On Unification in Physics

I really enjoyed the article, and actually understood most of it! I made a list of points I appreciated as I went... - Humility is required - Understanding is rewarded so questioning is painful - "Science advances one funeral at a time" might apply to politics... - We should be cautious against making it look like there are just a few loose ends to tie into some grand unification - Universities are not designed to create revolutionaries - Infinities are never observed in practice With regard to this last point, when I had the experience 50 years ago that redirected my life, I came into contact with consciousness/intelligence that was unbounded and therefore infinite. It was, in my experience, everywhere and nowhere and out of time. For me, the grand unification is to ponder the relationship between that unbounded consciousness and the fact that we can not only perceive a world at all but that we can perceive a world that we can all agree on, no matter how different our interpretat... Read more

Engaging writing. I cannot offer much feedback, except that the author should take a look at the literature on progress in science and take into account the arguments for thinking that disunity in its various forms, e.g., conceptual and methodological, is an important condition for progress in science. Work in this area is done by philosophers like Nancy Cartwright and Hasok Chang. A good place for finding appropriate sources is the following entry on scientific progress: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-progress/. A closely related area of work that might be interesting is about what successful unification in physics actually involves. Some are suggesting that such unification is far more limited than appears to be the case on the surface of things. Mark Wilson’s work, e.g., his book Wandering Significance, is along these lines. Cartwright, already mentioned, also writes on this topic. This is not to say that I think the author is wrong to think that unification is impo... Read more

Not always convincing – for different reasons. The “advices” given in it look somewhat like the author would try to teach the birds how to fly or the rabbits how to procreate. Below, I'm including few comments to this post in a form of rather cursory reflections. Unification of physics does not consist in unifying everything with everything. Such an approach has rather philosophical origin, in particular inspired by the Hindu concept of "primeval unity". I’m not enthusiastic about such (luckily outmoded) New Age concepts of mixing physics with pseudo-scientific mysticism. When it comes to real unification in physics, two things should be stated. First, self-evident, is that different branches of applied physics so to say by definition do not need to be unified. Everyone knows, however, that the thread connecting applied physics with theoretical physics is usually very short. Second (which is the right point), if we focus on theoretical physics, unification is very precisely defined a... Read more

Very insightful indeed.