Saturday, June 27, 2009

Self-reference.

There was a poignant obstinacy in Albert Einstein's effort to come up with an unified field theory in his later years. Einstein's rejection of the quantum mechanical solution was based on his strong intuition. Whether his intuition was wrong is still an open question.

It is interesting how gravity has withstood all efforts of unification so far. Gravity is after all a force pertaining to the space-time structure. So there is an inevitable element of self-reference.

It is interesting to consider how the theory of relativity, derived from Mach's principle, fares with the notorious problem of the self-referential.

1 comment:

(ma)gog said...

I have never studied quantum mechanics, but thanks to all the efforts of the current scientists who try to explain about basic theory of quantum field theory to the general readers, the knowledge is open even to the people like me. (although it is often beyond my understanding.) The wonder of "existence" of this world itself including the space-time structre and the self consciousness overwhelms me. If Einstein had lived to this day, it could have been possible that he would have tried to develop the knowledge of recent quantum mechanics and have finally come to find the final unified theofy where the problem of consciousness is also explained... I just wonder.