Fairy Tale Physics
Thoughts on Jim Baggott’s “Farewell To Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth”
In 2013, science writer Jim Baggott1 wrote:
It seems that we can barely get through a week without being assaulted by the latest astounding physics story, its headlines splashed gaudily across the covers of popular science magazines and, occasionally, newspapers. The public’s appetite for these stories is seemingly insatiable, and there’s no escaping them. They are the subjects of innumerable radio and television news reports and documentaries, the latter often delivered with breathless exuberance and lots of arm-waving, from unconnected but always exotic locations, against a background of overly dramatic music.
Then he asked:
What evidence do we have for super-symmetric ‘squarks’, or superstrings vibrating in a multidimensional spacetime? How can we tell that we live in a multiverse? Is it really the case that the fundamental constituent at the heart of all matter and radiation is just ‘information’? How can we tell that the universe is a hologram projected from information encoded on its boundary? What are we really supposed to make of the intricate network of apparent cosmic coincidences in the laws of physics?
His answer (original emphasis):
There is as yet no observational or experimental evidence for many of the concepts of contemporary theoretical physics, such as super-symmetric particles, superstrings, the multiverse, the universe as information, the holographic principle or the anthropic cosmological principle. For some of the wilder speculations of the theorists there can by definition never be any such evidence. This stuff is not only not true, it is not even science. I call it ‘fairytale physics’. It is arguably borderline confidence-trickery....
[C]ontemporary theoretical physics seems to have crossed an important threshold in at least two senses. Speculative theorizing of a kind that cannot be tested, that cannot be verified or falsified ... is now almost common currency. The discipline has retreated into its own small, self-referential world. Its product is traded by its advocates as mainstream science within the scientific community, and peddled (or even missold) as such to the wider public. Secondly, the unprecedented appetite for popular science and its attraction as an income stream have proved hard for the more articulate and eloquent of these advocates to resist. The result is that virtually every other popular book published on aspects of modern physics is chock-full of fairy stories. It is pseudo-science masquerading as science.
On to the next question:
But, you might ask, what’s the big deal? Why get so worked up? After all, consumers of popular science may simply wish to be entertained. They may wish to have their already boggled minds further boggled by the latest ‘scientific’ thinking, through a rapid succession of ‘Oh wow!’ revelations. Blimey! Parallel universes!
To take this view is, I believe, greatly to underestimate the people who consume popular science. It also shows an astonishing lack of respect. I suspect that many people might actually like to know what is accepted science fact and what is science fantasy.
The big deal, Baggott suggests, is to capture the attention of funding agencies, popular science publishers, and the producers of radio and television programs.
I could not agree more with Baggott’s criticism of fairy tale physics. I share it here because it needs to be known more widely.
Baggott closes his book by addressing the following six questions.
Question #1: If fairy-tale physics isn’t science, what is it? The easy answer would be that fairy tale physics is metaphysics. Baggott, however, is well aware that
it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to eliminate all the metaphysical elements from what we would have no difficulty in accepting as perfectly legitimate science. Philosophers of the logical positivist persuasion had a go at this in the 1920s and 1930s, and failed.... Metaphysics is an inherent and perfectly natural part of the language we use in our dialogue with nature.
What is characteristic of fairy tale physics is that “the metaphysics is all there is. Until and unless it can predict something that can be tested by reference to empirical facts, concerning quantity or number, it is nothing but sophistry and illusion.” Here Baggott alludes to a famous quote of David Hume2:
If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Question #2: But aren’t theoretical physicists supposed to be really smart people? Baggott is surely right in writing that “the standard model of particle physics ... is one of the most successful theories of physics ever devised.... There is, at the time of writing [2013], no observation or experimental result in particle physics that cannot be accommodated within this framework.” The standard model, which came to completion in the early 1970s, features a certain number of adjustable parameters, whose actual values remain unexplained; it is an amalgam of three theories rather than a single completely “unified” theory; and it does not include a quantum theory of gravity. It thus stands to reason that there is physics beyond the standard model.
