Relativity, the Surge and a Third Scientific Revolution
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Relativity, the Surge and a Third Scientific Revolution |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | James E Beichler |
| Keywords | Relativity |
| Published | 2008 |
| No. of pages | 14 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Quantum theory emerged the victor of the last Scientific Revolution even though relativity theory had a more progressive view of reality to offer science. As a result, the physical aspects and properties of the gravitational field were never fully explored or exploited and science went through several decades of denial concerning the relevance of general relativity and its physical implications. The only small victory that relativity theory could claim before the 1960s was in cosmology with the expanding universe. The victory was small because the expanding universe was far from the everyday needs of a science more concerned with the atom and the nucleus. Under these circumstances, the theory of relativity had no practical applications in the everyday real world, so its theoretical implications were largely ignored. However, the 1970s brought something of a resurgence of good fortunes and everyday relevance for relativity theory and quantum theorists finally accepted the possibility that unification was the primary goal of physics, albeit a unification based upon the quantum concept of discrete particles rather than the Einsteinian concept of field continuity: According to quantum field theory, the gravity field could be reduced to an exchange of gravitons. But what at first seemed a resurgence of general relativity under the quantum paradigm in the 1970s has slowly evolved into a surge of physical relevance resulting in the emergence of general relativity as a dominating field of research in physics. And the story does not end there. The recent discoveries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy are about to push physics and relativity theory into a Third Scientific Revolution in which a unification with the quantum will be made on relativity's terms. The quantum will not emerge out of the mathematics as a constraint on the continuous field as Einstein had hoped, but it will emerge as a field constant that limits the continuous field as described by general relativity.
Overview
James E. Beichler delivered this paper at the Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory (P.I.R.T.) conference at Imperial College, London, in September 2008. It is a work of history and philosophy of science rather than of physics: no equations appear in it. Beichler's thesis is that the Second Scientific Revolution of 1900–1927 was left unfinished, that the quantum won it by default rather than on merit, and that the anomalies now called Dark Matter and Dark Energy are the crises that will force a Third Scientific Revolution — one settled on relativity's terms rather than the quantum's.
The argument departs from the standard narrative at several points. Where textbooks treat 1900–1927 as the overthrow of a failing Newtonian physics, Beichler insists "Newtonianism was completely progressive and it never failed", and that it had in fact solved both precipitating crises before the revolution — the Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction for the aether problem, and Planck's thermodynamic-statistical treatment of blackbody radiation. Where the Bohr–Einstein debates are read as a quarrel over determinism, he argues that the real, unnoticed shift was in the Cartesian boundary between Mind and Matter, and that positivism buried it. And where general relativity is usually grouped with "classical" physics, he argues it was the genuinely radical theory of the two, because it alone proposed a definition of matter — matter as space-time curvature — which positivism then neutered by declaring curvature intrinsic.
The argument
How positivism derailed the second revolution
Beichler's diagnosis centres on Ernst Mach. He is careful not to call Mach wrong: Mach's work was "in strict keeping with his era, extremely important to the history of science, completely necessary for his time". The problem is that science held on to Machian positivism far too long. Mach's reduction of knowledge to sensations, and his consequent denial that either mind or matter can be known directly, made both illegitimate as objects of investigation. Beichler traces the same move through psychology: Wundt, Freud, Fechner and James founded a science of mind, which Watson's 1913 behaviourism converted into a science of behaviour — "Psychology lost consciousness and probably its mind in 1913".
In physics the effect was that the revolution redefined only the motion of matter, never matter itself: at high speed by special relativity in 1905, near large masses by general relativity in 1915, and at sub-microscopic scale by Planck, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg and Schrödinger. The one attempt at a definition of matter — Einstein's identification of matter with curvature — was rendered a "mathematical gimmick" when curvature was declared intrinsic to the four-dimensional continuum, since real (extrinsic) curvature would require a physically real higher dimension, and higher dimensions were unobservable and therefore forbidden by positivist doctrine.
Why the quantum's victory was incomplete
Beichler lists what he takes to be the Standard Model's unpaid debts: gravitons and supersymmetric particles undetected, magnetic monopoles undetected, proton decay unobserved, neutrinos found to have mass when the model predicted none, and the Higgs invoked to supply the mass the model could not eliminate. His deeper objection is methodological — that quantum theory "keeps inventing new particles to account for the fundamental physical properties of real material particles", when "properties of material particles are not themselves particles" — and that it must import consciousness and entanglement, neither of which it explains, from outside its own framework.
He notes that dissent was never absent: Schrödinger never accepted the statistical reading of wave mechanics and devised the cat paradox and entanglement to show how absurd the theory had become; Oskar Klein was talked out of his five-dimensional quantum model built on Kaluza's unification; de Broglie was persuaded to abandon the double solution; both later returned to their original views; and Einstein returned to the attack with the 1935 EPR paper, "possibly the most misunderstood philosophical argument of all time". These objections failed, Beichler argues, because none of them identified the root problem — the shifting Mind/Matter boundary.
