Scan barcode
blackoxford's review against another edition
2.0
Scientific Validity Is Not Truth or Reality
Within this brief summary of physics over the past two centuries Krauss has a great deal to say about truth and reality and the way the first is established by the second in science. He puts it this way: “[T]he central question becomes: To what extent do our imaginings reflect our own predilections, and to what extent might they actually mirror reality?” This metaphor of a ‘mirror’ is one that has been casually used for centuries. It has also be roundly critiqued as misleading and problematic for the concepts of both truth and reality (See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31947.Philosophy_and_the_Mirror_of_Nature?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=N8qNDUvaHd&rank=1). Krauss’s book and particularly his criteria for determining the truth of recent scientific theories demonstrates the issues which he seems unaware of.
As background to my interpretation of the book, for example: the physical theory of gravity formulated by Isaac Newton allowed us to successfully land human beings on the Moon and bring them back safely. Does this mean that Newton’s theory is true? No, it is not. More recent theories in physics claim that gravity is not a force as Newton conceived it but rather a distortion in space-time caused by massive objects. Gravity as such is therefore not even a ‘thing’.
But we certainly experience something which we call gravity. Does this mean that we simply don’t have the natural sensory apparatus necessary to detect its real character. Also no, because we have been able to enhance our sensory faculties through technology. This allows us to confirm and precisely measure the distortions in space-time correlated with our experience of gravity.
With our newer relativistic theories we have been able to predict and confirm the movements of large galactic structures. Does this mean that we have been able to ‘approach reality’ more closely? No. Newtonian physics is not a ‘special case’ of relativity physics even if it gives the same suggestions for getting people to the moon. The two are contrary views of reality, with very different ontological concepts. The entire history of physics is one of successive ‘breakthroughs’ the effects of which are to rubbish everything previously thought to be taken for granted about reality. As some physicists put it therefore: Even space-time is ultimately doomed. It doesn’t exist except as a very useful fiction.
I am not primarily suggesting this has anything essential to do with our natural perceptual limits (although there is a good argument that this is the case). I am claiming that it is a consequence of ideas and concepts that are derived from reflection* on this experience, not from experience itself. These ideas and concepts are literally imagined. Krauss points to imagination as the essentially human attribute: “[I]magination almost defines what it means to be human.” And he’s correct. But imagination requires language in order to formulate and communicate, even to communicate the concept of imagination. And there’s the rub.
Krauss goes off the rails when he claims that through science, as a disciplined form of imagination, “… we gain new insights into our own standing in the universe.” This we certainly do not do, unless it is to recognise that “our standing” is entirely uncertain. That is, we know nothing more about the reality of the universe, including our place in it, than we as a species have ever known before, which is precisely nothing.
Surely we are able to do things we have never done before because of the knowledge we have accumulated and shared about ‘how the world works.’ But we can only use that phrase in the strictly pragmatic sense that our knowledge has permitted us to achieve a result based on the behaviour of the universe as it responds to us, not because we know anything about what it is. And part of that knowledge of behaviour is that we have produced innumerable desirable results - like travel to the Moon - using knowledge which we have subsequently learned to be wrong about what is actually ‘there.’. In other words, our ideas and theoretical concepts may useful whether they are true or not and whether or not they conform with something called reality.
Krauss feels that “If we couldn’t imagine the world as it might be, it is possible that the world of our experience would become intolerable.” This seems dangerously close to the religious belief that we need the concept of God to make the world bearable. In any case, the epistemological value of that sentiment is zero. It is a kind of whistling in the ontological dark. By ignoring our own incapacity to definitively match our scientific ideas and concepts, indeed any kind of language, with what is not-language, we repress the knowledge that we cannot control the universe, not even by naming it (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2803972241 And https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3173722787 And https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4515522244?type=review#rating_663013665 ).
Krauss makes frequent reference to religion as a sort of parallel inquiry into reality. But what he doesn’t seem to realise is that theologians have long recognised the basic principle that fundamental reality, that is what they call God, is beyond any description, that no theory of God’s existence is even remotely correct. So unless scientists wish to call their findings some sort of divine revelation which is fixed in dogmatic formulae that can’t be challenged, they are forced to accept this basic principle. Reality is beyond language. No matter what we are able to accomplish through language, we get no closer to the world it purports to represent.
