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Science
A new physics is in the offing, and with it, a new politics
By Kevin Potvin
The two go hand-in-hand down through history
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Besides uncovering the ultimate truth about reality—in itself an obviously worthwhile pursuit—physics is important to watch for another big reason: physics has historically played an important role in the evolution of our political structures.
There is a good reason for this strange connection. Politics is the art of persuasion, and the most persuasive argument for any political reform is that a new way of organizing society promises to be more “natural.” As physics is the study of what is natural, changes in physics changes what we conceive as “natural,” and so alters what we consider the optimum way of organizing society.
It is no coincidence that the collapse of a thousand years of Church-dominated feudal Europe followed the discovery of proof that the Earth is not a single, unique centre in the universe. The new physics of the time, first formulated in the 1500s, paved the way toward the breakdown of central Church-dominated authority in Europe and led to the invention of individually-determined national sovereignties more aligned with the new “natural”: individually-orbiting planets.
It is similarly the case that the supposed discovery of a Big Bang universe undergoing constant expansion, and always under threat of a reversal leading to complete destruction, gave rise in the 20th Century to an economically-oriented global political order predicated on constant growth under threat of complete destruction if growth were ever stopped. Alternative political orders that don’t include constant growth are beyond our conception (for now), because constant growth, thanks to today’s physics, is understood to be “natural.”
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As clearly annunciated in Lee Smolin’s 2007 book, The Trouble with Physics, physics is currently in a state of crisis, which is to say, it is in a state of severe transition leading to a whole new model on the order of the new models that arose from Nicolas Copernicus’ insights in the 16th Century and from Albert Einstein’s in the 20th Century. We just don’t know yet what that new model of nature is going to look like. But the new model is almost certain to bring in its wake a complete overhaul of our overarching political structures, especially because those structures also seem at the moment terribly unstable and ready for toppling. It is therefore very important to discern the chief elements of the new physics to get the inside scoop on what the new political structures are likely to look like, since they will inevitably be based on the new physics and will, as always, conform to the new “natural.”
New models of physics don’t typically throw everything of the old models out, however. Instead, there is usually only one or a small number of crucial problems in the old model that finally loom too large to ignore, and therefore attract attention of physicists, get restated, and in so doing, form the basis of the new model.
The two most serious problems in the current model have to do with its treatment of that old bugaboo gravity, and its conception of that always mysterious conundrum, time. It is therefore likely that whatever new model comes along will have as its centerpieces a whole new treatment of gravity and time in particular.
Gravity is widely thought to have been finally understood and explained by Einstein. But in fact a full explanation was never offered and serious paradoxes remain. Besides, the chief insight Einstein had about gravity has largely been ignored or misunderstood by most: gravity is not a force, Einstein proved. Nonetheless, physicists today are obsessed with finding the particle responsible for creating the force they believe gravity is, to the point of constructing the $8 billion Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility in Switzerland to find it. (That installation’s opening has been delayed again, this time because of an apparently broken magnet revealed in test start-ups.)
Time is also in for a serious revision. “I believe there is something basic we are all missing, some wrong assumption we are all making,” Smolin concludes in his book that takes apart string theory. “What could that wrong assumption be?” he asks. “I strongly suspect that the key is time. More and more, I have the feeling that quantum theory and general relativity are both deeply wrong about the nature of time. . . . [It] is a deeper problem, perhaps going back to the origin of physics. . . . It’s terribly hard to represent time, and that’s why there’s a good chance that this representation is the missing piece.”
Gravity isn’t just a current mystery for physicists, it’s the biggest, most common and most prevalent phenomenon in the world everywhere evident in everyday life. In the world of what is natural, gravity dominates: it is the biggest, most important aspect of nature by far. Any change in the conception of what gravity is will to a huge degree rewrite the whole book on what is natural.
If there is a phenomenon as evident and as prevalent in nature as gravity, it is time. And if the conception of time is in for a re-write in the same era that gravity is up for a revision, we are due for a world-record when it comes to revisions of the book on what is natural. And if the book on what is natural is the one we use to create and re-create our political and social structures, if that is the thing regarded as “natural” to which we constantly conform our political and social structures, then those political and social structures are in for an awful lot of change too.
What kind of new political and social structures will arise to conform to a new view of nature that includes a revised account of gravity and a whole new notion of time is hard to guess at. But now’s a good time to start guessing.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
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