David Peat

From Object to Process 61to the test, it is now dealing with theories about theories, or even theoriesabout theories about theories. It is only at the level of subtheoriesor sub-subtheories that theoretical predictions can be tested.This is a dramatic change in worldview. Science always prided itselfon objectivity and the ability to deal directly with nature throughcarefully designed experiments. But if no one can reach energies highenough to test a theory of superstrings then what is the criterion forscientific truth? Are theories to be judged, like poetry and art, on aestheticgrounds? A good poem has a unified structure, each word fitsperfectly, there is nothing arbitrary about it, metaphors hold togetherand interlock, the sound of a word and its reflections of meaningcomplement each other. Likewise postmodern physics asks: How welldoes everything fit together in a theory? How inevitable are its arguments?Are the assumptions well founded or somewhat arbitrary? Is itsoverall mathematical form particularly elegant?A New Order for PhysicsThe American physicist David Bohm (1917–1992) believed that thispersistent failure to unify physics exposes the limits of our current wayof thinking in science. What is needed is not a brilliant new idea or anovel piece of mathematics. The issue is much deeper than piecingtogether a unified theory of relativity and quantum theory. It involveschanging our way of thinking about the physical world. As Bohm putit, what is required is a new order to physics.Despite the radical differences between Newtonian physics and theworld below the atom, physicists continue to make calculations usingexactly the same mathematics that Newton employed—spatial coordinatesand differential equations. Covering the quantum world with acoordinate grid means that, in a very fundamental sense, little haschanged between Descartes and Newton on one hand, and Bohr andHeisenberg on the other. In quantum theory a coordinate grid impliesthat space is a backdrop against which physics is played out. Elementaryparticles move in space but remain distinct from it; thus a dualityexists between space (or space-time) and matter. This duality goes back