In fact it seems as if the more we know, for example about quantum physics and general relativity, the less coherent our language about the world becomes. Reality is very likely something beyond our experience given our perceptual limitations and the overwhelming power of our reflective ability. But whatever reality is, it is certainly beyond our capability to express it other than that single word’ reality.’. Krauss’s suggestion that there are “hidden realities” to be discovered through science is therefore highly misleading. There may be many more theories of the world in our future, but none of these will correspond to a reality. Like God, whatever we think reality is, He/It is not that.
Krauss is correct in one specific observation. Science, like art, discloses new ways of viewing the world. But to claim that these new ways are about reality or even an approximation of reality is unsustainable by the standards of science itself. What science creates may be useful, exciting, inspiring. But ultimately it is another form of poetry. Like the best of poetry, science is useful, exciting, or inspiring when it points to something beyond itself that cannot be described by science. Like the best of theology, science is most robust when it recognises that truth, like God, is a fictional ideal which motivates inquiry but can never be reached.
Krauss’s potted history of scientific achievements is really a story about overcoming the prejudices and false presumptions developed largely by previous science. Science, although it is empirical, is never about experience; it is about coherence of the scientific, especially the mathematical, language du jour, and through the things that may be accomplished with that language. It is through incoherence that science progresses in the drive to eliminate it. But there will always be such incoherence, just as there will always be another poem to write (or read).
This is one implication of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics, perhaps the most significant scientific finding of the 20th century. But this scientific finding, because it implies an infinity of future ‘horizons’ for inquiry, is, it seems to me, far from “intolerable.” It is as inspiring as the knowledge that there are infinite number of poems to be penned or paintings created. Krauss implicitly recognises this himself when he writes, “ultimately the driving force behind all human inquiry is the satisfaction of the quest itself.” This may be the fundamental human instinct correlated with our reflective capability. If so it acts as both a spur and an end point, an end point which is being defined while it is simultaneously pursued.
So Krauss’s unsupportable presumptions about reality and scientific validity lead him to curious conclusions. For example, he says “It is also simply disingenuous to claim that there is any definitive evidence that any of the ideas associated with string theory yet bear a clear connection to reality,” ‘Who cares?’ must be the only reasonable response. Newtonian gravity never had any connection with reality. Einsteinian space-time doesn’t either. Yet both were useful and, for their time, scientifically valid. In many ways string theory is the most coherent version of physical laws we have. Yet we have known from its inception that it is wrong. And it may not be considered ‘useful’ for decades or centuries - like many other scientific and mathematical advances - until one day it is. But it’s correspondence with reality will no be the deciding factor.
Perhaps scientists and their boosters might benefit from a slightly wider reading list. Just sayin’.
*Reflection is the old fashioned term for what is now coming to be called ‘metacognition.’ Being old fashioned I tend to use the former term. But metacognition also has a useful connotation which is important: suffering. Part of this suffering is the necessity of intellectual advance through unlearning what we thought we knew. This is a painful process and we tend therefore to resist it in proportion to the potential advance.
Within this brief summary of physics over the past two centuries Krauss has a great deal to say about truth and reality and the way the first is established by the second in science. He puts it this way: “[T]he central question becomes: To what extent do our imaginings reflect our own predilections, and to what extent might they actually mirror reality?” This metaphor of a ‘mirror’ is one that has been casually used for centuries. It has also be roundly critiqued as misleading and problematic for the concepts of both truth and reality (See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31947.Philosophy_and_the_Mirror_of_Nature?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=N8qNDUvaHd&rank=1). Krauss’s book and particularly his criteria for determining the truth of recent scientific theories demonstrates the issues which he seems unaware of.
