“Like peeling an endless onion, the more we peel, the more peeling.”
Brain galaxy
Most physicists live under the assumption of a strict and unalterable set of laws that govern the universe – but not all of them.
Theoretical physicist Sankar Das Sarma wrote in the beginning of the new Must Read column at new world vertical. These laws of physics are intended to describe our shared reality, even if they “evolved as our empirical knowledge of the universe improved”.
“That’s the thing,” Sarma continues. “Although many scholars view their role as revealing these ultimate laws, I don’t think they exist.”
Before Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking—and ultimately incomplete—attempts to create a theory of everything, and all the leaps in fields like quantum mechanics that followed, the physicist argues, such an assertion would not have seemed outlandish.
Indeed, Sarma says he finds it “amazing” that humans “can understand some aspects of the universe through the laws of physics” at all.
“As we discover more about nature,” he writes, “we can refine our descriptions of it, but it is never finished.” “Like peeling an endless onion, the more we peel, the more peeling.”
Multiverse madness
Referring to the concept of the multiverse, or an infinite number of universes, Sarma wonders how humans can have such arrogance as to imagine that the apparent rules that seem to govern our reality will apply in every universe.
Raising a theoretical argument, Sarma adds that even in the face of a theory as fundamental as quantum mechanics, which he describes as “more like a set of rules we use to express our laws than a final law in itself,” there remain too many puzzles and variables that these cannot be considered. The so-called basic theory is sacrosanct.
“It’s hard to imagine that a thousand years from now physicists will still be using quantum mechanics as a fundamental description of nature,” he continues. “Something else should have replaced quantum mechanics by then just as quantum mechanics itself had replaced Newtonian mechanics.”
What this replacement might be, Sarma refuses to speculate. However, he sees no particular reason why our description of how the physical universe works should suddenly reach a peak at the beginning of the 21st century and become forever stuck in quantum mechanics.
“That would be a really depressing idea!” he adds.
More on physics: Those headlines about scientists building a wormhole are just bullshit, folks
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