Erudite Relics of Loc Huu Ho

We are already at the point where experiments are becoming impossible for technological reasons and unthinkable for social and political reasons. An accelerator bigger than the supercollider would be a vast technical challenge, and even if physicists are willing to try it, the likelihood of society paying the bills seems faint. Thermodynamics, however, is stronger than any political force; as the universe winds down, energy will become unavailable at any cost, and physics itself, in the form of the venerable structures of thermodynamics, will make it impossible for physicists to do any but a tiny fraction of the experimental work that would be needed to test a theory of everything.

The physicists must hope instead that they can complete physics in the manner the ancient Greeks imagined, by means of thought alone, by rational analysis unaided by empirical testing. The ultimate goal in physics seems to demand, paradoxically, a return to old ways. Modern physics was set on its present course by the pragmatic methods of Newton and Galileo and their many successors, and this effort, three centuries old, has led to the elaborate physical understanding we now possess. But this kind of physics seems to have run its course. Experiments to test fundamental physics are at the point of impossibility,. and what is deemed progress now is something very different from what Newton imagined. The ideal of a theory of everything, in the minds of the physicists searching for it, is a mathematical system of uncommon tidiness and rigor, which may , if all works out correctly, have the ability to accommodate the physical facts we know to be true tin our world. The mathematical neatness comes first, the practical explanatory power second. Perhaps physicists will one day find a theory of such compelling beauty that its truth cannot be denied; truth will be beauty and beauty will be truth- because, in the absence of any means to make practical tests, what is beautiful is declared ipso facto to be the truth.

This theory of everything will be, in precise terms, a myth. A myth is a story that makes sense within its own terms, offers explanations for everything we can see around us, but can be neither tested nor disproved. A myth is an explanation that everyone agrees on because it is convenient to agree on it, not because its truth can be demonstrated. This theory of everything, this myth, will indeed spell the end of physics. It will be the end not because physics has at least been able to explain everything in the universe, but because physics has reached the end of the all the things it has the power to explain.