Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Do Scientists Make Good Philosophers?

I am confused. Not (inordinately) by quantum physics: Smolin is an excellent populariser of an almost impossible subject. But by his philosophy, which appears self-contradictory. Either I don’t understand his philosophical argument or he doesn’t. Either way, it’s not a terribly convincing exposition of his point of view.

Smolin begins in a way that makes my heart sing: “To explain the world to ourselves we make up stories and then, because we are good storytellers, we get infatuated by them and confuse our representations of the world with the world itself. This confusion afflicts scientists as much as laypeople; indeed, it affects us more, because we have such powerful stories in our tool kits.” A scientist who takes seriously the centrality of story-telling to everything connected with human beings is a rare and beautiful bird.

He then increases my admiration by recognising the essentially conventional character of not just science but all human inquiry: “To have a scientific mind is to respect the consensus facts, which are the resolution of generations of dispute, while maintaining an open mind about the still unknown.” Some people know more than others about certain things, like physics. Groups of these people argue continuously about what they know about those things. Their concurrence is the best view, for the moment, that we’re likely to have about those things, even if the unknown remains... well, unknown.

And finally, Smolin recognises the validity of what I call metaphysics or what others think of as religion, that intellectual realm beyond language and beyond at least current experience. “It helps to have a humble sense of the essential mystery of the world, for the aspects that are known become even more mysterious when we examine them further.” In many ways the mystery of the ‘beyond’ increases the more we know. Existence itself, we begin to realise, is not something we are able to measure and evaluate. The closer we get to this descriptor-which-is-not-a-property, the less sure we are about everything else. So that “The simplest facts about our existence and our relationship to the world are mysteries.”

But then Smolin starts to get a bit eccentric. He says, “Behind the century-long argument over quantum mechanics is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality—a disagreement which, unresolved, escalates into an argument about the nature of science.” But he has already implied that he doesn’t want to fight about reality but rather who has a better story. It is at this point that he gets swept into metaphysics not as a scientist, or even merely as a thinker, but as a polemicist, that is, someone with an ideological axe to grind, with a story that he takes to be more than a story. He wants to tell me, and you, and his fellow scientists what’s really there. And it is here that we part company.*

Smolin‘s world is divided between realists, people like him who believe that there is a world that exists independently of our experience of it; and purported anti-realists, those who believe that our knowledge of the world, particularly our knowledge of atoms, radiation and elementary particles, is not just a matter of convention but ONLY a matter of convention. That is to say, that what we know about is solely the language in which we know it, and that’s the end of the matter. He claims that most scientists today are anti-realists and that this attitude represents a kind of ideology which is inhibiting a solution to the big problems of contemporary quantum physics.

This distinction between realists and anti-realists, however, is a parody and a slur; and in the context of his argument, it is fraudulent. To understand why, it is necessary to define metaphysics a little more carefully. Immanuel Kant, the 18th century thinker, is the go-to guy when it comes to what we mean by metaphysics in the modern world. For Kant, metaphysics is not about religious revelation or mythical accounts about how the world came into being. Rather it is a purely rational endeavour for discovering what might lie beyond language, beyond our immediate experience and what allows us to connect the two. Our experience is certainly of reality; it’s the getting of that experience into language which causes the disjunction between reality and story.

The intellectual technique which Kant developed for metaphysical inquiry is called Transcendental Deduction. In simple terms this technique tries to establish what things must be the case in order for us to connect our experiences with the language we use to express that experience. These ‘transcendentals’ are things that we employ instinctively as human beings to make sense of what we casually call reality. Since we cannot even conceive of something called reality without them, however, we are never able to communicate about reality itself, only reality filtered or constructed through this human faculty. Since communication about this reality can only take place through language, we are constantly tempted, as Smolin admits, to confuse language with reality.

Even these transcendentals are parts of stories however. Kant suggested, for example, that reality must have certain characteristics if it were to appear to us as it does, even through our human filters. Space and time, he said, are two such characteristics. These are the kind of things that must be there in light of our experience. But about a century after he wrote, it became clear that he was wrong. It is not space and time that are elements of reality, but space-time, an entirely different metaphysical, as well as scientific category. Space-time is part of a contrasting story. As such it is yet another deduction about the world, not necessarily a ‘thing’ in the world. It is a word, a concept, that is connected to other words and concepts, and not to that vague unknown called reality.

