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I suspect that the legacy of religious belief pushes the search for symmetries, invariants, and other ordering systems. Of course it could be the other way around, in the sense that our whole conceptual means of understanding the world is dependent upon our perceptual need to see symmetry in the world. That is, symmetry or order are the way we understand. And when these can not be satisfied by some purely abstract formalism (math, reason), then we resort to religious symbolism, or the arts as an alternate formalism.
Let me put it this way. I understand mathematics a lot better when I can grasp its symmetries and ordering relations. If I have to follow some procedural system blindly, I almost immediately forget the steps until those steps have illucidated the ordering method for me. In fact I won't bother any more with a procedural route, until I can see where it's going. Too many years of fighting, trying and dying in school on faith alone. Give me the point first, then I'll figure it out backwards. Of course this attitude makes analysis look like a complete morass---except when they use number theory or geometry as the application. Gimme a book with pictures!
But there is also a larger point. What if, with sufficient observation, the physical world becomes so inundated with exceptions, details, oddities, in short, things that don't fit, that it is made into a history of contingency without any overarching process or direction at all?
See, I think that's where this whole project is headed. We will see this as an series of modifications of various theories. The best example I can come up with at the moment are the computer generated maps of the large scale super clusters of galaxies. The maps I've seen have no symmetry or possible center at all. Instead they look like randomly dispersed globs and wisps, in archipelago like strings.
This raises two huge problems. First that a central origin is called into question because there hasn't been sufficient time for such a dispersion under predictions extrapolated from theory. And then, second there isn't enough observed matter in these giant maps, by a whooping eighty to ninety percent. This latter problem has been mitigated to a certain extent by the discovery of a gravitational lens effect of cold dark matter that probably surrounds galaxies (Dalal, Kochanek, CS Direct detection of CDM substructure, AstroJ, 2002)
Nevertheless, the missing matter problem is still a major drawback. You have to postulate that most matter in the universe is not directly observable, i.e. most of the universe is inconveniently invisible. And of course finding missing matter is a whole cottage industry with announcements of new ways to find the stuff every year (missing matter gets nineteen pages of hits on google).
What I want to know is how likely is it, that we are going to find at least eighty percent more stuff? Oh yeah, and there is the problem that most of the kind of stuff we do see, isn't the right stuff---the missing barons.
Nevermind. All this can be gotten around by a simple method. Bring back the cosmological constant! Or apparently, if that fails, change the speed of light. How about G? There's another suspect.
All of this reminds me of questioning a teenager on how come they haven't cleaned up their room.
Well, see, my friend came over and ah ... No, no, wait Dad. I've got it. Mom told me not to because of my asthma. There. Top that.
Chuck Grimes