Farewell to Reality Read online

  Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. A former academic scientist, he now works as an independent business consultant, but maintains a broad interest in science, philosophy and history, and continues to write on these subjects in his spare time.

  Also by Jim Baggott

  Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’

  The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments

  Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939—49

  A Beginner’s Guide to Reality

  Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory

  Perfect Symmetry: The Accidental Discovery of Buckminsterfullerene

  The Meaning of Quantum Theory: A Guide for Students of Chemistry and Physics

  FAREWELL TO REALITY

  How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth

  JIM BAGGOTT

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  To John, in memory of Mary

  Contents

  Preface

  1

  The Supreme Task

  Reality, Truth and the Scientific Method

  Part I

  The Authorized Version

  2

  White Ambassadors of Morning

  Light, Quantum Theory and the Nature of Reality

  3

  The Construction of Mass

  Matter, Force and the Standard Model of Particle Physics

  4

  Beautiful Beyond Comparison

  Space, Time and the Special and General Theories of Relativity

  5

  The (Mostly) Missing Universe

  The Universe According to the Standard Model of Big Bang Cosmology

  6

  What’s Wrong with this Picture?

  Why the Authorized Version of Reality Can’t be Right

  Part II

  The Grand Delusion

  7

  Thy Fearful Symmetry

  Beyond the Standard Model: Supersymmetry and Grand Unification

  8

  In the Cemetery of Disappointed Hopes

  Superstrings, M-theory and the Search for the Theory of Everything

  9

  Gardeners of the Cosmic Landscape

  Many Worlds and the Multiverse

  10

  Source Code of the Cosmos

  Quantum Information, Black Holes and the Holographic Principle

  11

  Ego Sum Ergo Est

  I Am Therefore It Is: the Anthropic Cosmological Principle

  12

  Just Six Questions

  Defining the Destination at the End of a Hopeful Journey

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  Modern physics is heady stuff. It seems that we can barely get through a week without being assaulted by the latest astounding physics story, its headlines splashed gaudily across the covers of popular science magazines and, occasionally, newspapers. The public’s appetite for these stories is seemingly insatiable, and there’s no escaping them. They are the subjects of innumerable radio and television news reports and documentaries, the latter often delivered with breathless exuberance and lots of arm-waving, from unconnected but always exotic locations, against a background of overly dramatic music.*

  We might agree that these stories are all very interesting and entertaining. But are they true?

  What evidence do we have for super-symmetric ‘squarks’, or superstrings vibrating in a multidimensional spacetime? How can we tell that we live in a multiverse? Is it really the case that the fundamental constituent at the heart of all matter and radiation is just ‘information’? How can we tell that the universe is a hologram projected from information encoded on its boundary? What are we really supposed to make of the intricate network of apparent cosmic coincidences in the laws of physics?

  Now, modern science has discovered that the reality of our physical existence is bizarre in many ways, but this is bizarreness for which there is an accumulated body of accepted scientific evidence. There is as yet no observational or experimental evidence for many of the concepts of contemporary theoretical physics, such as super-symmetric particles, superstrings, the multiverse, the universe as information, the holographic principle or the anthropic cosmological principle. For some of the wilder speculations of the theorists there can by definition never be any such evidence.

  This stuff is not only not true, it is not even science. I call it ‘fairytale physics’.* It is arguably borderline confidence-trickery.

  Matters came to a head for me personally one evening in January 2011. That evening the BBC broadcast an edition of its flagship Horizon science series, entitled ‘What is Reality?’. This began quite reasonably, with segments on the discovery of the top quark at Fermilab and some of the more puzzling conclusions of quantum theory. But beyond this opening the programme went downhill. It became a showcase for fairy-tale physics.

  There was no acknowledgement that this was physics that had long ago lost its grip on anything we might regard as descriptive or explicative of the real world we experience. Horizon has an impressive reputation, and I became deeply worried that many viewers might be accepting what they were being told at face value. Conscious that I was now shouting rather pointlessly at my television, I decided that it was time to make a stand.

  But, you might ask, what’s the big deal? Why get so worked up? After all, consumers of popular science may simply wish to be entertained. They may wish to have their already boggled minds further boggled by the latest ‘scientific’ thinking, through a rapid succession of ‘Oh wow!’ revelations. Blimey! Parallel universes!

