A very noteworthy shift occurred in the world of physics in the early part of the 20th century, and I’m not talking about Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis. In fact, much of Einstein’s work was diametrically opposite what I’m talking about: use of statistics as a foundation for physics.

I have to note a quotation from Niels Bohr, which shines with uncommon insight:

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

I think many scientists before the Modern era would have disagreed with this. Einstein would almost certainly have disagreed, because of his unusual obsession (shared with Newton) with mathematical beauty. It is explicit throughout his work that Einstein believed (and this rings out in Hawking, too) that the “mind of God,” or absolute reality, must be able to be inferred from physical observation.

After 1905, though, things turned ugly.

Schroedinger. Bohr. Heisenberg. Dirac. Feynman. These are the giants of quantum mechanics and its ilk, and they have a few things in common. The largest is that none would shy from using statistics in scientific observation and then describing phenomena in terms of these statistics, acting as though these summary methods explain how nature natures (to abuse Spinoza).

The literature of QM is rife with statistical terms, something that was simply unheard of prior to the twentieth century. Traditionally, statistics are used for analysis, then conclusions about reality are synthesized. It seems that physics has, for the last 70 years, been doing this backward, creating less and less productive (i.e., predictive) theories even as those theories diverge from mathematical beauty. It has been, in other words, a patchwork quilt of very fragile materials.

But now we must return to Bohr, who puts the argument to rest, even though he tarnishes some of Einstein’s dreams. We cannot hope to know Nature, only to predict in some small way how it will twist and turn as we move through it in time and space. The Standard Model, while mathematically vomitous in the eyes of romantic Classical theorists, is all we have.

At least until another genius comes along and shows us how all our statistics and renormalized integrals are analogous to some deeper insight that may be key to understanding reality.

But don’t expect it any time soon, especially if string theory continues as it is.