https://bookshop.org/books/the-god-equation-the-quest-for-a-theory-of-everything-9780593396445/9780385542746
I'm tempted to buy this book. I doubt I will. But one of the sentences in the blurb triggered me: "This would be the crowning achievement of science, a profound merging of all the forces of nature into one beautiful, magnificent equation to unlock the deepest mysteries in science: ..." Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things. But why should any 1 thing from an N-tuple of things necessarily be representable in terms of the remaining N-1 things? Where does that urge come from? It sounds like a need for cognitive closure [⛧]. It dovetails nicely with the free will thread where everyone's convinced of their own brain farts and fond of giving authoritarian answers even though the emperor's nude. The interview that sent me to Kaku's book is here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/03/string-theory-michio-kaku-aliens-god-equation-large-hadron-collider wherein he suggests the Multiverse can help harmonize religious beliefs! I'm tempted into pseudoscience nonsense to think that a feeling of free will (and the more collective "adjacent possible") is not justified by some meso-scopic biological evolutionary purpose, but because it's possible to see the "shadows" of other universes [⛤]. 8^D [⛧] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-06343-011 [⛤] I think I'm getting that from Deutsch's Fabric of Reality ... but who knows at this point? -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
