Theory of Everything: Putting failure to find such a theory to good use

Sure. Why waste a failure?

In "The imperfect universe: Goodbye, theory of everything" (New Scientist, 10 May 2010, Magazine issue 2759), Marcelo Gleiser mourns,

FIFTEEN years ago, I was a physicist hard at work hunting for a theory of nature that would unify the very big and the very small. There was good reason to hope. The great and the good were committed. Even Einstein, who recognised that our understanding of reality is necessarily incomplete, had spent the last 20 years of his life searching for a unified field theory that would describe the two main forces we see acting around us - gravity and electromagnetism - as manifestations of a single force. For him, such a mathematical theory represented the purest and most elegant expression of nature and the highest achievement of the human intellect.

Fifty-five years after Einstein's death, the hunt for this elusive unified field theory continues. To physicist Stephen Hawking and many others, finding the "theory of everything" would be equivalent to knowing the "mind of God". The metaphor is ...
subject to you buying an online subscription to New Scientist.

Maybe it's worth it. I mean, so rich a source of authentic pop culture rebranded as science, how can you resist? If you want to know what politicians and pundits fund and defend and why they do, read NS - on someone else's dime, to be sure.

Why is a theory about the Theory of Everything so important? As soon as you think you've worked everything out, it all changes again. Personally, I'd rather have a sound theory of something in particular.

Gleiser argues, says endorser Stuart Kauffman,

... that there is a profound link in Western science between monotheism and the scientific search for a Theory of Everything. He argues persuasively that we must give up this dream. This may augur a profound transformation in our understanding of the world.”

—Stuart Kauffman, Fellow of the Royal Society, Canada, Author of Reinventing the Sacred

Oh, I see now. Failure to find a theory of everything is repackaged as a reason to give up monotheism. And what if a theory of everything had indeed been found? ... why, wouldn't that be a reason to give up monotheism too?

So, really ...

I can't develop a Theory of Everything because no way could I hope to explain why these people don't get the reason the public doesn't take them seriously. Thus, mine wouldn't be a Theory of Everything.

Comments? Go to Uncommon Descent to comment.

(Note: Also, re Gleiser, back in 2005 he was into the "Who designed the designer?" schtick - as if any series could not just end, as a road ends in a highway.)

A theory of "almost" everything is the best we can do?

P.-M. Binder of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Hilo
thinks that David Wolpert, writing in Physica D (Wolpert, D. H. Physica D 237, 1257–1281 (2008) has demonstrated "that the entire physical Universe cannot be fully understood by any single inference system that exists within it" :

In proving his theorems,Wolpert defines U as the space of all world-lines (sequences of events) in the Universe that are consistent with the laws of physics. He then defines strong inference as the ability of one machine to predict the total conclusion function of another machine for all possible set-ups. Finally, he uses ‘Cantor diagonalization’ (Box 1) to prove, among others, the following two statements:

(1) Let C1 be any strong inference machine for U. There is another machine, C2, that cannot be strongly inferred by C1.

(2) No two strong inference machines can be strongly inferred from each other.

The first of these statements posits that there is a portion of ‘knowledge space’ (that inferable by C2) that is not available to any C1 machine. The second is a statement about the non-equivalence of inference machines; it implies that, at most, only one machine at one instant in time can infer all others. The two statements together imply that, at best, there can be only a ‘theory of almost everything’.

Memo to LaPlace's demon: Get a job, Mr. Know-it-all.

Citation: Nature 455, 884-885 (16 October 2008) doi:10.1038/455884a; Published online 15 October 2008
Abstract:

A provocative contribution to the logic of science extends the theorems of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, and bears on thinking about prediction, the standard model of particles, and quantum gravity. (paywall)