As background to my interpretation of the book, for example: the physical theory of gravity formulated by Isaac Newton allowed us to successfully land human beings on the Moon and bring them back safely. Does this mean that Newton’s theory is true? No, it is not. More recent theories in physics claim that gravity is not a force as Newton conceived it but rather a distortion in space-time caused by massive objects. Gravity as such is therefore not even a ‘thing’.
But we certainly experience something which we call gravity. Does this mean that we simply don’t have the natural sensory apparatus necessary to detect its real character. Also no, because we have been able to enhance our sensory faculties through technology. This allows us to confirm and precisely measure the distortions in space-time correlated with our experience of gravity.
With our newer relativistic theories we have been able to predict and confirm the movements of large galactic structures. Does this mean that we have been able to ‘approach reality’ more closely? No. Newtonian physics is not a ‘special case’ of relativity physics even if it gives the same suggestions for getting people to the moon. The two are contrary views of reality, with very different ontological concepts. The entire history of physics is one of successive ‘breakthroughs’ the effects of which are to rubbish everything previously thought to be taken for granted about reality. As some physicists put it therefore: Even space-time is ultimately doomed. It doesn’t exist except as a very useful fiction.
I am not primarily suggesting this has anything essential to do with our natural perceptual limits (although there is a good argument that this is the case). I am claiming that it is a consequence of ideas and concepts that are derived from reflection* on this experience, not from experience itself. These ideas and concepts are literally imagined. Krauss points to imagination as the essentially human attribute: “[I]magination almost defines what it means to be human.” And he’s correct. But imagination requires language in order to formulate and communicate, even to communicate the concept of imagination. And there’s the rub.
Krauss goes off the rails when he claims that through science, as a disciplined form of imagination, “… we gain new insights into our own standing in the universe.” This we certainly do not do, unless it is to recognise that “our standing” is entirely uncertain. That is, we know nothing more about the reality of the universe, including our place in it, than we as a species have ever known before, which is precisely nothing.
Surely we are able to do things we have never done before because of the knowledge we have accumulated and shared about ‘how the world works.’ But we can only use that phrase in the strictly pragmatic sense that our knowledge has permitted us to achieve a result based on the behaviour of the universe as it responds to us, not because we know anything about what it is. And part of that knowledge of behaviour is that we have produced innumerable desirable results - like travel to the Moon - using knowledge which we have subsequently learned to be wrong about what is actually ‘there.’. In other words, our ideas and theoretical concepts may useful whether they are true or not and whether or not they conform with something called reality.
Krauss feels that “If we couldn’t imagine the world as it might be, it is possible that the world of our experience would become intolerable.” This seems dangerously close to the religious belief that we need the concept of God to make the world bearable. In any case, the epistemological value of that sentiment is zero. It is a kind of whistling in the ontological dark. By ignoring our own incapacity to definitively match our scientific ideas and concepts, indeed any kind of language, with what is not-language, we repress the knowledge that we cannot control the universe, not even by naming it (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2803972241 And https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3173722787 And https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4515522244?type=review#rating_663013665 ).
Krauss makes frequent reference to religion as a sort of parallel inquiry into reality. But what he doesn’t seem to realise is that theologians have long recognised the basic principle that fundamental reality, that is what they call God, is beyond any description, that no theory of God’s existence is even remotely correct. So unless scientists wish to call their findings some sort of divine revelation which is fixed in dogmatic formulae that can’t be challenged, they are forced to accept this basic principle. Reality is beyond language. No matter what we are able to accomplish through language, we get no closer to the world it purports to represent.
In fact it seems as if the more we know, for example about quantum physics and general relativity, the less coherent our language about the world becomes. Reality is very likely something beyond our experience given our perceptual limitations and the overwhelming power of our reflective ability. But whatever reality is, it is certainly beyond our capability to express it other than that single word’ reality.’. Krauss’s suggestion that there are “hidden realities” to be discovered through science is therefore highly misleading. There may be many more theories of the world in our future, but none of these will correspond to a reality. Like God, whatever we think reality is, He/It is not that.
