Natural sciences, such as physics, astronomy and biology, have developed explosively in the 20th century. Naturally, we have no reliable knowledge of how they will develop in the future, and we can only guess about future discoveries. While there are extremely reliable predictions of nature based on scientific theories, there is no equivalent prediction of science itself. Nevertheless, we are not referring to pure guesswork, because the history of recent science at least gives us a clue to future developments—but, perhaps, no more than that. In particular, one of the scenarios that have been discussed for theoretical physics is that, in a relatively short time, we will have found the final synthesis of all the fundamental laws of nature. When, and if, this happens, there will, in principle, be nothing more to do at this level of understanding of nature. Physics will have come to an end—become a victim of its own success. After classical reductionist thinking, the other sciences will also have been understood at the fundamental level. But is the widespread talk about a “theory of everything” much more than just talk? And is there any possibility that this mythical theory will become part of the science of the future? Before looking at these questions, let us look at the relationship between past and future and the position of science in this relationship.
Time and Causality
We have knowledge of the present, both scientific and other forms of knowledge, because we live in it and have immediate access to, or can gain, knowledge about it. When a scientist does an experiment, it gives a kind of knowledge that has a lot of credibility. The experiment can be criticized and repeated, precisely because it takes place in the present. But, eventually, it will no longer belong to the present but to the past. Traditional and fundamental distinctions between past, present, and future provide various conditions for knowing the world, depending on which of the three areas are involved. The present, as indicated, is cognitively privileged because it exists. By contrast, past events do not exist (anymore), and they will never be recreated or come back. In a strict sense, the past is stuck and unchangeable. What has happened has happened, and it cannot be undone. The future does not exist (yet), for future events have not yet occurred. So, how can we have any knowledge about something that doesn’t exist?
The question is not particularly deep regarding the past, as we have comprehensive and credible knowledge about much of the not-currently-existent past. Historians have detailed and experience-based knowledge of, e.g., ancient Greece; and paleontologists similarly have knowledge about long-extinct dinosaurs, due to the fact that today we have traces or sources from these “pasts.” The normal, source-based historical method is also valid for the natural sciences, such as geology, astronomy, and paleozoology, which all have the past of nature as part of their subject area.
While we may have knowledge of the past, though only a partial knowledge, the situation is different regarding the future. For example, we have memories of the past, but—despite claims of clairvoyance—none of the future. We cannot have sources from the future, as it has not yet happened; so there seems to be no empirically-based future story by analogy with the common (past) history. But the future is not closed territory in cognitive terms, and it is not left to mere guesses and prophecies.
It may seem enticing to perceive past and future as symmetrical entities, but there is a fundamental difference in their perception. This difference is reflected in a certain “direction” of time, which, if viewed as an arrow, always points from the past through the present and into the future. The excellent English astronomer, Arthur S. Eddington (1882-1944), introduced the notion of “the arrow of time” for this direction, which is linked to the fundamental concept of causality. Disregarding the intricacies of quantum mechanics, natural phenomena occur as a result of causes happening before the effect that constitutes the phenomenon. If the climate in 50 years turns out to be significantly warmer than today, it will be due to causes (man-made or natural) rooted in the past, perhaps in our present day.
Common causality implies that future events, or at least some of them, are determined by contemporary events; or, present events are determined by the past. Even though the concept of causality was challenged by David Hume, it is a common conception that, while the past is closed, the future seems to be “open,” as a world of opportunities not yet defined. Philosophers have been playing with the idea of “backward causality,” that is, future events can cause present events. Although the idea of backward causality and symmetry between past and future is logically possible, it conficts with our experience-based intuitions and also with the usual perception of the laws of nature. Even though much of nature is basically predictable, this predictability hardly applies to human society and to the products, whether material or intellectual, originating from human activity.
Science is such a product. Based on our current knowledge, we can accurately predict the next time Venus will pass the solar disk. We can also predict, though with less precision and only making certain assumptions, how the climate will change in the future. But can we also predict the future state of science, e.g., its scope and new realizations in 2100? Or anno 2500?
