Philosophy Now Forum

I have no idea how you managed to draw that conclusion from my statement, Gingko. I was merely making the point that mathematical physics doesn't model reality. It models a theory about reality. This is hardly a controversial statement.

Obvious Leo wrote:I have no idea how you managed to draw that conclusion from my statement, Gingko. I was merely making the point that mathematical physics doesn't model reality. It models a theory about reality. This is hardly a controversial statement.

You have to explain this further - what does the theory model? or what is the theory and what is the mathematical model?

Wyman wrote:

Obvious Leo wrote:I have no idea how you managed to draw that conclusion from my statement, Gingko. I was merely making the point that mathematical physics doesn't model reality. It models a theory about reality. This is hardly a controversial statement.

You have to explain this further - what does the theory model? or what is the theory and what is the mathematical model?

This is quite a complex question but I'll try to respond briefly in a way that sort of relates to the OP. Physics is an entirely observational science so at the core of the tautology which is mathematical physics lies the simplest of questions. What is an observation? This is not a question which physics is equipped to answer but there are many other sciences which deal specifically with this question, the most sophisticated of which would be cognitive neuroscience, which in turn is divisible into a range of sub-disciplines. The nature of an observation has also always been a perennial favourite within every major philosophical school since time immemorial because this question has at its heart the difference between a subjective and an objective reality, a subject which philosophers simply love banging on about. Physics makes no such distinction between a subjective and an objective reality, simply because it is not designed to do so, which means that in physics these are assumed to be entirely synonymous terms. I don't criticise this methodology, because it simply couldn't be otherwise, but this inescapable fact has profound implications when we come to consider what physics is and is not able to tell us about the physical world. In physics this is generally termed the "observer problem", the "measurement problem" or even the "consciousness problem". Early in the 20th century physics was engaged in much hand-wringing and existential angst about this problem because the physicists of the time still had a basic grounding in metaphysics as part of their formal education. This is no longer the case and the geeks of the modern era no longer concern themselves with such trivial matters. Equating the subjective with the objective is good enough for them and this has led their "science" into a conceptual cul-de-sac.

In 21st century science the definition of an observation is a completely uncontroversial one and this definition accords with the definition of every major philosophical school in history. An observation is a construct of the human consciousness. The only thing our senses are able to provide to us is raw data which they glean from a reality which is continuously coming into existence all around us. In and of itself this data has no meaning because it is our consciousness which constructs this vast suite of data into a coherent model of our physical world. It is we who give meaning to this data and in the process of ascribing this meaning we necessarily include whatever a priori assumptions we have already made about this world. Rightly or wrongly we build our meanings onto the shoulders of our learning. In the technical jargon this model is called our "cognitive map" but in layman's terms it could equally well be called our Theory of the World and every single human mind constructs its theory of the world differently. Inter-subjectivity plays a dominant role in the way in which we construct our theory of the world, which means that everybody's theory of the world is broadly similar to everybody else's, but no amount of inter-subjectivity can turn a subjective world into an objective one. It will forever remain an incontrovertible fact that our cognitive map is not a map of the world as it is but rather a map of the world as we inter-subjectively think it is. This is pure Kantian philosophy, but it was also summed up by that master of the pithy epithet and one of the most exquisite minds in the history of science, the great Man himself.

"It is the THEORY which determines what the observer will observe".....Albert Einstein.

All of the great pioneers of early 20th century physics were well aware of the limitations which this incontrovertible fact imposed on the explanatory authority of their science. Its predictive authority would be unaffected provided that the observations were modelled correctly but no amount of modelling could ever possibly explain why the observer constructs his cognitive map of the world in the way he does, rather than in some other way. Neither could such modelling offer any evaluation of the objective truth value of this map. We can only speculate wildly about how other species might model their world and we can even speculate wildly about how an extra-terrestrial intelligence comparable with our own might choose to model its world but there is one absolute truth statement which we could make about such a model. It will bear no resemblance to our own because there is no such thing as a right way or a wrong way of doing this. There are simply ways which make our Theory of the World comprehensible and ways which make it incomprehensible. Since spacetime physics has chosen the latter course we are forced to the conclusion that this paradigm is founded on a fundamentally flawed a priori assumption of the intersubjective observer. The list of metaphysical absurdities in spacetime physics has been well documented and it is quite unnecessary for me to reprise them here. However to deny the existence of this flawed a priori assumption is to do something which no philosopher must ever to do, which is to deny the distinction between a subjective and an objective reality. Our universe is clearly ordered and self-organising which means that an objective reality must be comprehensible. If we deny this then both science and philosophy are meaningless.

