Physicist Amok

There’s been a hullabaloo about a New York Times op-ed by one Paul Davies which claims that rational ordering of the universe is an article of faith. Blog posts followed.

Some gems: “The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics.” (Paul Davies) No, the most refined expression of rational intelligibility is a properly randomized experiment. Theoretical physics is not king of the sciences, and most of science won’t change one whit if the entire forefront of theoretical physics reaches a dead end.

“Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are.” (Paul Davies again) He gives various naive answers. The proper answer is, “I don’t know, and I can’t think of a good way to answer such a question, so I’m going to keep it in the back of my mind in case I do, and get on with questions I can answer.”

“The only problem is that inductive reasoning is not sound.” (first comment on the first blog post I linked to above) Here is someone with little exposure to logic, who doesn’t realize that deductive reasoning isn’t sound either. You can choose any of an infinite number of rules for manipulating sets of well defined strings of symbols. The applicability of any of them is an empirical question. Classical deduction occupies no privileged place. It’s just old.

Then Davies rambles about how the emergence of life is sensitive to the details of the universe. We don’t know this, and no one has thought of any way of finding this out, hallucinations of a few experimentally-challenged string theorists aside, and they have no idea how to construct a science from the ground up. I might even use the word parasite.

Aside from all this, everyone seems to agree that they’re arguing over the proposition “The universe behaves in an orderly and rational manner.” I have no idea what that actually means, and I think there’s a better statement of the required proposition: “There exists some finite level of detail which guarantees the outcome of a protocol/algorithm/recipe.” (I don’t think we have a word for what I have offered three to convey.)

That statement is much weaker, and can be considered in an even weaker form: “For a GIVEN protocol/algorithm/recipe, there is a finite level of detail which guarantees the outcome.”

If we assume that tomorrow will be much like yesterday, then this statement’s converse is falsifiable, though it may not be finitely so. This isn’t perfect, but it’s a long way from a leap of faith.

If we don’t assume that tomorrow will be much like today, we can’t get anywhere. Christians don’t assume this (they expect a Judgement Day, when tomorrow will decidedly not be like yesterday), but fail to realize that you could just as strongly assert that tomorrow there just wouldn’t be a god anymore. So, although I don’t know how to demonstrate the axiom, I don’t have demonstrate it in an argument between science and faith. I would need to demonstrate it in an argument between science and skepticism.