The theory to end all theories | Peter Woit, Becky Parker, Hilary Lawson

foreign do we need to keep the idea at least of a fear of everything alive in order to keep faith in this idea of scientific progress and before anyone shouts at me about scientific progress I'm just the messenger I'll let them take the blame what do you think well I mean a lot of motivational for why I've been running this blog and wrote that wrote this

book is it exactly I think you know what what happened in theoretical physics starting around after Hawking starting after 1980 was was something actually quite dangerous because you know my analysis of the problems that we're hitting are is different but I think the problem that I see happening is that we see kind of a kind of a pathology of the scientific of the scientific method so

the modern science has this whole kind of apparatus of of how you get jobs how you get grants how you do all this and and it really the the apparatus for how we um provide incentives for people about what to think about and what to work on is really complete turns out to be completely wrong I think for the kinds of problems the field is facing

in the in the past we used to have you know somebody would turn on a new accelerator they would produce all these unexpected new particles the theorists would then immediately everybody would compete to figure out what these new particles were and write 10 papers in a few months and so every the field was really driven by this new experimental information and it was very very fadish

but it made progress and what's happened is that the experiments have not been telling us anything really unexpected and so but there's still this the sociology of how you do science which is demands that you you continually have this novelty you can easily have a new paper you continually do all this and it ended up producing you know a lot of what's happened with supersymmetry and

Grand unified theories and super string theory is they were kind of generated by the the necessity of the way the scientific research is organized and and they really simply were ideas that don't that didn't didn't work and instead of but but people that you know once people have written 100 papers about something they're not going to admit that this doesn't work and you and and this

is actually potentially quite damaging I think to the extent that people look and see these TV programs or whatever about the glories of string theory and then later find out oh wait a minute this was all kind of nonsense this is actually really you know has real dangers for for the way people um you know respect or think about science can I come to you Becky

because I think I can't remember which of the the creators of quantum mechanics said the short version is science progressed his funeral by funeral is that pooling Max Planck Max plan thank you um so do your students need to believe in a fear of everything to have an idea that they can make progress or the opposite well I would say the opposite and I would say

the opposite because you want them to have some chance to contribute you know students can do amazing things my kids put a payload up in space and fed data to CERN and NASA they use CERN technology and did amazing things and you want them to feel that they can do that and you also teach a lot in science but most of science is being wrong actually

that you're not always getting the answer and you know you're doing experiments and perhaps they don't work and that's all scientific uh experience and that's one of the strengths of science that it could admit say super symmetry that it's wrong one of my colleagues spent this whole PhD doing um on City symmetry at CERN and of course nobody seems to have got any evidence but yet

so I would say that actually you know Perhaps Perhaps the focus because he's wrong I was reading um about the talk Martin Reese did to the RSA just recently and you know perhaps it we should more Focus about how science should have a vision for improving the planet saving the planet sorting out you know what's going on in the world rather than this sort of rather

to me now it seems a bit you know who who decided that surely we've got different priorities here well I mean I'd like to say it's not just physics and Richard Horton the editor of the Lancer I think it was in 2014 wrote a paper saying 50 of biomedical science is wrong and he was the editor of the Lancet so it's not just physics how do

we get out of that I mean what do we do what do we say to students to to to to get them to understand that they can somehow step outside but they're still they're not gonna suddenly see the universe the way it is because you on one hand you're saying step outside the Paradigm but you're not saying and then you'll see the world clearly so how

do you put it to them I I agree it it it's a bit tricky I mean my suggestion was that we think of the world as open we stop thinking it as a thing that we might have an answer to not a theme we somehow think of it as being you know what's the answer to the university like seven and a half here it's it's that

it's already divided that there's it's out there we're cracking a crossword puzzle there's the problem of human knowledge is is to crack the crossword puzzle well you know before you start that we're not going to crack it are we I mean it's not that you know we've just had 10 000 years of of human civilizations that's that's got closer and we're just in a little bit

we're going to crack it I mean you know we're not going to do that um so if if we did we'd close down our universities oh it's all over now there's nothing more to do that's what they said didn't they yeah and it's it's obviously it's obviously a fantasy that's that's not our relationship to knowledge uh or relation of the relationship of knowledge to the world

it enables us to do things we can do all sorts of things we couldn't do before and we need to continue to try and do that but just to to the previous conversation we're talking about The Theory of Everything I am in favor as I mentioned at the beginning I am in favor of pursuing the attempt to provide an overall Theory so in one sense I

like the idea of yes we need to try and provide an overall Theory and why do I think that I think that it's because it's only by trying to make your overall model that you realize the bits that don't work it's only by having your overall cosmological theory that starts to think actually this inflation Cosmic inflation stuff doesn't really make sense we've got a problem about

you know where's the edge of the uh Universe we've got a problem about you know the the mathematics of the all of those all of those bits are part of the overall picture and you need that overall picture to identify what doesn't work but that doesn't mean to say there's a right one around the corner it just means that any model that you perceive proceed with

will always generate those problems but we're just trying to make our models better and be able to do things we can't do at the moment and the exciting bit about all of this now you know I do think there is an exciting because most people feel this oh the loss of reality is is gonna is a real problem I don't I think it's exciting because it's

