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Weird Science

The English word ``weird'' is self-descriptive, violating for no apparent reason the grammatical rule, ``i before e except after c.'' No doubt there is some interesting etymological reason for this particular exception, but to students of English as a Second Language it must seem a completely arbitrary booby-trap set for hapless victims.

The numerous breakdowns of the ``Laws of Physics'' discovered in the early part of the Twentieth Century must have elicited similar reactions in students of Physics as a Second Language [which is, of course, what we are all trying to learn].

There is a story [which may even be historically accurate, but for my purposes it doesn't matter] about a distinguished physicist around the end of the 19$^{\rm th}$ Century who advised his bright student to go into some other more promising field [today it would be Computer Science or Microbiology] because ``Physics is just about wrapped up - all that remains is to tie up some loose ends and work out a lot of engineering details.'' Imagine the consternation of that student when, a decade or two later, it became clear that the basic classical ``Laws'' of Physics were all wrong and that the world behaves essentially differently from our ``common sense'' expectations! The success of Classical Physics [before Relativity and Quantum Mechanics] was just a lucky accident: in the world we perceive - naturally enough, a world of objects of roughly our own size - the true qualitative behaviour of matter and energy is obscured by the enormous size of objects we can handle and the miniscule speeds we can achieve with our own huge, puny bodies; in this anthropocentric limit [virtually infinite size relative to atoms and virtually zero velocity relative to light] Newton's ``Laws'' turn out to be an excellent approximation to the truth, so we can still make good use of them. But they are wrong in an absolute qualitative sense. Of course, the ``Laws'' of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are almost certainly wrong in an absolute qualitative sense, too. In fact, ever since their ``discovery'' (if that is the right word), their ``truth'' has been challenged continuously, often no more aggressively than by those who formulated them in the first place. Einstein in particular was convinced that Quantum Mechanics was merely a provisional calculational technology, that ``God does not play dice.'' And he was surely right; sooner or later we are bound to find where these new descriptions break down [e.g. in the description of gravity . . . ] and there we will doubtless find the more ``true'' theory of which they are merely limiting cases under restricted conditions. [Ain't it always the way?] But it is no criticism of any theory to predict that it is ultimately wrong in an absolute sense; and in any case I am getting much too far ahead of myself here.