FQXi FORUM
CATEGORY: Article Discussions
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TOPIC: In Search of Uncertainty
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In the beginning, theee came a simple thought, a lonely query about a local oddity (local to the person that instigated the first thought!), thus one simple question needed one acceptable answer. Since that first question and answer, there have been a large "mega-input" of questions, but there has been a definate bias to the number of answers?
I think there will always be "more questions than answers"?..it appears to be a natural order.
To attain a theory of everything, you have to be confident that you first have a "theory of every possible question"..if you were that person of long past, who somehow created a simple rational query, and then answered it in the next thought, why bother to formulate another question?
A theory of everything may have existed, if you are satisfied with a single "ultimate" question.
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Gödel Esher Bach and .... Heisenberg? Gödel's incompleteness theorem has nothing to do (does not even give a hint) with the "uncertainty" relations of Heisenberg, and has nothing to with the limited "constant" speed of TEM waves, bla bla bla ...
Gödel's theorem implies that mathematics is infinite (always possible to add new axioms to existing formal systems). Physics is more or less applied mathematics, so a subset of all math can be used to express physics laws. Since there is no way to determine which math is applicable or not, one cannot conclude that physics is never finished, because math is never finished !
Physics is never finished if one can proof one can always generate new emperical data that is not covered/explained by any theory, but this has nothting to do with math. Such a proof does not exist of course.
An interesting concept might be a "vanishing point" for the science of physics: the vedantic trinity knower = knowledge = all-that-is-known. This trinity transcends the modern scientific research methodology which presumes the distinction between observer, observation and observed world.
But since our understanding of the knower, knowledge and that-what-is-known is evolving, one might approach the vanishing point of the science of physics, but Gödel has nothing to do with it !!!
Maybe the "ultimate goal" of physics is this vedantic trinity, maybe it is not. The standard physics model does not provide any hope for such a trinity, but then this standard physics model can easily be wrong on many of its unproven assumptions.
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