I regard the divorce between physics and philosophy as the single greatest tragedy of our modern era and the sole stumbling block standing in the path of the unification model which physics has been so desperately seeking for a century. Indeed I find the philosophers far more culpable than the physicists in this regard because they have failed to address their attention to the metaphysical absurdities which the spacetime paradigm has thrown up. The simple fact is that this model works and it works so spectacularly well that it has brought our species to the dawn of a technological super-age. It's authority in answering the "how" questions cannot be contradicted while the corresponding "why" questions have been ignored, but these questions do not belong in the domain of physics. It's time for the navel-gazers to climb down from their ivory towers and help their scientific brethren out in a time of crisis. It's also well past time for the physicists to show a bit of humility and confess that they are in desperate need of such assistance.

We need the Blues Brothers to come out of retirement because it's time to put the Band back together.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Wyman wrote:I have to echo everyone else's objection to how you've treated Newton, Leo. I know all the stories of Newton's wackiness, but he did produce the first mathematical model of the universe that actually worked (to a large extent) and invented a new branch of mathematics in the process. That's more than being good at arithmetic! He also seemed to have the intuition, never successfully worked out until Einstein, that light had the properties of particles. And although we speak a different language (of ideas), aren't we all looking for a way to 'model the mind of god' when we ask what lies beyond the mathematical models of physics?

This is perfectly true and I don't seek to belittle Newton's achievements for what they were. However Newton established a methodology for science which is fundamentally flawed in its assumptions. Newton assumed that the mathematical representation of an observation was synonymous with truth and thereby he did exactly what Ptolemy had done over a millennium earlier.

No - I don't think he did that.
I'm pretty sure he was aware that Maths was just a language to describe the motions of the Solar system. I'm not even sure you can make that claim about Ptolemy.

Newton was clear in his statement Hypothesis Non Fingo.

It's a fair point, Hobbes, and I'll freely grant it. However it has nevertheless become infused into the language of physics that the universe can ONLY be described in the language of mathematics. This is the sort of claim that I take issue with because of the tautologous relationship between mathematics and the observations which the mathematics are used to model. Instead of modelling reality mathematics can only be used to model a THEORY of reality, a point which Einstein in particular took pains to stress throughout his life.

Obvious Leo wrote:Instead of modelling reality mathematics can only be used to model a THEORY of reality, a point which Einstein in particular took pains to stress throughout his life.

This is one statement which consistently gets me confused seeming so at odds with itself. Again it's to be reiterated, what choice do we or any other intelligent life form have except to theorize based on observation, logic and even gut feeling all subjected to prediction and the scrutiny of math? The best we can achieve is to have our "virtual reality" models based on its mathematical description coincide as much as possible with that which it seeks to describe. If "Reality" is supposed to equal some kind of positive certainty then theories only become probability statistics - which they actually are - that can exist anywhere at anytime in a range from low to high. Does "Reality" have to be fully described for it's models to work and what in this Universe could accomplish that?

Every kind of "narrative" from societal to scientific is ultimately "modeled" which keeps us in the game because we possess no other methodology to accomplish that. Maybe God doesn't need math and modelling to create but in order to understand that creation we are limited to what has proved most potent in defining it despite its limitations. In spite of Albert's quote, which I find half banal and half bizarre, the modelling methodology has proven quite successful for Relativity as it has for QM. These "theories" have certainly changed OUR reality with no doubt much more to come.

Dubious wrote:These "theories" have certainly changed OUR reality with no doubt much more to come.

Are you quite certain that you want to have your reality defined by theories which make no sense, because this means you're willing to redefine what making sense means in order to conform with theories which will almost certainly have gone the way of phlogiston within a generation. This is what has happened to every other theory in the history of science so why should these be different?

