Ah, the Theory of Everything

There are a lot of physicists I like. Two days ago, I spent four hours with one, working out possible research plans. Some physicists are even smart.

Yes, that sounds condesending. Physicists are a little like Latin scholars confronted by Dante, publishing in vernacular. They’ve mastered an arcane bundle of mathematics, and the complexity of the math validates the one who masters it.

The math, though, was all developed to make manipulating the representations tractable for people. (Becuase people do the math.) Some amazingly clever stuff. There’s a lot, though, that we don’t need to do that way any more. Area under a curve? Just count pixels, at whatever resolution you need. The machine doesn’t care if it takes 100 million additions.

This might have been why Wolfram’s New Kind of Science was so controversial (read: annoying) to so many physicists. We’ll have little cellular automate with weird incomprehensible semantics do the job.

The problem is not that physicists aren’t smart, really. It’s that some physicists forget their underlying assumptions and overgeneralize their expertise. Physicists work with the simplest things in the universe, and design clever experiments to isolate single, unique factors that affect outcomes.

Life is a nonlinear, nonequilibrium thing. No single factors. Hard to do experiments and know unequivocally and universally what they mean.

Which brings us to the Theory of Everything, the ongoing project to unify quantum and relativistic representations of the universe. The most striking thing about what at least many physicists like to call the Theory of Everything is that it’s really the Theory of Everything Excluding Life.

Oh, well. The Theory of Everything sounds way cooler than the Theory of Inanimate Things In Their Simplest Forms.