Is the Physical Theory of Everything possible?
First part
Fr. Kazimierz Kubat SDS
Since the beginning of humanity, one of the biggest challenges of humans was the temptation and the desire to understand: “How to understand the universe, its functions, its construction, its beginning and destination, but also, our place in it?”
Men tried it in different ways, searching for the answer not only in magic, religion, and the stars but also in philosophy and sciences and nowadays even in UFOs. We would like not only to know how the universe continues to develop and of what its ultimate large scale structure consists, but also why the universe exists, its point of origin, and our origin and place in it.
These kinds of enterprises and endeavors that try to explain the Universe as a whole in one short and understandable way may be called Theories of Everything. (TOE). We can find examples of religious TOE in the Bible, in the Sacred Scriptures of India; Wedda, (Ramayana and Mahabharata) but also in Buddhist and Taoist scriptures in China as well as in every other religion and mythology. The religious answers - although holistic and ultimate - are for some people not adequate because they are not precise. They seem even to avoid the clue of the ultimate questions and they seem not to solve the problem.
For others, convinced of the correctness and exactness of them, these kinds of answers are only a challenge and an invitation to further questions, research and investigation. Although personally, I believe that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty” (Gen. 1, 1-2), I would like, if possible-following the idea of Saint Augustine “Fides querrens intellectum”-to see how God did it, how the creation was done, how the earth was formless and empty. I don't think that this desire is a negation of the faith or a revolution against the power of God, even if it is a kind of “looking up God's sleeves”. Of course, someone could say that I pretend to understand God, but what is wrong with this as long as I keep in mind that God's thoughts are not my own and God's ways are not mine. As long as I am aware of my own limits and of the borders of my reason, as long as I don't try to replace the ultimate truths of the faith by the partial and far from ultimate truths of my own.
We can find more kinds of these attempts of TOE. For our purposes, we can divide them in three groups:
1) - religious TOE
2) - philosophical TOE - trying to explain the Universe as a whole in a philosophical way
3) - physical TOE - attempting to represent, using the observation and mathematical languages, the Universe as a whole in the form of one quite simple mathematical equation.
Let us see, first of all, how the philosophers have been dealing with the problem.
One among the non-religious (but not anti-religious) attempts at answering the above mentioned questions, constructing the fabrication of TOE, is certainly the philosophy of nature.
Since the time of the first philosophers (seventh and sixth centuries B.C.), people have been trying to find a simple and rational explanation or justification of the Universe as a whole. The first attempt to answer the question “What is the most fundamental principle of everything?” is certainly the Ionian philosophy of nature, launched at the very beginning of philosophy, but also at the very beginning of Western Culture and civilization. I dare say that this is the first attempt of TOE. Already Tales of Millet (surveyor, mathematician, astronomer and politician) living in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., used to think that the water, from which everything is emanating and towards which everything will return, is the most fundamental principle of the Universe. In this thought of Tales, the mythological gods of Oceanos and Thetida were, for the first time, replaced by materialistic principles and mythological creatures. The fantastic explanations were replaced by materialistic and rational ideas.
This is the first non-religious and non-mythological attempt of understanding the Universe — of gathering the totality in one simple and understandable concept. In this way, everything started.
There were many others following Tales.
For Anaximander (649-546 B.C.) this is the fundamental principle and the reason of everything (arche). The hard and unchangeable building material was the indefinite (apeiron), from which limitless and boundless but still material principle, “all heavens and the worlds held in them raised.”
For the next philosopher of that time, Anaximenes (585-525 B.C.), the most fundamental principle and the cause of the Universe, which gives insight into the understanding of the whole, was the air. It is interesting to note that those three first philosophers, who attempted the first TOE, came from Millet, the Ionian colony of Greece on the coast of Asian Minor.