Dubious wrote:Maybe God doesn't need math and modelling

Don't bother answering the above. Obviously a universe which makes sense is not high on your list of considerations.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Dubious wrote:These "theories" have certainly changed OUR reality with no doubt much more to come.

Are you quite certain that you want to have your reality defined by theories which make no sense, because this means you're willing to redefine what making sense means in order to conform with theories which will almost certainly have gone the way of phlogiston within a generation. This is what has happened to every other theory in the history of science so why should these be different?

Dubious wrote:Maybe God doesn't need math and modelling

Don't bother answering the above. Obviously a universe which makes sense is not high on your list of considerations.

You haven't read my post very well that's for sure.

So what solution do you propose for all these theories we have which make no sense?

Dubious wrote:So what solution do you propose for all these theories we have which make no sense?

Too easy. Accept that they are flawed and try to figure out why. Physics has shown itself to be utterly incapable of doing this and spacetime is accepted as canonical doctrine chiselled into stone tablets as if it were holy writ. If you think there's a few gratuitous insults flying around this place you ought to see the shit that gets flung my way in physics forums. There is genuine hatred in some of the venomous criticism but this is not about a difference of professional opinion or an expression of an alternative view. This is about idolatrous heresy from a traitor who deserves to be burnt at the stake. It's not a good look for a science which has been stalled in its progress for a century.

Dubious wrote:So what solution do you propose for all these theories we have which make no sense?

Obvious Leo wrote:Too easy. Accept that they are flawed and try to figure out why.

From everything I read and all the documentaries I've seen regarding Relativity, QM, et al, theories continue to be examined. Obviously String Theory or M-theory do not have anywhere near the credibility of Relativity or QM. The latter two but especially QM yielded results which no one in the beginning could have imagined and yet no physicist that I've encountered would claim them as being sacrosanct. So in what sense or to what degree would they be flawed making the assumption that you're referring to, among others, two of the most potent theories of the 20th century with no end in sight to their effectiveness?

Obvious Leo wrote:Physics has shown itself to be utterly incapable of doing this and spacetime is accepted as canonical doctrine chiselled into stone tablets as if it were holy writ.

If you renounce spacetime as described in Relativity wouldn't that also destroy the theory? I mean you may hate Minkowski for his 4D space paradigm but it was still Einstein who accepted it but amended to form curved space. By every experiment so far and continuously refined, it keeps on proving itself. Maybe there will eventually be another theory to replace GR and remain as predictive though it annuls the spacetime paradigm...if it ever can be annulled. But like any good theory, it would have to account for all the reasons why the prior theory is correct.

Obvious Leo wrote:It's not a good look for a science which has been stalled in its progress for a century.

Again, a fair question. How can science have stalled for a century? Does 2015 look like 1915? Though Leibniz invented the Binary system it is QM which implemented the technologies based on it. When you think about 3D and 4D printing, the new and future technology of Qbits in Quantum computing what is left to say about your statement? Science has always and will always be an uphill battle especially as things get more abstract. But in what sense are we living in the Middle Ages when one could hardly tell the difference between one century and the next which is what your quote implies?

Dubious wrote:two of the most potent theories of the 20th century with no end in sight to their effectiveness?

I've never ever disputed the effectiveness of these theories. In fact as far as effective theories go I rather doubt that they are ever likely to be improved on. However a science must be both predictive and explanatory and effective theories have no explanatory authority.

Dubious wrote: If you renounce spacetime as described in Relativity wouldn't that also destroy the theory? I mean you may hate Minkowski for his 4D space paradigm but it was still Einstein who accepted it but amended to form curved space. By every experiment so far and continuously refined, it keeps on proving itself. Maybe there will eventually be another theory to replace GR and remain as predictive though it annuls the spacetime paradigm...if it ever can be annulled. But like any good theory, it would have to account for all the reasons why the prior theory is correct.

