Peter,
Something similar has been running round my head during this contest. I lay the basic concept out in my essay; That perception is a function of the particular focus and in many ways, looking at the broad and general, is as fundamental as the specific and exact. Yet physics as we have it today, is obsessed with ever more concentration of the focus. I just happened to read Peter Woit's latest blog post, where the subject of what machine comes after the LHC is being discussed.
Does it ever occur that contextuality might be a function of the general, not though ever finer detail?
Not only do they not know what they are looking for beyond the Higgs, but as these FQXI contests have shown on any number of occasions, they can't even adequately explain time.
It seems many major institutions in this world, from the US government, to leading edge physics, to various monotheistic/monolithic religious institutions, to the current monetary paradigm, are all being pulled into their various bureaucratic black holes. I'mn thinking the end result will be one of those binary star systems, where the little one sucking in all the energy eventually goes supernova.
Tome makes an interesting point in the Contest [link:fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1589[thread[/link];
"There is an important aspect of the competition, however, that escapes judging. It is the merging and contrasting of original research results that cohere in a theme worthy of publishing as a collection. This is not adequately reflected -- in my opinion -- in the collection of winning essays picked from the final 35 or 40. A "proceedings volume" of sorts would have to be drawn from the complete range of entries containing serious and potentially falsifiable results, or feasible and well organized research programs.
Such a proceedings would help satisfy FQXi's mission to promote leading edge research independent of the contest outcome. It just takes good editing skills and the sage advice of an already-empaneled advisory board. Some such proceedings in other venues have become classics -- such as the 1990 volume (edited by FQXi member Woijczek Zurek) on complexity, entropy and information produced from a conference at the Santa Fe Institute."
Given his opinion of me, I thought I'd refrain from seconding it, but you would definitely be one to push the idea. Obviously there are a lot of contrasting ideas and it would be difficult to achieve consensus, but how about some form of formalized competition, where the two major schools of thought, the realists and the platonists, each coalesce around a core model and let all those in the middle be able to see the contrasts and where they might fall?
Think I might cut and paste this idea over there. Or think it through a little further.
Regards,
John