The next Greek philosophers tried to give a new kind of explanation and justification of the Universe, but still in the same way. For Heraclites (c. sixth and fifth centuries B.C.) the most fundamental principle explaining everything was fire, which could change into everything without limits. Moreover, the fire is not only the fundamental principle of everything, but also the cause of the most fundamental fact present in nature-the alteration itself. For Heraclites, the world doesn't exist but it changes, it flows constantly (pantha rei)-it becomes. The change is not random, haphazard or accidental; it is rational, logical and teleological. In order to understand the Universe, we must first find this logical principle included in it. The reason (logos) is not only the human feature but also a cosmic power, the most immanent nature of the world. Thus, the fire is not the unchangeable and fixed element of nature and the world, but rather a symbol of its constant change and fluxion, which is following the principle of reason governed by logos.
Here we have the beginning of something which will be re-born twenty-five centuries later, in another way; i.e. in physical or cosmological theories of the evolution of the Universe or in unification theories. The logos, governing the world, organizing it and leading it, could be rationally understood and known by men. Man only should read it from nature. Let us not hurry but let us recognize that the temptation of the unification of the image of the Universe–all the attempts of TOE–is nothing new and that we can already find its traces at the very beginning of the intellectual adventure of humanity know as philosophy.
The answer to the fluxion and variability of Heraclites' world was the ontological monism of Parmenides. Once again, in the name of reason and logic, Parmenides (fl. sixth and fifth centuries B.C. therefore contemporary with Heraclites) tries to prove that the most fundamental principle of the Universe and its element unification is the unity of being, or, being as such. “The being is, the nonbeing doesn't exist.”
Because each change or alteration is the passage from something to something else (which is the opposite of the starting point), the change itself can only be recognized as the passage from being towards nonbeing. If the nonbeing doesn't exist, the passage itself is impossible. Change doesn't exist. Unlike Heraclites, Parmenides acknowledges that the Universe is unchangeable; moreover, there is only one unchangeable and monolithic being, therefore the change itself is fictive. This concept of monolithic being is the most fundamental principle explaining everything in Parmenides' philosophy. So we have the next TOE.
For Xenophanes (580-480 B.C.) the fundamental element and the principle of the Universe is the earth.
For Empedocles (490-430 B.C.) the four elements mentioned above (water, air, fire and earth) are altogether the fundamental principles of the Universe. The scheme of Empedocles is worth remembering because it will be influencing our further investigations. According to Empedocles thus, “four are the roots of everything, four are the forces of nature or states of matter.”
State of matter
or of elements fixed volatile
wet Water Air
dry Earth Fire
It is not without reason that we speak more precisely concerning these first attempts of TOE. They show that since man tried to think independently and to liberate himself from the religious and mythological beliefs, he tried simultaneously to understand the Universe and to create a comprehensive and coherent theory explaining the totality of the surrounding reality. There are not yet physical approaches (physical in the sense of contemporary physics) but nevertheless there are rational and philosophical approaches, and in a certain way, materialistic theories trying to justify the Universe and to explain it using one short and understandable physical (material, non-spiritual) principle. Behind these attempts, we can notice another kind of temptation, which we can call “looking up God's sleeve”. Understanding the Universe, its composition, its way of working, means to create it, or re-create it, even theoretically, that is, only on paper. So it is not surprising that nowadays theoretical physicists and cosmologists cannot avoid such a temptation.
Plato and Aristotle also created their philosophical TOE. For Plato, the condition sine qua non of understanding the structure and the construction of the Universe is the dialectical ascension into the world of pure ideas. Achieving this ascension means to reach the highest level of knowledge (gnosis or episteme) and gives the philosopher the full insight into the nature of the Universe through the reminiscence of the world of pure ideas. This is only possible on one condition, namely if man liberates himself from the chains binding him to material reality, to the temporary world of shadows. The liberated man is able to reach the ideal and perfect world, where perfect and full knowledge is attainable. In this sense, Plato's TOE is possible only for the mystics, in the almost religious revelation. TOE can be created or understood just at the top of the laborious ascension through the steps of knowledge (from doxa through the pisitis and dianoia to the gnosis-episteme.)
