Around the two questions of "what is the world" and "how did the world become like this", the 2004 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Wilczek, in "The Principle of Everything", revealed ten insights, telling people what the most basic principles can be learned from the study of the physical world - to understand the way of thinking of "discovering them" and get inspiration from life.
Wilczek encouraged people to re-understand the material world as "born-again babies". He first introduced the scientific achievements that human beings have made from eight aspects: space, time, the composition of matter, the law of the movement of all things, materials and energy, the evolution of the universe, the emergence of complexity, and the expansion of perceptual ability, and gave his own predictions for the development of artificial intelligence, neurobiology and other fields.
At the same time, Verczek, combining his years of research experience, suggests that people look at the real world in a complementary way of thinking—that when we think about the same thing from different perspectives, we seem to find that it has different properties at the same time, even contradictory properties. Vercek said: "This attitude has opened my eyes and benefited me a lot. It really changed the way I think and made me stronger: more open-minded and more eclectic. ”
The following is an excerpt from the book "The Principles of All Things" with the permission of the publisher, with the content of which has been abridged, and the title is from the editor.
Original author 丨 [American] Frank Wilczek
Excerpt 丨 He Ye
The Principle of All Things, by Frank Wilcek, translated by Bai Jiangzhu and Gao Ping, CITIC Publishing Group, January 2022.
The universe is a strange place.
For newborn babies, the world presents a messy and confusing array of impressions. In the process of collating these impressions, a baby quickly learns to distinguish between information from the inner and outer worlds. The inner world includes feelings such as hunger, pain, happiness, and drowsiness, as well as the yin cao mansion in dreams. There are also thoughts from within that lead her to gaze, grab things, and then learn to speak.
The external world is carefully constructed through intelligence. Babies spend a lot of time completing this construction. She learns to recognize, through her own perception, stable patterns that don't respond reliably to her thoughts like her own. She integrated these patterns into objects and learned that there is a certain predictability in the behavior of these objects.
Eventually, the baby grows into a toddler and begins to realize that some objects are creatures that resemble herself, and that she can communicate with them. After exchanging information with these creatures, she was convinced that they were also experiencing the inner and outer worlds, and importantly, many of the objects she and other creatures recognized were the same, and that they all followed the same laws.
Understanding how to control the common external world, the physical world, is certainly a crucial practical issue in many ways. For example, in order to thrive in a hunter-gatherer society, young children must learn where to find water, understand which plants and animals can be eaten, and how to find, breed, or hunt them, know how to prepare and cook food, and many other facts and skills.
In more complex societies, other challenges arise, such as how to make specialized tools, how to build durable structures, and how to record time. For the problems posed by the physical world, generation after generation has found successful solutions, and this knowledge is constantly shared and accumulated, becoming the "technology" in every society.
Non-scientific societies often develop rich and complex technologies. Some of the technologies allowed them to thrive in harsh environments like the Arctic or the Kalahari Desert, and they still work today. There are also technologies that helped people build huge cities and striking monuments, such as the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica.
But for the vast majority of human history before the advent of the scientific method, technological developments were unplanned. The emergence of successful technologies is more or less accidental. Once discovered by chance, they are passed down in the form of very specific procedures, rituals, and traditions. They do not form logical systems, and people do not improve them through the work of the systems.
Rules of thumb technology allows people to survive, reproduce and enjoy leisure and live a satisfying life. In most cultures and histories, for most people, this is enough. People have no way of knowing what they're missing, nor do they know that what they're missing might be important to them.
Modern ways of understanding the world emerged in Europe in the 17th century
But as we know now, they missed out a lot.
Modern ways of understanding the world emerged in Europe in the 17th century. Earlier, there were precursors to the birth of science elsewhere, but it wasn't until Europe in the 17th century that a series of inspiring breakthroughs known as the "Scientific Revolution" really illustrated what the human mind could achieve by creatively participating in the physical world, and the methods and attitudes that produced them provided a clear model for future human exploration. With this push, the science as we know it really begins. It never looked back.
In the 17th century, exciting theoretical and technological advances were made in a number of cutting-edge disciplines, including machinery and ships, optical instruments (including significant microscopes and telescopes), clocks and calendars. A direct result is that people can harness greater power, see more things, and plan things more reliably. But the essential reasons that gave rise to the uniqueness of the so-called "scientific revolution" and make it worthy of its name are less immediate and perceptible. It is a change of mindset: a new ambition and a new self-confidence.
