Month: February 2015

Sober reflection may be required after my paean of praise for physicists in the post In Our Time, The Photon.

Too many worlds is a thought-provoking Aeon article by Philip Ball.

Nobody knows what happens inside quantum experiments. So why are some so keen to believe in parallel universes?

Apparently there is a strongly held view that simplicity and elegance trump falsifiability, and there are an indefinite number of parallel universes in which everything that can happen does happen. The problem is that we are inhabit just one of these, and can know nothing of any of the others.

Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics by George Ellis and Joseph Silk (Nature, 16 December 2014) proposes that physics is becoming undermined by untestable theory. Any hypothesis is only as good as the evidence that supports it.

As card-carrying Popperian, I am with Ellis and Silk. However, all seem to agree that the Copenhagen model won’t do. The question is: what can we put in its place?

I have nothing to offer. However, important questions about the nature of reality and of ourselves clearly coincide in deciding how to interpret quantum mechanics.

I still wish I were a physicist. I have consistently sought unifying principles in biology, biochemistry, and evolution, while believing that nothing can advance understanding if it fails to make predictions about observations that could, in principle, demonstrate that it is false. I act on the assumptions that we all inhabit the same single World, and that we can, if we are honest with each other and ourselves, share our experiences of it, thus increasing our understanding; pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge; seeing more deeply into nature. The alternative seems absurd. And, in fact, dangerous.

Nevertheless, both physicists and biologists eventually run up against the insight that there is a problem in understanding how we can know things in the first place. There, I am endorse Philip Ball’s closing comment.

Here, after all, is a theory that seems to allow everything conceivable to happen. To pretend that its only conceptual challenge is that it leads to scenarios like the plot of Sliding Doors (1998) shows a puzzling lacuna in the formidable minds of its advocates. Perhaps they should stop trying to tell us that philosophy is dead.

What an informative and inspiring edition of BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, The Photon on 12 February.

Steve Jones sometimes refers to biologists as having “physics envy”. I suffer from this. Steve suggests it is because biologists know that physicists are cleverer than they are. Hard to know. However, as a group, physicists use terms clearly and consistently, and don’t waste time on trivial disagreement. They seem to wish to understand each other, and always strive to know how the world really is.

I’d intended to write on my own experience as a guest, last May 15, on In Our Time. BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, Photosynthesis. I’ll try to get back to this. Just for now, let me record that Melvyn Bragg – surely the perfect host and chairman – wrote:

I think it was John Allen who said that the United States aerospace industry is giving quite substantial support to research into photosynthesis. The reason that NASA is interested is because they are looking for ways in which they can identify on the surface of planets what may be the origins of life as we know it. Seems a terrifically oblique way to subsidise science, but in my view, the more oblique the better. John ended the programme with a wonderful quotation from Priestley about the practical discovery of photosynthesis. It was, he said, as a result of Priestley’s curiosity. All of Priestley’s research was curiosity-driven. Again and again research has been curiosity-driven.

I’ve picked up from academics over the past few years a feeling, sometimes of sadness, sometimes approaching despair, that that sort of research – i.e. intellectual curiosity, knowledge for the sake of knowledge – is not in favour at the moment. Why on earth have we become a box-ticking, bureaucratic, over-managed society wherever you look? Why don’t we follow the talent, instead of (as in the case of universities and elsewhere) driving the talent out because of ways of managing which only make sense in some sterile boardroom…?

How strongly I agree.

How clearly is Melvyn’s last point illustrated by subsequent events.