That's what makes it such a devilishly tricky problem. SR, GR and QM have all proven themselves time and time again. No scientific theory in science history can hold a candle to them. However they are all mutually exclusive which means they cannot possibly all be right. Since each separately contradicts either one or both of the others then the only logical conclusion is that all three are logically flawed for the same reason. In my view the reason for this is bloody obvious, hence my username. Time is not a spatial dimension, although I don't "hate" Minkowski for representing it as such. It was a stunningly clever mathematical trick which led to two further highly successful models. I just wish that the community of physics would recognise the fact that models of physics are not laws of physics and the mathematical representation of a physical model is not the same thing as a physical representation of a physical model. Until they acknowledge this simple fact then they'll have no hope of finding the unification model they've been looking for for a century. A century is a hell of a long time in modern science and they are no closer to such a model now than they've ever been. Simply trying to tack new ideas onto a dodgy paradigm is never going to work.

" A fool is someone who repeats the same actions and expects a different outcome".....Albert Einstein

Dubious wrote: Again, a fair question. How can science have stalled for a century? Does 2015 look like 1915? Though Leibniz invented the Binary system it is QM which implemented the technologies based on it. When you think about 3D and 4D printing, the new and future technology of Qbits in Quantum computing what is left to say about your statement? Science has always and will always be an uphill battle especially as things get more abstract. But in what sense are we living in the Middle Ages when one could hardly tell the difference between one century and the next which is what your quote implies?

Making new gadgets by using effective theories does not equate to progress to a model to unify them. There has been only one significant advance in physics modelling in the past century, a fact which no physicist will deny and all regard as a major problem. Gell-Mann's insights which led to the development of the Standard Model of Particle Physics was a far more nuanced way to model QM and it led to some significant new technologies. However this was almost fifty years ago and nothing new has happened since.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Wyman wrote:

Obvious Leo wrote:I have no idea how you managed to draw that conclusion from my statement, Gingko. I was merely making the point that mathematical physics doesn't model reality. It models a theory about reality. This is hardly a controversial statement.

You have to explain this further - what does the theory model? or what is the theory and what is the mathematical model?

This is quite a complex question but I'll try to respond briefly in a way that sort of relates to the OP. Physics is an entirely observational science so at the core of the tautology which is mathematical physics lies the simplest of questions. What is an observation? This is not a question which physics is equipped to answer but there are many other sciences which deal specifically with this question, the most sophisticated of which would be cognitive neuroscience, which in turn is divisible into a range of sub-disciplines. The nature of an observation has also always been a perennial favourite within every major philosophical school since time immemorial because this question has at its heart the difference between a subjective and an objective reality, a subject which philosophers simply love banging on about. Physics makes no such distinction between a subjective and an objective reality, simply because it is not designed to do so, which means that in physics these are assumed to be entirely synonymous terms. I don't criticise this methodology, because it simply couldn't be otherwise, but this inescapable fact has profound implications when we come to consider what physics is and is not able to tell us about the physical world. In physics this is generally termed the "observer problem", the "measurement problem" or even the "consciousness problem". Early in the 20th century physics was engaged in much hand-wringing and existential angst about this problem because the physicists of the time still had a basic grounding in metaphysics as part of their formal education. This is no longer the case and the geeks of the modern era no longer concern themselves with such trivial matters. Equating the subjective with the objective is good enough for them and this has led their "science" into a conceptual cul-de-sac.

In 21st century science the definition of an observation is a completely uncontroversial one and this definition accords with the definition of every major philosophical school in history. An observation is a construct of the human consciousness. The only thing our senses are able to provide to us is raw data which they glean from a reality which is continuously coming into existence all around us. In and of itself this data has no meaning because it is our consciousness which constructs this vast suite of data into a coherent model of our physical world. It is we who give meaning to this data and in the process of ascribing this meaning we necessarily include whatever a priori assumptions we have already made about this world. Rightly or wrongly we build our meanings onto the shoulders of our learning. In the technical jargon this model is called our "cognitive map" but in layman's terms it could equally well be called our Theory of the World and every single human mind constructs its theory of the world differently. Inter-subjectivity plays a dominant role in the way in which we construct our theory of the world, which means that everybody's theory of the world is broadly similar to everybody else's, but no amount of inter-subjectivity can turn a subjective world into an objective one. It will forever remain an incontrovertible fact that our cognitive map is not a map of the world as it is but rather a map of the world as we inter-subjectively think it is. This is pure Kantian philosophy, but it was also summed up by that master of the pithy epithet and one of the most exquisite minds in the history of science, the great Man himself.

"It is the THEORY which determines what the observer will observe".....Albert Einstein.

