"Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year."Intrigued by the story, I researched it a bit on the internet, and found more explanation, as well as a nifty spirograph-style image of "E8," what some call "the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics," which the new "theory of everything" proposes as the underlying pattern that might solve the biggest quandary in particle physics.
Here is where my gripe started to arise. The sad part for me is that this horribly-misnamed "theory of everything," if not viewed in a broader context, can support an extremely reductionist view of the universe that denudes it of all its experiential qualities and beauties and of all that we associate with living things and humanity.
They call it a theory of "everything" presumably because, assuming that "everything" in the universe is built upon a foundation of legos, this new theory potentially explains the composition of the lego in a more comprehensive and encompassing way than ever before.
But when we look at legos in isolation we by no means see "everything" that has or can be constructed on a foundation of legos: e.g. living creatures, human beings and all the achievements of human communities over the course of history are themselves invisible in the lego theory, even though lego theory says that looking into any of these things we will discover legos behind them. What I am suggesting is that something that inherently transcends legos in fact has more "being" than the legos viewed in themselves can ever have. Spoken from the point of view of lego theory, this "something" might be said to consist in different patterns of relations and processes between legos, and then between such stabilized patterns and processes themselves, which relational patterns themselves come to constitute levels of being that can never be reduced to or fully explained through the underlying legos themselves. The logic of life, for instance, is a logic over and above the logic of physics and not reducible to it, just as the logic of human conversation and friendship- and community-building cannot be reduced to or explained by biology.
Thus this so-called "theory of everything" might more appropriately be called a "theory of nothing," nothing being the defining complement to the concept of "everything." That's because, from an important perspective, this "going back" of mathematical physicists (going back conceptually and temporally) to the underlying primary foundations of everything is to go in the direction of nothing: it is to follow evolution backwards to its beginnings and to the discovery of the primordial constituent components of "everything."
(This process of lego-discovery requires going so far beyond the scope of ordinary experience that the findings must be called a "theory" only, must be described in terms that defy ordinary conceptualization, and can be "tested" only by constructing enormous technological experiments -- e.g. the so-called supercolliders -- in a quest to reproduce conditions never otherwise found or encountered within the scope of earthly nature.)
This tracing backwards accords with a dominant view that has been around for a few thousand years, what Nietzsche and subsequent existentialists called "metaphysics," which assumes that true Being and Power are at the Beginning, in the Past, in what "was," i.e. in what lies under or before (arrived at through conceptual and actual dissection and other means of decomposition, such as super-collision; as Bacon said, "science puts nature on the rack"), rather than, for example, in the Future or what "might be" (e.g. what might be built upon our endowments joined with our hopes and dreams). Hence, in our tradition God is conceived as a Past Creator "in the beginning," rather than as a Future Attractor.
Compare the artist who starts only with colored dirt and liquid (the artist's legos as it were), and over time and with ingenuity and vision creates a painting where before no painting was; compare the carpenter who with certain basic materials, e.g. stone and dead wood, mixed with desire and purpose, creates a house where before there was nothing; compare the process of evolution which, from out of the primary raw materials of matter and energy, led to the emergence of variegated life in systems interacting to produce the conditions for more and more vibrant life, eventually leading to the emergence of people like you and me and our gatherings of friends who are motivated by hopes and possibilities.
"Everything" is not to be found in the underlying subatomic legos, in the under-realms upon which our experienced world is built, but in the other direction, in the emergence of the world of our experience over eons of time and, finally, in the future where we might hope to build a more beautiful and harmonious world. The future is everything.
The primary components through which the future human world are to be built cannot be found by dissecting the things we experience into constituent components, but only by coordinating the elements of our experience to form new structures and relations that realize new harmonies and possibilities, i.e. through innovative new relatings and combinings that cannot be foreseen by recurring to the underlying atoms that are not even visible in ordinary experience. The birthplace of such innovation must be social and public conversation and mutual coordination. The everyday world and the everyday language in which we live the world is ultimately where science gets all of its direction and orientation, and is therefore the ultimate source of "everything," including "theories of everything." Scientists are kidding themselves if they think otherwise.
All this is important, I think, because as a culture we are given to this illusion that science sees "everything" when in fact science and its resultant technologies are based on a kind of tunnel vision that, without direction from loving human community, can lead down a dangerous road. We are given to overlooking the importance of relations -- ecological, systemic, communal -- and the importance of cultivating relations relative to a shared and commonly constructed vision of the human future -- because we are focused on objects that can be pointed to, dissected, and, theoretically, controlled. I bristle at the arrogance, naïvete, self-congratulation and thrill of power that I imagine to be present in the phrase "theory of everything."
The question might arise, but can't this knowledge of the underlying legos of creation be put to use in constructing that beautiful longed-for future?
Here I have my doubts. One reason is that I fear that the impetus to discover this kind of knowledge is often or even primarily rooted in a collective, fearful flight from the given finite conditions of humanity and a related desire to re-engineer nature because of a fear of accepting these limitations. What I am talking about is a reaction against all the "limitations" of our biology in every respect, including our natural consignment to a finite, localized world. Ultimately, this might be epitomized by the fear of accepting the human condition of mortality. Unable as communities to face up to nature and even death in a way that apprizes us of the beauty of what we have and who we are (on the ground of accepting what is given), we get caught up in a collective pursuit based on denial, as if we could change, or as if it would be desirable to change, the very grounds of our existence through technological and scientific intervention. Look at the world today. As evidenced by widespread psychological struggle, our very relationship to our "selves" is troubled by non-acceptance.