Aristotle tries to pull down Plato from heaven to earth and to show that the world is knowable not through the ideal world but in the realistic and philosophical vision of the nature of this material world. Aristotle's explanation of the Universe, though already archaic nowadays, nonetheless still remains a good example of a rational attempt towards the understanding of reality, based on what nature itself reveals to us through sensual knowledge. The world is not the shadow of ideal reality, but it is reality itself, knowable by our senses and explainable by reason, not by reminiscence of what we knew about it in the ideal world.
To create TOE, we have to know everything which is accessible to our senses and to generalize, to summarize everything to the most fundamental and general principles. For Aristotle, this is the theory of material being which is temporal, special and changeable. Understanding this being and its principles gives us the insight into the nature of the Universe and into the most fundamental principles of existence.
Aristotle develops here his metaphysical theory of ontological constitution of being, but he is also the first to show the way to modern physics, accentuating the phenomena of motion and the necessity of its study. It is true that in his metaphysical theory of motion he is talking rather about the qualitative aspects of motion, but the quantitative aspects of his theory (although false) are foundational to classical mechanics. From his physical theory of motion, there is only a small step to be taken towards modern physics although for this step science and philosophy have to wait for centuries. Nevertheless, Aristotle should be recognized among those who have attempted to understand the Universe as a whole in a rational way and to build up a philosophical TOE. As for Plato, the knowledge of idea was the main point to understand reality; for Aristotle, the knowledge of material reality opens the way to us to the understanding of the totality.
So, already in ancient philosophy we have examples of the construction of the TOE, which will be developed (in further history) in two different kinds of theories. On the one side we will have a continuation of the research of the philosophical explanation as a whole, while on the other (starting from Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries forward) the autonomization of the physical attempts of constructing the TOE based on the natural sciences, especially physics, will be visible. In the process of development of the tools of physics, the philosophical attempts will be put on the periphery of human knowledge because of their insufficiency or inaccuracy. The qualitative aspects of philosophical ideas will gradually be replaced by the qualitative aspects derived from physics. In this way, natural sciences, with physics and cosmology at the top, become primary. Nevertheless, we cannot neglect the value of those philosophical attempts present in antiquity. They forged ideas and concepts. They tried to present the rational understanding of the Universe as a whole which was attainable for then extant humanity.
It is thus comprehensible that man would like to understand the Universe and its structure, and his place in it in each era. It is understandable that he would like to understand origin-the origin and the destiny of the Universe as well as his own. So would man desire to understand the Universe creating the very Theory of Everything, literally “everything.” Is there something intrinsically evil in this attempt? Are such attempts not rather an expression of the fundamental human desire and research of his non-accidental and non-transient nature? To understand, to know, means in a certain way to govern, to take his own future in his hands, to be a not-accidental issue of a blind game of the forces of the nature. Of course, such a desire can lead us to boldness, arrogance, atheism and rejection of God who will be replaced by arrogant reason. Indeed, in the history of philosophy, we encounter such facts.
On the other side, those desires and researches can lead to humility and to the deepening of faith, to the acceptance of the truth that the final explanation and justification of everything can be found in God. This is the place where the religious truths that are “ex-definitione”, TOE can meet the rational or even the scientific attempts of TOE. I am certainly not in favor of a concordant idea of mixing scientific knowledge with philosophy or religion. But, from the other side it is also not acceptable to bring natural sciences and religion in contradiction. Saint Augustine did not err speaking of the necessity of understanding in order to deepen the faith “intellige ut credas”, but also, about the necessity of faith in order to better understand “crede ut intelligas”. Thus faith is not a contradiction to rational understanding and vice versa. Personally, I am deeply convinced that TOE's are precisely the basis on which science and faith can meet each other with mutual respect and show together the deepest sense of the existence of the world and we ourselves.
In the second part of the article, I would like to show how TOE's were developed in the further history of philosophy, but especially how they became the domain of natural sciences.