Quantum physicist David Bohm on why there cannot be a Theory of Everything
| July 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics |
David Bohm/Karol Langner (CC)
At Scientific American, John Horgan reprints his profile of Bohm (1917-1992) shortly before his death, in which Bohm explains his view:
Although he tried to make the world more sensible with his pilot-wave model, he also argued that complete clarity is impossible. He reached this conclusion after seeing an experiment on television, in which a drop of ink was squeezed onto a cylinder of glycerine. When the cylinder was rotated, the ink diffused through the glycerine in an apparently irreversible fashion. Its order seemed to have disintegrated. But when the direction of rotation was reversed, the ink gathered into a drop again.
He was consistent:
Bohm rejected the claim of physicists such as Hawking and Weinberg that physics can achieve a final “theory of everything” that explains the world. Science is an infinite, “inexhaustible process,” he said. “The form of knowledge is to have at any moment something essential, and the appearance can be explained. But then when we look deeper at these essential things they turn out to have some feature of appearances. We’re not ever going to get a final essence which isn’t also the appearance of something.” More.
As his interview with Horgan shows, he did not even think that one can reduce everything to mathematics. He believed in an “implicate order” but doubted that it could be captured by the methods of science alone. It would require a unification of art and science.
He might be right. Much seems stalled just now.
See also: Can there really be a Theory of Everything? Wouldn’t it really be a theology of everything?
How string theory can be a theory of everything
Post-modern physics: String theory gets over the need for evidence
Dusting off a 1970s Theory of Everything could be bad news for supersymmetry
Can a theory of consciousness help us build a theory of everything?
and
Scientific American Science writer John Horgan still doubts cosmic inflation …
10 Responses to Quantum physicist David Bohm on why there cannot be a Theory of Everything
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Bohm’s pilot wave theory has been found to be, to put it mildly, inadequate:
In regards to Bohm’s work, Bohr quipped,,,
Moreover, pilot-wave theory requires that “hidden variables” exist. Yet, “multiple mathematical theorems have all but proven that hidden variables between particles cannot explain away the instantaneous ‘spooky action at a distance’ that is seen in quantum mechanics.”
Besides being mathematically preposterous, the conjecture of hidden variables is now also experimentally falsified. Specifically, in direct contradiction to Bohm’s base assumption within pilot wave theory, it has now also been experimentally confirmed that “entangled objects do not cause each other to behave the way they do.”
As the following article states, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
Here are a few more notes along this line,
As to this particular ‘artistic’ sentiment of Bohm’s
Ironically, Bohm, (although he seemingly detested a ‘mechanistic’ view of reality in which art, and particularly the artist himself, was left on the cutting room floor), Bohm, with his pilot wave theory was himself fighting against letting the ‘artist’ back into the picture of science. To be specific, Bohm, with his deterministic pilot wave theory, was fighting against the instrumentalist approach of quantum mechanics in which the free will of humans directly contradicts the deterministic view of reality that Bohm himself seemingly detested.
As Steven Weinberg states in the following article, (in the instrumentalist of quantum mechanics) humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.,,, the instrumentalist approach (in quantum mechanics) turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.,,, In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure,,, Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,
And as leading experimental physicist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Thus, Bohm’s preferred view of art and science someday ‘merging’ into a ‘artistic spirit’ was a view of reality that he actually, apparently unwittingly, was fighting against with his, now falsified, deterministic pilot wave theory.
Of related interest:
Catholic physicist Stanley L. Jaki says a theory of everything is possible.
Who cares? This is not even philosophy, it’s feelings. Do the work, show results, demonstrate and quit yapping senselessly.
Shut up and calculate was the mantra about QM for a long time. Efforts to understand what it means about reality are not worth the effort. Not everyone believed that was the proper perspective, though.
jdk,
You misunderstand. Read again.
Read what again? And what do I misunderstand??? I was just making a statement about how there is a disagreement among physicists, especially 50 years or so ago, that trying to interpret QM was not worthwhile: the calculations worked and that was sufficient was the attitude.
At 3 mung states:
I don’t know what particular quote, or line of thought, that mung is referring to, but I do know that, in regards to Godel’s incompleteness theorem, Jaki stated this:
Godel’s incompleteness can be stated simply as such:
Bottom line, due to Godel, even if a single overarching mathematical theory happened to describe everything, we still would find it necessary to postulate God for why that particular equation, out of an infinity of other possible mathematical descriptions, described the universe:
Here are a few more thoughts on what the true ‘theory of everything’ actually turns out to be.
Verse:
For bornagain77:
“Godel’s theorem does not mean that physicists cannot come up with a theory of everything or TOE in short.”
A Late Awakening to Gödel in Physics (pdf)
mung, there is the same huge caveat for a “TOE” in your referenced paper, which you did not make explicitly clear, that I mentioned in my quote,,,
Of supplemental note: Jaki, in the following video,
,,, seems to agree with Einstein when Einstein stated that,,
Yet, ‘the Now’, as philosophers term it, and contrary to what Einstein (and Jaki) thought possible for experimental physics, and according to advances in quantum mechanics, takes precedence over past events in time.
Moreover, due to these advances in quantum mechanics, it would now be much more appropriate, as far a quantum physics is concerned, to phrase Einstein’s answer to philosophers in this way: