``...John Barrow and friends are the one's who've been finding strange anomalies. Whether scientists will be inclined to give up nomological metaphors etc. once some of their cherished *invariants* look more like products of their equations and theories than of the phenomena themselves will be most interesting to watch; how could it be otherwise if there is no god...'' Ian Murray
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Pi in the Sky Barrow? Here is an almost randomly chosen quote:
``During the twentieth century the Platonic approach has dominated fundamental physics. Since the mid-1970s when gauge invariance and symmetry was found to be a master-key with which to unlock the secrets of the elementary particle world, the laws of Nature have been regarded as more interesting than their outcomes. This is not altogether surprising: for laws are simpler to study and one might imagine that once in possession of laws one could understand and predict their outcomes, having come to appreciate that there exists sequences of events which cannot be replaced by timeless invariants in the Platonic manner.
The existence of incompressible sequences means that the Platonic approach is of no use in their analysis. The lack of an abbreviated representation means that there exists no symmetry or invariance whose simple preservation is equivalent to the data content of the sequence. For that would be a compression of the sequence. The outcomes contain a level of complexity that requires nothing less than their explicit listing to capture their full information content.
Besides elevating the study of outcomes to something that is not necessarily included within the study of natural laws this notion of compressibility gives simple ways of characterizing many of our intellectual activities. We recognize a possible new definition of `science' as being simply the search for compressions: the laws of Nature are the compressions of our sense data. The discovery of a Theory of Everything would be the ultimate compression. Moreover, the apparent success of this process hinges upon two superficial features of things: the physical world that we observe seems to be surprisingly amenable to compression, and the brain is remarkably good at effecting compressions when presented with events. In a predominately incompressible world we would not have scientists but archivists who simply recorded every observed event. The compressibility of many aspects of the world saves us from this `Bureaucracy of Everything'...'' (163-4p, Pi in the Sky).
When I first read this passage, I remember thinking about the moons of Jupiter---all utterly unique, bizarre, and curious each in its own way. How odd I thought. What if every object in the sky is completely different from every other object, just as the moons of Jupiter, or the planets of the solar system? What if the whole night sky was composed of completely unique bodies, each formed in an un-repeated sequence of events that give them all forms, but historical forms that are as different as each person's face, finger print, or life history? If this were so, then it would not be much of a stretch of the imagination to consider that we are unique in exactly the same way, and there is nothing like us, except us, anywhere else. This seems to me to be much more difficult to consider than the standard science fiction scenario where every other planet in the galaxy has somebody on it.
I think it is much more psychologically terrifying and therefore more titillating, if there was no life anywhere else or if it was extraordinarily rare, than if it were a completely repeatable and predictiable sequence---given some initial conditions, etc.
In other words, we could arrive at a supremely abstract physics or science, only while we were completely unaware of the concrete details. As long as the objects of astronomy (or sub-atomic particles) were remote, out of focus, and mostly guessed at, we could take advantage of that non-specificity, and enjoy the luxury of abstraction simply because of our ignorance of the detail. But once that detail and all of its variation and history was impressed on us, then suddenly the abstractions would seem extremely crude and highly inaccurate approximations.
What if with sufficient knowledge of the physical world, it suddenly takes on such a unique cast of characters, that it appears to us much like human history---an utterly unique and unpredictable sequence, much like the uncompressible sequence that Barrows outlines above.
Chuck Grimes