And Smolin is undoubtedly correct: something is missing from current quantum theory. Perhaps, as he suggests, time generates space, which might then explain quantum entanglement. But neither Kant nor any other ‘idealist’ thinker, scientist or layperson, would deny the existence of reality as something independent of human perception or experience. What they are likely to deny is that the language we use to express this reality is ever any kind of permanent truth. Among other things, our deductions about what is actually ‘there’ are changing more or less continuously. And we know that the language we use to describe what is there, however scientific, is not the reality of what is there. The map is not the territory. Smolin’s story may turn out to be better by the standards of his colleagues but it will never be any more real.

Regardless of its elusiveness, indeed its inherent unattainability, reality is a necessary transcendental category for all scientific inquiry. Perhaps it is the only one that really matters. Without a presumption that there is something ‘there’ to be inquired about, inquiry would not take place. Without the failure of scientific stories to achieve what we hope to achieve, knowledge could not be distinguished from self-interested boast. Reality is a permanently receding horizon which doesn’t get any nearer the more precise our measurements or the more inclusive our theories become. To even suggest that some scientists claim that reality doesn’t exist is simply a tendentious ploy on Smolin’s part. It’s a ridiculous assertion. And it needlessly undermines his own position.

It is perfectly possible and respectable for scientists to differ about the best transcendental deductions to be made about reality. Or indeed for scientists to simply decline to make such deductions and ‘get on with calculating.’ And there are better and worse deductions to be made depending upon how inclusive they are of alternative deductions, that is to say, scientific stories about the world. Smolin’s story isn’t one of these; it is only about the possibility of one of these - that he apparently wants assistance in writing. He claims his story might be better once it gets finished. Sure, and I might have been a world-wide celebrity with Stephen Hawking’s intellect and Rock Hudson’s looks. Shoulda, woulda, coulda, as my mother used to say. Until his story is told, it has no status except that of dream.

The literary parallel is to me inescapable: Can you imagine a Jane Austen who instead of exposing the misogynistic mores of contemporary English culture in her work, wrote instead about the reprehensible lack of critical fiction among contemporary authors and solicited allies in her cause for ‘real’ fiction? Or perhaps a Cervantes who instead of creating the genre of the novel, complained about the absence of untrue but meaningful narratives about human beings trapped in their own imaginings? I think it’s clear that neither of these imaginary figures would be taken seriously by history.

So despite his overtly Kantian epistemology, which makes the distinction between stories and reality, what it is that Smolin wants to replace current quantum mechanics, is at best only something temporarily better not something definitive, true or even necessarily a closer approximation to reality. Instead of slinging intellectual mud, perhaps he just ought to get on with it. I regret my conclusion because Smolin is a fan of Leibniz, as am I; but he’s not doing himself or Leibniz justice with this fruitless rant about realism.**

=====================

* Smolin contradicts his initial assertions about science both implicitly and explicitly throughout the book. Here is one example:

“I want to uncover a world beyond quantum mechanics. Where quantum mechanics is mysterious and confusing, this deeper theory will be entirely comprehensible. I can make this claim because we have known since the invention of quantum mechanics how to present the theory in a way that dissolves the mysteries and resolves the puzzles. In this approach, there is no challenge to our usual beliefs in an objective reality, a reality unaffected by what we know or do about it, and about which it is possible to have complete knowledge. In this reality, there is just one universe, and when we observe something about it, it is because it is true. This can justly be called a realist approach to the quantum world.”

Note the sudden appearance of ‘complete knowledge’ and ‘truth’ and the disappearance of ‘mystery’. Smolin clearly reckons he is on the trail of ultimate reality itself. Note also that he is particularly concerned not to challenge our ‘common-sensical’ beliefs. Yet in the previous paragraph he wants us to dump our common sense understanding of what physicists call ‘locality,’ that is, the impossibility of two objects sharing properties at a distance. So much for the distinction between stories and reality.

** inspired by Leibniz, Smolin imagines a universe of entities called ‘nads’ which are similar to Leibniz’s ‘monads’. These nads are defined relationally to each other, an idea perhaps borrowed from the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in which each Person is defined entirely in terms of its relations to the other two. Nads are ‘events’ rather than things in Smolin’s conception. Interestingly, this idea has been previously put forth by Philip Caputo in his Theology of the Event. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

But this idea makes no sense in terms of Leibniz’s Monadology since each of his monads is ‘windowless,’ that is, has no perception of anything but it’s own isolated state. The only relation the monad has is with God. The monad’s perception is in fact supplied entirely by God who also ensures that the collectivity of monads is coordinated in their perceptions and actions. Smolin seems dangerously close to this theology when he suggests that there are ‘hidden connections’ among nads which defy locality restrictions and explain quantum entanglement. That may be interesting poetry but it is not compelling science... or theology.

View all my reviews