Then books started to appear with names like The Mind Of God and God And The New Physics
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Then books started to appear with names like The Mind Of God and God And The New Physics. Now God has become the PR mascot for physics."The problem, argues Wertheim, with the Theory of Everything which is an attempt to understand the origins of the universe by uniting relativity and quantum mechanics (that is, space, time, all forces and all particles) in a single mathematical equation, is that it has turned the subject into a decadent, women-excluding sect - with Stephen Hawking as its "crippled seer" - which is in danger of falling into a moral black hole."I don't think there's anything immoral about doing the theory," explains Wertheim, "because, in theory, all it takes is a blackboard and chalk and a salary. In fact, I hope I live to see the unification of relativity and quantum mechanics - as a physics student you couldn't hope for anything else. My reservation comes only when it involves spending billions and billions of dollars [on particle accelerators]."Why? "Physicists who are working on the theory of everything, even its greatest champions, acknowledge it is not going to have any practical applications, not even for the military.
Because the conditions of the physical universe simply don't exist any more for this stuff. They only existed in the split second after the Big Bang, 15 billion years ago. So it's not even going to lead to better bombs."The TOE people say, `We're doing this because it's truth and truth is beauty, that it's such a beautiful and wonderful truth that it's worth the money'. I think it is a great aesthetic endeavour and I want to see it happen but if it's primarly giving us beauty and its greatest value is aesthetic then surely they should be competing with the arts budget. And if so, why should they get $13 billion when we're cutting back on money for every other form of arts?"I don't have a problem if society collectively makes that decision - I don't want to dictate that we should spend money on x and not on y. What I want to say is let society be involved in determining where our society does go.
And it has to be asked why is there billions of dollars available for things like the Hubble telescope and there's not billions of dollars to investigate new forms of contraception?"Convincing as Wertheim's argument is, it is obvious that the book is also a working out of her own, more personal demons. That she should be antagonistic to the links between physics and religion is unsurprising, given her mother's experience of Catholicism. "My mother had six children in five and a half years and she couldn't believe that God wanted her to have any more children, and I agree. For her to go on the Pill in the mid-Sixties meant leaving the Catholic church."Similarly, her sense that the world is against women was born in the womb: one of identical twins (her sister, Christine, teaches critical theory at Goldsmiths college in London), Wertheim's mother was in labour for 48 hours.
