In Search of a Theory of Everything
In Search of a Theory of Everything
The Philosophy Behind Physics
DEMETRIS NICOLAIDES
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ISBN 978–0–19–009835–3
eISBN 978–0–19–009837–7
For my Maria-Christina, my daughter, the most precious of all that exists!
For Anna, my loving wife
For my mother and the memory of my father, for their unconditional love
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1.Philosophy and Physics
2.Close Encounter of the Philosophical Kind
3.The Quest for a Theory of Everything
4.Cosmic Justice
5.The Stepping-Stone to Truth
6.Numbers and Shapes
7.The Changing Universe
8.The Unchanging Universe
9.Paradoxes of Nature
10.The Chemistry of Love and Strife
11.In Everything Is Everything
12.Atoms of Matter and Energy
13.Atoms of Space and Time
14.It’s Fate—Maybe
15.Atomic Connections
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I thank my teachers—including my PhD mentor, professor Alexander A. Lisyansky, and professor Jacob Neuberger—for teaching and challenging me, and my students, whose thirst for knowledge keeps me improving.
I’m grateful to physicist Walter Polkosnik, philosopher Richard D. McKirahan, and historian of science Joseph D. Martin, for their useful comments and overall support of this book project.
I’m sending special thanks to an anonymous Oxford University Press reviewer, whose insightful reading of the manuscript and subsequent thoughtful comments and recommendations undoubtedly led to a significant improvement of the book.
I am forever grateful to my literary agent, Nancy Rosenfeld, for her kindness, wisdom, guidance, and for giving hope to the writers of the world.
I’m thankful to Bloomfield College for giving me the opportunity to research this topic.
All people from Oxford University Press deserve a special recognition for their diligent work. Those with whom I had the pleasure of interacting directly include editor Jeremy Lewis, editorial assistant Bronwyn Geyer, project manager Rajesh Kathamuthu, and editor Leslie Johnson. My sincere thanks!
I’m thankful to my wife, Anna, for her continuous support in pursuing my research, and to our daughter, Maria-Christina, for asking so many questions about the world—some of which have found their way into this book.
Introduction
In Search of a Theory of Everything is an adventurous journey in space and time in search of a unified “theory of everything” by means of a rare and agile interplay between the natural philosophies of influential ancient Greek thinkers and the laws of modern physics. For a theory of everything, all the phenomena of nature share a subtle underlying commonality and are explainable by a single overarching immutable principle. Reading the past for what it is, is of tremendous value, but so is its reading from the perspective of modern knowledge. Not to judge it for its flaws but to be inspired by its insights. This comparative study of the universe is the spirit of In Search of a Theory of Everything—to physics through philosophy, to the new via the old, in a balanced way.
A relatively “easier” analysis of nature, that of a major natural philosopher of antiquity, commences every chapter to fasten the bedrock for the more complex. The transition into the more complicated views of modern physics is gradual and systematic, entwining finely the two, the ancient with the new, the forgotten with the current, by unfolding a history and a philosophy of science, and connecting all the great feats of the mind and time. Those philosophers had ideas that resonate with aspects of modern science; puzzles about nature that still baffle;1 and clever philosophical rationales that can be used to reassess completely anew fundamental but competing principles of modern physics, even to speculate about open physics problems. In Search of a Theory of Everything is a new kind of sight, a philosophical insight of modern physics that has long been left unexamined.
About 2,600 years ago, the ancient Greeks had a magnificent intellectual awakening that contributed to the rise of their civilization. “Suddenly” the age-old popular mythological worldviews were questioned, rethought, and eventually changed. Nature was no longer seen as a chaos of random, unpredictable, and incomprehensible phenomena attributed to mysterious supernatural forces through myths, superstition, and the chancy decisions of capricious, anthropomorphic gods. On the contrary, nature was viewed as a cosmos: a well-structured, organized, ordered, harmonious, self-contained, self-consistent, and beautiful whole in which the phenomena were natural components that obeyed intrinsic causal laws that could be discovered and understood by the practice of rational analysis of nature and without invoking the supernatural. A profound transition in human thought took place that was a consequence of the realization by these philosophers that nature is comprehensible. A simple question emerged: what is the nature of nature? The prolific answers these Greek thinkers offered ascribed purely naturalistic causes to all phenomena in nature and created a new outlook, the scientific! Science has been influencing the world ever since by guiding it out of the cave of ignorance and into the light of truth.
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1Carlo Rovelli holds the same view: Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems (New York: RiverHead Books, 2017), 21 (Kindle ed.).
