HZY wrote: ToE can never be because it permanently awaits the next discovery.This is exactly the point I'm trying to make. We've had socks that went missing years ago and we're still trying to discover what happened to them.
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HZY wrote: ToE can never be because it permanently awaits the next discovery.This is exactly the point I'm trying to make. We've had socks that went missing years ago and we're still trying to discover what happened to them.
Atreyu wrote:As far as whether or not it will ever be "worked out" by modern science, I would say no. But it's possible to have one, because it already exists and was developed long ago, only it is not known by modern science, nor will it ever be because they don't know where to look for it. Nor will they ever have the inclination to do so, since they will naturally always be under the very strong impression that they can arrive at it by themselves.Hi Atreyu, interesting post!
Philophile wrote:Is a ToE fundamentally possible?I think yes, even without us having a complete mapping of interrelationships of Universe. What follows what Ive deduced from my experiences. It is best to think of this cosmic hierarchy as a table of contents, of a book entitled "U"niverse: The Cosmic Hierarchy.
Paradigmer wrote:Can you point us to the TOE that already exists and was developed long ago?To put it briefly, two laws known in ancient times which applied to Everything Everywhere were
Philophile wrote: ↑February 3rd, 2015, 7:53 am A theory of everything (ToE) is a proposed theory which combines consistently the two well known and well verified theories in physics of general relativity and quantum field theory. If one could find such a theory, it could help understand questions of dark matter and black holes, as well provide the most fundamental description of our universe. There are two major candidates for a ToE, string theory (or M-theory) and loop quantum gravity. Both, however, still have issues, even after being worked on for 30+ years, as well as no experimental verification. Recent experiments at the LHC (large hadron collider) don't help: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/science/2013/08/18/1-string-theory-takes-a-hit-in-latest-experiments.htmlI've tried numerous times to contact people like Verlinde, Tamara D., Rovei, Carroll, etc. In vain. Only Harari was kind enough to reply. It seems so obvious to me what quarks and leptons are made of (and the Higgs particle, for that matter). It seems so obvious what is dark energy and matter. Try to tell that on a physics forum... Instant ban, and the so-called important physicists and cosmologists are just afraid...
My thoughts are that there are three possible reasons why such a ToE has not been discovered. Either scientist are not trying hard enough (doubtful), we need to wait for more data (could take a generation), or more interestingly, such a ToE is fundamentally impossible. This is the question I wish to discuss here:
Is a ToE fundamentally possible?
I propose there is something fundamental about the universe which is unknowable. Given we live in the universe, and take measurements within it, we interact with the universe. The only completely closed system is the universe itself. Thus one could only completely understand the universe by observing it from outside the universe. Since this is not possible, neither is a ToE.
Or is it that a current candidate for a ToE will get closer and closer to the physical reality of the universe as it gets modified and changed, but only reach an exact description as time goes to infinity?
Philophile wrote: ↑February 3rd, 2015, 7:53 am I propose there is something fundamental about the universe which is unknowable. Given we live in the universe, and take measurements within it, we interact with the universe. The only completely closed system is the universe itself. Thus one could only completely understand the universe by observing it from outside the universe. Since this is not possible, neither is a ToE.The late Stephen Hawking had actually said something somewhat similar to that:
Hawking in "Godel and the end of physics" wrote: In the standard positivist approach to the philosophy of science, physical theories live rent free in a Platonic heaven of ideal mathematical models. That is, a model can be arbitrarily detailed, and can contain an arbitrary amount of information, without affecting the universes they describe. But we are not angels, who view the universe from the outside. Instead, we and our models, are both part of the universe we are describing. Thus a physical theory, is self referencing, like in Gödel’s theorem. One might therefore expect it to be either inconsistent, or incomplete. The theories we have so far, are both inconsistent, and incomplete.Regardless of how it was obtained, in the end, the ToE would still be a document.
Wikipedia on the term "quine" wrote: A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. The standard terms for these programs in the computability theory and computer science literature are "self-replicating programs", "self-reproducing programs", and "self-copying programs".Even though there may be other reasons why acquiring a copy of the ToE from within the universe would be impossible, I do not believe that the self-referencing nature of such situation would necessarily be a problem.
A quine is a fixed point of an execution environment, when the execution environment is viewed as a function transforming programs into their outputs. Quines are possible in any Turing-complete programming language, as a direct consequence of Kleene's recursion theorem.
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