Stills from the movie Einstein and Eddington (2008).
The scientific method developed by Kepler, Galileo, and Newton retained humility to respect facts and learn from nature, but it also advocated bold application of what one learned to anywhere, even beyond the scope of the original evidence. If it works, you find something useful; if it doesn't work, you learn something important. I call this attitude "radical conservatism." To me, it is the essential innovation of the "scientific revolution".
Radical conservatism is conservative because it allows us to learn from nature and respect facts, which is a key feature of the scientific method. But it's also radical because it makes you desperately extrapolate everything you've learned to other situations. This is the essence of the actual operation of science, which provides the frontier for science.
This new idea was mainly inspired by a discipline that had a deep tradition and well developed even in the 17th century: celestial mechanics, that is, the discipline of describing how objects in the sky moved.
Long before there are historical records, people have been aware of such laws as the cycle of day and night, the cycle of the four seasons, the profit and loss of the moon phases, and the arrangement of stars. With the rise of agriculture, it has become critical to record the seasons in order to plant and harvest at the most appropriate time. Another powerful (but misguided) motivation for precise observation of the position of celestial bodies — astrology — comes from the belief that human life is directly connected to the rhythm of the universe. In any case, for various reasons (including mere curiosity), the sky was carefully studied.
The results show that the vast majority of stars move in a reasonably simple, predictable way. Today, we interpret the motion of the stars in our eyes as the result of the Earth's rotation around its own axis. Stars are so far away from us that relatively small changes in their distances are invisible to the naked eye, either from their own motion or the Earth's motion around the sun. However, some of the exceptions do not follow this pattern, being the Sun, Moon, and some "rovers," including the naked-eye visible Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
How to solve the grand problem of how the world works?
Ancient astronomers, after generations of hard work, recorded the location of these particular objects and eventually learned how to predict their changes more precisely. This task requires geometric and trigonometric calculations, following a complex but completely deterministic approach. Ptolemy (c. 100–c. 170) summarized the material into a mathematical work called Almagest( also known as the Astronomical Treatise) – Magest is the highest in Greek, meaning "the greatest." It has the same root as the English word majestic (meaning "magnificent"), and Al is just a definite article in Arabic, similar to the English thermo.
Ptolemy's comprehensive discourse was an outstanding achievement, but it had two shortcomings. One is that it is very complex, so it looks very ugly. In particular, the methods used to calculate the motion of the planets introduce many numbers that are purely calculated by fitting and observed, but there are no deeper guiding principles to link them. Copernicus (1473-1543) noticed that the values of some of these numbers could be linked to each other in surprisingly simple ways. These mysterious "coincidental" relationships can be explained geometrically, provided we assume that Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all rotate around the Sun (the Moon rotates further around the Earth).
The second disadvantage of Ptolemy's synthesis is more direct: it is imprecise. Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) did work similar to today's "big science", designing sophisticated instruments and spending a lot of money to build an observatory that greatly improved the accuracy of observations of the positions of the planets. There is an indisputable deviation from Ptolemy's prophecy.
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) wanted to create a simple and precise geometric model of the motion of the planets. He absorbed Copernicus's ideas and made other important technological changes to Ptolemy's model. In particular, he allowed the orbits of the planets around the Sun to deviate from a simple circle and replace it with an elliptical shape, with the Sun as a focal point. He also allows the rate at which planets orbit the Sun to vary with their distance from the Sun, by the fact that they sweep the same area in the same amount of time. After these reforms, the system is much simpler and more accurate.
At the same time, turning his gaze back to the earth's surface, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) carefully studied simple forms of motion, such as how the ball rolled down the bevel and how the pendulum swung. These mundane studies of location and time counting seem completely inadequate to solve the grand question of how the world works. To most of Galileo's academic colleagues who were concerned with grand philosophical questions, these problems certainly seem insignificant. But Galileo aspired to establish a new way of understanding the world. He wants to understand something precisely, not everything vaguely. He was looking for the exact mathematical formula to fully describe his mundane observations, and he eventually found them.
Explaining all the laws of nature is an overly difficult task
Isaac Newton (1643-1727) combined Kepler's geometry of planetary motion with Galileo's dynamic description of motion on Earth. He proved that both Kepler's theory of planetary motion and Galileo's particular theory of motion could be understood as special cases of certain general laws that apply to all objects at any time and in any place. These general laws, now known as the Newtonian theory of classical mechanics, have continued to succeed in explaining Earth's tides, predicting comet trajectories, and creating new engineering marvels.
