I enjoy reading posts on physics forums. As guilty pleasures go it’s a little tame, not to mention somewhat geeky. What does surprise me, though, is the number of people who claim to have worked out some alternative theory of physics in which all the problems that vex the world’s greatest physicists today have been solved. These budding Galileos (or Newtons, Einsteins, Diracs and Feynmans – take your pick) seem to have leapfrogged the struggles of the physics community and in a single stroke restored clarity, sanity and insight to modern physics – at least in the fevered imaginations of these would-be laureates.
It is, of course, possible that one of these alternative visions is correct. Possible, but unlikely. Part of the problem is the very mythology that has arisen surrounding the great thinkers of the past. Galileo and Einstein, for example, are conventionally viewed as lone warriors battling against the prevailing orthodoxy. Whilst this is in some sense quite true, it also neglects to mention that both Galileo and Einstein were masters of the respective prevailing orthodoxies, and that they also did careful and brilliant work within those orthodoxies.
Take a wander up the timeline to today and we see many wonderful examples of attempts to explain the often abstract and difficult theories of physics to a non-professional audience. This is a noble and laudable endeavour. There are (and have been) some truly gifted communicators who manage to distil some of the essence of modern physics into a form that can be more readily digested without the abstract mathematics. Today we have blogs, TV documentaries, books, videos on YouTube all giving ‘popular’ accounts of modern physics. I am in awe of many of these individuals who manage to bring modern physics to a general audience with such clarity and insight.
But (and isn’t there always a but?) as far as internet forums go these beautiful and brilliant popular expositions are double-edged swords. At the risk of mixing too many metaphors, physicists are all-too easily hoisted on their own insightful petards. Let me explain. These popular accounts can generate the impression in the viewer or reader that the material is actually quite easy to understand. Armed with this petard of superficial understanding, some individuals then sally forth onto the internet and loudly proclaim their new theories to all and sundry. These theories range from attempts to prove Einstein ‘wrong’ (thereby ensuring immediate fame for the theory’s author should this theory succeed in toppling Einstein from his pedestal) to attempts to explain quantum mechanics in terms of classical pictures, to claimed unifications of gravity and quantum physics.
Not all of these alternative theories can be correct (and I should mention that I am being deliberately charitable in using the term ‘theory’ to describe these efforts). If we make a (very) conservative estimate that the number of different alternative theories ‘out there’ on forums and the like is 100, then even if we assume that just one of these is correct, then the probability that any one of them picked at random is correct is just 1/100. So even within the alternative theory reference frame the probability that any given theory (chosen at random) is correct is pretty small.
It takes many years and a lot of hard work to develop an understanding of today’s modern physics. I think it’s fair to say that the majority of physicists recognize the need for a new theory of physics – or some new ideas at the very least. But this realization comes from a deep understanding and appreciation of today’s physics. This appreciation does not come from any popular account but hours of sweating over the detailed mathematics, understanding where every squiggle and symbol comes from and what it means.
In the minds of many of the proponents of these alternative theories this hard-won understanding of modern physicists is just ‘dogma’, the prevailing ‘orthodoxy’. It can, in the minds of these visionaries, be dismissed at will – after all it’s just ‘dogma’ isn’t it? Yes, in a limited sense, it is just ‘dogma’. The correct question, I feel, is to ask why has it become dogma? After all, these theories were developed by stupendously clever people who were masters of the prevailing orthodoxy (before they played a part in changing it). We know they couldn’t have been 100% correct – there are lots of unresolved problems in physics – but what is the probability that they were trivially wrong?
And this is the nub of the issue. Most of the alternative theories I’ve seen on various forums posit all sorts of essentially superficial modifications to existing ideas – resurrections of the aether, revisions of special relativity, classical interpretations of quantum mechanics (and so on). These revisions rarely go into mathematical detail, many claiming that modern physics is just fanciful maths and that words and concepts are sufficient, or they use elementary high school maths. What these people don’t seem to realise is that those stupendous physicists who developed the ‘dogma’ in the first place had already considered these modifications – and considered them to a very deep and profound level indeed – and dismissed them!
Again it’s possible that these great physicists were (and are) wrong. It’s possible that they’ve overlooked something simple. Certainly possible, but how probable? I enjoy speculation. It’s why I read some of these internet physics forums. There are some imaginative people out there and the questions and alternative theories help me to deepen my own understanding. But all the time I am reminded that “to be a Galileo it is not sufficient merely to be a heretic; one must also be right”.
Thoughts From Under the Hat 