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Hawking & Mlodinow: No 'theory of everything'
- zeynel1 16y ago"we adopt a view that we call model - dependent realism" I have been writing for years that nature is definitional; http://science1.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/true-knowledge/ http://science1.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/true-knowledge/ I am glad to read that Hawking realizes this now. But this is not enough. He needs to give up his materialism; and reject the materialist physics. But what this quote reveals is that; study of nature is not a "physical" process; study of nature is not a monopoly of physicists; anyone who is curious can study nature without professional doctrines developed by physicists. All you have to do is to develop your own model. I welcome Hawking's statement.
- gmlk 16y agoPersonally I think that the physical reality can't be described in a finite Theory of Everything (ToE) for the same reason as that there is no ToE for mathematics? See http://plus.maths.org/issue37/features/omega/index.html http://plus.maths.org/issue37/features/omega/index.html
- zeynel1 16y agoThanks for the link to that article. Very interesting. But I disagree with the language of this sentence; it contradicts the rest of the article: "we can distinguish a world which can be explained by science from one that cannot." "The sentence, to me, should be "we can distinguish a world which can be explained by [mathematics] from one that cannot." "Mathematics" and "science" are not synonyms. But I agree with Leibnitz that, to paraphrase, "line explains the dots." And also, I would like to note that; physicists use "theory of everything" to mean two things; and they exploit this meanings anarchy that they created: Even in the same sentence; by "theory of everything" a physicist may mean "a theory that will conform three famously incompatible physics theories" and "a theory that will explain the entire reality." These two definition are not the same.