“One Question To Ask Nature”

Last night at Liffey Toastmasters table topics I was invited to respond to the prompt, “Say if you can ask nature one question and get a definite answer, what would your question be?” Thematically, the evening gathering was titled “0th Law of Robotics” with a tint of discussion over trends in AI and thinking machines (Herbert). This is the flushed out version of my response for the record.

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Madam table topics master, Dear Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and guests,

I have been here a handful of times in the past few years, always a guest, and I have introduced myself using various terms. I am now a computational physicist with a job in Germany.

I appreciate the prompt in profound ways, as it is something I think about quite often in the course of my job. To put it in broad and yet concrete terms, my question would be

“Is nature actually understandable, to a human?”

I ask — making it more pertinent today — as I have begun now too outsource data processing and coding to a coding robot. As a computational physicist that’s quite alarming as an automaton is now performing duties that, by many measures, on the exterior resemble the main duties of my job. Is there anything left?

The development of physics and the physical sciences always relied on what is called reductionism, that a myriad natural phenomena can be summarised as or reduced usefully to simple equations which — though never an explicit rule — fits on a few pages (I am making allowances for civil engineers).

At the same time, there exist worried voices and beliefs that we are not always guaranteed such luxury: that the ultimate descriptions of the universe need not be simple. High energy physics, turbulence, emergence, consciousness, et cetera, maybe the way to understand complex stuff like these is through complexity as it is, extensive data and dense irreducible models… To the point and any bot we send to aid us in making sense of such mess becomes part of the nature outside a human mind’s grasp. In other words, I fear that to understand nature and make sound decisions, the best we can do is relocate the black box from “the world” to “the box on your desk” and pay rent on it.¹

Being in the circle of astrophysics, often shielded from (removed from) societal consequences of curiosity as we luckily don’t have much — unless someone spots a world-ending comet on the space telescope², grants a unique seat in watching how the trends in tech sweeps across a group of people. Around me is no shortage of senior academics who weigh the cost of Claude Pro against the cost of a new graduate student and each option’s pros and cons. I wish — at the same time acknowledge the backwardness — to understand the limits of human scientific exploration. To me, it is no way to live by knowing the answer ahead of time, and I operate knowing there can never be such question. After all, if someone guarantees the world is at its heart beyond human comprehension, saying “no” to the question that I ask, especially via the voice of a bot, there’d be dramatically fewer reasons to live as a human.

1. Additional sentence. ↩︎
2. Additional sentence. ↩︎