All of the great pioneers of early 20th century physics were well aware of the limitations which this incontrovertible fact imposed on the explanatory authority of their science. Its predictive authority would be unaffected provided that the observations were modelled correctly but no amount of modelling could ever possibly explain why the observer constructs his cognitive map of the world in the way he does, rather than in some other way. Neither could such modelling offer any evaluation of the objective truth value of this map. We can only speculate wildly about how other species might model their world and we can even speculate wildly about how an extra-terrestrial intelligence comparable with our own might choose to model its world but there is one absolute truth statement which we could make about such a model. It will bear no resemblance to our own because there is no such thing as a right way or a wrong way of doing this. There are simply ways which make our Theory of the World comprehensible and ways which make it incomprehensible. Since spacetime physics has chosen the latter course we are forced to the conclusion that this paradigm is founded on a fundamentally flawed a priori assumption of the intersubjective observer. The list of metaphysical absurdities in spacetime physics has been well documented and it is quite unnecessary for me to reprise them here. However to deny the existence of this flawed a priori assumption is to do something which no philosopher must ever to do, which is to deny the distinction between a subjective and an objective reality. Our universe is clearly ordered and self-organising which means that an objective reality must be comprehensible. If we deny this then both science and philosophy are meaningless.

I regard the divorce between physics and philosophy as the single greatest tragedy of our modern era and the sole stumbling block standing in the path of the unification model which physics has been so desperately seeking for a century. Indeed I find the philosophers far more culpable than the physicists in this regard because they have failed to address their attention to the metaphysical absurdities which the spacetime paradigm has thrown up. The simple fact is that this model works and it works so spectacularly well that it has brought our species to the dawn of a technological super-age. It's authority in answering the "how" questions cannot be contradicted while the corresponding "why" questions have been ignored, but these questions do not belong in the domain of physics. It's time for the navel-gazers to climb down from their ivory towers and help their scientific brethren out in a time of crisis. It's also well past time for the physicists to show a bit of humility and confess that they are in desperate need of such assistance.

We need the Blues Brothers to come out of retirement because it's time to put the Band back together.

Inter-subjectivity plays a dominant role in the way in which we construct our theory of the world, which means that everybody's theory of the world is broadly similar to everybody else's, but no amount of inter-subjectivity can turn a subjective world into an objective one. It will forever remain an incontrovertible fact that our cognitive map is not a map of the world as it is but rather a map of the world as we inter-subjectively think it is.

I agree with most of the post, but it seems strange that you put one extra layer of subjectivity between the observer and and the world. Why wouldn't our cognitive map be a map of the world? You say it is a map of our inter-subjective interpretation of the world. But the inter-subjective interpretation is the cognitive map. We do not map a map, we map the world. For an analogy: a satellite maps the Earth via cameras and algorithms utilizing principles of general relativity. The satellite does not map a map of the world - it maps the world 'through' or 'via' a particular set of principles. Thinking of these principles through which the world is 'seen' as another map implies an infinite regress which I do not think is logically warranted.

Obvious Leo wrote:It's a fair point, Hobbes, and I'll freely grant it. However it has nevertheless become infused into the language of physics that the universe can ONLY be described in the language of mathematics. This is the sort of claim that I take issue with because of the tautologous relationship between mathematics and the observations which the mathematics are used to model. Instead of modelling reality mathematics can only be used to model a THEORY of reality, a point which Einstein in particular took pains to stress throughout his life.

Indeed we are all inevitably trapped within the limits of the human metric, be that metaphorical language or maths; all is contrivance.

I think Newton, as many other Cosmologists of his time was on a search to "save the appearances". We always have to remember what Wittgenstein reminded us of - if sun went round the earth what would it look like. Nature then resists some descriptions as they offer us consequences that cannot be ignored.
One of the chief reasons that the idea that the earth moved was resisted, was the lack of stellar parallax. If the earth moved then the fact that the background of stars seems static one with the other, then they would have to exist at unimaginable distances. This consequence made the very suggestion that the earth moved around the sun ridiculous in the extreme.
But once we accept that the earth moves around the sun, then we have to accept the enormity of the Universe.

We write this reflection is plain words from reason - no maths required.

