Theories of the World

There can be no all-unifying theories. Scientists can strive for single explanation of most different experiences, they construct theories covering all the other theories as special cases—but there always will come yet another experience that would not fit in the seemingly comprehensive theorization. The world is qualitatively infinite, and no theory can describe any of the world's turns.

Science in general is essentially a partial vision of the world, and theoretical science is even narrower. It is only in the limit, somewhere in infinity, that all the world becomes entirely reflected in science, and theoretically described; however, this would mean that science itself ceased to exist as something separate from other modes of comprehension.

If so, what is the use of modern integrative initiatives, like the unified field theory? Yes, one can show that all the existing field theories can be derived as special cases from a single theory with enough spatial dimensions. What of that? In principle, this could be predicted from the very beginning, since all the field theories are based on the same logical scheme, and hence they a priori allow combining in a single theory. Obviously, there are different ways to construct such a unified theory, and probably one can find a few more effects favoring one of the possible solutions. And then? Does that give us a clue to understanding anything except a narrow class of physical processes? Even admitting that everything consists of particles and fields, one cannot reduce everything to them. Collective motion is qualitatively different from the motion of an isolated body, and there is no way to compute higher level effects entirely on the basis of their lower level mechanisms.

Physical theories cannot be simply extrapolated to the whole world, like many scientists do, to impress silly journalists and gain cheap popularity, thus attracting money for continuing serious research. All the talk about the Big Bang, expanding/collapsing Universe, dark matter etc. is nothing but a kind of joke, mental play without too much pretence, just to see what happens if... Such over-extrapolations are useful in science to clarify the logic of theory and draw the limits of its applicability. They do not have to apply to any physical reality, save the reality of thinking. Presenting them as absolute truth and the highest achievement of science is always an ideologically motivated act, and it starts with stretching a formally obtained result to a political interpretation. Where it happens is outside science, even if former scientists get dragged into the fraud by psychological manipulation.

A theory (in any science at all) is always a theory of something particular, and never a theory of the world as a whole. As soon as we start talking about that wide generalizations, we drift from the domain of science into the realm of philosophy. Since the very distinctions of different sciences originates from the structure of human activity, and hence the currently possible applications, any science can only develop models of limited generality applicable to a very specific range of phenomena, on a single level of hierarchy. As human activities change, sciences evolve into other sciences, and other phenomena need to be described. However general, a science is still about one of the infinity of the possible human relations to the world, and that is what gives it strength and makes science useful in productive activity.

Impossibility of all-unifying science does not mean that the result of one particular science cannot be used in any other. However, this is achieved not through extrapolation, but via the mechanism of activity scheme transfer. People learn from each other doing different things in a similar manner, and one science can borrow certain tricks from another, transforming it to work in a different context. Despite of all the superficial similarity, the same method has different meaning in different sciences. The same formal apparatus describes different phenomena in different application areas, and any similarity can only be limited.

Science produces nothing but approximate models of the world, and no such model can pretend to describe the whole universe, in any its aspect. Unified theories of all kinds make science hierarchical, but, as in any hierarchy, each level retains its specificity and cannot be entirely reduced to another. And, like in any hierarchy, a hierarchical structure ordering theories by the degree of generality can be unfolded in a quite different manner, with former special theories becoming more general than formerly unified. This would mean a scientific revolution—but who said that the present picture of world had been completed and fixed forever?

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