packrat

HANGING BY A STRING

“The arc of history, in the long run, bends toward justice.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“A culture that does away with God cannot succeed, for the simple reason that God exists.” — R. Guardini
“No experiment can be considered valid until it has been confirmed by theory.” – Wolfgang Pauli

Despite the bewildering array of opening quotes, this essay is occasioned by my reading of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, an explanation for the layman, by one of its leading researchers, of String Theory.

The basic idea of string theory is that the elementary particles (electrons, quarks, etc.) that are conceived of as point particles in the “standard model” of particle physics are in fact tiny (on the order of the Planck length, approximately 1x10^-33 cm) vibrating one-dimensional strings. But the devil is in the mathematical details. These infinitesimal strings are vibrating under literally tons of tension. They are moving in an 11-dimensional spacetime. The theory requires (due to an arcane symmetry principle) the existence of a whole class of particles none of which, though they should be discoverable at energies available or soon to be available to us, have been found.

So with all the improbabilities (and some mind-bending consequences I won’t even attempt to explain), why is string theory seen by many as the cutting edge of physics? Because symmetry principles have been perhaps the greatest driver of progress in modern physics. Because string theory can eliminate the incompatibility between relativity and quantum mechanics. Because it shows promise – if we can ever formulate its equations precisely enough and learn how to solve them – of deriving the masses and other properties of the elementary particles, which now must be merely expressed as givens, as direct consequences of the theory, arising naturally from the vibration of the strings in a certain configuration of multidimensional spacetime.

The mathematics behind such a theory could not be simple; and indeed, it’s daunting even to the physicists working with it, pushing the very envelope of pure-mathematical technique. Greene has written a book for laymen. But a glance in the appendix at some of his notes “for the mathematically inclined reader” is quite enough to scare off 99.9% of us.

I have to explain my own position here. Me and mathematics parted company somewhere around the middle phases of completing the square, where I just could not see, despite many efforts to enlighten me, how what was being proposed was in fact doing the same thing to both sides of the equation. That there are areas of mathematics I can’t understand – whose very existence is unknown to me – is no strange concept. But when physicists speak of a particle or its properties “arising naturally” from a set of equations (or being rendered impossible), I begin to feel myself in the presence of the kind of mindset that discovered concepts like the Trinity and Calvinist predestination within the pages of the Bible.

My most lasting impression, in fact, is how much the whole enterprise resembles medieval Scholasticism: a withdrawn expertocracy doing highly arcane research in a foreign language (there, Latin; here, mathematics) on the basis of principles as unprovable as Euclid’s axioms (though far less obvious to the uninitiated) and without the least hope of any confirmation within any reasonable time frame in this outer Universe.

And may I add (as Greene himself does) the shortcoming which no amount of peer-reviewed research will remedy: the lack of a master ground-idea, like Einstein’s principle of equivalence between gravitation and acceleration, or his acceptance of the constancy of the speed of light not as an anomaly to be explained, but as the very foundation of a new world-view.

Obviously, scientific truths cannot be discovered without the organizational/technical apparatus to discover them – or at least verify the work of those geniuses who, against all odds, discover them anyway. But once those truths are discovered, I ask myself, do they change society – or is it the nature of the society itself that determines which truths are capable of being found?

The late Carl Sagan was fond of remarking that the Aristotelian worldview was the natural outgrowth of a slaveholding society, and found it significant that, while the Hellenic scientists and philosophers questioned everything else, they never questioned the rightness of slavery. But there, whatever the validity of his first point, he went a bit too far. After all, when did Sagan or any of his fellows question the legitimacy of a societal structure that inserts its regulatory and tax-extraction apparatus into areas of human existence and family life that every other civilization in the history of this planet has considered private, and has turned its citizens into mere serial-numbered data-subjects as a consequence/enabler? And the reason for their silence is the same as Aristotle’s: who pays their bills?

The Newtonian universe was one of Euclidian space running by known laws, and a separate, absolute time – truly a perfect fit for a society navigating the whole globe and starting to invent complex machinery, including timepieces accurate and motion-independent enough to serve as aids in that navigation.

Einsteinian spacetime destroyed those certainties, and was often quoted in defense of moral relativism. But society was well on its way to moral relativism anyhow, and according to Bertrand Russell (who at least was there) Einstein was much more excuse than cause.

The case is perhaps more complex with quantum mechanics. But the Uncertainty Principle has more-than-scientific resonances in this age of ours, and in the dichotomy between quantum-scale phenomena and the macrocosm – to say nothing of the incommensurability of quantum mechanics and general relativity – one can see (I can, anyway) a paradigm of the fundamental disconnect of our time: on one side a physical universe of violence on a grand scale and a biology of more-than-realpolitik ruthlessness, in which God, if not absolutely denied, plays no active part; and on the other a religious (no other word fits, even or especially for professional atheists like Dawkins) insistence on the values of altruism. Both sides, of course, to be defined and executed by the academic-bureaucratic class.

