R.E.A.L.I.T.Y.

The biggest questions, pursued to their end, all start to shimmer into one. Why is there something, rather than nothing? Why is the universe the way it is? Who am I? Such questions cannot be answered in terms of anything else, because anything else is just another version of the same question. One response is to treat them as a koan, designed to take one beyond words and beyond asking. Another response is to try to see the questions as their own solution: somehow to grasp them in such a way as to be able to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps from ignorance to knowledge. At the more pedestrian level of theoretical physics, this was the impetus of the 'bootstrap theory' of Geoffrey Chew's group at Berkeley in 1962, which proposed, and tried to get something useful from the idea that every kind of fundamental particle was simply a sort of quantum 'fusion' of all the other sorts of particles. In a different mode, the pursuit of the ultimate essence of logical thought has led to books such as Frederic Parker-Rhodes' The Inevitable Universe and Spencer Brown's Laws of Form. The work of Peter Jewsbury is one of the more satisfying contributions to this genre. His method is to pare down his assumptions to an absolute minimum (of three), then show that these assumptions lead to consequences that not only empirically match the world as we see it, but also logically imply the original assumptions. Such a claim would not imply that our universe is the only possible one, but it would show that the universe (in the sense of everything that exists, material or otherwise) is in a strong logical sense self-consistent, and that any other universe would have to be unimaginably weird. His three basic assumptions are: that the universe exists; that some aspect of the universe looks like a geometrical space; and that the universe is rational and logical. Does he succeed in this programme? I must confess that I am unsure. He has to a remarkable extent made his argument comprehensible and non-technical in The Hypothesis on the Edge of Science, and he has filled in a lot of solid detail in the more technical 'R.E.A.L.I.T.Y.'. The former book is beguilingly jokey and chatty, so that at first I was suspicious of it, but the latter book (published earlier) shows that there is an impressive body of scholarship lying behind it all. They held my interest because of the originality of his powerful generalisations of philosophical and physical ideas: most centrally, Anaximader's apeiron ('the unbounded') and a generalisation of Fermat's 'principle of least time' (as it is usually called, but extended by Jewsbury into a much more general Darwinian-like principle with far reaching consequences). After much pondering, I was left asking myself whether he had not bitten off more than anyone could chew. To succeed fully with his basic logical claim he would have to show that in the course of his arguments no assumptions were creeping in other than the three that he had stated at the outset. The only conclusive way to do this would be to resort to formal logic in the style of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. But this heroic work was demolished by Gödel in a way that has, to date, banished all such enterprises as impossibly hubristic. Moreover, an argument of this scope, when set out on a readable scale, inevitably has many gaps: what does Fermat's principle really mean when applied to entities as general as the apeiron? When appealing to 'logic', what sort of logic is it, in view of the panoply of inconsistent logics, contextual logics and other modern devices that could be used? The fact, however, that questions such as these with their many consequences are raised is itself a tribute to the originality and depth of this work. The hypothesis is definitely worth a try.