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by
Lee Smolin
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August 31 - October 1, 2019
What could that wrong assumption be? My guess is that it involves two things: the foundations of quantum mechanics and the nature of time.
More and more, I have the feeling that quantum theory and general relativity are both deeply wrong about the nature of time.
It’s terribly hard to represent time, and that’s why there’s a good chance that this representation is the missing piece.
The worst thing we could do would be to hold them back by insisting that they work on our ideas.
Why, despite so much effort by thousands of the most talented and well-trained scientists, has fundamental physics made so little definitive progress in the last twenty-five years?
there may be more professors of physics in a large university department today than there were a hundred years ago in the whole of Europe,
we should look at some pervasive changes in the academic landscape that a young person must negotiate in order to pursue a career in science.
I’ve met more than one older colleague who never once actually had to apply for a job.
there are fewer corners where a creative person can hide, secure in some kind of academic job, and pursue risky and original ideas.
the decline in undergraduate degrees is more than compensated for by increases in PhDs earned by bright, ambitious students from the developing world.
universities don’t function well as vehicles for innovation, even when nothing more is at stake than modernizing a curriculum that is eight decades behind
to understand the workings of a community you have to investigate power. Who has power over whom, and how is that power exercised?
If the discussion veers to the fact that string theory predicts a landscape and hence makes no predictions, some string theorists will rhapsodize about changing the definition of science.
string theorists seem to have no problem believing that string theory must be right while acknowledging that they have no idea what it really is.
At first I found this puzzling. I was pursuing an old strategy of working on different approaches to try to learn from each what I could.
they genuinely believe that concentrating the efforts of a large community of very bright people will lead to faster progress than encouraging colleagues to think independently and pursue a variety of directions.
what people say privately to their friends is not the point. Indeed, if that wider range of views is expressed privately rather than publicly, it suggests that there is a hierarchy controlling the conversation—and
There is no scientist, not even Newton or Einstein, who was not wrong on a substantial number of issues they had strong views about.
Another facet of string theory that many find disturbing is what can only be described as the messianic tendency of some of its practitioners, especially some younger ones. For them, string theory has become a religion.
Finiteness is not the only example in string theory of a conjecture that is widely believed but so far unproved.
I’ve never heard a mathematician refer to a result as “true but not proven,” but beyond that,
It also leads to a corrosion of the ethics and methods of science, because a large community of smart people are willing to believe key conjectures without demanding to see them proved.
He joined the philosophy club, where he discovered that he could win on any side of a philosophical debate simply by using the skills he had learned in the acting profession. This made him wonder whether academic success had any rational basis.
young academic scientists have the best chance of succeeding if they impress older scientists with technically sweet solutions to long-standing problems posed by dominant research programs.
it becomes impossible to distinguish sciences like physics and biology from other belief systems—such as Marxism, witchcraft, and intelligent design—that claim to be scientific.5 If no such distinction can be made, the door is left open to a scary kind of relativism, in which all claims to truth and reality have equal footing.
The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing.
When people join a scientific community, they give up certain childish but universal desires: the need to feel that they are right all the time or the belief that they are in possession of the absolute truth.
science in its modern form evolved from monasteries and theological schools—ethical communities whose aim was the preservation of religious dogma.
the same factors that cause people to agree about all sorts of things that don’t rely on evidence, from religious beliefs to fashion to trends in popular culture.
people who are good at asking genuinely novel but relevant questions are rare, and that the ability to look at the state of a technical field and see a hidden assumption or a new avenue of research is a skill quite distinct from the workaday skills that are a prerequisite
He was slow in argument, easily confused; others were much better at mathematics. Einstein himself is said to have remarked, “It’s not that I’m so smart. It’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
we were being taught to look down on people who thought about foundational problems. When we asked about the foundational issues in quantum theory, we were told that no one fully understood them but that concern with them was no longer part of science.
The paradoxical situation of string theory—so much promise, so little fulfillment—is exactly what you get when a lot of highly trained master craftspeople try to do the work of seers.
I can think of no mainstream string theorist who has proposed an original idea about the foundations of quantum theory or the nature of time.
deep, persistent problems are never solved by accident; they are solved only by people who are obsessed with them and set out to solve them directly.
To tell the truth, we laugh at them behind their backs, and sometimes as soon as they have left the room. Having done Nobel Prize–level physics—or even having won the prize itself—apparently doesn’t protect you when you question universally held assumptions such as the special and general theories of relativity.
If even the most honored visionaries are not taken seriously once they begin to question basic assumptions, you can imagine how well people fare who are seers but not lucky enough to have made substantial contributions first.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity as a relational theory is now the way we in the field understand it.
Time and the freedom to think, then, are all that a seer needs to find that unexamined assumption. The rest they do themselves.
he was motivated to invent quantum computers by his disquiet with foundational problems in both mathematics and quantum theory.
could have been discovered anytime since the 1930s. Here is a clear example of how the suppression of a field by academic politics can hold up progress for decades.
his years of isolation allowed him to engage in scholarly self-education,
to reach out in my own way to the things I wished to learn, rather than relying on the notions of the consensus, overt or tacit, coming from a more or less extended clan of which I found myself a member, or which for any other reason laid claim to be taken as an authority.
once asked a successful venture capitalist how his company decided how much risk to take on. He said that if more than 10 percent of the companies he funded made money, he knew he was not taking on enough risk.
I would not be surprised if research showed that these rankings are, on average, poor predictors of genuine success in science. If we were really concerned about making good hires, we would carry out such research.
nor have I ever seen guidelines on how to recognize signs of prejudice or stereotyping in your own or others’ views.
There is heated debate among physicists over why there are not more women or blacks in physics, compared with other fields just as challenging, such as mathematics or astronomy. I believe the answer is simple: blatant prejudice.
No matter what the field, a taste of success is often all that is required to turn erstwhile rebels into conservative guardians of their research programs.
It is also true that some of these creative and original scientists are not easy to get along with. They can be impatient. They express themselves too directly when they disagree with you, and they lack the good manners that come easily to those for whom fitting in is more important than being right. Having known several such “difficult” people, I suspect they are angry for the same reason that very smart women in science are sometimes angry: They have suffered a lifetime of being made to feel marginal.
But we pay a severe price for the tenure system: Too much job security, too much power, and too little accountability for older people.