Conversely, Gregor Mendel’s work, meticulous as it was, was ignored for some half a century because it didn’t fit with the scientific orthodoxy of the time.

And when it comes to the social sciences not even the words in which a truth is expressed hold their meaning. Take the quote of Dr. King’s with which I opened this article. I would be the last to shoot down an expression of long-range optimism from such a pc icon. And yet...a democratic man, whose people can only advance in a climate of democratic principles, in a profoundly democratic time when not only the academic-bureaucratic class but the judicial elite and the power directories of finance and industry have it as axiomatic that every individual must be allowed to rise in any social endeavor to the limit of their abilities – what more natural than that such a man in such a time should see the bow as bending toward “justice” – which of course is also defined democratically.

It should be obvious that I use the term “democratic” as deTocqueville used it, as the antonym of “aristocratic,” and in no way connected with any form of parliamentary governance, and certainly not with those values of freedom, responsibility and privacy which we continue to reflexively associate with “democracy” even as we legislate, regulate, and civil-lawsuit them out of existence.

But there are other voices, informed by other realities, speaking different truths. They see the loss by the West of its unquestioned predominance, the decay if not collapse of public morality, the squeezing of the middle class, an intelligentsia not merely divorced from but hostile to the ways and beliefs of the people, a lack of will to control even something so basic as immigration – and recognize the telltale signs of a culture that has lost all faith in itself. And they know what the culture does not, that that faith is inseparable from the right to continued existence: and can only watch as the huge social organism hurries from one fatal admixture to the next as if propelled by some secret deathwish, fouling not only its environment (SOP for our species, unfortunately), but its foundational principles, its ideas, its national territory, and yes, its DNA.

So whose theory should we use to confirm (a certain set of) the experimental facts? Well, one could do worse than use the peer-review method in current favor. And both by majority rule (unless the courts overturn it, of course) and right of conquest (unless the intelligentsia doesn’t like who won) we are – all democrats. But a caveat. When your calculations yield infinite or absurd results, warns Greene, it is a sure sign you are pushing your theory into territory where it no longer applies.

Now the democratic voiding of “artificial” inequalities has in the past been the source of great progress. Starting with the elimination of distinctions based on religious confession, it has moved on to those based on birth, national origin, ethnicity, and finally sex and race. Our society (or the directing portions of it) now seems poised to extend the sweep of equality even farther, to those who deviate grossly from traditional standards of Western morality. I mention only Timothy Geitner and Barney Frank. Different names, and different lapses, will readily suggest themselves to any not totally anesthetized.

I personally find the assumptions behind this expansion wrong, its reasoning flawed, its implementation highly destructive of other values (religious freedom and the supremacy of the will of the majority, to name only two), and its chances of producing any net gain to society highly dubious at best.

And there’s yet more. A positively Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values” is going on here. This expansion is being pushed not by the popular will or any significant portion of it, but by the courts and the elites. Democracy, in short, has been declared too important and complex to be left to “the people” and been entrusted to the tender mercies of the judicial elite and the academic-bureaucratic class.

In mythological terms: Luke Skywalker is beginning to look more and more like his father (and ruling with a hand of iron!).

Again: the progress of modern physics has been almost inseparable from the elimination of “privileged frames of reference.” For the ancients, the earth was the center of the Universe. Then the sun, then the galaxy. Now there are “galaxies like grains of sand” and the center is everywhere and nowhere, the uncertainty principle sets limits to what can be known, and all the matter we can see is only a tiny fraction of the total mass/energy of the cosmos.

Something analogous took place in the moral field. Civilization abstracted universal principles from tribal practices, so that even an enemy could be recognized, at least in certain ways, as a good man. The axial religions completed this separation of morality from ethnocentrism. Then Marx, and later Nietzsche in a different way, posited that even these abstracted moralities were but the power-lust of particular groups. Despite this, there remained a range of activities that believers, pagans, tribesmen, and even Marxists would all call good.

It’s just these behaviors that now seem preferentially under attack: and in certain sectors of the ecology movement even the welfare of humanity is not seen as central. The consequences have not been long in coming, and I see many – especially the young – who hate themselves and everything they are, and have been encouraged to do so, in large part though by no means exclusively, by people old enough to know better.

One could argue with the conclusions I draw from my data. But that so many, preferentially of the most intelligent, educated, and “evolved,” have such a relationship to the circumstances in which they find themselves that they feel disinclined or disempowered to bring children into them, is not open to dispute.

We may have reached one of those junctures which is a turning point precisely because it does not turn. There are equators beyond which going south will not make you warmer, but the reverse. Only so much salt improves the flavor of the stew.