marcus said:
Notice that grasping is not the same as seeing for the first time.
When you see an idea presented for the first time it may seem complicated and bizarre, but the commonplace concepts that we think with EVOLVE over time so that future decades or generations can have more evolved mental imagery and be comfortable with mathematical constructs that may be awkward/unintuitive now.
Of course, there is much truth in this. And no doubt, whatever the truth we find in 100 years or 200 years, this will seem to be fuzzy times when scientists were clouded over with half-truths and misconceptions, as every age seems to the ones that follow it, or as we look back upon the late 1800s perhaps.
Certainly, for example, in about 25 hours, a relatively educated layman can watch Susskind's lectures on GR and grasp it at a level that would have been unimaginable only 20 years ago, let alone during the 20s. Computer animation also let's us visualize ideas that would have been indescribably difficult with only a flat piece of paper. So the reach of our potential to grasp is indeed much higher.
Other technologies help, even ones you wouldn't imagine. Skydiving, for example. A few years back I learned to skydive in the San Francisco Bay area. The weather was bad so we waited inside for the winds to die down so beginners could jump. I got to watch some videos of people flying around in very non-traditional maneuvers in what is known as freeflying. Skydivers fly upside down, in a sitting position, in a sort of 3D dance. I eventually learned how to do this. And after about 165 jumps and 40 hours inside a vertical wind tunnel, I found that I could fly around upside down and move my body around in ways that I could not have conceived of when I started. I stopped thinking in 2D and started thinking in 3D.
The unexpected benefit is that I think this really helped my ability to visualize complex geometry. I can imagine in my head much more complex relationships and fly around looking at the various different pieces and how they might fit together in my head. I don't know if I was draw to freeflying because of this aspect of it, or if it was just a side benefit, but it definitely helped my thinking. For Ender's Game fans, it was in many ways like an "enemy's gate is down" experience.
I imagine in the future, there will be many more ways for people to interact in this sort of way with technology. Perhaps we'll be able to use virtual reality to walk or fly around inside hyperspaces, who knows, but the new abilities to reason in different ways we develop through play and the possibilities made available through new technology may help us find important keys to the larger reality. And we'll be able to use those tools to communicate the ideas that we come up with using this new heightened conceptual basis.
Still, I imagine that Wheeler meant something more.
John A. Wheeler said:
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid for so long?
Consider physics from Galileo up to the period before general relativity. It was mostly synthesis and reduction in complexity that marked the great breakthroughs. Keppler's replacement of epicycles with ellipses, Newton's gravity and motion laws, Faraday's Observations and Maxwell's equations. The equations were simple and easy to understand.
Biology became particular arrangements of cells and molecules with emergent system level behavior not possible to predict when looking at the individual components. Entities were composed of complex arrangements of smaller more fundamental and fewer in kind entities.
Matter became molecules consisting of less than 100 elements with emergent properties. Again, entities were composed of complex arrangements of smaller more fundamental and fewer in kind entities.
Elements became atoms consisting of only three different elements with emergent properties. Again, entities were composed of complex arrangements of smaller more fundamental and fewer in kind entities.
And then
the clear direction towards the simpler fundamental entity with complexity emergent reversed itself.
Instead we had an exponential increase in the complexity of physics starting with quantum physics in the 20s or so. The nice clean proton, neutron and electron begat the particle soup which begat the standard model. The nice clean determinism of the 1800s begat the fuzziness of probabilistic quantum mechanics. So now we have a very complex set of theories governing most of experimental data but no real understanding of how it all fits together, or why our constants take on the values they do.
So I believe that what Wheeler was alluding to is the idea that we still await at least one major simplification. One that will be obvious once we have seen it because it will replace a lot of complexity and difficult math with simplicity and much easier-to-understand mathematics.
No doubt, much of our current work will offer clear hints of that simplification once we eventuallly find it. Perhaps it will be an arrangement of string theory that makes everything much simpler. Perhaps it will be a quantum gravity idea that makes everything much simpler. Who knows?
I share Wheeler's optimism in this regard specifically because of the trend towards simplicity that has accompanied our most famous laws and advancements. It just doesn't seem right that everything would get so complicated just at the very edge of our ability to probe.
I'm sure everyone has their own sense of what assumptions physics is making that might be wrong or misleading. My hunch is that we have not taken the dualities seriously enough. The wave-particle duality, the discrete-continuous duality, and probably others like them.
Another hunch is that we haven't really thought deeply enough about what it means to probe using high energies and the possibility that we pump so much energy into our probes of the tiniest matter that we are creating "particles" out of parts that are not fundamental at all.
It just shows you the relativity of being well known versus being intelligent in the physics community.
