“The time it takes to
test a new fundamental law of nature can be longer than a scientist’s career.
This forces theorists to draw upon criteria other than empirical adequacy to
decide which research avenues to pursue. Aesthetic appeal is one of them. In our
search for new ideas, beauty plays many roles. It’s a guide, a reward, a
motivation. It is also a systematic bias“
In “Lost in Math - How Beauty Leads Physics
Astray” by Sabine Hossenfelder
One of the most obnoxious notions I’ve ever
read in Physics is the one that purports that we’re a simulation. If it's all a
simulation, why wouldn't the world that simulated us be a simulation too? This
is the turtles all the way down idea. This doesn't mean it isn't true but it's
also the same question as, if God created the universe and us, who created God?
The answer I sometimes get when I say it’s all hogwash, is that the theory is
aesthetically pleasing. Where is the evidence? And more importantly, is it
“implausifiable” (I’m borrowing here Hossenfelder’s term)? The supposed
evidence for our universe being a simulation seems to largely include the idea
that if we extrapolate our technological progress further ahead in time, we
will be able to build such a simulation ourselves *therefore* we are a
simulation. That's not a very good argument for a lot of reasons. First, how do
we know there aren't hard blockers that prevent us from ever getting to the
point in our technology to actually build a simulation equal to the world we
live in? Of course those blockers might be because we are in a simulation. But
like string theory, you might have a theory of everything but if it can't
predict anything, its utility is questionable without some other actual theory
that predicts things in a testable way.
But in actually thinking about this idea (I
always do this thinking before my morning bowel movement), the one word that
best describes the world we live in is "lazy". It answers why water
doesn't go uphill, why everything seems to submit to math, even quantum mechanics and the weird observer
question. The answer is, if you are lazy, why bother to do something unless you
have an observer or something that impacts an observer in some manner? Why
bother building other galaxies when you can just show them to us as photons of
light? Why bother actually building Mars until humans bother to send spacecraft
there?
If I were programming our universe, a computer
language with lazy evaluation would be ideal. Write the whole thing out but
only actually calculate each function when it is actually needed. We could be
living in a Haskell REPL and God could be having fun making changes at the
command line. Of course the full Schrödinger equation is rather
complicated so
perhaps our universe could be termed "mostly lazy". Make it
complicated enough to confuse us with a dazzling array of possibilities but
down deep, lazy. At this point, even entropy is reduced to a notion of
laziness, the glass shatters on the floor but it never fixes itself and returns
to its original form because that would be too much bother.
Why do physicists embark on the “Aesthetically-Pleasing-Bandwagon”?
Because Physicists belong to the Human Race (at least some of them do). I think
it’s due to the human need to believe in an ordered universe. It's all part of
our pattern-finding instinct that lets us turn separate flashes of colour into
a tiger hiding behind some trees. It can be very useful, this desire to provide
simple, aesthetically and pleasing explanations. We get chemically rewarded
when we make links, so we feel satisfied when we identify a tiger and
successfully run away. Unfortunately, we also feel satisfied when we make a
wrong link, as long as it doesn't eat us. Hence a String Theory (the TOE of all answers), provides
the same three-letter answer for pretty much anything and everything (TOE that
is). The same goes for the Multiverse. Fortunately, some people are less
than satisfied by this. We call these people "well-grounded physicists".
In millennia gone by they would all probably have been eaten by tigers while
they checked the rigour of their solutions. It might be a tiger, or a series of
birds, or possibly some oranges carefully positioned, so what I am calling for
is more research into... chomp!
If the universe is simple, as it was for early
man, simple answers will do. Now we know it to be more complicated, we need
better answers than just yelling "Tiger!" every time we see something
orange. Sabine says: “Since Pauli's days,
postulating particles has become the theoretician's favorite pastime. We have
preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzilla, axions,
flaxions, erebons, cornucipons, giant magnons, maximons, macros, branons,
skyrmions, cuscutons, planckons, and sterile neutrinos – just to mention the
most popular ones. We have unparticles. None of thse has ever been seen, but
their properties have been thoroughly studied in thousands of published research
articles.” It’s quite a jungle. General
Relativity was invented based on facts that were already known for a long time
and it opened doors to new insights. What Einstein did is play with ideas to
come up with something unique. In that sense if you let more people play with
ideas on what the Vacuum is made of connected to how the Higgs Field works and
how Dark Matter works, doing (thought) experiments with something like granular
and CFD simulators than 'something' interesting might pop up. What the LHC is
doing is like sifting through the desert to gain an important clue of what
'sand' is, while with simulations you can explore the idea of grains and
interactions on a whole new level, we already know almost everything there is
to know and can find out with these machines. Now with powerful supercomputers
we have a chance to play with as many different kind of simulations we like,
this is the new world that is opening up and new to explore, and where we
should focus on.
Bottom-line: “Physics isn’t math. It’s choosing the right math”. I fully agree
with Hossenfelder. What a load of BS what’s happening in the world of Physics
nowadays. This is nothing more than a pack of hack physicists trying to explain
what they can't understand with absurd fantasies just to justify tenure. I like
the proverbial analogy with Copernicus, which alludes to certainty to give a
modicum of credibility to their erroneous reasoning. If I can rip holes in
these absurd claims, anyone can. The people who make them have below average
intelligence; real not simulated. Billions of weirdos and thickos
think otherwise...Who cares!
