The Limits of Knowledge
Not to be confused with the book by Nancy McHugh about pragmatic feminist theories.
Now more than ever, the study of Theoretical Physics is coming to the point of being an academic grey area. What that means, is that almost every possible nudge forward is met with three nudges backward, and progress is stunted, if not unmeasurable. It makes me wonder if our fellows wielding Doctorates in Philosophy are barking up the wrong metaphysical tree, and what the study of this highly esoteric field will look like in the coming years.
This fixation in me arose after reading Sabine Hossenfelder’s “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray”, and I realized just how terrified this book made me feel about aspiring towards a PhD in Physics. I might have to become a football pundit — they know a fair bit about classical mechanics too. With the field slowly saturating and papers being churned to no end, I am left reeling, thinking about what the end goal of it all even is. Hossenfelder’s recollections of conversations with Physics powerhouses — like Steven Weinberg and AstroKatie — shed light on the cracks in our desire to understand fundamental truths of the universe. And I might like to point out at this juncture that a large portion of this discussion will be centered around Particle Physics and other such extreme topics.
Let’s then discuss what it means to covet knowledge, and why certain people dedicate their lives to equations and giant particle-smashing pool floaties.
As far as Particle Physics goes, it mostly began somewhere around 400 B.C.E. with a Greek philosopher named Democritus, who suggested that all we can see and feel is made up of tiny, indivisible particles, which he illuminatingly called “atomos” (which is Greek for uncuttable). And it was all downhill from there.
Since then, a rat race has commenced, to determine where it all ends (if it even does). Now, we truly do know that all regular matter that we interact with on the daily is made up of atoms of the hundred or so chemical elements, and that if probed even deeper, these atoms consist of inner atomic nuclei and outer electron “shells”. And as we continue to enhance, as they do to no end in CSI: Miami, we will see that the nucleus holds both protons and neutrons, which are themselves the product of 3 quarks in different configurations. And I will be entirely honest with you: That’s what we think we know, and are convinced of merely because the theories, mathematics and experimental data tally up. The usefulness of our microscope technology has been lost long before we reached the immaterial size of quarks. Even then, scientists will waggle their finger and tell you “Nuh uh, you couldn’t see quarks even if you could magnify that scale, because they must coexist in certain permutations that don’t allow you to isolate any one of them.” Although I’m sure that you would be fully mesmerized by that video of moving atoms made by IBM, it just appears that once we start discussing the innards of atoms and beyond, beauty is no longer in the eye of the beholder.
And this is where it starts to get truly groovy, and every theoretician and their mother swoops in to answer the purportedly fundamental questions. While we are rather certain of the gravitational and electromagnetic fields, there have been far more theories written which conjure up all sorts of fields; it certainly may be Strawberry Fields Forever, as hypothesized by The Beatles. We all know about the atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons discussed thus far, but in the world of academia, there have been hundreds of postulated new particles to explain phenomena like dark matter, which accounts for about 3 quarters of mass in the observable universe. And they all have hilarious names.
We can also open up the file cabinet for awe-inspiring theories, like string theory as pioneered by Polchinski, or M-theory as postulated by Witten, which is just a whole bunch of string theories bound together with more hypothetical string due to the similarities and symmetries between them. Further down the line, there’s quantum loop gravity, and if you want to go really off the wall, there’s enough multiverse and hologram theorems to go around. As bonkers as it sounds, any of them has a chance of being true. And I would love to bore you with the details; I’m sure I will when I get around to properly studying them and subsequently losing my mind.
This brings me to a point in my thought process where pedantry reigns supreme, and the limits of knowledge become apparent. Thus begins my grudge with our inane attachment to language.
