What Is the Fundamental Nature of Reality? | Paul Davies, Rupert Sheldrake, Katie Robertson.

Okay, well, the first sort of question, if you like, I suppose it's a historic question. Is it possible to provide a true account of the ultimate bits that make up the universe? I know you're sort of anti this reductionist idea, why are we so obsessed with bits anyway? But I want to ask, can we get to the turtle foundations, I suppose? You mentioned vibrating strings. You know, that's kind of where we are at the moment. That's the sort of theory du jour, for good reason, string theory. Paul, perhaps you can just tell us perhaps where we are at the moment. Yes. And where we can go, can we cut it even smaller? I want to say two things. The first is to sort of arrive at a compromise because reductionism gets a bad press. And I'm a fan of reductionism, by the way. I'm going to put my cards on the table. Right, and it's certainly true. You learn a lot by smashing things to bits and seeing how they're put together. And it's been immensely successful. And Rupert is quite right, it does cost a lot of money to build particle accelerators. But we've discovered new particles that couldn't be found any other way. There's a sort of semi understanding of what's going on among all those little bits and pieces. But we're a long way from a complete understanding. But obviously, it's productive. And so it's a very effective way of having a first go at understanding the world. But it's absolutely not the whole story. And even if you figured out all of the fundamental particles, it wouldn't tell you how I'm likely to vote in the next election or anything of that sort. And so, you know, I completely agree that there's the layer upon layer of emergent phenomena that require their own laws and principles that should be consistent with, but not reducible to those down at the bottom level. I absolutely agree. I think there's that middle position. It's not hopeless. It's not one or the other. We need both. Where are we at? Well, that could be a very long conversation. But the theoretical physics community is in thrall of something called string theory or sometimes M-theory. The idea being that unlike democritus who wanted little particles, everything made out of little particles, the idea is they're made out of little strings, little loops of strings that wriggle around. And as they wriggle in different ways, this is perceived by us on a bigger scale as different types of particle. And so the idea is there's only one or maybe a few types of string. So the fundamental entity would be this string and out of it would come not just the particles of matter, but the particles that convey the fundamental forces of nature like electromagnetism and gravitation and so on would all be in that mix. And so if you could get this to work, you'd have a super duper equation you could wear on your T-shirt and it would capture in a succinct mathematical way all natural phenomena, particles, forces, and everything. It's wonderful. Some of my colleagues have wasted their whole lives actually working in this area, but they remain upbeat that they will get there eventually. But it's a decades-long quest and it's not done yet. String theory is kind of where we are at the moment. I mean, I noticed that actually they're turning on, they're cranking up the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider. We're going for another run. So the big news a few years ago was, and I mentioned the Higgs boson, the Higgs particle that sort of gives particles mass. What are they gonna, what are we looking for now? Are we looking for, are we looking for string? Are we gonna see like a wiggly worm? Well, at the risk of dominating the conversation, shut me up, because otherwise my wife will stand up and say something. Just very, just very, very quick. And I'm gonna come on to a question for Katie. What was the question again? I can't remember. I'll come on to Katie. Actually, while we're on the subject of T-shirts, in the CERN gift shop, they sell the T-shirts with the standard model of sort of particle physics on it. I mean, what, yeah, so the standard model is the term that we need to introduce. Yeah, and I'm sort of interested from a sort of philosophical point of view, because where does philosophy come into all this? Because basically, aren't we just looking closer and closer? What have philosophy philosophers got to talk to us about? Well, there's a couple of things in kind of recent developments where I think philosophy is brought to bear on it. So one, Paul was saying that some of his colleagues have wasted their time on string theory. One of the reasons people worry about string theory is because if we don't have any hope of any empirical justification, then people worry that it's not very scientific. So the kind of hallmark of science is often meant to be that it's possible to falsify your theories, show that they were wrong. And if there's no way of getting any empirical evidence for string theory, then people worry that it's not on a safe footing. And that's- Can I just, can you just expand a bit on this idea of falsification, for those who aren't familiar with where it comes from, because I think it's a really important term. Right, so falsification goes back to the philosopher of science, Popper, who was at the LSE. His idea was the thing that really tells the difference between science and pseudoscience is whether you can falsify your theory. Can you do an experiment and show that in fact it could have been wrong? So it's not about proving you're correct, it's actually seeing if you can pull your theory apart and disprove it. Right, if there was no possible way of disproving it, say every time you had some evidence that didn't look like it quite fitted with your theory, you just came up with another kind of ad hoc modification, then that wouldn't count as being a scientific theory. And where are we with string theories? Are people accusing that of being unfalsifiable? It's not, I guess it's tricky. It's not unfalsifiable in principle, it just looks very difficult. Yeah, the problem is you've got, you talked about a large hadron collider. If you really wanted to pull the strings apart, so to speak, and poke around, you'd need to go 20 orders of magnitude greater in energy. 