Yes, I enjoyed it, Graham. Many in the 1930s formulated the answers we are only now understanding.
When in the 1980s, physicists asked what the Theory of Everything was, I figuratively fell off my chair. They were asking a question that belonged outside the physicists' box. It was a non-scientific question (more on that in a bit), and they did not realize it.
The answer to the question (which they reject of course) is about the role that Nothing plays, just as you mentioned, how vitally important it is.
First about the role, and let me use the metaphor of two empty entities to show you how important this Nothing is.
* The empty wallet is not liked much in the world; we are forced to find ways to not keep it empty. We dislike it when it is empty.
* The empty laundry basket is very much liked in the world; we finally have all clothes clean and we can relax, don't have to do anything. We like it when it is empty.
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Gödel (best friends with Einstein) provided us the answer that physicists are looking for. The strange part? Physicists reject Gödel's work as informative to them in their search to understand the big picture.
What Gödel showed, and I'll turn this into the question physicists are asking, is that a Unified Field of Forces does not exist. At best, we can get two fields of forces, but never a single unified field. Their wanting to know how we can get a Unified Field of Forces is asking too much; we can’t meld two completely different things into one.
To turn this into an example understandable for us all, consider the quest to understand human nature in its entirety and then only inviting males to partake in the study. Yes, snickers, because that is a rather unintelligent approach.
In reverse, inviting only females, and we have now two examples of Gödel's first Incompleteness Theorem. When we start with an absolute truth, we cannot use that truth as starting point to then get to a completed overall outcome.
His second Incompleteness Theorem is like asking men and women to partake. Then, still, we cannot get a completed outcome if we demand it is explained on a single level. We then have to apply the fig leaves to Adam and Eve to get everything placed on a single level. Ergo sum, we always end up with an incompleteness.
And that is exactly how physicists can find the answer they desperately want to hear: they are now occupying a spot they should not occupy. In plain English, physicists reject zero as fundamental and they are nevertheless standing right on top of it, not seeing that they occupy a spot of choice and they subsequently choose to deny it exists. Physicists should embrace the duality of zero, and not see it as a singular number. Zero can (!) be quite functional, but it comes in two ways, just like the examples of the empty wallet and the empty laundry basket showed.
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Science cannot be religion and religion cannot be science.
The scientific house has a foundation that no religion can show. Yet that scientific house does not have a finished roofline.
The religious house is peachy dandy, complete from the outside. But don't ask to come inside and see the foundation because you may not live to regret that question.
To make science and religion one is like making a man and a women a single person, something's gotta give. It is logical that we always over-ask, but it is illogical to expect a good answer when over-asking.
The nice part is that once we separate all versions from one another, we can actually provide the same storyline for all (albeit while using different words for each version).
The omelet we call the universe we live in was once an egg. And so we know with 100% certainty that the egg had to get broken before we could have gotten this omelet.
So, looking for the whole among just the broken pieces is like looking for everyone that ever lived among the people alive today, an impossibility. When wanting to understand the whole, one must begin with the whole, and not with just the parts we see.
Scientists are sitting in God's seat asking where God is. Answer: God left a long time ago (13.8 billion years ago to be precise).
We must follow logical structure or we won't get the outcomes we are looking for.
Just look at the subatomic matter and we see immediately that we have linear matter, neutrons and protons, and we have non-linear matter, the electrons.
Anyone wanting to see the connection between linear and non-linear matter must accept that the original non-linear reality got broken. God cannot be whole. God cannot have just a single eye; if we envision God today, God must have two eyes.
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Take a wind-up toy that got wound up too much so it broke. We see immediately that it lost a special capability. Sometimes, we can still play with the broken toy, but the special trick is gone.
Same for the prior universe and its special ability. It’s gone.
To bring this all back to the same scientific question: The Unified Field of Forces could have been true before there was matter. Yet that whole prior reality got involved in a setup that made it loose that unified field.
At best, we have two fields today (the GUT then occupying one field, gravity occupying then the other field).
Nice article, Graham. Thank you.
'Economists Are Smarter Than Physicists'
https://fred-rick.medium.com/economists-are-smarter-than-physicists-438070e0d9ad