the idea that we can catch sight of other ways of holding the world which will enable us to do things that we can't do at the moment and that's fantastic idea your lesson favor for answers and better mistakes is what you want I think certainly we certainly want to find new mistakes you'd love to make a new mistake rather than just repeating oh yeah yeah yeah

yeah if we could that's kind of our problem is that we don't we haven't admitted up to our current mistakes we're not making any new ones this is exactly our problem right now yes because I mean for a while it looked like you were being edged into the defender of The Theory of Everything But then I'm thinking yes but you're the man who has bashed away

at String Theory when it had pretension to being the answer everything more than anybody else yeah yeah yeah but but very specific specifically because it was I mean there are things that I and many people could see you know there's a TV program saying oh this is a huge success so this is wonderful this is doing all this great stuff and I and many other people

looked and said well no it actually doesn't this doesn't work and that doesn't work that doesn't work and and you know that so that relationship between the kind of public reality and what I was seeing was actually going on was was what had drove me to these extreme efforts of this blog and the book but uh yes but it yeah it's a separate issue of you

know is there I'm in some sense an agreement with the strength there is I actually had had lunch with a string theorist in Oxford last week and we found that one he wouldn't mind Joe conlon and but he uh you know and I I find that we ended up agreeing on on almost everything you know except very specifically prospects for certain kinds of ideas that you

know that I would claim there's a good argument that this couldn't go nowhere and he's devoting his life to trying to do it um and I think we ended up that's not what we really discussed because that would not be a very fruitful discussion I think but um other than that you know I'm not in terms of goals I'm I'm unfortunately kind of in agreement with

this with the string there is it's a but trying to understand that there is a there is a fundamental difference I think between the two of you in the sense that if I've understood right you think there is an an objective reality out there maybe that only God knows what it is but it's there and I think you're saying there may be something out there but

God's never going to tell us and our relationship with it is always relational it's always it and us I think I'm not going to be tempted to say what is out there because any description I give is going to be perspectival it's going to be another model so but and in that sense I go along with uh Hawking's uh position he called it model theoretic realism

I'm not quite sure why he used the word realism it seems to me that that makes out that it's rather something rather than different from what I I he seems to be arguing to me which is that we just have to realize that we operate within Frameworks and they are our reality you know we can't break through that reality to to find the ultimate stuff but

there's lots of constraint on our models we can't we we see the effect of all of the stuff out there in terms of how we understand it we understand it through our model so it's not like we're just lost in this network of um an idealist world of making up anything you want you've got loads of constraint but it's just you can't work out what what

it is that's constraining you because you're stuck in your model you can't get through you know I thought the quote I heard of Hawking is just right you know there's no there's no um model independent test how are you going to do this you've got to have a theory to look to see what's happened where does mathematics come into this because I I have a feeling

that that's at least part of your hesitation to agree with Hillary because I can see you nodding at some things he says but something's holding you back yeah because it was a bit again it we talked a lot about this in other discussion the question is you know my position I I've been partly in the physics departments partly a math department so I've been thinking about

this relationship of mathematics and physics most most of my life and and and just continually seeing as I learn more about the subject these deeper and deeper um relationships between between the two subjects so this is part of you know my resistance idea well this is just a model because I mean I I on the the mathematician in me is actually looking at um seeing all

sorts of very very different areas of mathematics which is a kind of a completely different story than and how we interact with the world and seeing that at a deep level these structures are coming together between our our model of reality and kind of deep mathematical structures and so maybe I've I think Lee's moment accuses me of being a mathematical Mystic and so I so I

I can't anyway I've become more and more of the feeling that there is there is this kind of Deep thing going on there which is only we only very partially understand and and this you know maybe you can maybe you can say that you know thinking that this exists and is is some just good to do because it's going to encourage me maybe in in positive

directions or maybe it really does exist but whatever it is this is a motivation Becky I wanted to come to you because there's a sort of a dark side to the the idea that there's an objective reality and our models are getting closer to it because you can end up saying look I'm objectively right and you are just objectively wrong and especially if I've got a

PhD from somewhere and you haven't and there is that sort of authoritarian side to it isn't it we don't want to overplay it but it is there well yeah I would agree and I would agree that how are we ever going to get out into new models unless we have a different education or possibilities of acceptable science within the whole education system because that's what you

do and what you know we're talking about bigger and bigger accelerators and that's one particular sort of obsession to get higher and higher and higher energies and actually perhaps that's not the way to go but that seems to be the Orthodox thing now and you sort of think about you know uh that whole idea of an objective reality when I was in Chicago I worked with

Bob Garrosh and I swear that he lived in multiple universes he was like one of those parallel universes people and you sort of think we've lost some of that sort of uh one that sort of wow you know because if you're just stuck in the asset model you know actually if you think about implications of quantum mechanics it's phenomenal and that could spark different models and

different ways that we perhaps could think of students and US interacting with the world in a way which might encourage sort of innovation and new ideas new approaches um it sort of brings us to the the third theme to continue watching this video click the link in the top left or in the description below or visit iai.tv for more debates and talks from the world's leading

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