When Lindley says "myth," be means it not as a metaphor but
literally: "a story that makes sense within its own terms...but can
be neither tested nor disproved." Such is the sorry pass he
believes that particle physics has come to at the end of the 20th
century. The quest for theories of everything - for the grand
unification - has indeed becomes a "holy grail" that can cost time,
money, and careers, all to no avail. That's the message brought by
a messenger with credentials as a senior editor of Science as well
as a Ph.D. in astronomy. Curiously, Lindley's apocalyptic vision
has a parallel with one promulgated at the end of the last century,
when physics was also thought to be coming to an end, but for
different reasons: It was thought that the major discoveries had
been made. This time, Lindley avers that it's the seduction of
mathematical constructs unrelated to the real world that's doing
physics in. To reach this conclusion, he summarizes all that the
20th century has wrought, from Einstein to Heisenberg to Fermilab,
CERN, and the plan for the superconducting supercollider - a grand
cathedral. (For an opposing view, see Steven Weinberg's Dreams of a
Final Theory - Jan 1993.) Whether or not readers buy Lindley's
judgment, they're well served by his first-rate exposition of the
state of the science. The rub may lie in the eerie phenomenon by
which the toys of mathematicians so often do turn out to be the
tools that physicists use to construct - and demonstrate - the next
paradigm. (Kirkus Reviews)
For more than a century physicists have hoped that they were
closing in on the Holy Grail of modern science: a unified theory
that would make sense of the entire physical world, from the
subnuclear realm of quarks and gluons to the very moment of
creation of the universe. The End of Physics is a history of the
attempts to find such a theory of everything" a forceful argument
it will never be found and a warning that the compromises necessary
to produce a final theory may well undermine the rules of good
science.At the heart of Lindley's story is the rise of the particle
physicists and their attempts to reach far out into the cosmos for
a unifying theory. Working beyond the grasp of the largest
telescopes or the most powerful particle accelerators, and unable
to subject their findings and theories to experimental scrutiny,
they have moved into a world governed entirely by mathematical and
highly speculative theorizing, none of which can be empirically
verified. Lindley argues that a theory of everything derived from
particle physics will be full of untested,and
untestable,assumptions. And if physicists yield to such
speculation, the field will retreat from the high ground of
science, becoming instead a modern mythology. This would mean the
end of physics as we know it.
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