This a response to a short YouTube clip:
The originating quantum physicists, such as Wigner, Heisenberg, and Bohr, for example, were strong enough to face and deal with the philosophical dilemmas that arose from their observations and discoveries.
In Heisenberg’s “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics”, which was a response to Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”, he demonstrated that QM had obliterated subject/object metaphysics, introduced the unfathomable role of consciousness, and the impossibility of any rational model to be sufficient to fundamental reality. He concluded with the statement, deeply unsettling to naive realists such as Carroll, that physics can no longer claim to be a study of nature, but is confined to a study of how physicality is known through human conditions of perception and thought.
In Wigner’s writings from 1949 to 1961, Wigner (a seminal Nobel-Prize winning mathematical physicist) took a critical look at physics adopting mathematics as its language. Building off of Poincare’s “Four Geometries” and his own account of the approximate nature of number as a pragmatic adaptation of the primarily esthetic nature of mathematics, he demonstrated that mathematics was a game with invented axioms and rules, and chosen problems (or events) with which the mathematician enjoyed displaying his cleverness. In adopting mathematics as its mode of expression, physics also became a parlor game of sorts, with axioms being presented as “fundamental laws of nature”, limited to carefully chosen events, and clever solutions invented out of new rules and axioms increasingly removed from anything in reality, such as complex numbers. This led to his Empirical Law of Epistemology, which showed any rational system to be approximate due to the approximate nature of numbers, and tightly limited in space, time, and chosen event. As these limits are exceeded and new events are introduced, entropy inevitably increases and the system breaks down. And as was the case case with Heisenberg, Wigner also didn’t shy away from the mysterious role of consciousness in the process.
Today, we mostly find physicists more desperately limiting chosen events and dismissing those things that they cannot explain in order to create somewhat fantastical theories, all of which are no more than groundless metaphysics. The best exception to this sad state of affairs is probably Carlo Rovelli, although even he doesn’t rise to the level of the originators of early 20th Century.
Carroll complains of amateurs nosing around in physics, but he doesn’t even rise to amateur level in the philosophy that underpins his questions and answers. He could only be characterized as naive. None of us has any understanding of consciousness or the arational nature of quantum reality on the other side of the density matrices. He has a naive assumption of concerning the ability to describe fundamental reality with mathematics or any systematic explanation. He has no idea what Heisenberg meant about physics no longer able to claim a study of nature. From such a position, it would be foolish to proclaim any unitary theory of existence.
Too Late for the Gods 