Since the 1970s, theoretical physicists have been trying to discover it. They have come up with grand unified theories (GUTs), theories incorporating supersymmetry (SUSY), string theories and superstrings vibrating in at least ten dimensions, M-theory (subsuming the five variants of superstring theory into a single, eleven-dimensional framework), and Theories of Everything (TOEs). If they were honest, they would admit that they are at their wit’s end. They would follow the example of Richard Lewontin. In an interview with Discover Magazine (April 2011), biologist Lynn Margulis (a member of the National Academy of Sciences) recalled:
Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it — changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.
Granted, it may take some time before there are measurements that match the quantities that theoretical physicists are talking about. But for how long should demands for empirical proof be suspended? The assumption of electro-weak symmetry-breaking caused by the Higgs field allowed Steven Weinberg to predict the masses of the W and Z bosons in 1967. These particles were discovered in the early 1980s, but the Higgs boson itself was discovered only in 2012, forty-five years after its existence was postulated. Back to Baggott:
We have obviously had to learn to be patient. But at least the Higgs mechanism was progressive — it solved some problems and made predictions for which there was some hope of providing a test sometime in the not too distant future. SUSY has made some predictions, of a sort, but these are not so far supported by data emerging from the LHC [the large hadron collider at CERN]. SUSY is failing the test. Superstrings/M-theory and the various multiverse theories have made no really testable predictions at all. At what point do we recognize that the mathematical structures we’re wrestling to come to terms with might actually represent a wrong turn?
Once we ease off on our demands, once we abandon the checks and balances afforded by a proper adherence to the scientific method, we train a whole generation (perhaps that should be generations) of theorists to believe that a soft approach to empirical proof is not only perfectly acceptable but even necessary to continue to publish research papers and advance their careers.
What happens when some really clever people decide that it’s okay to abandon the checks and balances? After all, they say, we’re all grown-ups. We’re all smart cookies. According to a strict interpretation of the rules, this is maybe not acceptable. But hey, rules are made to be broken. If we just relax the rules even by a little bit, then all manner of new and exciting things become possible.
This shift in value-set can be overt or it can be quite subtle. Irrespective of its subtlety, such a shift can lead inexorably to the development of what I call a Grand Delusion (with Capital Letters, intended to Emphasize its Profound Importance).
There are plenty of precedents for Grand Delusions throughout history.3 And ‘cleverness’, it seems to me, is almost a prerequisite. The best example of a recent Grand Delusion that I can think of is the one that led some very clever people in the global financial sector to think that they could relax the rules on financial risk, thereby discovering that all manner of new and exciting things become possible.
Question #3: Okay, but in the grand scheme of things is there any real harm done? After all, one might think that indulging in fairy-tale physics “is hardly earth-shattering when measured (for example) against the misuse of a mathematical function to price collateralized debt obligations.”
I believe that damage is being done to the integrity of the scientific enterprise. The damage isn’t always clearly visible and is certainly not always obvious. Fairy-tale physics is like a slowly creeping yet inexorable dry rot. If we don’t look for it, we won’t notice that the foundations are being undermined until the whole structure comes down on our heads.
Here are the signs. The fairy-tale theorists have for some time been presenting arguments suggesting that the very definition of science needs to be adapted to accommodate their particular brand of metaphysics. The logic is really rather simple. Developments in theoretical physics have run far ahead of our ability to provide empirical tests. If we hang our definition of science on the Testability Principle, then we have a problem — this stuff clearly isn’t science. But if it isn’t science, we forgo the opportunity to explore the vast richness afforded by the mathematics. This richness is compelling, as it feeds an innate human desire to concoct stories about our universe and our place in it. Something has to give.