1
Philosophy and Physics
Episteme means “knowledge” in Greek. For Aristotle, we have episteme if we know the cause of something.1 Science is episteme in Latin. Hence, strictly speaking, science includes all fields of knowledge (theology, philosophy, physics, history, etc.). Physics is a particular type of science: it is the study of physis (nature in Greek). With time, however, especially nowadays, the word science evolved to have a narrower focus, and it, too, means the study of nature. Because of this, physics and science have basically become synonymous, but also so because all subfields of science that study nature are really reducible to the natural laws of physics. For example, biology studies cells, which are made of molecules; chemistry studies molecules, which are made of atoms; and physics studies atoms. Therefore, generally all the sciences about physis are ultimately built from (and are branches of) physics.2 The natural philosophers3 of antiquity that we’ll consider were philosophers but also physicists. Philosophy and physics were then closely related fields.
According to leg
end, Pythagoras probably coined the term philosophy, “love of wisdom,” in Greek. So to define philosophy we need to know what wisdom is. Recall that the Oracle of Delphi prophesied that Socrates was the wisest, but he humbly doubted it.4 Using the art of dialectic (his famous questioning style, the maieutic), he set out to prove the Oracle wrong (by engaging in meaningful discussions with his fellow Athenians, politicians, poets, craftsmen, and farmers, in search of the truth) only to find out that the prophecy was spot-on. He was the wisest indeed for, unlike the others, who confused their skill with wisdom, their empeiria (in Greek, experience or talent) with episteme,5 he at least knew well one thing: that he knew nothing.6 Confessing ignorance gives healthy skepticism hope to advance to the truth and become wise. And the road toward wisdom begins for Socrates with the “know thyself,”7 by recognizing our mind’s limitations and the uncertainties of our methods of inquiry.
I want to say, parenthetically, that knowing nothing is inconceivable. For the notion of “nothingness” is not allowed; it’s an impossibility! In chapter 8, we’ll talk about nothing, in reference to the philosophy of Parmenides—the philosopher who contemplated well, nothing, first—in order to check the validity of one of Einstein’s most bizarre claims, which he based on the physics of his relativity, that, change, in the universe, is an illusion.
Anyhow, I’m not sure what wisdom might be, but I’m sure that the journey to it begins with a question and continues with courage, determination, and an honest effort to eliminate age-old, false beliefs and prejudices and seek rational (not dogmatic) answers. Now, although we are born imaginative creatures with insatiable curiosity and desire for adventure and knowledge, with age we usually settle down both physically and mentally (our body and mind) and inquire less and less. Asking is a trait of youth but of philosophy, too. Neither solar nor entropic8 time ever ages the inquiring mind.
In a more concrete example, philosophy for me is this: I read a book about physics (of Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, Michio Kaku), and I usually understand it well. Then I read a book about philosophy (of Aristotle, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper), and I often don’t understand it that well. So then I reread it, and again, only to find out that I now understand better the physics book. And so sadly I keep on reaffirming that “the man of science is a poor philosopher.”9
Philosophia10 is She who managed to escape from the darkness of superstition and ignorance (from Plato’s cave) and dared to ascend into the world of light and knowledge. It is “the vision of truth,”11 it is the ability to “teach people to talk sense,”12 it is sameness in dissimilarity, or a subtle immutability in conspicuous change. It is part Apollo (reason) and part Dionysus (passion) but never any one alone, it “is something intermediate between theology and science,”13 or, put simply, philosophy might be what the Greeks called “the gift of wonder”14—of imagining, searching, discovering, and learning all you can by wondering.
Adding to such gift is science, the systematic study of nature and the organization of acquired knowledge into “timeless, universal,” causal, and, most important, testable laws that are derived from observation and rational consideration. A good scientific theory, therefore, makes experimentally verifiable and falsifiable predictions, which must be tested by experiment. Science is evidence-based knowledge; it is not knowledge based on opinion or dogma. The defining characteristic of science is its unique way of study, the scientific method. It can be summarized in five steps.
(1) Observe nature. For example, things fall. (2) Formulate a question, a problem (based on observation). Why do things fall? (3) Answer the question with a hypothesis (an educated guess) that makes testable predictions (the cardinal rule of science). They fall because the earth is pulling them: dropped from rest, they should fall 4.9 meters in 1 second. (4) Perform properly designed reproducible experiments to collect data that will be used in order to verify or falsify the predictions of the hypothesis. Drop various objects from rest and measure the distance they fall in 1 second. (5) Draw conclusions by comparing the predictions of the hypothesis against the data of the experiment: (a) if the predictions are observed (i.e., they agree with the data, so things would indeed fall 4.9 meters in 1 second), the hypothesis is verified and it transitions into a scientific fact, a law of nature; (b) if the predictions are not observed (they are in disagreement with the data, things would not fall 4.9 meters in 1 second), the original hypothesis is falsified and thus replaced by a modified one or by something completely new.