Futurology
Future research, or so-called futurology, deals with future opportunities for the development of society—not in the form of actual law-based predictions but by indicating plausible alternatives for future development and pathways to reach them. Considered as a social system, the scientific world does not differ significantly from other social systems and, as such, can be the subject of sociological studies, including futuristic studies. Research policy and planning naturally contain elements of future research. Many researchers and planners are currently working with, e.g., the resources that will or should be used for scientific purposes in the future.
Thus, while there can be no doubt that science as a social system is a legitimate area for realistic future studies, the case seems to be different in terms of the cognitive level—that is, the future of natural knowledge. Traditionally, this level has not been covered by future research, with the emphasis that precisely scientific discoveries and technological inventions are basically unpredictable. Nevertheless, there are several attempts at predicting future scenarios for the development of scientific knowledge. In some cases, new discoveries are not quite unpredictable, but rather expected; they will be made if sufficient resources are invested in making them.
It is worth pointing out an important difference between scientific predictions and future-research forecasting. Predictions based on natural laws involve predicting future conditions of nature, whether or not these conditions are desirable. In contrast, the issue of predicting future research almost always contains a normative element, considering some scenarios to be more desirable than others. It seeks to gaze into the future in order to actively shape this future in accordance with contemporary social, political, and economic objectives. Unlike the physicist, the futurist is not interested in the future as it will be in any case. In other words, the futurologist’s approach to the future is often of a technological, rather than a scientific, nature.
Trends and Extrapolations
Futurology is by no means an exact science. In many cases, its bid for the future is nothing more than qualified projections of trends that can be traced through, e.g., the last couple of decades. Thus, we must rely on the known recent history and extrapolate this into the unknown future in the form of one or more plausible scenarios. This is, of course, a primitive method, but it is often the only alternative to pure speculation. Although history is not a good guide to the world of the future, it is often the only guide. History does not repeat itself, but we can nevertheless learn from it.
When it comes to scientific knowledge in the form of new theories, concepts, and discoveries, there is little help in analogies or trends from history. We can only modestly predict what will come. Looking back on the history of science, there is every reason for skepticism regarding predictions of the cognitive level of the science of the future.
Physicists such as George Gamow and Freeman Dyson claim that we can imagine that physics, at least at the very basic level, will reach its conclusion in the very near future; namely, when physicists have discovered and united all the fundamental laws of nature.
Monolithic Science
The idea that all physics—and, thus, all scientific understandings of nature—can, in principle, be formulated as a few natural laws (or perhaps just as a single super law) can be found as far back as in the views of Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827). However, it was not until the 20th century that the idea had been taken seriously and was viewed as anything but just a philosophical belief. With quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity theory of gravity, many theoretical physicists were convinced that physics had found a permanent basis. This is still the case, as the two theories today are perceived as fundamental and, in practice, inviolable. Physicists have very good imaginations, but they cannot imagine that quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity could be wrong, only, perhaps, that they might have a limited scope.
Following that thought, it is the ultimate goal of physics to find the basic laws and formulate them in a unitary theory within a common mathematical framework. Once this theory is found, it will be final, and the physics at the fundamental level will be a closed chapter in the book of nature. There will then be nothing else for the physicists to do other than digest this “theory of everything” and derive the consequences of it. Such deductions to measurable physical phenomena could, in principle, take place as purely mathematical deductions from the theory, although the deductions may be impossible in practice. Based on the theory of everything, we will have a complete knowledge not only of today’s phenomena, but also of the future’s. However, since the theory is “quantum mechanical,” this kind of knowledge of the future will not be deterministic but will probably be in the form of probabilities for future events.
There are not many physicists who seriously believe that a theory of everything is a realistic opportunity in the near future, whether this theory is based on many-dimensional string theory or has another background. But some take a final theory very seriously and do not just write about it in popular science. An example is the Swedish-American physicist, Max Tegmark, who, in several works, has prepared a framework for an almost maximally ambitious theory of everything. Tegmark’s theory is mathematical rather than physical, in the traditional sense, arguing that physical reality basically consists of mathematical structures. Ultimately, there is nothing else in the world than these mathematical structures that manifest themselves in our universe in the form of the known physical laws. Such thinking is characteristic of the Platonic-Pythagorean tradition in classical natural philosophy; but with Tegmark, it is not philosophy but—according to himself—exact physics.1
Tegmark’s proposal for a future theory of everything is strongly reductionist, since all science could be derived logically from the not-yet-known quantum-gravity super theory. This reductionism, which is a common feature among many theoretical physicists, is perceived as a virtue and a necessity. It will be not only the known physical disciplines that follow from the final theory, but also the engineering sciences, geology, biology, and medicine—and, yes, even psychology and sociology will be reduced to special cases of the fabled (and, after all, completely hypothetical) theory of everything.
