John D. Barrow - New Theories of Everything

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Even today, there persists... a feeling that the creation of the Universe out of nothing must violate some basic conservation law that stops one from getting something for nothing. Nevertheless, there is actually no evidence that the Universe as a whole possesses a non-zero value of any such conserved quantity. The total mass-energy of all the constituents of a finite Universe appears to be always equal in magnitude but opposite in sign to the total gravitational potential energies of those particles.... Similarly, there is no evidence that the Universe possesses any overall net rotation or electric charge.

John D. Barrow
Scanning the past millennia of human achievement reveals just how much has been achieved during the last three hundred years since Newton set in motion the effective mathematization of Nature. We found that the world is curiously adapted to a simple mathematical description. It is enigma enough that the world is described by mathematics; but by simple mathematics, of the sort that a few years energetic study now produces familiarity with, this is an enigma within an enigma.

John D. Barrow
We say that the string is 'random' if there is no other representation of the string which is shorter than itself. But we will say that it is 'non-random' if there does exist such an abbreviated representation.... In general, the shorter the possible representation... the less random... On this view we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions.

John D. Barrow
It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns.... When viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics.... In many ways the search for a Theory of Everything is a manifestation of a faith that this compression goes all the way down to the bedrock of reality...

John D. Barrow
The legacy of the great monotheistic religions is the expectation of a single over-arching explanation for the Universe.... There is no logical reason why the Universe should not contain surds of arbitrary elements that do not relate to the rest.

John D. Barrow
The living world is not a marble palace. It is a higgledy-piggledy outcome of natural selection and the competition between many interacting factors. The outcome is often neither elegant nor symmetrical.

John D. Barrow
By interlinking causes, by searching always for unity in the face of superficial diversity, modern scientific explanations prize depth above breadth. A deep and narrow theory can, and often does, graduate to become a deep and broad one. A broad and shallow theory never does.

John D. Barrow
Ultimate explanation no longer means only a story that encompasses everything.

John D. Barrow
It is not hard to see why the Eastern holistic perspective made scientific progress so difficult. It denies the intuition that one can study the parts of the world in isolation from the rest—that one can analyze the world...

John D. Barrow