While a useful tool to engage, and communicate key ideas, language is at best a vehicle for doing just that: engaging, and communicating. Whether it is the best tool for understanding the bases of pure truths is another issue entirely. Anything we can say is most likely possible to be misconstrued, even in a casual context (don’t get me started on that). But imagine, with that being said, how steep the learning curve is when you begin assimilating knowledge of the nomenclature and terminology of a specific field. Even worse, coming up with new terms to describe the concept that you have abstracted in your mind is a nightmare. With fields like the inflaton, particles like the graviton and axion, or even SIMPs and WIMPs — granted those are just hilarious acronyms — among many other awful instances, we can see just how far people are willing to go to try to describe something they fail to understand. An honorable mention goes to theories which incorporate supersymmetry, which gets shortened to SuSy; I will never forgive the 21st century for ruining that word.
In a similar line of reasoning, we can point our digits at mathematics and its shortcomings. While it is a lot harder to be subjective when using math, it is most definitely possible to obfuscate, complicate or be flat out wrong when the right tools fall into the wrong hands, or vice versa. Any unlucky layperson who has seen the myriad of symbols that are used in mathematical physics will know — they wish they had never seen them. And even though it is true that we are able to mathematically process or compute data to bolster our confidence in a theory, it still begs the question: Do we really know what we are doing?
When numbers fall out of equations to give us the mass of an electron, or the speed of light, those numbers only have significance relative to us, defined in terms that we know because we measured them. Are there truly any fundamental quantities that are not founded in the preconceived human notions of anything? In Lost in Math, Hossenfelder points out the tug-of-war between natural theories and fine-tuned, unnatural theories. Natural theories, wherein numbers seem to be just nice, are thought to be more proper, mostly out of pure aesthetic superiority. Unnatural theories that require fine-tuning to make numbers appear more “pretty” are less favorable in the eyes of scientists. Why we make a distinction between the two is beyond me; the way we see numerical value is inherently flawed by our desire to see numbers that agree with data and aesthetically determined value. Just as conveniently, we do all of our computation in decimal. Could numbers look different, and more fundamental if we’d taken, say, binary? Or Base 12?
The scientific method is what people in the upper echelons of academia have deemed to be the most upright way to realize truths in science. Watered down, it follows as such:
- Make an observation
- Figure out a way to explain that observation (bonus points if you had a 2nd initial observation to compare it to)
- Try to find new observations that fit in line with your aforementioned explanation
At this point, there’s a huge dessert fork in the road. Either your explanation fits with all proceeding observations, or it doesn’t. As simple as it seems, this leads down a deep and uncomfortable rabbit hole of bias and speculation, peppered with fallacy and trepidation.
This rabbit hole is part of the reason why the discovery of the Higgs Boson (at long last) was met with equal parts relief and anxiety. The world had spent billions of dollars on the projects at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, just to get exactly what they expected, no more, no less. If you asked me, science would have progressed faster if we hadn’t found the Higgs Boson. But of course you didn’t ask me; I’m not even in university yet! And now, the levels of energy required to prove subsequent theories involving heavier particles are far beyond our human capabilities. For example, to probe the Planck Length (thought to be the shortest possible length scale, below which quantifying space makes no sense), we would need an accelerator the size of our galaxy. Slightly ambitious, no doubt.
Of course, this skepticism is not meant to let us become lackadaisical in our approach to science. When humans are met with impossibly difficult tasks, they rise to the occasion and dispel all doubts. Yes, I’m thinking of the guy who ate pig blood jelly filled donuts in Fear Factor like a total champ, and now you are too. While I’m not saying that all of our findings thus far are all for naught, I agree with Dr. Hossenfelder that we should probably reevaluate how we approach science. Just thinking that one equation could describe a universe so big (well, relative to us) would certainly be our downfall. Simplex sigillum veri: Simplicity is the seal of truth. But is it really? I am certain that the fallacies wrought upon us by our dependance on words and numbers and symbols ad nauseum will be obstacles that we need to carefully step around.
Regardless, I don’t think the pursuit for a final answer will ever end. It just doesn’t make sense that we could ever understand something so terminal on our own subjective terms, and I doubt that mathematics as we understand it is truly “encoded” into the cosmos as “information”. Besides, finally finding the brief answers to the big questions would put a whole lot of Physics researchers out of a job.