The surge
The central historical claim is that relativity's fortunes turned after 1960. When Einstein died in 1955, only two American universities taught general relativity. Time dilation had been confirmed only in the late 1940s by atmospheric mesons reaching the ground. The expanding universe was accepted but the Big Bang was still contested by the steady state theory. Of Einstein's three classical tests, the perihelion advance of Mercury was already known, light bending was confirmed by Eddington in 1919, but gravitational redshift waited until the Pound–Rebka experiment at Harvard in 1959. That experiment, together with the space programme and improved astronomical technique, began the era of precision tests. Meanwhile quantum unification stalled: supergravity failed but legitimised eleven-dimensional Kaluza–Klein space-time; superstrings and branes adopted compactified higher dimensions — which Beichler reads as positivism's last triumph, a device for explaining why the extra dimensions cannot be observed — and also failed, being "incapable of rendering testable predictions".
Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the coming revolution
Beichler credits Zwicky (1933, 1937) and Sinclair Smith (1936), with Oort in 1940, for the missing-mass problem, and Rubin and Ford (1970, 1985) for its confirmation; he notes pointedly that the stability of spiral arms should itself have flagged the anomaly decades earlier, and treats the delay as evidence of observation biased by paradigm. Dark Energy he dates to the 1998 Type Ia supernova results of Perlmutter and Riess. He then draws his central analogy: DM is this era's luminiferous aether problem and DE its blackbody paradox, while the Standard Model plays the role once played by "aether vortex" theory, with loop quantum gravity, superstrings and branes as "idle speculations resulting from a paradigm in trouble and grasping at straws". The parallels are extended: quantum theory today is as successful and as universally trusted as Newtonianism was in 1900; consciousness studies today parallels the multidisciplinary birth of psychology; the genome project parallels Darwinism.
His forecast is specific. The new paradigm will be based on continuity and the relativistic field; the field will be characterised by physical constants including permittivity, permeability and the Planck constant; it will be hyper-dimensional and non-Euclidean; curvature will be extrinsic; and the revolution will be about consciousness as much as about matter. The quantum "will emerge as a field constant that limits the continuous field", not as a constraint arising from the mathematics as Einstein hoped.
Assessment
The paper's real strength is its critique of the Kuhnian crisis model. Beichler's observation that crises are generated by the successes of a paradigm, not its failures, and that Newtonian physics solved both of the problems that supposedly overthrew it, is historically well-founded and genuinely sharpens the usual textbook story. His refusal to caricature Mach — insisting that Machian positivism was right for its time and has merely outlived its usefulness — is more careful than most polemics of this kind. And the observation that no one asked why spiral arms are stable for five decades before Rubin and Ford is a fair and uncomfortable point about paradigm-conditioned observation. Given how much dissident writing on this wiki treats Dark Matter and Dark Energy as fudges to be eliminated, it is worth noting that Beichler does the opposite: he takes both anomalies as real and treats them as the engine of the coming change.
The weaknesses are those of a paper that argues by analogy. The DM/aether and DE/blackbody pairings are asserted, not established, and nothing in the history constrains them — one could as easily pair DE with the aether, since both concern the properties of empty space. The claim that "general relativity passed the quantum theory in accuracy of prediction more than a decade ago" is stated without a citation or a figure, and is hard to sustain against the electron anomalous magnetic moment, where quantum electrodynamics and experiment agree to about twelve significant figures — the very number Beichler quotes for the quantum side elsewhere in the paper. Solar-system tests of general relativity, by contrast, constrain the Eddington parameters to roughly parts in 105. The list of Standard Model failures is also uneven: neutrino mass is a genuine extension of the minimal model, but the non-detection of gravitons is not a failure of any theory that predicts their coupling to be unobservably weak, and the paper was written before the 2012 Higgs discovery, which removes one item from the list altogether.
More fundamentally, the constructive part is a prospectus rather than a theory. Beichler tells us the coming field will be continuous, extrinsically curved, hyper-dimensional and characterised by ε, μ and h, and that consciousness will be part of the account — but no mechanism is offered by which extrinsic curvature in a fifth dimension yields flat galactic rotation curves or accelerating expansion, and no number is derived that could be compared with the Rubin–Ford or Perlmutter–Riess data he makes central. The two constituencies here, the physics of DM/DE and the study of consciousness, are joined by an assertion that a theory of matter "can be neither had nor complete without considering the role of the consciousness that perceives matter" — a philosophical premise inherited from the Mind/Matter framing, not a result. Readers should note that the underlying five-dimensional model is set out in Beichler's own cited work (his 1980/1999 thesis and his 2007 Journal of Scientific Exploration paper) rather than here. As a diagnosis of why physics is stuck, the paper is sharp and worth reading; as an argument that relativity will win the next round, it rests on historical parallel alone.