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Professor Dijkgraaf expressed it well when he said that there is one nature so having two theories, one for the very large and one for the very small, is inelegant and seems to be asking for that defining theory that unifies gravity with the other forces. Admittedly, much of the speculation is still more philosophy than science, but this is great, because physics remains open with questions still to be answered. I hope that when these theories are unified, new questions arise out of them.
I don’t know if this tension has always existed but I agree that now the problem of testability vs. mathematical elegance is one I hear often around such subjects as string theory, quantum gravity and many worlds, for instance. I think beauty is a human construct, and that in general aesthetics are not yet definable by math, and I don’t know if they ever will be.
There seemed to be something contradictory in what we’ve learned. We are told that a black hole is so dense and so massive that nothing that enters its horizon (edge) can escape, but, if I understood Professor Strominger, he stated that there is nothing in the black hole, that space comes to an end.. If that is so, how does it contain information and what happens to the mass that is captured by the gravity of this mass?
The state of no working, experimentally validated theory of quantum gravity is a problem for physicists but not the universe. It is okay to have solid working frameworks that make accurate, testable predictions at vastly different scales, and it will be wonderful when a workable, working theory of quantum gravity is discovered. I believe that the Copenhagen Interpretation is also waiting for a solution that goes beyond Feynman’s motto, “shut up and calculate.” Perhaps Quantum Gravity will also point the way to a solution for what underlies Quantum mechanics.
When a theory fails by not answering key questions, the choice is to either accept the holes in the theory and go with what works, or develop a new theory. It’s not the contradictions alone that drive discoveries, it’s the collapse of a paradigm under the weight of accumulated failures. That drives theories that will contradict the accepted ideas and if those new theories resolve the holes in the old without creating too many new ones, a either a new paradigm emerges or the existing one shifts to incorporate the new ideas. I think Thomas Kuhn discussed this in depth in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Looking at my own preferences there are attractive features to both the experimental and theoretical. I like to tinker with things, pull things apart and put them back together to see how the parts fit and how they work together, yet I also like to look at the things being worked on and discussed and think through the implications and try to project out from them toward the next thing.
What degree of intelligence would I consider in the range of human or greater, might be a better question.I like the idea of a causal test that the Integrated Information Theory posits as a beginning but granting “human rights” to an AI is a question that needs to be examined by conscious intelligences in many disciplines including philosophy, ethics, law, anthropology as well as neuro-biological and physics and more.
After seeing the play, “The Curious Case of Watson Intelligence,” I asked the person I was with a simple question: Would it be a crime to disconnect the power from an electronic conscious AI?
I don’t know. Subjectivity is inherent in all human activity, whether conscious or not. Filtering it out requires a strong effort to recognize it, measure and account for it. Often this must be assisted by outside observers because the biases may be so sublimated as to make the subject resist eliminating them from their study. It is sort of like the story of the blind persons and the elephant. How does the external observer get the blind persons to revise their understanding of what the elephant is.
This question makes me think of the spacetime cone that each of us lives in. A person can only have knowledge of events that occur within that cone. Outside of it, the event has not had enough time to reach us. A person’s direct experience of the world is similar with this addition: we interact with other people’s cones and if we are open, share some of their experience, taking possession of it for oneself. The question is not whether my self-knowledge precludes knowing someone else’s but whether I accept it as being as real as I perceive my own.