The Beckettish Failures of Science....

But this is why you fail…

Proposition: The failure to come up with Grand Unified Theory is a failure of imagination not of logic. It is a failure of metaphor, of the associative or analogical mind. It will require a shift in our conception of the universe more profound than the one that made the shift from Newton to Einstein possible. It remains to be seen whether we are capable of this imaginative shift. We may be capable of comprehending the model but incapable of generating it, as millions are capable of understanding calculus but not of imagining calculus from the point of view of algebra. Recall that the inadequacies of Newtonian physics were not numerous or anxiety provoking when Einstein came along. There was no need to believe it needed a major overhaul. Indeed, it still works perfectly well in almost all cases. The next iteration will be both smaller and larger than the last, or rather what’s needed will be, whether or not it comes, whether or not if achieved it will in fact settle the matter. (Unless of course it’s already here in string theory or some other unprovable iteration.)

The thing that has impeded progress toward the GUT is the reliability of the math. And that’s all I really want to say. Nothing else I’ve said even needs to be true. The math of quantum physics works so well that it is hard to imagine that it isn’t also in the most important sense “true.” The same holds true of course of the math of the macro world. That we need two separate sorts of equations must tell us either that the worlds themselves are somehow incompatible and work on separate laws of nature (that loathsome phrase) or that the math itself is only one way of thinking about being and not a reflection of the deep structures or laws of the universe itself—a far more likely state in my view. We use the math we use because it’s the math we have, just as the Romans used the math they had, with awkward letters and no zeros because it was the math they had. Math as we know it is impossible in Roman Numerals. Without Arabic, we can do very few wonders. But for what we need Arabic numerals and all the symbols of higher math are no better than Roman numerals for the performance of calculus.

So what must happen is that the metaphor, akin to the leap of curved space and of space-time itself and gravities waves and the whole Einsteinian vision, has to arise hand in hand with a new math as far above calculus and calculus is above algebra.

Metaphor first.