Hawking & Mlodinow: No 'theory of everything'

physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com

6 points·edw519··3 comments

Personally I think that the physical reality can't be described in a finite Theory of Everything (ToE) for the same reason as that there is no ToE for mathematics? See http://plus.maths.org/issue37/features/omega/index.html

Thanks for the link to that article. Very interesting. But I disagree with the language of this sentence; it contradicts the rest of the article:

"we can distinguish a world which can be explained by science from one that cannot."

"The sentence, to me, should be "we can distinguish a world which can be explained by [mathematics] from one that cannot."

"Mathematics" and "science" are not synonyms. But I agree with Leibnitz that, to paraphrase, "line explains the dots."

And also, I would like to note that; physicists use "theory of everything" to mean two things; and they exploit this meanings anarchy that they created: Even in the same sentence; by "theory of everything" a physicist may mean "a theory that will conform three famously incompatible physics theories" and "a theory that will explain the entire reality." These two definition are not the same.

"we adopt a view that we call model - dependent realism"

I have been writing for years that nature is definitional; http://science1.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/true-knowledge/ I am glad to read that Hawking realizes this now.

But this is not enough. He needs to give up his materialism; and reject the materialist physics.

But what this quote reveals is that; study of nature is not a "physical" process; study of nature is not a monopoly of physicists; anyone who is curious can study nature without professional doctrines developed by physicists.

All you have to do is to develop your own model.

I welcome Hawking's statement.

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