I've been urging more people to read Stephenson's "Quicksilver", for
some sense of how new theories are embedded in historical context. The
first of many fine pithy quotes from the book,
"Those who assume hypotheses as first principles
of their specualtions...may indeed form an
ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be."
--Roger Cotes,
Preface to Sir Isaac Newton's
Principia Mathematica
Second edition, 1713
That said, I like theory anyhow, but in order to approach any of these
TOE's, I've found that it helps to seek some understanding of their
historical context (such as from the math and physics community blogs
we've referred to elsewhere). I found some of Lee Smolin's popular
books (Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, The Trouble with Physics, etc.)
to be useful - one wants to understand what problems all these different
TOE folks are trying to answer, and where did those problems come from?
Personally I think the Markopoulou stuff may be more accessible for
this reason, but nobody should take that as a recommendation. The CDT
stuff has been too hard for me to situate thus far (again, not a
recommendation either way, I may simply be too dim).
So, to answer your last question, no, I don't think that would be
enough. The accessibility of the ideas comes through an understanding
of their history. Otherwise, well, one is left with an "ingenious
romance". Which can be fun too for awhile, but ultimately frustrating,
since one is then forced to take on a bunch of assumptions without
knowing where they came from -- the whole corpus starts to feel way too
intimidating.
I do believe that a TOE should live up to its name; it should inform all
our models, including, e.g., biology and economics. One would hope that
it would inform our thinking about complexity. However, we keep
assuming the unification of the physics of the itty-bitty and the
mighty-big will lead to some fundamental set of building blocks that
will inform our daily modeling practice. Maybe that's one reason why
background-independent theories in physics and mathematics are still
regarded as 'radical'.
Carl
Jack Stafurik wrote:
> Per our discussion at Friam, here is an article with some radical TOEs. One,
> Causal Dynamical Triangulations, give us our four dimensional spacetime if
> you make the assumption of causality. I wonder how many people in the world
> really understand the concepts and mathematics behind these. Would I require
> a PhD plus many postdoc years to understand these?
>
> Jack
>
>
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