Relentless Human Thinking
What is your theory of the world?
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RELENTLESS HUMAN THINKING
“All the philosophers got into a car and went to the beach,” I tried to explain over the noise of a California coffee shop. On the other side of the phone line, my friend cackled. For most of the week my job was to attend a conference where people debated what our world is and why we think we may be able to know it. In short, I was briefly getting paid to hang out with philosophers. I laughed too, at the seeming absurdity and the very real joy of the situation.
How can we access reality in the multiverse? Is the passage of time fundamental or do we actually live in one everlasting present moment? Is the world fundamentally chance-y? And what is a particle anyway? For three days, I soaked up these questions and several, often conflicting, answers that philosophers of physics offered to each other in packed classrooms and sunny patios. It was the most heady conference I had ever been to. Every day, I returned to my hotel room both deeply tired and buzzing with intellectual excitement. “Everyone who is here, is really here out of love,” one philosopher told me as we waited for the conference shuttle on day three. By the time I was on the phone with my friend that afternoon, I felt like my heart was really full too.
Don’t get me wrong, though I completed a PhD in theoretical physics several years ago, I really don’t have the technical know-how to keep up with what it really means to do philosophy of physics or study the so-called “foundations of physics” with rigor. None of the philosophers that I met are spending their days sitting around and thinking big thoughts or pulling arguments out of thin air as the stereotype of a cartoon philosopher might suggest. Many understand the postulates on top of which quantum physics is built in more detail and with more nuance than people that use quantum physics’ equations in their work every day. At the conference, there was an awful lot of mathematics, formal logic and painstakingly careful readings of historical writings and experiments. A plenary talk called “Quantizing Epistemology” started with a mention of a “von Neumann algebra” and I had to really rack my brain to remember whether those words ever met each other in my graduate level theoretical physics courses. One of my biggest assets as a science journalist is that I am not scared of mathematics and formalism, but during this week I have to admit that I felt very aware of how little I had actually learned in my time as a scholar.
But even with my at most surface level understanding of the big issues that plague physics’ philosophical and mathematical foundation, I found the conversations really stimulating, and the passion of the researchers deeply evident. It made me think of that often repeated fact that Lewis Carrol wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in part as a response to what was happening in mathematics at the time. I had briefly crossed over into my own Wonderland here on the campus of a University of California school, but where Carrol’s Wonderland was satirising his field’s new and shocking ideas, mine embraced a variety of opinions. The bubble I found myself within was surreal, but not unfriendly. If you could stand up a reasonable mathematical theory for some surprising, even shocking, view of the world, chances are you could have a seat at the table.
I don’t think I had ever shared space with so many staunch Everettians who, as I write in chapter four of my book, argue that quantum theory isn’t weird if we accept that we live in a multiverse. Colleagues they went to the beach and karaoke with during the week vehemently disagreed. Cup of coffee or a microphone in hand, they could share a world that they had exactly opposite views about. It was fascinating to see them all thrive despite this poignant difference in what they think is real. Not for the first time I started wondering who it is that, within current societal structures, gets to make a living from asking deep questions about reality, and who is encouraged to look away from them, maybe even dismiss them as frivolous. The crowd of social media commenters that claim that “it’s not that deep” would have hated it here and even researchers from very elite institutions admitted to feeling isolated from the physics that gets the most funding, glamorous media coverage, and scientific cachet.
Truthfully, there is an odd tension at the heart of fields such as foundations of physics. Consider, for instance, a philosopher that told me, over drinks, about her controversial views on the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. “Will I get hatemail if you write about this?” she asked jokingly. Have you ever heard of the measurement problem? Solving it could completely change our understanding of physical reality as it would explain the exact mechanism by which quantum objects that make up the bones of our world are so fragile. But you could also keep living your life in exactly the same way as now regardless of whether it’s solved, unsolved, or controversial. In fact, you could never learn what it is and still be perfectly happy. Is it then really worth it to pay someone to spend a lifetime working on it?
There is an argument in favour of funding the work of philosophers that appeals to its possible utility. It is perfectly reasonable to argue that getting the philosophical foundations of physics right will help us do physics better and doing physics better has always had positive technological and societal knock on effects. Studying the atom gave us quantum theory and quantum theory taught us how to make transistors which then gave rise to computers and smartphones, for instance. It is also reasonable to argue that tools that philosophers, logicians, mathematicians and similar scholars develop always stand a chance to be useful in other, more practical areas of study. For instance, to encrypt data that we send to each other, or our banks, online, we had to first develop number theory.
