AFTER I WROTE that piece the other day I watched more of Sabine Hossenfelder's videos and listened to the one titled, "How Can We Test A Theory of Everything?" and, even better, I found out that she has an excellent blog on which she gives the transcript of her videos (I'm a big fan of the use of scripts, very few of us can wing it). I'd rather have a written text than one delivered even as well and entertainingly and subtly humorously as she can deliver them. In the case of my questions about the relationship of larger entities and the constiuent atoms, subatomic particles, etc. had to the characteristics of the things that are made of them, she said:
The name is somewhat misleading. Such a theory of everything would of course not explain everything. That’s because for most purposes it would be entirely impractical to use it. It would be impractical for the same reason it’s impractical to use the standard model to explain chemical reactions, not to mention human behavior. The description of large objects in terms of their fundamental constituents does not actually give us much insight into what the large objects do. A theory of everything, therefore, may explain everything in principle, but still not do so in practice.
That shows two things, it shows exactly what I said, that the relationship of what are now taken as the basic particles that in the modern atheist-materialist reductionist ideology constitute the entire basis of existence* is unknown and likely cannot be known. It also shows that the ideological faith of such scientists, even one as honest as she is has a faith that that unknown and likely unknowable connection between the character of large objects and the character of the smallest units they are composed of is there when there is no reason to believe it is there. That was exactly what I was questioning and if I'd happened to have listened to her on the topic, I'd have been able to use this paragraph to support what I said.
I will point out that when I got Sean Carroll to admit to a simple fact that rather sank his claim that science was on the cusp of having a theory of everything I got him to admit that science didn't know everything about so much as a single electron in the entire universe so it was unlikely that it was going to have a theory of everything about everything about all of them. Though the questions I had on Monday are, as far as I'm concerned as prohibitive of them getting one as ignorance of electrons is. If those unknown, I'd guess unknowable relationships between the character of large objects and the atoms, subatomic particles etc. they are comprised of include characters of larger objects that don't come into being from any intrinsic characteristics of the smaller constituent objects and those characteristics, the larger objects are as much a part of everything as the things that modern physics has been obsessed with for the last century and a half.
* No matter how much S. H. correctly says that existence is a murky concept that really has no place in science (Eddington said it about a century ago) almost all scientists violate that truth constantly, none more so than who want to use it to support their ideological preferences and opinions.
UPDATE: Oh, I don't worship S.H. she has some of the typical and arrogant habits of materialist-atheist adherents to scientism, either admitted or denied. Her review of Sean Carroll's The Big Picture and participation in the comments is a glaring display of many of them. I have left a comment on her blog pointing out that she, effectively, does the old logical positivist trick of, by fiat, declaring that things she doesn't like and doesn't want to have to deal with are pointless or "meaningless" or uninformed (by which she often means that her preferred framing is somehow violated in what someone else says, out of her chosen bounds). She can be as bad as most of the atheist-scientist ideologues can be when it comes to arrogant dismissal, she's just more honest within her subject matter. I wouldn't trust her outside of it unless she demonstrated that she knew what she was talking about. But, then, you can say that about pretty much everyone in every specialty.
No comments:
Post a Comment