What's always been interesting is the divided idea of what scientists mean by a 'Theory of Everything': most layman think of TOE as the idea that science can someday lock down all possible solutions to a description of the universe and its laws; whereas scientists, at least the many I've studied and spoken to over the years, see it not as a finality, some closure to the grand scheme of scientific enquiry that will then say: yes, now we have a fully qualified description of life, the universe, and everything.... no, this is not the real TOE, that is the ficiton, the babble of journalists, instead of scientists.
Instead scientists themselves see TOE as but the apprehension of a special case of theoretical physics that will only give them a limited set of mathematical descriptions and a new foundation for the sciences, a sort of - to use a Arnoldian term, 'touchstone' for all possible cases of the universe. For as most scientists will tell you we are limited minds seeking possible answers to a complex ever-changing universe that can never be apprehended in the moment of now by a finite mind, and even if that mind could formutlate a mathematical theorem to describe those laws that describe the universe: the universe that they describe would always already be a dead universe; i.e., a universe that was past, cut off from our ever-changing time-moving universe we all live in.
The universe is dynamic and our descriptions of it are only and always a topigraphical mapping of its surface tensions, never the actual thing itself; the thing-in-itself will always remain outside our calculations, that is why poetry and the universe are closer to the untruth that is; for truth is always a slice, a partial grasp of the universe through the lens of a finite mind called the human.
As we are discovering, even the brain itself changes, has plasticity: and, from infancy to old age we learn new things about both the universe and ourselves. The universe may be finite: but we do not know that for a fact... It might be stranger than we have yet thought... maybe the poets are closer to the truth or untruth, maybe hyperbole and metaphor reaches into the dark recesses better than scientific description.
Science as we know it now is hooked to technology and industry and is therefore locked into a political and goal oriented system of production rather than some impersonal pursuit of truth.
At least that is my take... although many scientists would love us to believe they are bound to some idealist pursuit of truth rather than the pragmatic ventures of investment bankers that sponsor them and their institutions. But that is another tale...
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Instead scientists themselves see TOE as but the apprehension of a special case of theoretical physics that will only give them a limited set of mathematical descriptions and a new foundation for the sciences, a sort of - to use a Arnoldian term, 'touchstone' for all possible cases of the universe. For as most scientists will tell you we are limited minds seeking possible answers to a complex ever-changing universe that can never be apprehended in the moment of now by a finite mind, and even if that mind could formutlate a mathematical theorem to describe those laws that describe the universe: the universe that they describe would always already be a dead universe; i.e., a universe that was past, cut off from our ever-changing time-moving universe we all live in.
The universe is dynamic and our descriptions of it are only and always a topigraphical mapping of its surface tensions, never the actual thing itself; the thing-in-itself will always remain outside our calculations, that is why poetry and the universe are closer to the untruth that is; for truth is always a slice, a partial grasp of the universe through the lens of a finite mind called the human.
As we are discovering, even the brain itself changes, has plasticity: and, from infancy to old age we learn new things about both the universe and ourselves. The universe may be finite: but we do not know that for a fact... It might be stranger than we have yet thought... maybe the poets are closer to the truth or untruth, maybe hyperbole and metaphor reaches into the dark recesses better than scientific description.
Science as we know it now is hooked to technology and industry and is therefore locked into a political and goal oriented system of production rather than some impersonal pursuit of truth.
At least that is my take... although many scientists would love us to believe they are bound to some idealist pursuit of truth rather than the pragmatic ventures of investment bankers that sponsor them and their institutions. But that is another tale...