Individually and collectively, we instead turn to technology and consumerism that is aimed at overcoming nature. (Imagine, overcoming nature!) Technology, in general, has been all about transcending limits -- starting perhaps with the limits of time and space, and ending with the limits of the natural world to sustain technologically-enabled mass consumption.
Incapable of realizing the beauty and meaning available to us within the natural finite limits given to human beings, incapable of accepting (i.e. loving) our selves, and on that basis of acceptance, realizing everything that love makes possible, we are under the spell of a knowledge-model that believes it can get to the root of "everything," which belief has a lovely but illusive silver aura of total control. Human beings are attempting to live in the world as if they were not bound by earthly limitations, with the result that they fall out of balance with nature and themselves.
This "theory of everything" might look like a theory of everything from the point of view of the engineer/scientist who loves to satisfy curiosity and to contemplate the beauty of "objective knowledge," as in elegant diagrams, blueprints, descriptions and machines. This is an important knowledge and appreciation, but again I say that the danger is not to see it within a larger context that brings other perspectives into the mix. The engineer/scientist's knowledge is incomplete and in itself is never enough to lead to action, and is never enough to understand the motives behind the engineer/scientist's own action. Action requires motivation. Motivation comes from emotion: we move away from something due to fear, or towards something from love and attraction. The most powerful source of emotion is our relationship to other people, i.e. how we find ourselves nurtured and sustained in community.
It is in the interest of those who are in power and who act from fear to laud the engineer/scientist's way of knowing as the highest way of knowing as a cover for preserving their reign of fear. Fear can drive technological development under the cover of a drive towards objective knowledge.
Because objective knowledge itself is directionless, the choice of what to investigate and know is never itself rooted in objectivity. This is why the engineer's knowledge is always subservient to emotion. This is why a community must work to cultivate love and acceptance if it is to direct, not only the pursuit of knowledge but human action in general, in desirable and "sustainable" ways.
For people who want to learn how to recreate nature through artifice, this having a more advanced theory of the lego must be quite exciting. It might open a key to unlocking even more fundamental natural forces than humanity has hitherto been able to unlock. We might be able to tinker with nature and biology (e.g. in biotech and nanotech) in ways that have even more significant consequences than anything that has been done before. The trouble is, I am not confident that more significant means better. It is not my wish to provide more keys to power to those who are tempted to "improve upon" nature because they are turned against nature, or to those who confuse a theory of dark and distant underlying foundations with a theory of "everything." Unfortunately, every advance into the theory of the lego -- like the earlier advances in the theory of the atomic nucleus -- brings humanity that much closer to attaining the power to destroy everything in the universe. To toy with the forces that rule the underlying physical foundations on which all subsequent layers of life and world have been built, is to toy with the forces that can unravel them all.
Earlier steps into the atomic nucleus and its logic led humanity to discover how to unleash nuclear explosions that could destroy whole cities and cultures, undoing hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary achievement with the flick of a switch. With this new knowledge a step nearer to the theory of "everything," who knows but we might discover how to create a bomb that could explode the planet in a flash, or the sun or solar system. From the perspective of the "theory of everything," even if you blow it all up, "everything" would still be there. Presumably, it's a theory about the stuff you can't destroy. It's what you end up with when you smash "everything" to bits. (That's why they use super-colliders to test it.) Now there's a more appropriate name: "A theory of what can't be destroyed."
As kids, my brother and I had an enormous set of wooden building blocks. I can still remember the piney scent of the wood. The blocks filled a tub-sized wicker basket. We used to build tall and elegant towers, architectural masterpieces. We'd put the biggest, heaviest, most simply-shaped blocks, the ones with wide, flat tops, at the bottom. They were the foundation. Then we'd carefully set various forms atop these, in successive layers, some jutting out in intriguing cantilevers with curvaceous profiles. We took our time. We enjoyed the evolution of the structure. At the top, we put our most colorful, most whimsically-shaped blocks -- as a fancy crowning glory. We admired what we had built. We were concerned that someone unaware of what work had gone into the masterpiece, someone perhaps ignorant of its fragility and its laws of balance -- someone like my two-year-old little sister -- might inadvertently knock it down. We were acutely aware that moving the pieces on the very bottom was particularly dangerous to the whole.
I hope our world gets busy building community. I hope we focus more attention soon on cultivating love and collaboration between neighbors and neighborhoods, between towns, between nations. Conversation is where the world is really made, and it's on the quality and depth and breadth of our conversations that "everything" really depends. We've taught science and industry in our schools for a long time now. I think our technological power has well gotten ahead of our ability to achieve harmony among peoples and within ourselves. We've taught our young around the planet how to look through microscopes and telescopes. We've whipped up a frenzy of excitement over powerful technologies that enable us to manufacture, produce and consume vast quantities of goods, and to transport people, goods and communications over vast distances far in excess of what we are naturally capable. What we have been paying less attention to is how our excited pursuit of such technological powers have been having unintended consequences on our communities and on the planet that sustains us. How much of our drive to push forward with technology is rooted in problems that we can only solve at the level of community and human relations? How much does our overweening focus on technical development exacerbate the problems that technical development can't solve?
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