**
What is it that makes you so sure?
The argument was about "invent" versus "discover".
"invent" corresponds to subjective "things". These subjective "things" exist because we exist. **
Nope, to discover - in the sense of making a lab experiment - is objective as far as the setup and the experimental outcome itself is concerned (and there it usually stops, subjectivity creaps in as soon as the statistics is done
). A property can be objectively true (in an appropriate statistical sense) but the *theory* dealing with this property can only be objectively *adequate* with respect to a universal Occam's razor. Now, this adequacy heavily depends upon our contemporary knowledge and can either (a) be falsified by a future experiment (at higher energies) (b) the theory is replaced by one which fits better Occam's razor or (c) the strategy underlying the theory is not suitable for one's goals (unification) and one has to look for a new theory which is at least as good.
**Why not say;"it is silly to claim that such thing would be an EMERGENT property"?
What is this "EMERGENT property" anyway? **
If you do not know what emergent is, then your statement is supersilly
. Let me give a simple example : the correlations in the data discovered in the 19'th century concerning experiments on electricity lead Maxwell (and others) to the *invention* of electromagnetism. It was Lorentz I presume who saw that Maxwell's laws were invariant under the group of hyperbolic transformations and consequently (due to the importance of special relativity) the modern Lorentz covariant formulation was invented (in terms of vector potentials, field strenghts and Hodge duals). This formulation clearly posses a symmetry (which was of course known before, but I just like telling the story
) which is extremely important in the endeavour of finding solutions. So, SYMMETRY became (and was this in a less formal way already for a long time) itself an important principle (also due to Noether's theorem) - which explains the exploration of higher local symmetry groups. Therefore, the only fair statement we can make is that observations (more or less objective truths) are consistent with effective theories (effective in the sense that all *fundamental* particles are assumed to be pointlike) which have local gauge symmetries. Now, these ``fundamental´´ particles are not fundamental at all of course : at sufficiently high energies we will discover new substructures and the ``points´´ shall become bound states of interacting points and hence get an effective spatial dimension (such as with the proton and the quarks). So, such strategy can never lead to a theory of ``everything´´ since you can not even make a falsifiable prediction of what the next generation of subunits will be at sufficiently high energies. Moreover, higher and higher gauge groups lead to more and more ``fundamental´´ interactions and is therefore an extremely uneconomic picture of nature (and not particularly insightful I must add). Therefore one might contemplate that these theories are just effective as is their symmetry : it could very well be that -say- at the Planck scale a (deterministic ?) fundamental dynamics is chaotic and posesses no symmetry at all (of course I do not think you have to go as far as the Planck scale for this
).
**
I used the verb "believe".
Just look in Phys.Rev.D(1930-2006) and count the number of papers which deal with particle physics, QG, SUSY, strings and other unification subjects, and then do the percentage! **
Doing the percentage is stupid ! Percentages say something about money, not about intelligence.
** I don't know about this. I didn't ask "Most of them", did you?
**
Most people I asked think about it in this way
And I guess many mentors on this forum (looking at their attitude) do too (I know for sure Vanesch does).
Cheers,
Careful