20 orders of magnitude, it's one followed by 20 zeros, above the large hadron collider. But we know that what the large hadron collider has, to answer your previous question, has found is incomplete because there's something called the standard model of particle physics, which is our best understanding of the electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces, and it's worked brilliantly for decades, but it can't explain why neutrinos have mass or what the dark matter is in the universe, and a bunch of other stuff. We know there's physics beyond the standard model, and the hope with the revamped large hadron collider is we get a glimpse of what that physics might be, maybe by even producing a new particle. Rupert, I get the sense you're really anti, you said you're sort of anti this reductionist view of the universe. I don't think physicists would disagree with you when you talk about it's more than that. Why are you so anti it? Why are you so anti the, I don't want to say anti the scientific method because you're not, but you're anti how science is done. You mentioned sort of, oh, they throw lots of money at this thing, and this isn't the only game in town, and I'm wondering where that comes from. I think it's partly a question of the distorted priorities that result from the reductionist worldview. So in biology, it comes down to funding eventually. I mean, in biology, the vast majority of funding goes to molecular biology. The Medical Research Council, for example, used to have quite a number of research centers that looked at medical conditions, medical outcomes. It's now been centralized at the Francis Crick Institute in near St. Pancras Station, and Francis Crick was never a doctor. He never cured anyone. He was a molecular biologist, and so the whole ethos is one of molecular medicine. Well, that doesn't help people who've got, there are lots of medical conditions where molecular medicine is not the answer. The very fact there's a placebo effect shows us the power of the mind in curing. But the mind is still made up of atoms. Minds are in brains which are made up of atoms. Well, you see, that's the reductionist and the materialist philosophy. Yeah, well, it's also the correct. Well, there you see. You're the moderator. I'm the moderator, so I'm not allowed, yeah. If you have a view that. It's not, what I mean, it's not really a view. Of course it's a view. It's a view. It's a reductionist philosophy of nature, a materialist philosophy. My book, The Science Delusion, since you mentioned it before me, it takes the 10 principle dogmas of science and turns them into hypotheses that can be questioned exactly as you say. Are they refutable hypotheses? No, they're not. Materialism, if you say, well, what would be testable? Materialism says the mind's nothing but the activity of the brain. It's all inside the head. What would refute it? E.g., the existence of telepathy, which would imply thoughts having an action at a distance. Does it refute it? Do materialists give up and say, oh, well, we were wrong? No, they don't. They say, this isn't evidence at all. It doesn't exist and it's impossible and therefore I'm not even going to look at it. So the trouble is that Popper's philosophy of science is an idealized view that assumes all scientists are totally rational. They're not motivated by emotions or their own beliefs. I don't believe that scientists believe that though. Certainly the scientists I know, I don't believe that scientists think like that. Certainly the scientists that I know, they don't. Well, there's one at this very conference, Richard Dawkins, who does think like that. Perhaps we should, I mean, I've had discussions with him on these very subjects as far as he's concerned. There is no evidence because it's impossible and therefore all this careful philosophy of it could be refuted and stuff. That's not the way it works. You've got a system of belief, a system of priorities and a system of careers. I mean, particle physicists need more particle accelerators. They need these things to work. Otherwise they won't get billions of euros more to fund them. It's not just a question of objectively looking at the facts. No, no, no, I know, but you're bringing up sort of values and human things and I'm sort of interested in how deep can we go down the stack of turtles? But that's a value and a human thing. I mean, it's a human, it's a value when someone makes a decision to spend billions of euros on one thing and nothing on another. That's a value. And scientists pretend that their work is objective, but look at any grant application. And in the first paragraph, they tell you that they're going to cure cancer or solve the problems of the world or cure global warming. All sorts of exaggerated and basically untrue claims that give that particular research program a value so they can get the money for it. This is just the way it works. Well, it may be the way. I suppose, for me, sort of, you know, I spend my time with scientists. They would argue with you. They're like- Of course they would. They're like- Well, no, but you seem to sort of suggest that scientists all drive around in Ferraris and they're in it for the money. Of course they do. And they're just not. No, they're not in it for the money, but many of them are in it for their careers and jobs. Well, there is a bandwagon effect. You know, again, to take a middle position. Rupert's quite right that there's certain things people rush after. Of course there is. Because they get you Nobel Prizes or they get you a job. They get you in Nature magazine. And what happens is that there are various sort of thought leaders who dominate or define the scientific agenda. And so people rush in and they, and of course, there's some sort of self-serving aspect of this. But when I look at scientific endeavor over the last 200 years or so, you know, by and large, I approve of what's been done. Yeah. There's a man at the back saying end on a very large piece of paper. We have to go. Is that the end of physics? No, no, no. We can stay. I'm gonna pick up on that, Paul. I want to go on to the sort of next theme if I can. Katie, this is for you. Okay. 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