Apologies to Maudlin

In my last post I complained about the philosophers George Ellis recommended in Sabine Hossenfelder's book. Further research reveals that I was wrong. I have to retract my complaint, at least in the case of Tim Maudlin. I'm happy to report that Maudlin appears to have a healthy respect for Aristotle. Further, the latter part of his paper on substances and space-time is written in the style of Thomas Aquinas's replies to objections in the Summa.

Maudlin also has a very good paper on unification in physics from which I think Hossenfelder and Smolin would profit. He asks what unification means and sets out some limitations of what we can reasonably expect from unification efforts.

A young theorist friend of mine points out that people largely aren't working on grand unification schemes these days (viz., GUTs, TOEs) and that the figures interviewed in Hossenfelder's book who are working on unification are either older or somewhat marginal. (Admittedly he wasn't familiar with some of the names.) It strikes me that the people who are most concerned with unification are people like Hossenfelder and Smolin who write books on what's wrong with unification efforts. But what they really need to consider is that the possibility that unification of physics isn't possible within physics as we understand it today, but through philosophy, that is, natural philosophy (in other words, by also bringing in some methodologies more typically characteristic of metaphysics). (I wonder if Ellis was hinting in that direction.)

Discovering truth is unification, at very least bringing together reality and the mind, but also often finding commonalities in previously separate insights. The over-all tendency of a truth-discovering activity like philosophy is to unify seemingly unrelated parts of and thoughts about the universe.

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Tim Maudlin 1990 "Substances and Space-time: What Aristotle Would Have Said to Einstein," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 21:4, 531-561.

Tim Maudlin 1996 "On the Unification of Physics," The Journal of Philosophy, 129-144.

Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (New York: Basic Books, 2018).