  To take this view is, I believe, greatly to underestimate the people who consume popular science. It also shows an astonishing lack of respect. I suspect that many people might actually like to know what is accepted science fact and what is science fantasy. Only the hard facts can illuminate the situation sufficiently to make it possible to judge the nature of the trick, and to decide if it involves a betrayal of confidence, or even a betrayal of the truth.

  Put it this way. If we were to regard fairy-tale physics as a lively branch of contemporary philosophy rather than science, do you think it would continue to receive the same level of attention from funding agencies, universities, popular science publishers, the producers of radio and television programmes and the wider public? No?

  This is the big deal.

  In writing this book, I’ve tried to hold on to several ambitions. I wanted to describe what modern physics has to say about the nature of our physical reality, based as far as possible on the accepted body of observationally or experimentally grounded scientific fact.

  But we have to accept that even in this ‘official’ or ‘authorized’ version of reality there are many grey areas, where we run out of hard facts and have to deal with half-truths, guesses, maybes and a little imaginative speculation. This description is the nearest we can get to reality given the current gaps in our knowledge.

  I also wanted to convince you that whilst the knowledge in this authorized version goes very deep, it does seem that we have paid a high price for it. We now know much more about the physical world than we have done at any other time in history. But I believe that we comprehend and understand much less.

  We were obliged to abandon Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe quite some time ago, but there was an inherent comprehensibility about this description that we found familiar and maybe even comforting (unless you happened to be a philosopher). The world according to quantum theory remains distinctly unfamiliar and uncomfortable. ‘Nobody understands quantum mechanics,’ declared the charismatic American physicist
and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, with some justification.* And today, more than a hundred years after it was first discovered, the theory remains completely inscrutable.

  Some modern theoretical physicists have sought to compensate for this loss of understanding. Others have tried to paper over the cracks in theories that are clearly not up to the task. Or they have pushed, with vaulting ambition, for a final ‘theory of everything’. These physicists have been led — unwittingly or otherwise — to myth creation and fairy tales.

  I want to be fair to them. These physicists have been wrestling with problems for which there are as yet no observational or experimental clues to help guide them towards solutions. They are problem-rich, but data-poor. Rather than simply pleading ignorance or focusing their efforts on more tractable problems, they have chosen instead to abandon the obligation to refer their theories to our experience of the real world. They have chosen to abandon the scientific method.

  In doing this, some theorists have railed against the constraints imposed by a scientific methodology that, they argue, has outlived its usefulness. They have declared that the time has come to embrace a new methodology for a ‘post-empirical science’.

  Or, if you prefer, they have given up.

  With no observational or experimental data to ground their theories in reality, these theorists have been guided instead by their mathematics and their aesthetic sensibilities. Not surprisingly, ever more outrageous theoretical speculations freed from the need to relate to things happening in the world that we experience have transported us to the far wild shores of the utterly incredible and downright ridiculous.

  This is not a wholly new phenomenon. Speculative theorising has always played an important role in scientific development, and in this book we will take a look at some examples from history. However, under the stark, unyielding gaze of the scientific method, in the light of new observational or experimental data such speculations have either become absorbed into mainstream science or they have fallen by the wayside and been rigorously forgotten.

  But contemporary theoretical physics seems to have crossed an important threshold in at least two senses. Speculative theorizing of a kind that cannot be tested, that cannot be verified or falsified, a kind that is not subject to the mercilessness of the scientific method, is now almost common currency. The discipline has retreated into its own small, self-referential world. Its product is traded by its advocates as mainstream science within the scientific community, and peddled (or even missold) as such to the wider public.

  Secondly, the unprecedented appetite for popular science and its attraction as an income stream have proved hard for the more articulate and eloquent of these advocates to resist. The result is that virtually every other popular book published on aspects of modern physics is chock-full of fairy stories. It is pseudo-science masquerading as science.

  This will prove to be a controversial book. I’m not hopelessly naive — I don’t expect it to change current thinking or current practices. But I am hopeful that it will provoke some debate and, at the very least, provide a timely and much-needed antidote.*

  In August 2011, I joined popular science writer Michael Brooks in a discussion about science at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Brooks encouraged the assembled audience to imagine who members of the general public would name if asked to identify three scientists. He went on to suggest Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox.** The last is a former pop star turned high-energy physicist and television science presenter who has rapidly established himself as an important UK media personality. Interestingly, all are (or were) physicists.

  The contrasting approaches of Einstein and Hawking are particularly relevant to the aims of this book. Hawking is a rather indulgent fairytale physicist, recently declaring that a form of untried and untested (and possibly untestable) superstring theory is the unified theory that Einstein spent the latter part of his life searching for.