Obvious Leo wrote:There has been only one significant advance in physics modelling in the past century, a fact which no physicist will deny and all regard as a major problem. Gell-Mann's insights which led to the development of the Standard Model of Particle Physics was a far more nuanced way to model QM and it led to some significant new technologies. However this was almost fifty years ago and nothing new has happened since.

That could be but no matter how one thinks of it 50 years is definitely not a long time. The abstractions which exist now are of a completely different order than anything previous, something humans are in the process of getting used to on many fronts.

Think of the time it took between Newton and the appearance of James Clerk Maxwell and Einstein. There are certainly going to be more advanced theories in the future which will make sense of what doesn't make sense now and so it goes for as long as we keep on going. Every NOW has its own mysteries which future nows will dissolve while producing more of their own. That's the story of the human race as far as scientific progress is concerned...all a matter of time and torque.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:We write this reflection is plain words from reason - no maths required.

A beautiful turn of phrase to encounter in a philosophy forum. Reason must always be regarded as a higher path to truth than mathematics because it is our reason which our mathematics is being used to model.

Try this for a perfectly logical argument. The sun rises in the east, traverses across the sky, and then sets in the west. It does this every 24 hours. Therefore the sun orbits the earth. This is a flawless conclusion and yet it is false. However if the earth and sun were the only bodies in our solar system it would be perfectly true. In a 2-body system it makes no sense to regard one of the bodies as a "primary" body since they simply orbit each other. We tend to do this as a matter of convention but this convention is entirely arbitrary. For instance the moon and the earth simply orbit each other. Modern cosmology could never have been developed if there were no other planets in our solar system because in such a case heliocentrism has no meaning. In the n-body system ALL of the bodies affect the orbital motion of ALL of the others. Not until the development of GR was this fully realised, so science had come a long way without this very basic piece of knowledge. We think of all our planets as simply orbiting the sun in the same trajectory year in and year out but this neat little mental picture is completely false. No two orbits of a planet around the sun are the same. No two orbits of the moon around the earth are the same. These are simple physical facts known to any physics undergraduate and yet they do not form a part of the everyday narrative of physics. In the case of our solar system it is far simpler to just compose our narrative in the language of Kepler's laws of planetary motion because near enough is good enough. I have no problem with us doing this as long as we understand that we're taking a shortcut in which we're conflating a procedure of thought with a fact of nature. Philosophy is all about how we think the world.

Hobbes' Choice wrote: I think Newton, as many other Cosmologists of his time was on a search to "save the appearances"

My aging brain had lost this wonderful "save the appearances" term in the fog and I thank you for bringing it back into the light, Hobbes. Physics is all about saving the appearances and thus near enough is good enough as long as our models are yielding accurate enough predictions. However near enough is not good enough for truth because reason sets the bar for truth much higher. Modelling the orbits of planets to the umpteenth degree of precision is quite literally impossible because GR tells us that every cosmological body in the universe is moving in a relativistic relationship with every other. It may sound wildly counter-intuitive but the motions of a planet in a faraway galaxy affect the motions of our own. Obviously this effect is negligible but in matters of truth negligible is not synonymous with irrelevant and a miss is as good as a mile. Our epistemic models are simply unable to model the real world, a truth which Kant would accept as a given.

The narrative of physics is perfectly entitled to ignore this inconvenient truth and the early pioneers of 20th century physics were well aware of the limitations of their discipline. Sadly few of our modern physicists have the grounding in metaphysics which these pioneers absorbed as part of their formal education and thus these limitations are nowadays less well understood. However, although the narrative of physics is entitled to ignore inconvenient truths the narrative of philosophy is not. There MUST be an underlying truth beneath these epistemic truths which our models of physics is unable to capture.

In my philosophy I claim that this underlying truth has been known to philosophy for millennia but has been obscured in recent centuries behind the Newtonian veil. It was known to the ancient Greeks, Hindus, and Chinese, but it was known most precisely by the Persians. Our universe is not a "place" at all. Our universe is an EVENT.

