I get at least one email each week asking me to read and comment on a new proposed theory, usually having to do with overthrowing the Big Bang theory, refuting Einstein (mostly by contradicting relativity), or replacing dark matter with a new concept. Many of these ideas are quite sophisticated (while others um…are distinctly not), but they share a lot of characteristics:
- The authors are often intelligent people, frequently skilled professionals in various fields (especially engineering for some reason). They possess a lot of knowledge, but have little or no formal physics training.
- The theories are presented as logical arguments, sometimes with diagrams, but few or no equations.
- Similarly, the proposed theories make general sweeping predictions, but few propose specific experiments or observations that would provide a way to test them. (They do often contain thought experiments, about which I’ll have more to say presently.)
- The authors express a strong sense of frustration that nobody in the establishment will listen to their theories, even while they rarely cite published previously published work in the field. The exception is usually popular science writing or TV shows. The people writing to me are often widely-read and conversant with the popular accounts of string theory, cosmology, relativity, and other topics in theoretical physics.
(Another common factor that is sociologically interesting but not relevant to today’s post: nearly all of these writers are white males.)
I get that the world of physics can seem daunting. There are real obstacles to people who want to become physicists, both systemic and inherent. The systemic barriers come down to access to education and related issues (e.g. family support), a topic I am passionate about, but which is far beyond my primitive means to address. The inherent obstacles, though, can be summed up very simply.
Theoretical physics is hard.
Or more to the point: coming up with workable new theories in physics is difficult. Partly that’s because of the vast successes of science: we are remarkably good with our current theories at describing, predicting, and otherwise characterizing a huge number of physical phenomena. Any new theory has to cover known phenomena adequately and do better at characterizing experimental or observational evidence than existing successful models. That’s hard to do, which is why big shifts in the way we do things — relativity, quantum physics, and so forth — are much rarer than smaller advances.
Sometimes I wonder if popular science writing of the kind I do can be a disservice to some people. After all, one of my missions is to help non-specialists understand some of the complex ideas underlying modern physics. However, it’s much harder to learn how to do the calculations yourself, which is a crucial part of being an actual theoretical physicist. I want to show you why physics works, and a bit of the mechanism of how it works, but the limits of the medium — and of most readers’ interests and time — I can’t show you very well how to do it yourself.
You can appreciate the music of Bach without playing piano, but most of us will never be able to perform the Well-Tempered Clavier without some kind of instruction, or at least many hours of hard work at the keyboard. Physics is no different: you may understand the concepts behind relativity pretty well (if writers like me are doing our jobs!), but that’s not sufficient to do relativity calculations yourself. And unless you know how to do the calculations, you’re going to have a very hard time coming up with an alternative theory that describes the same phenomena that physicists and astronomers have been measuring for over a century.
Learning to be a physicist is also akin to an apprenticeship in a craft: you learn to be creative by seeing what has already been done and what works. Sometimes when you know the rules, you can break them: knowing the rules of classical geometry allowed Lobachevsky, Bolyai, Gauss, and others to find entirely new types of geometry, kinds we use in modern physics. To be a theoretical physicist today, you should know how relativity and quantum mechanics work on a fundamental level and why they are successful theories. When you have that knowledge, maybe you’ll find exceptions to their rules, but it’s unlikely you’ll succeed without a thorough grounding in standard physics first.
It’s all in your head
Another tricky aspect involves the role of thought experiments, which are both a staple of popular-science writing and used by working researchers. As the name suggests, instead of (or, for preference, in addition to) performing experiments in the lab, you work out what the results of an experiment should be virtually, using the principles of the theory under development. Einstein is probably the most famous thought experimenter: he used a number of them to help him with the trickier aspects of relativity, as well as to criticize some of the aspects of quantum physics he disliked. Thought experiments are really handy, especially in situations where a real experiment might be impractical (e.g., accelerating a spaceship close to the speed of light).
People who send me radical new ideas are very fond of thought experiments. However, thought experiments are beholden to both theory and real experiments. A scientific theory isn’t just a random thought, after all: it’s a coherent framework of testable hypotheses. It’s possible for a thought experiment to simply not make sense, making it useless from a scientific point of view; I’ve received a number of these that contradict known physical phenomena.
Sometimes reality just sucks
Once again, I get where purveyors of radical theories are coming from. There’s a lot about the Universe that can seem weird or even wrong. Dark matter is a prime example: I’m pretty sure most physicists and astronomers would be very happy if it just went away. After all, it’s invisible (making it hard to detect directly) and isn’t made of any of the components of normal matter (making it annoying). However, astronomical observations force us to accept its existence; any alternative idea has to explain all the same phenomena, and none have passed that test thus far. To put it another way, dark matter is the worst solution to the problem, except for all the other proposals.
Similarly, the Big Bang model seems to describe our Universe extremely well, strange as it is. Think of it this way: before cosmology became a branch of science, it was the purview of philosophy and religion. Many of those cosmologies postulated a cyclic cosmos, a small reality in which Earth was a significant portion, and/or an eternal existence of some form. All of these ideas appear inconsistent with the Universe we observe. We may yet end up with another model, but not one in which we occupy a special position; those days are gone forever.
Einstein famously disliked many aspects of quantum physics; while he has often been mocked for that, his criticisms were a lot more sophisticated than just “God doesn’t play dice”. (I would like a dollar for every time someone invokes that phrase out of its proper context, please.) He was wrong about many things, but he had his reasons — and he returned to physics to make his points. His example is illustrative: he was brilliant, contributed many things to physics, was right about many things, wrong about others — but ultimately isn’t the arbiter of how the Universe behaves.
Perhaps in the end, the most difficult act in science is accepting that the cosmos need not conform to our wishes. Scientific training is largely devoted to learning that, though we rarely put it that way. Theoretical physics is hard simply because we have to make it match reality, and reality doesn’t always cooperate. However, if you can get over that mental hurdle, you may find the real Universe is beautiful in itself, and contemplating it is one of the most glorious endeavors a human —physicist or not— can engage in.