Sean Carroll’s recent blog post is typical of the arrogant
physicist confronting questions that he has no idea how to answer but is
absolutely certain that no one but a physicist like himself could possibly find
the answers. Musing about the origin of life, the origin of the universe, and
the origin of consciousness, he says,
Anyone
seriously interested in tackling these big questions would be well-served by
acknowledging that much (most? almost all?) progress in science is incremental,
sneaking up on major discoveries by a series of small steps rather than leaping
right to a dramatic new paradigm. Even if you want to understand the origin of
the universe, it might behoove you to think about some more specific and
tractable problems, like the nature of quantum fluctuations in inflation, or
the emergence of spacetime in string theory. If you want to understand the
origin of consciousness, it’s a good strategy to think about something like our
perception of color, with the idea of working your way up to the more
challenging issues.
Conversely,
it’s these big questions that attract crackpots like honey attracts flies. I
get a lot of emails (and physical letters) from cranks, but they never have a
new theory of the branching ratio of the Higgs boson into four leptons; it’s
always about the nature of space and time and everything. It’s too easy for
anyone to have an opinion about these big questions, whether or not those
opinions are worth paying attention to.
All of
which leads up to saying: it’s still worth tackling the big questions! Start
small, but think big. Because they are so hard, it’s too easy to make fun of
attempts to solve the biggest questions, or to imagine that they are
irreducibly mysterious and will never be solved. I wouldn’t be at all surprised
if we had quite compelling pictures of the origin of the universe, life, and
consciousness within the next hundred years. But only if we’re willing to
tackle the big problems seriously.
While it’s true that most progress in physics
is incremental, once in a while it requires a new paradigm to get past a
roadblock. We’re at such a point right
now, and that’s why we need crackpots like me (or “cranks,” as Sean calls them).
The physicist haughtily dismisses people like me, preaching to us that we must
first find something incremental, like a new theory of Higgs branching ratios,
before being taken seriously. Well, no physicist can tell you what the Higgs
field actually is, let alone
calculate its mass, but I can,
based on tha new paradigm I’m talking about in this blog. The paradigm had to
come first, and now the incremental progress can resume. Meanwhile, the
physicists make zero progress, incremental or otherwise, secure within the box
of their familiar paradigm. They won’t
solve the big problems that way in a hundred years, or ever.
While we’re mentioning the Higgs field, you
might take a look at Sabine Hossenfelder’s recent post
at Backreaction. She attempts to explain the Higgs field and how it gives mass
to elementary particles using a seashore analogy. It doesn’t really work, of
course, because like all physicists, she has no idea what the Higgs field is or
how it actually works. She admits that physicists have no spacetime model. But
her wryly humorous writing style is always worth reading.
