Physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute
has been saying for some years tht physics and cosmology are in crisis. The standard
models are highly successful as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough,
and for decades, there’s been a frustrating failure of all attempts to go
beyond them. Sabine Hossenfelder agrees. In a post
for Fortune, she writes:
During
my professional career, all I have seen is failure. A failure, that is, of
particle physicists to uncover a more powerful mathematical framework that
improves upon the theories we already have. Yes, failure is part of science –
it’s frustrating, but not worrisome. What worries me much more is our failure
to learn from those failures. Rather than trying something new, we’ve been
trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
In a desperate effort to break this logjam, Lee
Smolin has teamed up with philosopher Roberto Unger to develop a new natural
philosophy, which they describe in a new book, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, published by
Cambridge University Press. Now, a physicist has to be desperate to fall back
on philosophy. That’s like stepping into quicksand looking for solid footing.
In the end, they don’t even agree completely with each other. They do agree,
however, on three central ideas:
1. There is only one universe.
2. Time is inclusively real. It does not emerge
from any other aspect of reality and it applies to everything—nothing in nature
lasts forever.
3. Mathematics is selectively real.
On the second point they are completely wrong.
As I explained here,
ultimate reality is atemporal and time emerges from it. Ultimate reality is a
thought—a thought that thinks itself and is therefore conscious. We call it
consciousness or existence, which are logically equivalent in their atemporal aspects.
Yes, this thought lasts forever.
Smolin and Unger go on to declare that mind is
emergent. In this they agree with most physicists and philosophers who study
what is called the “mind-body” problem or the “hard problem of consciousness,”
which John Horgan explains at Scientific
American’s Cross-Check
means “how matter creates mind.” Wrong again! As I’ve explained many times on
this blog, mind creates matter, not the other way around. Philosophers like to
sneer at this position as “idealism,” which they gave up on long ago, failing
to see that reality has two complementary aspects, temporal and atemporal.
Philosophers abhor contradictions or paradoxes.
They don’t realize that ultimate reality is self-creating and therefore logically
self-referential, which inevitably leads to paradoxes. The Danish physicist
Neils Bohr found that this just means that nature has two aspects, that is, itcan
be seen in two different ways, and as long as both aspects cannot be seen at
the same time by the same observer, there is no contradiction. He called this
complementarity. Neither physicists nor philosophers can expect to make
significant progress unless they take it seriously.
