Reductionism Is The Ultimate Problem
Recently there have been several books and essays noting that theoretical physics appears to have lost its way forward. A nice example of this concern can be found here: https://aeon.co/essays/has-the-quest-for-top-down-unification-of-physics-stalled .
If you study the major problems in theoretical physics today, such as the vacuum energy density crisis, the hierarchy problem and the failures of WIMP theory, Supersymmetry and String/Membrane theories, one cannot help but notice that they can all be traced to one assumption. That assumption is the belief that reductionism is the best approach to understanding nature. Reductionism claims that fundamental explanations will always be found on the smallest scales of nature. Hence when any new phenomena is found or a new enigma presents itself, the reductionists assume that it must be some new subatomic particle or field. The reason for this near religious faith in reductionism is easy to understand: it worked marvelously for the macroscopic scales of our world. But what if reductionism is the wrong approach for understanding the whole scale range of the cosmos.
If one observes the cosmos objectively, one sees that it has a hierarchical organization that extends to our observational limits on small and large scales, and probably beyond. Moreover, the cosmological hierarchy is highly stratified into distinct Scales like the Atomic Scale, the Stellar Scale and the Galactic Scale.
Here’s a new idea for our lost theoreticians: maybe reductionism works fine within each cosmological Scale, but fails badly when applied to the entire hierarchy of discrete cosmological Scales. Maybe absolute scale works within individual Scales, but fails badly for the cosmos as a whole, which requires relative scale for proper understanding.
Here’s some observational evidence that could embolden the lost theoreticians to question their faith in reductionism.
If the lost theoreticians are so desperate that they are ready to embrace the “multiverse”, which involves giving up traditional evidence-based science and adopting mathematical aesthetics as a guiding principle, then how can it be so difficult to seriously consider an anti-reductionist self-similar approach wherein fundamentality occurs on every cosmological Scale.
Discrete Scale Relativity has demonstrated how to solve the vacuum energy density crisis and the hierarchy problem. It predicts a dark matter candidate for which there is already an abundance of observational evidence. It offers a new direction in the long quest to unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. DSR has been waiting for over 40 years for the lost theoreticians to give it a fair chance.