These are reasonable arguments and they are practical, especially in a world where funding for science is ever hard to come by and where you always run the risk of some senator publicly singling out your work as wasteful nonsense. They appeal to utility, productivity and easily quantifiable outcomes, all things that will get you far within the scientific machine that sits inside of the larger capitalistic machine like a monetizable Russian nesting doll. These are not the arguments that account for why I left California with such a full heart, and so deliciously intellectually stimulated.
My argument is much simpler: it is just really good and right to want to know things, especially when they’re big and awe-inspiring. Curiosity and creativity are some of the most magical, most valuable gifts that are accessible to us as humans. We can ask questions about our world and dream up new models of it; that is a kind of superpower. In the same way that storytelling may be what makes us human or so-called homo narrans, so could the mix of curiosity and imagination that underlies so much of scientific inquiry. There may not be an immediate practical, technological change in my life once someone devises a theory that goes beyond quantum physics, maybe even explains away all of its oddities, but it will be a triumph of human minds, of relentless human thinking, of human dreaming in the language of mathematics. The more time I spend talking to scientists and seeing how to modern science works in terms of its institutions, its funding, and what work gets served up to members of the press like me, the more I am enamored with researchers who are asking questions that may not seem immediately useful but actually go to the core of what it means to exist in the world, and for that world to exist too.
“This all sounds very abstract, and also, this is us,” writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein in her latest book, The Edge of Space-Time, which I have been going back to all summer long. “What we know about the cosmos has transformed our relationship with the stories that we tell about ourselves. What we know shapes how we dream,” she asserts. Sometimes, talking to researchers who ask the big questions feels like talking to people who have committed to keeping these dreams rich, colorful and full of texture.
Right now, the notion of what type of scientific work counts as valid and who counts as a valid scientist, at least in the eyes of the state, is under threat in the United States. Following politically motivated funding cuts that started as soon as the second Trump administration came into power, censoring of language in governmentally funded research institutions, and the administration itself explicitly championing views contradicted by scientific research, it has been clear for a while that the legacy of the current generation of scientists will be marred by what is not there. Even more dangerously, all of these actions from the state make for a concerted effort to erase some parts of science from the public imagination of what science is for. Science is for building rockets that will help us colonize the moon, it is not for understanding social inequality, or so the message goes. The historical tail of this will be long.
Graduate students that can’t get funding for their projects because of what they study or who they are will leave academia. Their work simply won’t happen, nor the work of younger scholars they may have trained or mentored. Future scholars will look back into the literature and find evasive and ideologically motivated language that will make their work harder and less complete. In some places there will simply be gaping holes in the body of human knowledge, and they will enable future nefarious actors to say “that’s not a real area of study, no one respectable was studying it, no credible journal was publishing on it.”
A recently proposed rule from the United States Office of Management and Budget that would subject all grant proposals to a political litmus test and restrict researchers from working with their international colleagues could serve to only perpetuate this vicious process of narrowing science down to what’s deemed useful and politically aligned with the authoritarians in power. The proposal is explicit about only awarding funding to research proposals that “advance the President’s policy priorities,” an idea that is fundamentally at odds with science being a discipline whose only priority is asking questions and advancing understanding.
Couple that with the rise of AI, the use of which has already been shown to allow researchers to publish more but also more narrowly, and which is being marketed to non-researchers exactly as a way to outsource difficult, knotty thinking, and it feels alarmingly clear that we all ought to recommit ourselves to being curious about all the non-obvious, maybe even seemingly fanciful things. Why is there something instead of nothing? Do we really all experience the same reality? What is the most we can learn about the world around us without changing it? It’s a good time to ask these questions and read about them, as an exercise in thinking, as a way to expand one’s heart and soul.
People who do this sort of thinking for a living feel that much more precious now and I hope they keep their passion and their arguments as long as they can. The rest of us ought to be inspired. After all, at a time of rising fascism and climate disaster both knocking on our door and already here for some of us, how could it not be urgent to have your own theory of the world, even if you don’t know any math. You don’t have to macrodose philosophy like me, I am also incredibly privileged to have a job that allows me to be writing about this type of work and still pay rent, but I can’t recommend less cynicism and more passionate curiosity hard enough.
And yes, I do regret not having gone to the beach with all the philosophers. I can only imagine the conversations that were buoyed by the seaside breeze.
Best,
Karmela
You had me at the first sentence.