Inventing worlds

Isaac Newton

Physicists seem to have lost touch with reality. Instead of figuring out how the universe works, they dedicate themselves to designing possible universes, an activity that possibly they find pleasurable, but which doesn't seem very practical. The worst thing is that they often insist that their imaginary universes are real, putting speculations above experimentation and transgressing one of the fundamental principles of the scientific method: theories must adapt to facts, not the other way around.

One of the weak points of modern physics is the difficulty of explaining the passage of time. Since Newton’s theory, but especially with Einstein’s relativity, our physicists have not been able to deal with time. This happens, despite the fact that other conceptions of physics, such as thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, require unidirectional time: quantum superposition and collapse make no sense except with the hypothesis of irreversible time.

In trying to unify quantum mechanics with relativity (the workhorse of 20^th and 21^st century physics), some physicists are willing to abandon irreversible time, required by the former, giving primacy to Einstein’s view, which considers the pass of time as an illusion. Thus, solving the problem is replaced by denying its existence.

Stephen Hawking

When an inexplicable deficit of neutrinos in solar radiation was discovered a few decades ago, physicists considered it a challenge. It never occurred to them to deny that the problem existed, or to consider the results of the experiments as an illusion. Twenty years later, the problem was solved, when it was found out that neutrinos are capable of changing their "flavor" spontaneously. Shouldn’t the same criterion be applied to the problem of time?

We all perceive that time goes from the past to the future. Can this perception be an illusion? In that case, so could the result of any other experiment. Everything in science is the object of a perception.

Some physicists seem to be leaving the field of science to become philosophers. It is ironic that this occurs precisely when Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy is dead. Something like this happened to Karl Marx, who would be revolted if he knew that his ideas are studied in the history of philosophy, after he announced the death of philosophy.

Manuel Alfonseca