Building on the old question about if mathematics is invented or discovered we can ask the same about the theory of everything or the underlying code of reality. The language of mathematics is said to be the language of reality [1] in the sense of describing it. Dirac talks about a little improvement on the scientific method, by including beauty in the picture. He proposed that sometimes if the equation has beauty it should be put forward even if it does not agree with experiment at the moment. Now, how would a scientific community get agreement on the abstract concept of beauty? Dirac was thinking in terms of very advanced mathematics pointing out that a complementary and faster path than the experimental one, to progress in understanding reality, is to develop more and more advanced mathematics. He was almost saying that if someone finds a very beautiful equation that doesn’t agree with experiments at some moment, it may happen that it does later. Stretching this interpretation a little, we can have a view in what reality itself is an evolving language in action, which can be considered from different points of views that we will not address in details here. But can reality as a language encompass the essential creative aspect of general language? Our current theories for fundamental physics, so called “standard” at the moment, are under threat of anomalies. For example the standard model of particle physics is getting some prediction deviating from experiment such as for the muon anomalous magnetic moment. There are issues on internal consistency, dark matter, and so on. Each generation has their theories and their problems and knowledge about reality seems to be always advancing. We are always pushing our experience horizon a little more and in a feedback loop with our past where much of advances are revisited and improved. This follows from a phase transition on human cognitive capacities some thousands of years ago. At the same time, the last generations of physicists talk about the search for a final theory of everything (ToE). There are a lot of debates around the true meaning and how to make sense of a ToE as there are clear limitations such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, limits in accuracy, computational irreducibility - impossibility of calculation. The two main conceptual positions are that a ToE is not possible because reality would have an infinite number of layers, or that the ToE is at least in principle possible and the reductionist paradigm would lead to a simple logic self-consistent theory that would explain all basic physics. In this case reality has a final layer, which just is what it is, and can be discovered in principle. We would like to offer a slightly different tangential view on this debate. It is remarkable that physics theories about physical reality are accompanied not only by the experimental front in the usual scientific method but also by creative mathematical “inventions”. The development of general relativity was possible due to the previous mathematical advances within the field of differential geometry. For quantum mechanics, functional analysis was essential. The same apply for experimental “discoveries”; They require technology “inventions”. One can think that original mathematics and technology are also discoveries. So we would need to discover some new mathematical structure or technology to be able to discover new facts about reality. But thinking that we need to invent or create some new mathematics or technology to discover something new about reality sounds reasonable too and maybe a deeper insight in light of reality as a language. This leads us to another option − creativity working in both situations. We may be creating new mathematics and technology to create new elements of reality, not only discovering things. In this paradigm, once a thought (abstract or technological) is created, it enters the engine of reality and can be used in the ongoing non-local-temporal development of the underlying code of reality. Reality itself would be learning and upgrading itself through us. In this paradigm we would not really be trying to discover the ToE but rather co-working to create the base code of reality. The code is under development by all consciousness being in the universe. Most of the inventions do not need to be part of the supporting base code, they will live in emergent levels. Fundamental physics is concerned with discovering and creating new building blocks for this underlying code, supporting all the emergent codes. An observed general behavior that supports this view is universality − a basic fact about the physical world is the emergence of macroscopic laws, as in thermodynamics, where these laws do not depend on details of microscopic interactions. It is possible that the inner working of reality is under construction and yet we have a stable macroscopic reality. Emergence and enough layers of reality protect, serving as a natural error-correction for physical codes. Can we distinguish between (A) reality with infinite layers and descriptions (fundamental randomness) – no ToE, (B) reality with a defined underlying layer, (fundamental determinism) – precise ToE, and (C) reality with an undefined, under-construction underlying layer, (fundamentally a code)? We suggest it will be possible due to exponential growth in computational, technological, and cognitive powers. For (A) the discovery of new layers should start to be exponential at some point and for (B) it should stop. While with (C) we can expect to arrive at a good base source code, but with ongoing maintenance and minor improvements, see figure below. It should be possible, in principle, to obtain the correlation between the discovery or creation of new mathematics or technologies and our improvement of understanding about the code of reality.Illustration 1: Prediction for three options of a ToE. Undefined: (A) reality with infinite layers;Defined: (B) reality with a defined underlying layer; and Code: (C) reality with an undefined,under-construction underlying layer.
Keywords
Keywords
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Theory of Everything
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Codes
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References
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[1] Dirac, P. A. M., The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature. Scientific American Issue May 1963, Volume 208, Issue 5, (1963).