How can we accommodate this ancient truth within our modern understanding of physics? It was Albert Einstein who showed us the way. The motion of every physical object in the universe is gravitationally linked to the motion of every other and the simple rules of formal logic require that this must apply all the way down to the Planck scale. The entire universe is causally connected but these causal connections are constrained by the finite speed of light. The motion of the planet in the faraway galaxy which has a minuscule effect on the orbit of our own cannot manifest this effect until the INFORMATION regarding this motion reaches us. This takes TIME. We might think of this time in terms of "space" and the "distance" which this information has to travel, but this is the nature of the Newtonian obfuscation, where our internal narrative of reality becomes one of "objects" moving in "space". However this is a flawed narrative because empty space is not physical, as Gottfried Leibniz did his very best to explain. The underlying narrative of reality, the one which our models of physics is unable to capture, is that our universe is one of events occurring in time which the observer merely perceives as objects moving in space. Both the objects and the space are nothing more than the constructs of the consciousness of the observer so what the observer is doing is spatialising time, just as Minkowski did in SR. The observer has unwittingly accepted a flawed narrative in order to "save the appearances".

This perspective offers us a universe accessible to human reason, which our current epistemic models cannot. For example, instead of thinking of the universe as "expanding" we simply think of it as aging, just like the rest of us. The apparent expansion of space is merely an observer effect produced by the inversely logarithmic relationship between gravity and time, a fundamental truth of nature which Einstein uncovered in GR. GR tells us that time passes more quickly between galaxies than it does within them and the observer sees this as the galaxies moving away from each, which indeed many of them are. But the true nature of their separation is not a spatial one at all. It is purely a temporal one because the causal connectivity between these galaxies is widening because of gravity. In other cases this causal connectivity is narrowing, likewise because of gravity. For instance we are gradually becoming more closely causally connected to our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, and eventually these two galaxies will merge. The combined masses of the two galaxies will then cause the newly formed super-galaxy to take on the form of a neat ellipse, as no doubt both Andromeda and the Milky Way once were before they started flying apart internally. So much for dark energy and dark matter. Dark matter is an attempt to "save the appearances" at all costs but it strikes me as a rather desperate one. Why should we need an explanation to account for the fact that our galaxies aren't flying apart when some of them quite obviously are, including the one we're privileged to inhabit. No doubt the Andromeda/Milky Way mega-galaxy will also start to fly apart in due course, until such time as it finds another such to partner up with. Cosmology still has an awful long way to go in its modelling of galactic motion, I reckon. In fact I reckon this task alone should keep the physicists gainfully employed for centuries because our universe seems to be flying apart and collapsing together at the same time.

This is an entirely different universe from Newton's because this narrative defines reality as a PROCESS. It quite specifically defines our cosmos as a non-linear dynamic system, or a dissipative structure, and those familiar with these terms should immediately be able to see exactly what I mean. Non-linear dynamic systems are systems which are entirely causally and deterministically connected but the nature of this determinism is non-Newtonian. Newtonian determinism is linear, where matter and energy behave according to an underlying plan, which means that Newton's universe is one predicated on the notion of Intelligent Design. However in the Process universe the determinism is non-linear, or chaotic, which means there is no underlying plan. Chaotic systems obey only the meta-law of cause and effect.

Here is a truth about our universe which our models of physics is utterly unable to explain. It is evolving from the simple to the complex in direct contradiction of one of the most fundamental "laws" of nature, the second law of thermodynamics. This law states that all sub-systems of the universe must inevitably decay from the complex to the simple and the fact that this occurs is indisputable, since our very own galaxy seems to be doing this, along with all the "objects" it contains. However physics offers no conceivable explanation for why these complex sub-systems came into existence in the first place, and there is certainly no conceivable explanation for why these complex sub-systems should become increasingly more complex over time in such a way that the entropy of the entire universe is decreasing instead of increasing. Our universe as a whole is going backwards to the imperatives of physics and I offer this as conclusive proof that physics has got its determinism arse-about. Non-linear dynamic systems evolve increasingly more complex sub-structures within themselves for the simple reason that they cannot do otherwise in a reality predicated on cause and effect. This is a fundamental truth of nature from which the term "complexity from chaos" derives.

It is this fundamental truth of nature which accounts for the fact that here we are having a nice little chat about all this.

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve”.....Max Planck.

I agree with Max that science alone cannot solve such a mystery but science remarried to philosophy most certainly can. It’s time to put the Band back together