Saturday, October 16, 2004
The Fabric Of Reality
[via Denis Dutton]
This is something of a dream article. A great writer on scientific matters, and an extremely credible physicist, in conversation of sorts, via a book review, about the largest of matters — the very fabric of reality.
Penrose believes that time moves in only one direction (asymmetry) and that the universe has “handed-ness”. Penrose's observations, as summarized in part by Gardner, are intuitive — they just make sense.
Gardner points out that Penrose is a “Platonic realist” — that Penrose believes that there are truths that are woven into the fabric of the universe that are true for all time, everywhere.
The “many worlds” theory, the “end of science” theorizing of John Horgan, have no credibility for Penrose.
The Road to Reality loops through a luxurious landscape suffused with the beauty, magic, and mystery of Being. “Why,” Penrose’s friend Stephen Hawking recently asked, “does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” To an atheist, G. K. Chesterton somewhere remarked, the universe is the most exquisite mechanism ever constructed by nobody.
For Penrose, science is a neverending effort to penetrate the secrets of what Einstein liked to call the Old One. He has no sympathy for those who think that all underlying principles of physics have now, or soon will be, discovered. (See John Horgan’s book The End of Science.) For all we know, the universe may have infinite levels of sub-basements and infinite levels of attics in the opposite direction.
The secrets of the Old One are indeed painted with “beauty, magic, and mystery of Being”. What a great article about what appears — from the review — to be a difficult, but great book about the theater of our existence.