Is the concept of money blocking our understanding of the universe?
2024-09-06 19:28:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Earlier in the week I listenned to a very interesting roundtable discussion podcast between scientists about the current state of theories of everything.
We have spend decades at this stage trying to unify quantum theory and gravity. The long and short of it is that we've so far been unsuccessful. Both theories align with observations in their respective scales, but we haven’t figured out a way to unify both theories so as to have a single theory that describes everything.
In my mind I think of it like the moment the two teams of construction workers broke through from their respective sides and connected both sides of the Channel Tunnel, also known as the Chunnel, the tunnel that connects England to mainland France. I remember watching that on the tele when it happened, it was quite a moment.
I find it interesting that we have a similar major societal bottom up vs top down problem in society too: how to neatly connect the poor and the wealthy so their world views function together. In fact most people just assume it’s been figured out. But is it really? Is it even something that people recognise as being an issue. Could there even be some resistance to figuring this problem out. Seems likely.
There’s a well known dynamic that happens in software engineering where over time, the software being created by organisations ends up taking on, in some way, the shape of the organisation in which the developers creating the software are situated. It’s called Conway’s Law.
I wonder if something similar isn’t happening in physics. The universe doesn’t know or care about money, it’s a concept entirely made up by humans. Is that affecting how we are seeing the universe? It might even be a measurable thing if you have enough data across enough teams.