Taoist Cosmology

    I have written about string theory before.

    But I am drawn back to it today after having read Jim Holt's review of two books on the subject in this weeks New Yorker.  (I have gotten into trouble in the past when people have criticized me for simply responding to a review instead of reading the books; so, I state here clearly, that is what I am doing: responding to Holt's discussion, not the books themselves, which I have not read).  I had almost raised string theory here last week, when I saw these same two books reviewed in the NYT Book Review, but it slipped away.

    Long story short: both books are critical of the effort to develop a grand unifying "theory of everything."  The authors - Lee Smolin and Peter Woit - are serious math-science guys who know the arguments from the inside out.  Holt, as usual, gets off some funny lines.  In describing Smolin's career he says:

Smolin, a reformed string theorist (he wrote eighteen papers on the subject), has helped found a sort of Menshevik cell of physicists in Canada called the Perimeter Institute...

 "Menchevik cell" tells us something of the perceived dominance - dare we say Leninist ascendancy - of string theory in many physics departments.

      Given my own orientations, I am most open to the critiques offered by these books, at least in Holt's rendering.  But here's a line that jumped out at me:

The closest thing to an enduring mark of beauty is simplicity; Pythagoras and Euclid prized it, and contemporary physicists continue to pay lip service to it. All else being equal, the fewer the equations, the greater the elegance. And how does string theory do by this criterion? Pretty darn well, one of its partisans has facetiously observed, since the number of defining equations it has so far produced remains precisely zero. At first, string theory seemed the very Tao of simplicity, reducing all known particles and forces to the notes of a vibrating string. As one of its pioneers commented, “String theory was too beautiful a mathematical structure to be completely irrelevant to nature.”

      You didn't think "Tao of simplicity" would get past me did you?

      It seems that defenders of string theory like it because it is simple - parsimonious in the language of philosophy of science.  But it should not be taken as an analogue of Taoist simplicity.  A Taoist would reject the ersatz, manufactured "simplicity" of an overly broad "explanation of everything."

      There is a notion of simplicity in Taoism (excerpt from passage 32):

Way is perennially nameless,
an uncarved simplicity.  Though small,
it's subject to nothing in all beneath heaven.
But when lords or emperors foster it,
the ten thousand things gladly become their guests...

     Way is, of course, the grand totality of all things at once now. It is the "everything" that string theory aims at explaining.  But the simplicity of Way comes not from our effort to impose a singular explanation upon it, which is, for a Taoist, simply impossible.  Rather, its simplicity comes from its straightforwardness: it is everything.  And since each thing has a certain integrity unto itself (Te), the totality of all things (Tao) is simply the numberless summation of everything.  We might say Tao is all Te.  Its unity is simply a matter of coincidence; that is, the simultaneity of all things at this moment.  It is beyond our description and, certainly, beyond our explanation.

     Happily, Holt makes a passing reference to a truer Taoist sentiment (as opposed to his misused "Tao of simplicity" - which suggests a Taoist would be satisfied with explanatory parsimony) when he says:

Of course, it is possible that a final theory will never be found, that neither string theory nor any of the alternatives mentioned by Smolin and Woit will come to anything. Perhaps the most fundamental truth about nature is simply beyond the human intellect, the way that quantum mechanics is beyond the intellect of a dog.

 I can hear Chuang Tzu chuckling at that last canine image.

Comments

[Casey Kochmer]

:) once upon a time I was a physicist. I remember when string theory came out and I thought... hmm this indeed is a tangled skeen and the idea of Taoist simplicity wasn't what I would have stated about string theory. In fact string theory was one of the reasons I left the field. It was fun watching my friends play mental cat cradle games with the string theory ideas however. So it was good for something.

You did a nice job explaining Tao and Te