  Einstein, in contrast, was a theoretical physicist of the old school. His many pronouncements on the aims of science and the methods that scientists use are broadly consistent with common conception among both the majority of scientists and the wider public. On the basis of these pronouncements I suspect he would have been quite shocked by the state of contemporary theoretical physics. I had initially thought to title this book What Would Einstein Say? but have settled for trying to convey his likely sense of outrage by identifying for each chapter relevant quotations from his extraordinary lexicon.

  I am no longer a professional scientist, and some might argue that this means I am no longer qualified to hold an opinion on this subject. Obviously, I don’t agree. I believe I have studied it long and hard enough to allow me not only to form and hold an opinion but also to express it as best I can.

  But make no mistake, what you have in this book is an opinion that is very personal. Consequently, when I acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Professors Steve Blundell at Oxford University, Helge Kragh at Aarhus University in Denmark and Peter Woit at Columbia University in New York, who read and commented on the draft manuscript, I want to be absolutely clear that this acknowledgement should not suggest that they accept all my arguments. Of course, I take full responsibility for any errors or misconceptions that remain.

  Jim Baggott

  July 2012

  * And, to my mind at least, produced for an audience of 12 year olds suffering from attention deficit disorder. Or maybe I’m just getting too old and cranky? Answers on a postcard please …

  * With acknowledgement to Piers Bizony.

  * This quote appears in Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965), p. 129

  * And yes, I’m also interested in the income-stream.

  ** My daughter, shortly to start her second year as a university drama student, was sitting dutifully in the audience. She thought about Brooks’ question and challenged herself to name three scientists. Before Brooks could continue, she had identified Einstein, Hawking and Cox.

  1

  The Supreme Task

  Reality, Truth and the Scientific Method

  The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.

  Albert Einstein1

  Now I want to be absolutely clear and unequivocal upfront. I trained as a scientist, and although I no longer practise, I continue to believe — deeply and sincerely — that only science, correctly applied, can provide a sure path to true knowledge of the real world. If you want to know what the world is made of, where it came from, how it works and how it came to be as it is today, then my recommendation is to look to science for the answers.

  I hope I speak with conviction, but be assured that I am not a zealot. I will happily admit that the practice of science is not always black and white. We are forced to admit shades of grey. It is a lot looser and more ambiguous than many practitioners are themselves often willing to admit. Much of the looseness and ambiguity arises because science is after all a human endeavour, and human beings are complicated and unpredictable things.

  But it would be a mistake to think that the humanity of scientists is responsible for all the vagueness, that everything would be crystal clear if only a few flaky individuals would stick to the rules. When we look closely, we discover that what passes for the ‘rules’ of scientific endeavour are themselves rather vague and open to interpretation. This, I will argue, is how fairy-tale physics manages to thrive.

  Our problems begin as soon as we try to unpack the sentences that I used to open this introductory chapter. Reality is at heart a metaphysical concept — it is, quite simply, ‘beyond physics’ and therefore beyond science. And just what, exactly, is this thing we call ‘science’? For that matter, how should we define ‘truth’?

  That’s a lot of difficult questions. And, it seems, if I’m
going to accuse a bunch of theoretical physicists of abandoning the scientific method and so betraying the search for scientific truth about the nature of physical reality, then I’ll need properly to ground this assertion in some definitions. It’s better to try to clear all this up before we really get going.

  There’s quite a lot at stake here, so I’ve summarized my main conclusions about reality, science and truth in a series of six ‘principles’, handily picked out in italics with a grey background so that you can easily refer back to them if needed. Collectively, these principles define what it is that we apply science to, what science is and how we think we know when it is ‘true’.

  Of course, many physicists and philosophers of science will disagree with these principles, with varying degrees of vehemence. This, I think, is rather the point. What’s important is how they seem to you.

  In Part I, my mission will be to tell the story of the authorized version of reality in the context of these statements, showing how science has been applied to generate this contemporary version of the truth. This section concludes with a chapter summarizing most (but not all) of the problems with this authorized version and gives the reasons why we know it can’t be the whole truth.

  In Part II, I will attempt to explain how contemporary theoretical physics seeks to address these problems. It is here that fairy-tale physics sneaks in through unavoidable loopholes in our interpretation of one or more of the principles, but fails to satisfy all of them taken together. It is on this basis that I will seek to reject fairy-tale physics as metaphysics.

  Let’s start with reality.

  Real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain