Since I was a child, I've been reading popular science books ... by Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Steven Weinberg, Murray Gell-Mann, and others ... and finding that I did not really understand them. They described the world well enough, but they did not explain how it works: for example how attractive forces 'attract'; what 'fields' are; or even what 'mass' is.

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And then I recall reading this, from Richard Feynman:

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“[…] I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. […] Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ […] Nobody knows how it can be like that.”

[Richard Phillips Feynman (1965): The Character of Physical Law (MIT Press, 1985), p.129.]

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and thinking to myself that this - avoiding the problem - was not the way to do Science: there simply had to be a way of working out “what the world must be like”… despite Feynman's advice.

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"Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or anything you have ever seen."

[Richard Feynman, as quoted by John Langone in The Mystery of Time: Humanity’s Quest for Order and Measure (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2000) p.229.]

 

Perhaps, but even if it’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced, it must be like something, and it must be possible to work out what that is…  

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I couldn't accept that we should simply stop asking “how can it be like that?”; and I’ve spent the past 20 years working on the answer. It’s been an interesting journey...

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Now I am an Honorary Research Associate in Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and I pursue a wide range of interests: metaphysics (ontology), theory of knowledge (epistemology), philosophy of science, foundations of physics, STEM, climate science, philosophy of mind, and AI.

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