I just submitted a paper for the essay contest held at FQXi. I focused on topics from quantum indeterminism to no theory of everything, to a dynamic Universe with hierarchical underlying laws, all the way to the justification of our pursuance of open science, open society, and open world.
Gödel’s undecidability results (incomplete theorems) demonstrate that no consistent math system is complete, i.e., one can always construct statements that can not be proved or disproved within the same system. Hilbert’s dream of unification of all mathematics may be busted. Similarly, quantum indeterminism indicates that physics and the Universe may be indeterministic, incomplete, and open in nature, and therefore demand no single unification theory of everything. All my recent works on mirror matter theory and supersymmetric mirror models seem to support such an open world ideology.
What I did not talk about in the essay is the fine line between indeterminism and determinism. As one can imagine, quantum indeterminism may lie right at the boundary of the two ideologies. In the same sense, the Universe is right at the critical density so that we have a flat and expanding Universe without becoming either closed or too open. We could keep pursuing the studies of all the beauties of math and physics and gaining, in an asymptotic way but never completely, the full knowledge of our world. In other words, we are living right in this fine line of nature.
This fine line is exactly the so-called “the Golden Mean (中庸之道)” in Chinese culture. The same fine line between Yin and Yang, between openness and closeness, between freedom and rules, between war and peace, between you and me, and between everything.
Our behaviors ignoring this fine line will be punished by nature. Nature will teach us how to walk along this fine line. Despite all the hardships and adversity endured in the human history, I believe that we human beings, born with this fine line, will be advancing just fine in this barely open, almost comprehensible, and nearly spiritual Universe.
