Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond by Lawrence M. Krauss
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Scientific Validity Is Not Truth or Reality

Within this brief summary of physics over the past two centuries Krauss has a great deal to say about truth and reality and the way the first is established by the second in science. He puts it this way: “[T]he central question becomes: To what extent do our imaginings reflect our own predilections, and to what extent might they actually mirror reality?” This metaphor of a ‘mirror’ is one that has been casually used for centuries. It has also be roundly critiqued as misleading and problematic for the concepts of both truth and reality (See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...). Krauss’s book and particularly his criteria for determining the truth of recent scientific theories demonstrates the issues which he seems unaware of.

As background to my interpretation of the book, for example: the physical theory of gravity formulated by Isaac Newton allowed us to successfully land human beings on the Moon and bring them back safely. Does this mean that Newton’s theory is true? No, it is not. More recent theories in physics claim that gravity is not a force as Newton conceived it but rather a distortion in space-time caused by massive objects. Gravity as such is therefore not even a ‘thing’.

But we certainly experience something which we call gravity. Does this mean that we simply don’t have the natural sensory apparatus necessary to detect its real character. Also no, because we have been able to enhance our sensory faculties through technology. This allows us to confirm and precisely measure the distortions in space-time correlated with our experience of gravity.

With our newer relativistic theories we have been able to predict and confirm the movements of large galactic structures. Does this mean that we have been able to ‘approach reality’ more closely? No. Newtonian physics is not a ‘special case’ of relativity physics even if it gives the same suggestions for getting people to the moon. The two are contrary views of reality, with very different ontological concepts. The entire history of physics is one of successive ‘breakthroughs’ the effects of which are to rubbish everything previously thought to be taken for granted about reality. As some physicists put it therefore: Even space-time is ultimately doomed. It doesn’t exist except as a very useful fiction.

I am not primarily suggesting this has anything essential to do with our natural perceptual limits (although there is a good argument that this is the case). I am claiming that it is a consequence of ideas and concepts that are derived from reflection on this experience, not from experience itself. These ideas and concepts are literally imagined. Krauss points to imagination as the essentially human attribute: “[I]magination almost defines what it means to be human.” And he’s correct. But imagination requires language in order to formulate and communicate, even to communicate the concept of imagination. And there’s the rub.

Krauss goes off the rails when he claims that through science, as a disciplined form of imagination, “… we gain new
insights into our own standing in the universe.” This we certainly do not do, unless it is to recognise that “our standing” is entirely uncertain. That is, we know nothing more about the reality of the universe, including our place in it, than we as a species have ever known before, which is precisely nothing.

Surely we are able to do things we have never done before because of the knowledge we have accumulated and shared about ‘how the world works.’ But we can only use that phrase in the strictly pragmatic sense that our knowledge has permitted us to achieve a result. And part of that knowledge is that we have produced innumerable desirable results - like travel to the Moon - using knowledge which we have subsequently learned to be wrong. Our ideas and theoretical concepts may useful whether they are true or not and whether or not they conform with something called reality.

Krauss feels that “If we couldn’t imagine the world as it might be, it is possible that the world of our experience would become intolerable.” This seems dangerously close to the religious belief that we need the concept of God to make the world bearable. In either case, the epistemological value of that sentiment is zero. It is a kind of whistling in the ontological dark. By ignoring our own incapacity to definitively match our scientific ideas and concepts, indeed any kind of language, with what is not-language, we repress the knowledge that we cannot control the universe, not even by naming it (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... And https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... And https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ).

Krauss makes frequent reference to religion as a sort of parallel inquiry into reality. But what he doesn’t seem to realise is that theologians have long recognised the basic principle that fundamental reality, that is, what they call God, is beyond any description, that no theory of God’s existence is even remotely correct. So unless scientists wish to call their findings some sort of divine revelation which is fixed in dogmatic formulae that can’t be challenged, they are forced to accept this basic principle. Reality is beyond language. No matter what we are able to accomplish through language, we get no closer to the world it purports to represent.

In fact it seems as if the more we know, for example about quantum physics and general relativity, the less coherent our language about the world becomes. Reality is probably something beyond our experience given our perceptual limitations. But is certainly beyond our capability to express. Krauss’s suggestion that there are “hidden realities” to be discovered through science is therefore highly misleading. There may be many more theories of the world in our future, but none of these will correspond to a reality. Like God, whatever we think reality is, He/It is not that.

Krauss is correct in one specific observation. Science, like art, discloses new ways of viewing the world. But to claim that these new ways are about reality or even an approximation of reality is unsustainable by the standards of science itself. What science creates may be useful, exciting, inspiring. But ultimately it is another form of poetry. Like the best of poetry, science is useful, exciting, or inspiring when it points to something beyond itself that cannot be described by science. Like the best of theology, science is most robust when it recognises that truth, like God, is a fictional ideal which motivates inquiry but can never be reached.

Krauss’s potted history of scientific achievements is really a story about overcoming the prejudices and false presumptions developed largely by previous science. Science, although it is empirical, is never about experience; it is about coherence of the scientific, especially the mathematical, language du jour. It is through incoherence that science progresses. And there will always be such incoherence.

This is one implication of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics, perhaps the most significant scientific finding of the 20th century. But this scientific finding, because it implies an infinity of future ‘horizons’ for inquiry, is, it seems to me, far from “intolerable.” It is as inspiring as the knowledge that there are infinite number of poems to be penned or paintings created. Krauss implicitly recognises this himself when he writes, “ultimately the driving force behind all human inquiry is the satisfaction of the quest itself.”

So Krauss’s unsupportable presumptions about reality and scientific validity lead him to curious conclusions. For example, he says “It is also simply disingenuous to claim that there is any definitive evidence that any of the ideas associated with string theory yet bear a clear connection to reality,” ‘Who cares?’ must be the only reasonable response. Newtonian gravity never had any connection with reality. Einsteinian space-time doesn’t either. Yet both were useful and, for their time, scientifically valid. In many ways string theory is the most coherent version of physical laws we have.

Perhaps scientists and their boosters might benefit from a slightly wider reading list. Just sayin’.

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