In The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (Allen Lane, 2011), the mathematician/physicist Brian Greene points out three things that according to “the usual centuries-old scientific framework” a physicist needs to specify: the mathematical equations expressing the relevant physical laws, the universal constants appearing in these equation, and the initial conditions of the system under investigation. He then asks:
Can we explain the initial conditions — how things were at some purportedly earliest moment? Can we explain the values of the constants — the particle masses, force strengths, and so on — on which these laws depend? Can we explain why a particular set of mathematical equations describes one or other aspect of the physical universe? [p. 317]
And he believes that we can:
the multiverse proposals … render prosaic three primary aspects of the standard scientific framework that in a single-universe setting are deeply mysterious. In various multiverses, the initial conditions, the constants of nature and even the mathematical laws are no longer in need of explanation. [p. 319]
This is nothing but the latest (most ingenious but also most disingenuous) version of the infinite monkey theorem, which states that a monkey (or an army of monkeys) hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as a specific sonnet of William Shakespeare. The Achilles heel of this theorem is that finding that sonnet will almost surely take an infinite amount of time as well. This is where the multiverse proposal, in tandem with the anthropic principle, shines. The (weak) anthropic principle is the self-evident proposition that the world in which we find ourselves cannot have features precluding our existence in it. If every possible set of physical laws, every possible set of natural constants, and every possible set of initial conditions is realized in some universe, it comes as no surprise that we find ourselves in one that is just right. There is no need to spend an infinite amount of time to find it.
Question #4: What do the philosophers have to say about all this? While Eugene Wigner4 marveled at the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences” (as far as that goes, one might add today), Steven Weinberg5 pointed out the “unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy” in the same field. The way I see it, science and philosophy parted company when physicists started misconstruing and thereafter ignoring the profound insights of Niels Bohr. Since then little of relevance to physics has been produced by philosophers, and even less that is relevant to philosophy by physicists. Which reminds me of the philosopher Charlie (C.D.) Broad, who took the view that “the nonsense written by philosophers on scientific matters is exceeded only by the nonsense written by scientists on philosophy.” And this was in the days of scientists like Bohr, Eddington, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, who actually knew a thing or two about philosophy.
Question #5: Are we witnessing the end of physics? In the last decade of the 20th Century, as befits the ending of a century, a number of popular books declared the “end” of this or that. In 1996, John Horgan, then a staff writer at Scientific American, weighed in with The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Little, Brown & Co., 1997), writing:
The vast majority of physicists, those employed in industry and even academia, will continue to apply the knowledge they already have in hand — inventing more versatile lasers and superconductors and computing devices — without worrying about any underlying philosophical issues. A few diehards dedicated to truth rather than practicality will practice physics in a nonempirical, ironic mode, plumbing the magical realm of superstrings and other esoterica and fretting about the meaning of quantum mechanics. The conferences of these ironic physicists, whose disputes cannot be experimentally resolved, will become more and more like those of that bastion of literary criticism, the Modern Language Association. [p.91]
In a sense, Baggott remarks, “Horgan got it exactly right, although he might have emphasized that the most important psychological factor driving the development of what he called ‘ironic physics’ (and what I’ve called fairytale physics) is childish impatience.” My own view is that the progress yet to be made in physics is inversely proportional to the enormous progress that remains to be made in understanding the philosophical implications of all well-founded physical laws.
Question #6: So, what do you want me to do about it?
My own feeling [Baggott concludes] is that the interconnectedness of all the unjustified and untestable assumptions that have been deployed in the creation of fairy-tale physics will slowly but inevitably bring the whole structure down. Future theorists may look back at this period in the development of physics and wonder why so few thought to challenge the orthodoxy of the time. Didn’t we appreciate that something funny was going on?
J. Baggott, Farewell To Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth (Pegasus Books, 2013).
D. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Section VII, Paragraph 34 (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Baggott cites one of my favorites: Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841.
E. Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Communications of Pure and Applied Mathematics VIII, 1-14 (1960).
S. Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 179 (Pantheon Books, 1992).