Don Lincoln: uncertainty

Transcript context

…, going a mile up, things wouldn’t be very different. But if he goes 10 miles up, he wouldn’t breathe and he’d freeze. If he goes 100 miles up, he would die. If he goes two miles down, he would roast. The point being is we are like that Australopithecus. We have a realm that we can study, and we can even predict to some validity what would happen if we go some distance away. But the farther away we go, the less and less our local prediction really represents the reality of those more distant times. And so basically, his theory about the world would be totally bogus. So even if he had the best theory, his theory would not have anticipated the Alps. It would not have anticipated penguins. Right? Flamingos, not there. Yeah. You know? And that is just the case. So now that’s what we’re doing. We are taking something and we have reason to understand what we know and we can predict a factor of 10 or 100. But I think it is the absolute, the pinnacle of arrogance to think that what we can do given the understanding that we have from what we’ve measured now and predict it out a quadrillion times higher than we can see now. So my opinion, and this is partly because I’m an experimentalist, the correct way to make progress—practical progress towards a theory of everything—is to look around at the things that we don’t have answers to right now. For instance, are there some things smaller than quarks? I don’t know. Is dark matter real? I don’t know. If it’s real, what is it? I don’t know. Is dark energy real? Yes, probably, but I don’t know. What is the nature of space and time? I don’t know. But these are questions we can explore, and I would expect, and this is my prediction, that, all right, we’re gonna figure things out at a factor of 10 or 100 times better than we can do now, and we might be able to do that in my kid’s lifetime or something like that. But in order for us to predict a quadrillion times higher, I’m pretty sure superstring theory is wrong. Not because people aren’t smart, but because something new is going to happen. I mean, if you were talking about chemistry, you would have never predicted nuclear physics, and that’s a small increase in energy, right? The idea that there’s something in the nucleus of atoms that causes the sun to burn, there’s a reason why people didn’t believe, you know, they, they calculated how old the sun should be, and it should only be 10 million years old because otherwise it would burn out. Well, that’s clearly wrong, and it’s wrong because of nuclear physics. That is why I feel fairly confident to say, while someone could think, well, superstring might be right or something, and maybe it’s right, and I hope it’s right. It would be awesome if it’s right. But what are the odds when you’re making something with that tiny lever arm, predicting it out a quadrillion away and say, “Oh, yeah, we got it right.” What are the odds? And my answer is, you gotta be kidding me. the odds when you’re making something with that tiny lever arm, predicting it out a quadrillion away and say, “Oh, yeah, we got it right.” What are the odds? And my answer is, you gotta be kidding me. Now, I could be wrong, and I admit that I could be wrong, but that’s why I think the real issue is not the brilliance of humanity. It’s the stuff we haven’t found. We don’t know– I mean, the simple one, and I’m say it simple, and it’s not, but what is dark matter? We don’t have a bleeping clue. Not a clue. We know a lot of what it isn’t, but we don’t know what it is. And so, you know, talk about superstrings. All right, well, maybe dark matter fits in superstrings, or maybe dark matter is governed by a physics that is completely diametrically opposed to the superstring concept. And allow me a bit of a thought experiment here, a brief thought. My intuition says that when you propose a theory of everything, the kind of prediction you want to make involves a kind of leap of conceptual understanding that Einstein did. So, for example, you want to come up with something like space time and then gravity-…

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