Newton's work convincingly shows that we can solve grand problems by studying simple situations in detail. Newton called this method analysis and synthesis. It is the archetype of radical conservatism in science.
Here's how Newton himself felt about the approach:
In natural philosophy, as in mathematics, the analytical method of studying difficult things should always precede the method of synthesis. This analysis involves experiments and observations, from which general conclusions can be drawn by induction... Using this method of analysis, we can disassemble complexes into individual components, from motion to the force that produces motion; in general, from the effect to the cause, from the particular cause to the universal cause, all the way to the end of the argument in the most universal case. This is the method of analysis. The integrated approach, on the other hand, assumes that the causes have been found and established as principles, and then uses these principles to explain previous phenomena and prove these explanations.
Before we finish introducing Newton, it seems appropriate to add another quotation that reflects Newton's kinship with his predecessors Galileo and Kepler, and with all those of us who followed in their footsteps:
For any one person or even any age, it is an overly difficult task to explain all the laws of nature. So it's better to do a little bit of precise work and leave the rest to future generations.
Stills from the movie The Theory of Everything (2014).
One of the pioneers of modern information science, John F. John R. Pierce had a more recent quote for a while that beautifully captures the stark difference between the way modern science understands the world and all other approaches:
We demand that our theories explain a very wide range of phenomena and are harmonious in detail. We also insist that they provide us with useful guidance, not just rationalize observed phenomena.
Pierce is acutely aware that raising standards in this area comes at a painful cost. It means that we have lost our innocence. "We will never be able to understand nature the way the Greek philosophers did... We know too much. "I don't think the price is too high. In any case, there is no turning back from the bow.
The scope of the physical world revealed by science requires "rebirth" to be discovered
Whether it's the visible universe or the human brain, when we say something is big, we have to ask: How much is it? The most natural reference is the scope of human daily life, which is the background of the first model of the world we have built since childhood. The scope of the physical world revealed by science requires us to be "reborn" to discover it.
By the standards of everyday life, the outer world is vast. If we look up at the starry night sky on a clear night, we can intuitively perceive this external richness. Without any careful analysis, we can feel that the universe is far greater than our human bodies and the distances we may travel. Scientific understanding not only supports this sense of vastness, but also extends it further.
This scale of the world can feel overwhelming. The French mathematician, physicist and philosopher of religion, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), had this in mind and was tormented. He wrote: "The universe envelops me through space, engulfs me, and makes me like an atom. ”
This lamentation, which resembles "sending ephemera to heaven and earth, a millet in the sea of the vicissitudes," is a pervasive theme in literature, philosophy, and theology, and they appear in many prayers and hymns. When measured in size, this lament is a natural human response to its own insignificance to the universe.
However, the size is not all. Our inner richness, though less obvious, is no less profound and profound than outward. We see this when we think about things from the other extreme, bottom-up. The microscopic world has endless space. In all that matters, we are very big.
We have learned in elementary school that the basic structural units of matter are atoms and molecules. Judging from these units, a person's body is enormous. A person's body contains about 1028 atoms — 1 followed by 28 0:10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.
That number is far beyond what we can envision. We can name it "Hon", and then after some teaching and practice, we can learn to use it to calculate. However, since it is impossible to count such a large number, it overwhelms our intuition based on daily experience. Imagine that so many points are far beyond the carrying capacity of our brains.
On moonless nights, the maximum number of stars we can see with our naked eyes is only a few thousand. On the other hand, the total number of atoms in our bodies is "one thousand", which is about a million times the number of stars in the entire visible universe. In this very specific sense, it can be said that there is a universe that inhabits us.
The great American poet Walter Whitman (1819-1892) instinctively perceived the greatness within us. In his Song of the Self, he wrote: "I have a broad heart and an all-encompassing body. Whitman's euphoria for inner richness, like Pascal's envy of the universe, is based on objective facts, but the former is more relevant to our actual experience.
The world is big, but we're not small. More precisely, whether the scale is enlarged or reduced, there is a rich space. We shouldn't envy the universe just because it's big. We are also very big. To be precise, we are big enough to put the entire outer universe in our minds. Pascal also took comfort from this insight. After he lamented that "the universe envelops me through space, engulfs me, makes me like an atom," he wrote comfortingly to himself: "Through thought, I encompass the whole universe." ”
Editors 丨Liu Yaguang, Luo Dong
Introduction part proofreading 丨 Zhao Lin