When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought

by Jim Holt

The current problem with physics, according to Smolin, is basically a problem of style. The initiators of the dual revolution a century ago—Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg—were deep thinkers, or “seers.” They confronted questions about space, time, and matter in a philosophical way. The new theories they created were essentially correct. But “the development of these theories required a lot of hard technical work, and so for several generations physics was ‘normal science’ and was dominated by master craftspeople,” Smolin observes. “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.” Today, the challenge of unifying physics will require another revolution, one that mere virtuoso calculators are ill-equipped to carry out. And the solution, presumably, is to cultivate a new generation of seers.