Pardon the bragging, but I just won a bet I made 17 years ago with physicist and bestselling author Michio Kaku. In 2002, I bet Kaku $1,000 that “by 2020, no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, which recognized solid work in cosmology and astronomy but nothing related to a unified theory, was Kaku’s last chance to win before 2020.
Kaku and I made the bet under the auspices of Long Bets, which calls itself a “public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake.” Long Bets is a project of the Long Now Foundation, which entrepreneur Stewart Brand and others created in 1996 to promote “long-term thinking.” Folks like financier Warren Buffet, neuroscientist Christof Koch, physicist Freeman Dyson, inventors Ray Kurzweil and Gordon Bell, businessman Eric Schmidt, psychologist Steven Pinker, and actor Ted Danson have made hundreds of bets on predictions involving science, politics, the environment, economics, sports, you name it.
Proceeds of bets go to a charity chosen by the winner. Kaku and I each put up $1,000 for our wager. Since I won, $2,000 goes to the Nature Conservancy. If Kaku had won, the money would have gone to National Peace Action. Below is the argument that I presented in 2002, which provides background on the quest for a unified theory and my reasons for doubting it will be discovered.
In purely intellectual terms, a unified theory of physics would be the greatest of all scientific achievements. It would culminate the ancient human quest for knowledge, which began when the first of our ancestors asked, “Why?” It would yield the basic rules governing the entire universe, from the smallest to the largest scales. It would tell us how the universe came into being and why it took this particular form, which permitted our existence. It might even reveal our ultimate cosmic fate.
At least, that’s what seekers of a unified theory hope, and what I used to believe. In the early 1990s, I came to suspect that the quest for a unified theory is religious rather than scientific. Physicists want to show that all things came from one thing: a force, or essence, or membrane wriggling in eleven dimensions, or something that manifests perfect mathematical symmetry. In their search for this primordial symmetry, however, physicists have gone off the deep end, postulating particles and energies and dimensions whose existence can never be experimentally verified. The Superconducting Supercollider, the monstrous particle accelerator that Congress canceled in 1993, would have been 54-miles in circumference. Gaining access to the infinitesimal microscales where superstrings supposedly wriggle would require an accelerator 1,000 light years around. (The entire solar system is only one light day around.)
It is this problem that makes me confident I will win this bet. The Nobel prize judges have always been sticklers for experimental proof. The dream of a unified theory, which some evangelists call a “theory of everything,” will never be entirely abandoned. But I predict that over the next twenty years, fewer smart young physicists will be attracted to an endeavor that has vanishingly little hope of an empirical payoff. Most physicists will come to accept that nature might not share our passion for unity. Physicists have already produced theories — Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, nonlinear dynamics — that work extraordinarily well in certain domains, and there is no reason why there should be a single theory that accounts for all the forces of nature. The quest for a unified theory will come to be seen not as a branch of science, which tells us about the real world, but as a kind of mathematical theology. By the way, I would be delighted to lose this bet.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”
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