Daily Speculations

The Difficulties of Science

Momentous advice given by Enrico Fermi to the young Freeman Dyson in 1953, recounted in the Jan. 22, 2004, issue of Nature, holds a crucial lesson for all who would apply counting to the field of speculation.

Dyson visited Fermi's office in great excitement to show him the work of his group of students, who had done some calculations that agreed very closely with Fermi's theory.

"When I arrived in Fermi's office, I handed the graphs to Fermi, but he hardly glanced at them ... Then he delivered his verdict in a quiet, even voice. 'There are two ways of doing calculations in theoretical physics', he said. 'One way, and this is the way I prefer, is to have a clear physical picture of the process that you are calculating. The other way is to have a precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism. You have neither ... To reach your calculated results, you had to introduce arbitrary cut-off procedures that are not based either on solid physics or on solid mathematics.'"

"In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, 'How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?' I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, 'Four.' He said, 'I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.'"
 

Kim Zussman muses on religion, science and uncertainty:

What we (physicists) strive for' he cried, 'is just to draw His lines after Him - as one traces a geometrical figure.

                        -- Ronald Clark, "Einstein: The Life and Times" (1971)


Several years ago I had an interesting correspondence about  epistemology with a friend who is a philosophy and theology professor. During our discussion we stumbled naturally into the "god of the gaps." In the past, man's inability to answer fundamental questions of nature led to invoking evidence of god, and different interpretations of these boundaries has
led to great disputes. These include the Catholic church's persecution of Galileo for "looking at the face of god" with his telescopes, Scopes trial, etc.

Over time, man's understanding of nature and the universe has expanded, and this kind of evidence of god has receded into the gaps in human knowledge. Last year I (unfortunately) missed a lecture by a theology professor who now
publicly accepts recent neurobiological discoveries on the brain-locus of the soul. Through time, these gaps are narrower and fewer, but still they persist.

I have a background in astronomy, and have always been struck by the immense distances which are almost certain to prevent humans from contacting life elsewhere. It occurred to me (and others I'm sure) that man is presumptuous to
believe that we are capable of unraveling all the unknowns about matter, energy, space, cosmology, etc. Are these voids ultimately knowable simply by extrapolation from our extremely limited powers of observation and reason?
Ostensibly our brains, superior on earth as they may be, are so grounded in the circumstances and molding forces of their evolution, that even the best ones are not capable of this level of understanding. If I left my new laptop on the
ground, and 10,000 ants crawled over it, even the best "brain" of the colony cannot grasp anything more than the smell, shape, temperature, etc of the computer. Last I checked, there are more than 50 billion galaxies in the observable (Hubble telescope deep-field extrapolation) universe, each with millions of suns, many (or most-if you extrapolate Marcy and Butler's studies of Doppler wobble of nearby stars) with planets. Very likely there is extensive intelligent life out
there; perhaps brains bigger than Texas, with inter-neuronal connections having superior logic structure and formation speed, who might have a shot at elucidating most human-unknowables. But not us.

There would seem to be a nucleus of that which can never be known by humans. This uncertainty can be thought of as evidence of the invisible hand of god.

In markets, it seems that consensus thinking governs most price movements. However, this consensus is human. One could partition market participants into:

1. Those who model what is easily knowable; who cannot, by definition, out-perform.
2. Those who model what is hard to know, and use this knowledge to estimate probabilities better than 1 above. Outperformers.
3. Those who attempt to model the unknowable and the uncertain.

Undoubtedly this last group, when progress is made, stands to profit in the extreme; payment for a long-suffering faith in oneself and confidence in knowledge of the invisible hand. There is an undeniable religious component to
this endeavor. Galileo with his telescope, and progress which is in many ways an economic analogue to the objectives of Einstein.