From where I’m standing the answer is, “Maybe,” but not as things are now. If things go on the way they are I predict that science and philosophy will enter an ice-age. i.e. people will go cold on them, and the subjects themselves will become sterile and unproductive.
If you stand outside the sciences, stand well back and refuse to ‘take sides’, then you can see science as just another belief system. Then, like almost every other belief system science, too, has its ‘creation myths’ and its holy books and its ‘saints/prophets/holy men’ and a system of ethics that it imposes on its adherents.
If you do that then the ‘creation myth’ of science is the story of the Big Bang and the evolution of the universe right down to the ‘creation’, by evolution, of the first people. The interesting bit as far as this post is concerned is the evolution of the universe, and, in particular, its predicted fate.
Creation myths are unique to their religions because they are talking about the people who created or adopt those religions.
Take e.g. the ‘flood’ which occurs in the Old Testament and therefore in the mythologies of Judaism and Christianity (and Islam?). One of the problems with the Judaic religions is the belief that God can see every thought and every feeling. One is ‘naked before God’ (something that Adam and Eve discovered and it lost them the Garden of Eden!) If a person comes from a different culture or belief system and converts to one of the Judaic religions then they pretty soon come up against this feeling of being exposed. For example, there is going to be a day when a person gets fed up and the thought flashes into their head, “I hate this b----y God!” – oops, but God hears and sees all – he heard that thought! Suddenly you become VERY aware of how NAKED you are before God, and it is fearful. You don’t want to have any more of those ‘bad’ thoughts – but, oh dear, you’re plunging into a psychological phenomenon that you can’t control, and the more you try to control it the worse it gets; the more you ‘fear’ those ‘bad’ thoughts the more they pop into your head, and the WORSE they get! Everything just escalates: the number of thoughts, the emotionalism and the awfulness of the content of the thoughts, and if there are any thoughts that you feel you would REALLY rather not think about God then those are the ones that will fill your head – after a while the things you will be thinking about God will make “I hate this b----y God!” seem like a complement by comparison! This becomes an emotional trauma and that is what the ‘flood’ is.
(An aside: I said you cannot control these thoughts and feelings, but you can. The problem is actually the emotions. It is emotions that hang onto things, whether it’s nightmares, voices-in-the-head, hallucinations, out-of-control thoughts, phobias, whatever. Calm down and the problem will go away, and the way to calm down is to meditate. Zen Buddhist meditation is good, where you let the thoughts and feeling come, acknowledge them, and then let them go. If it’s a really bad problem then it could take years of calming down to completely cure it, but it WILL work, and all the time things will be improving and you will be able to see it happening.)
Anyway, back to the creation myth of science: the Big Bang and the evolution of the universe.
The universe is expanding, according to science, and its final fate depends on the amount of matter it contains: if the universe contains too much matter, then it will expand to a certain point then it will stop, turn around, and begin to contract. It will then all end in a huge implosion (-- with the possibility of another Big Bang and a new universe.) If the universe contains too little matter then it will go on expanding and it will get colder and colder until, basically, the whole universe freezes up and dies. If there is just the right amount of matter then the universe will hit a balance point where it will not longer go on expanding, but will not contract; it will reach a stable size and stay that way for all eternity. (This is, of course, why ‘dark matter’ is so very interesting: current best estimates put the universe in the ‘too small’ category which means it will implode; dark matter, however, may save the day by bringing the total content up to the balance point.)
If one interprets this myth it says this: ideas in science start like a Big Bang, a unique event with a subsequent flurry of activity among scientists that creates a ‘new universe’.
For example, when Newton’s Laws were discovered/invented that was a Big Bang that opened up the whole universe of classical physics – physicist were able to use those laws to give a mathematical description of a whole new conception of the universe and to make predictions and provide explanations and so on. Basically there was a flurry of activity that resulted in the collection of text books that describe the universe according to classical physics.
Maxwell’s Equations were another Big Bang.
Quantum Theory was, of course, another; and General Relativity.
(Another aside, being an account of the genesis of quantum theory: the birth of quantum theory as described in the text books goes like this: classical theory was having problems accounting for the photoelectric effect and Max Plank and Einstein provided the solution by introducing the idea of radiation travelling in ‘packets’, quanta, rather than as waves. The quantisation of radiation was taken up first by Schrödinger who, apart from having a famous cat, took things half way with his Wave Mechanics, then by Dirac and others who went the full hog and produced Quantum Theory. The trouble is this is all rather too neat and, as far as I have been able to understand, misrepresents what actually happened. In fact there had been a lot of stuff done by other, now forgotten, physicists, which had been accumulating until there was enough to generate a complete new theory. People like Einstein, Dirac, and all the others were widely read, knew their subjects inside out and had accumulated in their minds all the relevant stuff, until – Bang, it all came together in the birth of a new idea. Another image for this sort of thing is the ‘birth’ of a star: material accumulates in a cloud of gas, a nebula, until there is enough that gravity begins to pull it all together. It will still go on accumulating mass, drawing in more material, until it reaches a certain gravitational mass and then, boomph, it collapses into a dense ball and ‘switches’ on i.e. start to shine like the sun. So, Einstein et al were in the ‘fortunate’ position to come along when enough material had accumulated to form a ‘new star’, a new theory of physics, and their ‘genius’ lay in absorbing all the right material.)
