AND NO SACAJAWEA IN SIGHT:

Reinventing Physics: the Search for the Real Frontier (ROBERT B. LAUGHLIN, 2/11/05, The Chronicle of Higher Education)

My particular branch of science, theoretical physics, is concerned with the ultimate causes of things. Physicists have no monopoly on ultimate causes, of course, for everyone is concerned with them to some extent. I suspect it is an atavistic trait acquired long ago in Africa for surviving in a physical world in which there actually are causes and effects -- for example between proximity to lions and being eaten. We are built to look for causal relations between things and to be deeply satisfied when we discover a rule with cascading implications. We are also built to be impatient with the opposite -- forests of facts from which we cannot extract any meaning. All of us secretly wish for an ultimate theory, a master rule set from which all truth would flow and which could forever free us from the frustration of dealing with facts. Its concern for ultimate causes gives theoretical physics a special appeal even to nonscientists, even though it is by most standards technical and abstruse.

Learning about these things is an intellectual roller-coaster ride. First you find that your wish for an ultimate theory at the level of people-scale phenomena has been fulfilled. We are the proud owners of a set of mathematical relationships that, as far as we know, account for everything in the natural world bigger than an atomic nucleus. They are very simple and beautiful and can be written in two or three lines. But then you find that this simplicity is highly misleading. The equations are devilishly difficult to manipulate and impossible to actually solve in all but a small handful of instances. Demonstrating that they are correct requires arguments that are lengthy, subtle, and quantitative. While the basic ideas were invented by Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg in the 1920s, it was not until powerful electronic computers were developed and armies of technically competent people were generated by governments that these ideas could be tested quantitatively against experiment over a wide range of conditions.

Thus 80 years after the discovery of the ultimate theory we find ourselves in difficulty. The repeated, detailed experimental confirmation of these relationships has now officially closed the frontier of reductionism at the level of everyday things. Like the closing of the American frontier, this is a significant cultural event, causing thoughtful people everywhere to debate what it means for the future of knowledge. At the same time, the list of even very simple things found "too difficult" to describe with these equations continues to lengthen alarmingly.

Those of us on the real frontier listening to the coyotes howl at night find ourselves chuckling over all of this. There are few things a real frontiersman finds more entertaining than the insights from people back in civilization who can barely find the supermarket. I find this moment in history charmingly similar to Lewis and Clark's wintering on the Columbia estuary. Through grit and determination their party had pushed its way across a continent, only to discover that the value had not been in reaching the sea but in the journey itself. The official frontier at that time was a legal fiction having more to do with property rights and homesteading policy than with a confrontation with nature. The same is true today. The real frontier, inherently wild, may be found right outside the door, if one only cares to look.

The important laws we know about are, without exception, serendipitous discoveries rather than deductions. This is fully compatible with one's everyday experience. The world is filled with sophisticated regularities and causal relationships that can be quantified, for this is how we are able to make sense of things and exploit nature to our own ends. But the discovery of these relationships is annoyingly unpredictable and certainly not anticipated by scientific experts. This common-sense view continues to hold when the matter is examined more carefully and quantitatively. It turns out that our mastery of the universe is largely a bluff -- all hat and no cattle. The argument that all the important laws of nature are known is part of this bluff.

Thus the end of knowledge and the closing of the frontier it symbolizes is not a looming crisis at all, but merely one of many embarrassing fits of hubris in civilization's long history. In the end it will pass away and be forgotten. Ours is not the first generation to struggle to understand the organizational laws of the frontier, deceive itself that it has succeeded, and go to its grave having failed. One would be wise to be humble, like the Irish fisherman observing quietly that the sea was so wide and his boat so small. The wildness we all need to live, grow, and define ourselves is alive and well, and its glorious laws are all around.