| Russell Stannard: We can't know everything | My bright idea The physics professor is convinced that some questions will be too taxing for mankindIt is the hubris of other scientists that bothers Russell Stannard, emeritus professor of physics at the Open University. Claims such as that made recently by his fellow physicist Stephen Hawking that we're close to a theory of everything get short shrift.Stannard, a high-energy nuclear physicist, as well as a regular contributor to Thought for the Day on Radio 4's Today programme, believes we may be approaching the boundaries of the knowable; such is the message of his new book, The End of Discovery (OUP). But that is not because we'll have figured everything out – it is because we're incapable of doing so.In the 19th century, claims were made, in the wake of Newton and Maxwell, that there weren't likely to be any further significant advances in scientific understanding. Clearly that was premature, but will there be a point at which we say, that's it, we know it all? I think there's going to come a time when our descendants have discovered everything about the world that is open for us to understand. Whether they will know that they've come to the end is another matter because they'll be faced with many questions, as we are today, and just as we hope to be able to answer some of those questions, so will they, but there's no way of proving that a question will have no answer.So I don't think there'll be a triumphal end when everyone says: "OK, that's it, we've wrapped it up!" I think science will go out with a whimper rather than a bang. You'll get into a situation where for a very, very, very long time nothing interesting happens and people start to think, well, becoming a research scientist is probably not a good career move.What practical limits are there to our knowledge?Physicists today have a favourite theory – string theory – which is associated with M-theory, which Stephen Hawking has been talking about recently, where the assumption is that the ultimate constituents of matter are not tiny bits of dirt, they're actually vibrating strings. It's a very attractive theory. The trouble is that one expects these strings are going to be so tiny that you would need a Large Hadron Collider [as at Cern in Geneva] the size of a galaxy in order to be able to see them. So, for purely practical reasons, one is not going to be able to verify that they're there. These strings are supposed to be vibrating in 10 spatial dimensions, too. But we have evidence for only three.Also, M-theory postulates the existence of many other universes; by definition, you're not going to be able to detect them, otherwise they'd be part of this universe. So already it begins to look as though we might be foiled in a complete theory of everything simply from practical considerations. On top of that, there are the possible limitations of the human brain.Your point being that we didn't evolve to deal with these profound questions about our place in the universe?Yes, it was a question of avoiding predators, finding food and shelter, finding a mate and passing on your genes. Well, already we have managed somehow to go a long way further than that. Knowing about DNA, or the Big Bang, doesn't necessarily help you to survive to a point where you can mate. But we have to be very careful not to get carried away in thinking that the brain is capable of understanding absolutely everything.But we have technology – we outsource problems to computers. Aren't we already involved in some form of directed evolution?Certainly computers are able to help us with calculations that take us unaided much, much longer. But computers can do only what we, namely our brains, tell them to do. If you're doing fundamental science, what you're trying to do all the time is to come up with new thoughts. And I can't see how a computer is going to be able to come up some with some absolutely fresh way of looking at things unless it's been programmed to do that.Are some questions simply beyond the reach of science? The finest minds have been taxed by the questions of consciousness and of free will and determinism for a long time now, but there has been little progress. There's something about the quality of those questions that make one suspect we're barking up the wrong tree; we're not going to be able to get an answer. I cannot see how qualities like love, pain and fear will ever be quantified and find themselves in an equation. I can't see how you're ever going to get a simple, single way of looking at things that encapsulates everything we know about what it is to be human.So when Stephen Hawking announces that M-theory is "the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe", he's wrong?That philosophy of Hawking's is precisely the one that I'm trying to counter. His views, as have been reported, are a perfect example of what is called scientism: that science is the only route to knowledge and that, ultimately, we'll have a complete understanding of everything. That is nonsense, and I think it's dangerous nonsense, because it makes scientists sound exceedingly arrogant. It's all very well saying the universe came about as a result of spontaneous creation due to M-theory. But that raises the question: where did M-theory come from? Why are there intelligible physical laws?And it isn't even the only game in town...It hasn't even formulated yet! Ask these people: "Please write down the equation." I can write down Schrödinger's equation of quantum mechanics, I can write down Newton's law of gravitation. "You write down the equation which is M-theory." They can't. Because they haven't got one.Usually, one thinks of science as an endeavour in which you don't have to believe anything unless it can be experimentally proved but among certain scientists you're beginning to get the view that perhaps it's very inconvenient that we can't verify our theory, but it's so aesthetically pleasing that it simply has to be true, therefore we will make an exception and bring into science this idea that we know in our guts to be right. It's a very smug attitude: we know best because it's beautiful. But the history of physics is littered with theories that at the time were considered beautiful – and which everyone hoped to be the right ones – and they turned out not to be.But surely physics has had a good track record in the past 150 years?Yes, it's been a golden age. And the majority of questions that we face will be answered. But there will be some with which we're stuck. You must not expect that science is going to be able to explain absolutely everything,Are you religious?Yes. I didn't think I'd bring God into this book. But if you don't believe in God, you might want to read it to get a more balanced perspective as to what science itself is like and what it's done in the past, very much to its credit, and what it's capable of doing, but also what its limitations are.The End of Discovery by Russell Stannard is published by OUP at £14.99 Stephen HawkingEvolutionCaspar Llewellyn Smithguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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