a dissertation rejected by an academic committee wedded to the old paradigm.  As Thomas Kuhn explained in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the development of science is not an orderly process.  When a paradigm needs to be replaced, there will be entrenched defenders of it that need to be overcome.  Hence, for anyone - particularly those in an academic environment - who wishes to reconstruct physics, the task will be a daunting one, even an overwhelming one.  My personal hope lies with the next generation of young geniuses who, while benefiting from an education in the United States or Europe, are not held hostage to the establishment there.  I would not be surprised if our next Isaac Newton comes from China, from India, or from a rising third world country.  Whoever he or she is, the world - the future of our civilization - will be deeply indebted to them.  I only wish that I live long enough to see it, and perhaps have the opportunity to meet them and shake their hand.