Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 03:11:42 -0500
Subject: Re: SOKAL, PHYSICS, AND POSTMODERNISM IN NY TIMES


Ralph:

>Rahul and other interested parties, you should check out yet
>another shoddy piece of science popularization in the wake of the
>Sokal affair:
>
>Horgan, John.  "Science set free from truth", THE NEW YORK TIMES,
>16 July 1996, p. A17.
>
>Truly disgusting.  But is it not also true that physicists are
>also responsible for shameful mystification in their own field?
>And what do you think of superstring theory?

They are. Perhaps the most egregious example out there today is *The
Physics of Immortality*, by Frank Tipler. He purports to derive immortality
and resurrection (why both? I don't know) from an analysis of the
Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Needless to say, it's profound nonsense, though I
haven't bothered to read it -- nor will I. That crank Scarfatti belongs to
a group (the Physics/Consciousness Research Group -- the name says it all)
that includes Brian Josephson, who is a Nobel laureate. David Bohm made at
least one profound contribution to physics, but he's become another
shit-spreader. Why? I'm still going with premature senility. I don't
include Bohr among these people, although some of his maundering has
inspired more garbage than these guys could produce in their whole lives.

There are many more sensible books by sensible authors which might seem to
the intelligent layperson as if they are mystificatory. The problem is that
many people, especially professors of various stripes, believe that, since
physics is simply a discourse like any other, that the words people write
down to try to explain matters that would require years of study and more
brains than most of the readers have to begin with really mean something.
They don't. The authors are trying to paint a fuzzy picture with bright
colors, of the type to appeal to infants. It's not clear what the point is.
It is important to spread scientific knowledge, and, more importantly, a
scientific attitude, into the general public, but it's not at all clear
that sensationalistic popular science books serve that purpose. The best of
these books actually require some thought from the reader, and do not
purport to explain everything -- like Spacetime Physics by Taylor/Wheeler
of General Relativity from A to B by Robert Geroch. It's harder to find
good examples for quantum mechanics, but, in general, the older and less
American the book the better. The damn Russkis actually put out a decent
series of popular science books which tried to teach instead of simply to
impress -- ABCs of Quantum Mechanics (V. Rydnik, Mir Publishers) was quite
good, as I recall, although I read it about 15 years ago, so I can't really
remember. The main difference is that they never succumbed to the purely
American idiocy, that anyone can understand anything without having to put
forth any effort. I can see no conceivable point in writing such books
about string theory -- even most physicists don't have the tools to
understand it. Furthermore, it so far doesn't tell people anything new
about the universe. Still, I don't blame physicists primarily for these
books -- because of the excesses of modern journalism and the
anti-intellectualism (especially anti-mathematism, if that's a word) of the
American people, no better kind of book will be read.

I have given my opinion of string theory before (about a year ago). I'll
just repeat it briefly. It's based on an interesting hypothesis, which,
when you work out some of the mathematics, seems to remove many of the
theoretical difficulties which have been plaguing physicists (difficulties
in moving forward, not with the existing theory, the Standard Model, which
works phenomenally well), and holds out the prospect of far greater
explanatory power. A great many mathematical tools have been developed
through these investigations over the past 12 years, some of which, notably
conformal field theory, have found useful application in other fields of
physics. The theory (theories, actually) itself is completely up in the air
-- it's not really part of physics, because there's no reason to believe
(or disbelieve) that it's true. The mathematical difficulties involved in
making it give new predictions at accessible energies have so far proved
prohibitive, although there is no a priori reason that things should
continue that way. There are good reasons to believe that the methods of
analysis being developed will prove useful in the analysis of any future
true theory, whatever that may be. So think of string theorists as an odd
kind of mathematician, for the moment.

I'm not sure what you believe about this, Ralph, but it really is true that
reality at a low enough level looks completely different from what our
rather limited intuition in the middle realm would tend to suggest. There's
nothing surprising about this, and, though explanations of this fact may
sound mystical, they're really not.

Rahul




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