This is the general scientific method as was formulated by philosopher Francis Bacon. A clarification: as Einstein, Popper, Richard Feynman, and Hawking argued, we can only verify a hypothesis; we can’t prove it—we can never be absolutely certain if the laws we discover are truly timeless and universal. For example, while experiment after experiment keep on verifying Einstein’s relativity, “No number of experiments can prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong,” said he.15 That is, a new type of experiment may find a flaw in the theory (not previously detected) that will prompt scientists to revise or completely change it with a new vision.
In the quest for truth about nature, science without (the wisdom of) philosophy is practical and rational but (arguably) dull, and philosophy without (the empirical facts of) science is abstract and wise but (experimentally) unverified.16 For Einstein, “science without epistemology is—in so far as it is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled.”17 The road to truth, I believe, is paved by science and philosophy, but certainly by other fields of knowledge, too. The view, otherwise, is of mere copies, shadows of truth.
In Plato’s parable of the cave,18 prisoners constrained in a cave since childhood and for many years thereafter can see only shadows and mistake these shadows for the only reality. The prisoners therefore are utterly ignorant of the objects that project the shadows. But the sight and insight of the prisoner who eventually manages to escape start to gradually improve. At last, outside the cave and in the light of the sun, she begins to have a better perception of reality. She now sees how things resemble their shadows, and she realizes that shadows are deceptive; they are only a mere copy of the real objects (and of the grander truth in general). Nature, she now knows, is much more than what She appears, but Her divine secrets can ultimately be untied by the curious, willing mind. Eager to share her newfound sense with her prisoner-friends, she descends once more into the cave. But passing suddenly into the darkness from the light makes her sight briefly feeble. Her friends are tricked by it and think, up she went with her eyes and down she came blind; thus, sadly, they believe that the cave is the only safe place.
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1Aristotle, Organon.
2The word science will have this narrower meaning from this point on.
3Called so because they investigated nature.
4Plato, Apology, 20e–21b.
5They also confused gnome (judgment or opinion, not the garden ornament) with gnosis (knowledge).
6The exact quote is: “I know one thing; that I know nothing.”
7Inscription found at the Oracle of Delphi in Greece.
8The law of entropy describes the universe’s tendency toward greater disorder. It is manifested in everything, in humans, too. With time our physical attributes grow more disorderly, and we basically age. Eating slows down the increase in entropy and thus the aging process. I’m implying that thinking, too, may slow down the aging process.
9“400 Albert Einstein Quotes That Will Move (and Surprise You),” Wisdom Quotes, http://wisdomquotes.com/albert-einstein-quotes/ (accessed July 14, 2019).
10Philosophy in Greek.
11Plato, The Republic, Book V, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Complete Works of Plato (The Complete Works Collection, 2011), Kindle Locations 25382–25383.
12Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989), 68.
13Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), xiii.
14Popp
er, Conjectures and Refutations, 72.
15Quoted in Paul G. Hewitt, Suzanne Lyons, John A. Suchocki, and Jennifer Yeh, Conceptual Integrated Science, 2nd ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2013), 5.
16At least in the sense that philosophers in general don’t test their own claims via experimentation; rather, they rely on the soundness of their logic. But for physicists it is experiment that ultimately defines what constitutes scientific knowledge.
17Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 13.
18Plato, Republic, Book VII.
2
Close Encounter of the Philosophical Kind
It is the beautiful season of summer. I have been reading this great story for hours, since dusk and during the absolutely moonless night. It is now almost dawn. I am very tired but do not want to put the book down. It is unusually original and wonderfully profound. The pages are one by one turning. I am really exhausted and am fighting sleep because the story is so good.
All of a sudden I hear a splash. The day is hot and bright, the sky blue, the sun yellowish-white. I look up and see old sage Thales playing, falling into the fresh, cool, flowing waters of a river, in search of something. “Not very wise,” the atomic Democritus remarks with a smile, staring curiously in the void with undivided attention. He is vastly confident. Quiet Leucippus, his teacher, is solidly standing by. But also because moments later, pleasant Epicurus, the student of them both, hopping from his garden he swerved by the scene by his own free will. Brilliant Aristotle is meticulously studying them all, but he is not intimidated at all. His teacher is Plato, the philosopher of Ideas or Forms. Where is he anyway? He is usually all over the place, but don’t ask Socrates, his teacher; he knows nothing.
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