The Chronicle
March 13, 2011
Hey, Physics, Get Real!
By John Horgan
I'm not sure if I've changed or physics has changed, but the thrill is gone. Recent books by practitioner-popularizers—notably The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and a collaborator, the Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow (Bantam Books, 2010); The Hidden Reality, by Brian Greene (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); and the forthcoming Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe, by Roger Penrose (Knopf, 2011)—are leaving me peeved rather than inspired. In fact, I no longer recommend books like those to students hungry for far-out ideas from science's frontiers.
I feel a little guilty knocking physics, which more than any other field lured me into science journalism three decades ago. As a teenager, I lapsed out of the Catholicism in which I was raised, but I never stopped wrestling with the riddles that religion supposedly answered. Physics provided me with a kind of scientific theology, an empirical, rational way of probing, if not solving, the mysteries of existence. Physicists were discerning deep resonances between the smallest and largest scales of reality and spinning out astonishing conjectures about our universe and even other universes.
Just before I graduated from college with a degree in English, in 1982, I discovered the writings of John Wheeler, the archetypal physics-for-poets physicist. Wheeler was no flake. He helped Niels Bohr with the liquid-drop model of the nucleus, pioneered the study of black holes (and coined the term), and contributed to nuclear-weapons designs. Musing over the odd manner in which observation seems to determine the outcome of quantum experiments, Wheeler challenged materialism itself. He proposed that we live in a "participatory" cosmos, which emerges from the interaction of consciousness and the physical realm.
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