In a refreshing talk, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli says there has been no major breakthrough in theoretical physics in the past few decades and he suspects this is because we have not understood what science is all about.
The author of “The Seven Brief Lessons in Physics”, explains, “I am fascinated by this character, Anaximander…(before him) everybody around the world, thought that the structure of the world was: the sky over our heads and the earth under our feet. Then comes Anaximander and says: no, the earth is a finite body that floats in space, without falling, and the sky is not just over our head; it is all around. How does he get it? Well obviously…It’s sort of reasonable to think that below us is nothing, so it seems simple to get to this conclusion. But the fact is that no one else got to this obvious fact, why?”
Rovelli says even though Anaximander proposed the above idea, he had no answer to why the earth did not fall and how it floated. So his contribution was mainly to think out of the box, to think different.
Continues Rovelli, “If Einstein had gone to school to learn what science is…what would he do? He would say, okay, the empirical content is the strong part of the theory. The idea in classical mechanics that velocity is relative: forget about it. The Maxwell equations, forget about them…because this is a volatile part of our knowledge. The theories themselves have to be changed. Einstein does the contrary. He takes the theories very seriously…To force coherence between these two, the two theories, by challenging something completely different, which is something that is in our head, which is how we think about time…”
“He's changing something in common sense, something about the elementary structure in terms of which we think of the world, on the basis of the trust of the past results in physics. This is exactly the opposite of what is done today in physics…Every physicist today is immediately ready to say, okay, all of our past knowledge about the world is wrong. Let's randomly pick some new idea. I suspect that this is not a small component of the long-term lack of success of theoretical physics.”
Rovelli says our understanding of something new about the world is either from new data or from thinking deeply on what we have already learned about the world. “But thinking means also accepting what we've learned, challenging what we think, and knowing that in some of the things that we think, there may be something to modify and to change.”
He says, “Science is about constructing visions of the world, about re-arranging our conceptual structure, about creating new concepts which were not there before, and even more, about changing, challenging the a-priori that we have. So it's nothing to do about the assembly of data and the way of organizing the assembly of data. It has everything to do about the way we think, and about our mental vision of the world. Science is a process in which we keep exploring ways of thinking, and changing our image of the world, our vision of the world, to find new ones that work a little bit better.”
As Rovelli compels one to think he adds, “Science is not about certainty. Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking, at the present level of knowledge. Science is extremely reliable; it's not certain. In fact, not only is it not certain, but it's the lack of certainty that grounds it. Scientific ideas are credible not because they are sure, but because they are the ones that have survived all the possible past critiques, and they are the most credible because they were put on the table for everybody's criticism. The very expression 'scientifically proven' is a contradiction in terms. There is nothing that is scientifically proven. The core of science is the deep awareness that we have wrong ideas, we have prejudices. We have ingrained prejudices. In our conceptual structure for grasping reality there might be something not appropriate, something we may have to revise to understand better. So at any moment, we have a vision of reality that is effective, it's good, it's the best we have found so far. It's the most credible we have found so far, its mostly correct. But at the same time it's not taken for certain, and any element of it is a priori open for revision…”
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