Submitting the Theory of Quantum Gravity Part 1: The Streetlight Effect

I’m in the (hopefully) last stages of submitting my manuscript on the Theory of Quantum Gravity and Lignin Adhesives and while I’m polishing the paper to fit all of the criteria for Nature, I’m also feeling quite nervous of the streetlight effect.

I might have mentioned the streetlight effect in at least one previous post. According to Wikipedia, the story goes like this:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".

And I’m definitely not the only one applying this specifically to science. In fact the same Wikipedia article states that:

Noam Chomsky has used the tale as a picture of how science operates: "Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice."

The streetlight in this context are experimental results. And if one follows the scientific method the streetlamp can lead to really odd places. Still, according to Wikipedia:

Scientific inquiry includes creating a testable hypothesis through inductive reasoning,

If the criterion for the validation of a hypothesis is set too high, one can never step out of the light of the streetlight. That is, in my manuscript I set up a hypothesis that assumes that a basic postulate of science is wrong. And that experimental results reflect this.

But the problem is that the assumption that the initial postulate is correct casts doubt on any experimental result contradicting the initial hypothesis. I’ve already seen this with some colleagues, especially early on. When I’ve considered my hypothesis to be clear and testable, I haven’t received the same response from these colleagues. For them, the results have appeared inconclusive. As Carl Sagan popularized: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For them the extraordinary claim is that there is no random initial state. In my opinion the more extraordinary claim is the postulate of randomness. But because this is the original claim, it does not require the same level of evidence.

But isn’t there plenty of evidence of true randomness in nature? Well, not if you believe In Cristian Calude (a person I hadn’t heard of before writing this post):

"given the impossibility of true randomness, the effort is directed towards studying degrees of randomness"

But this is a view of mathematicians. Some physicists do believe in ontological randomness: i.e. that nature is intrinsically random. Not that they could prove this: rather they claim that experimental evidence indicates an unavoidable level of randomness in physical interactions.

What I claim is that the physicist way of observing something is by disrupting a system and claiming that the disruption is more fundamental than the undisrupted state.

In a sense, I’ve noticed the same thing in my experiments. Oftentimes the vast majority of experiments produce ordered systems that don’t reveal much about the inner workings of the system. But sometimes you see exceptions that reveal a deeper truth.

An example of this is a transmission electron micrograph of a broken micro cluster of lignin balls of my old paper:

When a colleague of mine studied spray dried lignin balls that I’d given to him, he saw mostly largish balls with bumps on the surface. Only a single ball was broken in half, showing its insides. And the insides showed that the ball was made up of smaller balls.

The large truth that I learned from this is that when a water dispersion of lignin balls is dried, these balls cluster into larger balls without breaking, or fusing the smaller balls. However, what I didn’t learn from this image was that this broken state would be somehow common for micro aggregates of lignin balls, even though the above image shows such a state.

And this breaking of things and observing randomness in the process is inherently messy. To attribute inherent randomness to nature because things look messy when they’re disrupted is what I call bonkers.

So, I need to write the manuscript in a way that addresses this bonkerness, but in as polite a form as possible. I won’t share the latest version of the manuscript yet, because the process of making the manuscript polite is a slowish process and there hasn’t been too much since the last version. But rest assured: after the manuscript is ready, most people should feel themselves a bit silly to have thought that randomness is the norm, rather than the exception.