10 quotes
Ultimate explanation no longer means only a story that encompasses everything.
New Theories of Everything (2007)
There is no formula that can deliver all truth, all harmony, all simplicity. No Theory of Everything can ever provide total insight. For, to see through everything, would leave us seeing nothing at all.
New Theories of Everything (2007)
It is enigma enough that the world is described by mathematics; but by simple mathematics, of the sort that a few years energetic study now produces familiarity with, this is an enigma within an enigma.
New Theories of Everything (2007)
In general, the shorter the possible representation... the less random... On this view we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions.
New Theories of Everything (2007)
The living world is not a marble palace. It is a higgledy-piggledy outcome of natural selection and the competition between many interacting factors. The outcome is often neither elegant nor symmetrical.
New Theories of Everything (2007)
By interlinking causes, by searching always for unity in the face of superficial diversity, modern scientific explanations prize depth above breadth. A deep and narrow theory can, and often does, graduate to become a deep and broad one. A broad and shallow theory never does.
New Theories of Everything (2007)
It is not hard to see why the Eastern holistic perspective made scientific progress so difficult. It denies the intuition that one can study the parts of the world in isolation from the rest—that one can analyze the world...
New Theories of Everything (2007)
The legacy of the great monotheistic religions is the expectation of a single over-arching explanation for the Universe. ...There is no logical reason why the Universe should not contain surds of arbitrary elements that do not relate to the rest.
New Theories of Everything (2007)
Scanning the past millennia of human achievement reveals just how much has been achieved during the last three hundred years since Newton set in motion the effective mathematization of Nature. We found that the world is curiously adapted to a simple mathematical description. It is enigma enough that the world is described by mathematics; but by simple mathematics, of the sort that a few years energetic study now produces familiarity with, this is an enigma within an enigma.
New Theories of Everything (2007)
It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns. ...When viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics. ...In many ways the search for a Theory of Everything is a manifestation of a faith that this compression goes all the way down to the bedrock of reality...
New Theories of Everything (2007)