To return to the ‘Big Bangs’ of classical physics, quantum theory and so on: each of these created a ‘new’ universe and gave employment to physicists as they explored and described it and sussed out its possibilities and developed them.
The question is this: does quantum theory contain enough material to implode and lead to another Big Bang? Or Quantum Theory and General Relativity combined?
I have to admit that I have always seen the TOE (theory of everything = tying up Gravity with all the other forces, like electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear etc = uniting quantum theory with general relativity.) as a sort of death sentence for physics – I mean, once you’ve got a Theory of Everything, where do you go from there? It seems rather like a ‘Job Done’. But as I write this I see that the TOE could be another Big Bang that, on the contrary, could give physics a new lease of life.
–and here we have multiple universes: each new Big Bang in physics leads to a new universe: the universe according to quantum theory, the universe according to classical physics etc. One might speculate how one can, IF one can, move between these universes. One can certainly get from quantum theory to classical theory (quantum theory reduces to classical theory in the limit of large size, i.e. when you move from dealing with atoms to dealing with billiard balls or planets.), but I do not think one can go the other way, from classical to quantum theory – this could give meaning to the phenomenon of the Black Hole.
On the other hand, there are some people of whom one says, “Nothing escapes him.” If this was the likes of Dirac, Bohr, Einstein, then the Black Hole (which is a gravitational phenomenon from which nothing can escape, not even light.) might be a metaphor that describes how their minds work – all the stuff they read going in and swirling down the Black Holes of their minds until enough has gone down to generate a Big Bang, i.e. a new theory. That would imply that the other ends of Black Holes would be the seeds of new universes – that is a very neat thought. It leads to a nice image of how universes form and where.
Anyway, the fate of physics depends on the amount of material quantum theory has managed to accumulate, or quantum theory and General Relativity between them.
My feeling is that it is insufficient.
To put this in more mundane terms, you need ‘material’ to be creative with. Every artist and writer knows the horror of the ‘blank’, white page. On the other hand, if you do what Tolkein did, i.e. you take as your starting material all the mythologies of the Norse and Germanic cultures, along with the likes of the Ring of the Nibelung, which has already worked the same material, and the imagination takes off and end up creating, in considerable detail, a whole new world with a history and mythology and with many cultures and languages etc.
So, to me, physics does not seem to provide enough. When I look at where physics has gone over the last half century or more, well, it seems to be more or less at a stand-still, to be honest. The theoreticians beaver away and every once in a VERY long while come up with a new idea, like ‘strings’, which never seems to go anywhere much. And the experimentalists beaver away looking for the fundamental constituents of matter trying to reach ever higher energies and shorter time intervals, and once in a VERY long while they detect a new particle, which does not seem to me to actually be going anywhere.
In fact, High Energy physics seems to me to have gotten into a sort of Mandelbrot set situation. Whenever they find a set of seemingly fundamental particles, they just go to higher energies and shorter time intervals and find that these fundamental particles actually break down into another set of even smaller, shorter lived particles. So, you have at one time a nice array of particles which fall into a nice neat pattern, and you think, “that’s it”, then you take a closer look, which in terms of physics means going to higher energies and shorter time intervals, and low and behold, each particle turns into patterns and arrays of new, smaller, shorter lived particles. (It’s not EXACTLY a Mandelbrot set, but something similar.)
When you sit outside of all this and look in, you are tempted to believe that this could go on forever. There IS no end; there ARE no fundamental constituents of matter.
And at this point I suddenly think I am spotting an ‘old friend’ putting in an appearance again: it is the conflict that goes back to the time of the Ancient Greeks: is the universe made of indivisible particles, or is it continuous and endlessly divisible?
In Ancient Greeks times it was a conflict, but in modern times the conflict has been resolved by creating a synthesis of the two ideas i.e. by having a universe that is BOTH particulate and continuous. So, in Classical Physics the particulate universe manifested as Newtonian physics, while the continuum manifested as Maxwell’s Equations which describe electromagnetic radiation as a wave.
In Quantum Theory, the synthesis is even closer: it manifests in wave/particle duality i.e. in the idea that both energy and matter take the form of particles, quanta, which can behave as waves or as particles, depending on circumstances. This also raises the interesting notion that nature ‘responds to the question you ask it’, which means that if you ask a question about particles (i.e. design an experiment to measure some attribute of particles) then nature will tell you about particles, and if you ask a question about waves, then nature will tell you about waves. Thus particles, say electrons, will behave like particles if you design an experiment to test for particles, but will behave like waves if you design an experiment to test for waves.
So, what I am seeing now is this: fundamental particles are indivisible particles within one level of energy, one level of the Mandelbrot set, but there IS NO smallest particle, no fundamental constituent of matter so that you will be able to go on endlessly looking for smaller and smaller particles and you will find them – always supposing you can build the equipment necessary to create and detect them.