Krauss is correct in one specific observation. Science, like art, discloses new ways of viewing the world. But to claim that these new ways are about reality or even an approximation of reality is unsustainable by the standards of science itself. What science creates may be useful, exciting, inspiring. But ultimately it is another form of poetry. Like the best of poetry, science is useful, exciting, or inspiring when it points to something beyond itself that cannot be described by science. Like the best of theology, science is most robust when it recognises that truth, like God, is a fictional ideal which motivates inquiry but can never be reached.
Krauss’s potted history of scientific achievements is really a story about overcoming the prejudices and false presumptions developed largely by previous science. Science, although it is empirical, is never about experience; it is about coherence of the scientific, especially the mathematical, language du jour, and through the things that may be accomplished with that language. It is through incoherence that science progresses in the drive to eliminate it. But there will always be such incoherence, just as there will always be another poem to write (or read).
This is one implication of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics, perhaps the most significant scientific finding of the 20th century. But this scientific finding, because it implies an infinity of future ‘horizons’ for inquiry, is, it seems to me, far from “intolerable.” It is as inspiring as the knowledge that there are infinite number of poems to be penned or paintings created. Krauss implicitly recognises this himself when he writes, “ultimately the driving force behind all human inquiry is the satisfaction of the quest itself.” This may be the fundamental human instinct correlated with our reflective capability. If so it acts as both a spur and an end point, an end point which is being defined while it is simultaneously pursued.
So Krauss’s unsupportable presumptions about reality and scientific validity lead him to curious conclusions. For example, he says “It is also simply disingenuous to claim that there is any definitive evidence that any of the ideas associated with string theory yet bear a clear connection to reality,” ‘Who cares?’ must be the only reasonable response. Newtonian gravity never had any connection with reality. Einsteinian space-time doesn’t either. Yet both were useful and, for their time, scientifically valid. In many ways string theory is the most coherent version of physical laws we have. Yet we have known from its inception that it is wrong. And it may not be considered ‘useful’ for decades or centuries - like many other scientific and mathematical advances - until one day it is. But it’s correspondence with reality will no be the deciding factor.
Perhaps scientists and their boosters might benefit from a slightly wider reading list. Just sayin’.
*Reflection is the old fashioned term for what is now coming to be called ‘metacognition.’ Being old fashioned I tend to use the former term. But metacognition also has a useful connotation which is important: suffering. Part of this suffering is the necessity of intellectual advance through unlearning what we thought we knew. This is a painful process and we tend therefore to resist it in proportion to the potential advance.
nickystrickland's review against another edition
3.0
Read in chunks around other life things. Covers a lot though the year 2005 version I read is starting to date a bit especially regarding CERN (hadn't been turned on yet at point of publication).
weaselweader's review
3.0
I’m still convinced that the anthropic principle is a meaningful cosmological outlook!
HIDING IN THE MIRROR is, first of all, a brief summary of the history and current status of physics' theoretical outlook at parallel universes, multiple dimensions, string theory, field theory and the manifestation of the forces - strong, weak, electromagnetism and gravity - we experience daily in the context of a visible three dimensional universe which might be described as a manifold embedded in a universe with a much larger but still undetermined number of dimensions. (Both the magnitude and the curvature of these dimensions is also far from locked down in these theories). Some very esoteric readers might also call it a primer on the subject but, even as a graduate of a university program in math and theoretical physics, I’m not sure that such a term has any meaningful application here. It’s pretty heady stuff and some of the reading is might tough sledding.
But, despite its difficulty, if you take your time you might be rewarded with some interesting insights. Consider, for example, this brief description of the Planck distance that conveys some idea of just how small it really is:
“Imagine you were looking at our galaxy through a distant telescope from another galaxy far, far away. Say your telescope could just barely resolve individual stars in the Milky Way, as the Hubble Space Telescope can in the nearby Andromeda galaxy, two million light years away. The problem of measuring extra dimensions on the Planck scale is for us, then, similar to the problem of trying to detect and probe individual atoms in that distant galaxy using your telescope!”
On multiple universes:
"… the principles [of inflationary theory] would in general imply that the entire visible universe is likely to be merely a part of an incredibly complicated “metaverse”of causally disconnected universes. Some of these may be collapsing, others expanding, some may only now be experiencing a big bang expansion … "
Interesting, enjoyable, informative but well beyond the difficulty level that might appeal to a casual reader of popular science.