Understandably, the idea of a final theory—which, in principle, ultimately will mean the end of physics—has been criticized by both physicists and philosophers. Many physicists reject the whole philosophy of this idea, which reductively claims a linear connection between the theory and the detectable phenomena of physics. However, many important phenomena are emergent; that is, they depend on particular organizational forms and collective states that cannot be reduced to simple states. An example is superconductivity at relatively high temperatures, which occurs only at a high level of complexity. The mindset among physicists and other scientists working with materials and complex systems is quite different from the reductionist and fundamentalist thinking that can be found at least in parts of the particle-physics environment.
There are other reasons to oppose a final theory (of everything) or doubt the possibility of it. Such a theory must necessarily be formulated in advanced mathematics, or it must be mathematical in its essence, as is the view of Tegmark. But according to a famous theorem of incompleteness, which German logician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) derived in 1931, mathematics is fundamentally incomplete: it is always possible to construct true sentences that cannot be proved. This problem will probably also arise in a physico-mathematical theory of everything and, therefore, render it impossible in a strict sense. It is not proven that Gödel’s incomplete theorem, in this way, destroys the dream of a theory of everything; but the conclusion might seem reasonable to some physicists.
The Cold, (un-)Natural, and Non-Spiritual Sciences
The dream—or nightmare—of a final physical theory is, in many ways, of peripheral importance to the more general challenges that science faces and must relate to in the future. Many of these challenges are of a social nature rather than linked to cognitive aspects in the form of theories and discoveries. Since Galileo Galilei’s (1564-1642) time, science has gone through a narrative of outstanding success, but it does not follow logically that the success will continue into the future. Can we be sure that, in the next century, there will be a science of the same magnitude, vitality, and type as today? It is worth remembering, in this context, that the scientific project is less than 500 years old and, as such, is not a natural or necessary part of human society. Science is, in many ways, unnatural. It is not entirely absurd to imagine a future society without science or, perhaps more realistically, with scientific activities at a significantly lower rate and with priorities different from today’s.
Science, on the present scale, depends on widespread political and popular goodwill. Military interest is also significant, especially in large nations such as the United States, Russia, and China. In general, we find the goodwill, but it is not automatic, unconditional, or guaranteed. There has always been criticism of science, either constructive criticism or destructive criticism, in the form of skeptical and anti-scientific undercurrents; and these critical voices do not belong only to the past. They are not, in and of themselves, a major problem, but they should remind us that the public’s confidence in the existing form of science is potentially fragile and cannot be taken for granted. The discussion on intelligent design in relation to the established neo-Darwinian developmental biology is a reminder of this.
Rejecting Science
There may be many reasons to reject or criticize modern science, ranging from a total rejection of the scientific project to hopes of being able to radically revise it in the form of one or more alternative sciences. There is a rather widespread feeling that the scientific requirement of control and objectivity has made science unrelated to human existential relationships and the spiritual dimensions of existence. This is clearly the case, because established science officially has nothing to say about the spiritual dimensions of existence.
The role of physics in future society was the subject of a UNESCO conference in 1999, where, among other things, some of the problems that science faced in relation to the broad population were discussed. It was noted that many people perceive science as “cold” and “alienating.” In addition, it was concluded that, “Modern forms of irrationality are becoming widespread and sometimes involve outright opposition to scientific attitudes and even scientific knowledge. There is sometimes an unfortunate, even dangerous, political aspect.”2 These observations are undoubtedly correct, but they are not particularly characteristic of our time.
Dissatisfaction with science can be…
- of a political nature, as when it is claimed to be a form of natural knowing that serves the interests of capital and not of the people.
- based on moral or philosophical grounds, when it is claimed that science, in its essence, is reductionist, manipulative, masculine, and technocratic.
- religiously or spiritually oriented, when it is pointed out (in essence, correctly) that science is confined to the physical and measurable but, per definition, ignores the spiritual and non-measurable dimensions of the world or of nature.
That kind of criticism has given rise to many attempts to replace the prevailing form of science with alternative sciences—for instance, based on mental life in nature and a close interaction between man and nature.
Although real alternative sciences should not be attached with too much importance, it is not inconceivable that the established scientific methods and standards could change in the future. These standards have been relatively stable since Galileo’s time but have undergone changes; and, in recent times, they have again been the subject of discussion among scientists themselves. The traditional form of natural science has been a fruitful dialogue between theory and experiment (or observation), the latter being used to assess the strength and credibility of theory. In addition, the experiment works in an explorative fashion, i.e., to uncover natural phenomena and make new discoveries. The burning issue is the fact that a theory, to be considered scientific at all, must lead to predictions or consequences that can be tested experimentally. This method has been a foundation for science for over 400 years and is still widely accepted.
Debating the Nature of the Laws of Nature
The overall problem is how to determine whether a research program is progressive or not, or whether it is scientific at all. Are there mandatory criteria that every science must live up to? If so, who has the right to determine these criteria and, thus, in a sense, define science? During the last decade, there has been a discussion within the physics environment about such questions; and, internally, a broader understanding of what actually constitutes science has been developing. The central stance that experiments and observations have traditionally held is no longer accepted everywhere. Within the theory of, e.g., the multiverse (causally separated universes), some physicists are not only ready to leave the criterion of empirical testability, but also have alternative perceptions about the very nature of the laws of nature and what can be recognized as explanations and predictions. One can imagine that non-empirical standards may gain widespread proliferation in the future of science, which would then involve a very radical break with tradition. There will then be a paradigm shift in the strong sense, as introduced by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1962-1996) in his famed book on scientific revolutions from 1962.3
Since this debate concerns the very definition of good science, it is of fundamental importance and interest even outside the ranks of the researchers. Can physicists or other scientists themselves choose the relevant criteria for their (own) science? Apparently, some do believe that, while critics maintain the value of general criteria based on empirical testability in particular. Nature does not tell us what constitutes good science and what does not. There must be someone to make the decision. But who?
Modern science has not yet become “postmodern,” but there seem to be trends towards a postmodernist direction. This means that scientific issues are not determined by comparison with experimental data but, for example, based on mathematical or aesthetic standards or, perhaps, on the basis of their social desirability. The decisive factor for this kind of postmodern science is not whether a theory is true or false, but whether it is interesting or not. This view clearly affects the discussion about the concept of truth claims about nature.
Nature will undoubtedly continue to deliver surprises to us, large as well as small; but they will hardly be able to shake the world picture in its foundation. It must be considered almost impossible that natural sciences will experience a paradigm shift of the same drastic nature as when the Aristotelian worldview was replaced by the Galilean/Newtonian version. This is, undeniably, a conservative and not very exciting forecast, but it is probably more realistic than the scenarios that predict a science of the future based on brand-new discoveries and new paradigms. However, there is a single possible discovery that could send our minds reeling back and forth, about both the world and man: if contact with a civilization outside our solar system is established. Should this happen, it will have consequences that one can hardly imagine.
NOTES
- Max Tegmark, “The Mathematical Universe,” Foundations of Physics 38, no. 2 (February 2008): 101-150.
- Raymond S. Mackintosh, “International Workshop on the Future of Physics and Society, Debrecen, Hungary, 4-6 March 1999, Workshop Summary,” Cornell University, Arxiv:physics/9904013: https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9904013, page 4.
- Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), https://archive.org/details/ThomasS.KuhnTheStructureOfScientificRevolutions/page/n1.
[*This article is written by Simon Olling Rebsdorf, but inspired by his MSc and PhD supervisor and mentor, Professor Emeritus and Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics recipient Helge Kragh‘s many writings and thoughts about the topic and is published in Journal for the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, 85-90. Edited and proofread by K. Kendrick]
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