Paul Weiss
HIDING IN THE MIRROR is, first of all, a brief summary of the history and current status of physics' theoretical outlook at parallel universes, multiple dimensions, string theory, field theory and the manifestation of the forces - strong, weak, electromagnetism and gravity - we experience daily in the context of a visible three dimensional universe which might be described as a manifold embedded in a universe with a much larger but still undetermined number of dimensions. (Both the magnitude and the curvature of these dimensions is also far from locked down in these theories). Some very esoteric readers might also call it a primer on the subject but, even as a graduate of a university program in math and theoretical physics, I’m not sure that such a term has any meaningful application here. It’s pretty heady stuff and some of the reading is might tough sledding.
But, despite its difficulty, if you take your time you might be rewarded with some interesting insights. Consider, for example, this brief description of the Planck distance that conveys some idea of just how small it really is:
“Imagine you were looking at our galaxy through a distant telescope from another galaxy far, far away. Say your telescope could just barely resolve individual stars in the Milky Way, as the Hubble Space Telescope can in the nearby Andromeda galaxy, two million light years away. The problem of measuring extra dimensions on the Planck scale is for us, then, similar to the problem of trying to detect and probe individual atoms in that distant galaxy using your telescope!”
On multiple universes:
"… the principles [of inflationary theory] would in general imply that the entire visible universe is likely to be merely a part of an incredibly complicated “metaverse”of causally disconnected universes. Some of these may be collapsing, others expanding, some may only now be experiencing a big bang expansion … "
Interesting, enjoyable, informative but well beyond the difficulty level that might appeal to a casual reader of popular science.
Paul Weiss
bill_desmedt's review against another edition
3.0
The spine of this bookhas been staring at me from my shelf for a while. I started it once, but found it all too easy to set aside. I think the problem is less with Krauss than with the subject matter: extra hidden dimensions in string theory and elsewhere. This area of study is still awaiting its Lincoln Barnett .
I took up the cudgels again owing to an inquiry from Scott Sigler. This time I finished it, though by end the game hardly seemed worth the candle. If you're looking for an incisive critique of string theory, you're better off with Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics"; if you're trying to get the scoop on large extra dimensions (as I was for Scott), then Lisa Randall's "Warped Passages" would be the way to go.
Here one gets the sense that Krauss, who did such a masterful job of science popularization in "[b:The Physics of Star Trek|2104|The Physics of Star Trek|Lawrence M. Krauss|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1159814418s/2104.jpg|6155]," has simply gotten tired of (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde's description of a fox hunt) explaining the inscrutable to the unedifiable.
He's also gotten tired of writing -- or at least of reading over what he's written, or he wouldn't leave in place such boners as (p. 53) "In physics, as in horeshoes, being merely close is not good enough." What makes this gaffe particularly egregious is that he subsequently gets it right ("close is *only* useful in horseshoes and hand grenades," p. 160), and then back-references the place where he got it wrong.
I took up the cudgels again owing to an inquiry from Scott Sigler. This time I finished it, though by end the game hardly seemed worth the candle. If you're looking for an incisive critique of string theory, you're better off with Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics"; if you're trying to get the scoop on large extra dimensions (as I was for Scott), then Lisa Randall's "Warped Passages" would be the way to go.
Here one gets the sense that Krauss, who did such a masterful job of science popularization in "[b:The Physics of Star Trek|2104|The Physics of Star Trek|Lawrence M. Krauss|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1159814418s/2104.jpg|6155]," has simply gotten tired of (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde's description of a fox hunt) explaining the inscrutable to the unedifiable.
He's also gotten tired of writing -- or at least of reading over what he's written, or he wouldn't leave in place such boners as (p. 53) "In physics, as in horeshoes, being merely close is not good enough." What makes this gaffe particularly egregious is that he subsequently gets it right ("close is *only* useful in horseshoes and hand grenades," p. 160), and then back-references the place where he got it wrong.
More...