As a journalist who writes about science, I thought my colleagues could learn a thing or two about the nature of “objective truth” from physics. Objectivity is a word that journalists use a lot—but in my experience, scientists don’t, because it’s not a very useful term. Journalists believe that it’s possible (and desirable) to have zero point of view—that is, to look at the world from some privileged frame through which they see the unvarnished “truth.” What makes science strong, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t fall into that trap. What scientists say is: I made this measurement, and I got this result. Or, I solved an equation, and I got this solution. To say you have a “result” or “solution” without saying how you got it is meaningless. Even when I say the sky is blue, it’s understood that I am a human being whose retina is detecting certain wavelengths of light which are then being interpreted by my human brain in very specific ways. The sky is not “blue” to a snake or a dog or a bee (or if I look through a red filter).

Similarly, if I say the universe was created in a Big Bang (never mind the details) 13 billion or so years ago, there’s no reason anyone should believe me unless I point out that this particular “objective reality” is based on evidence from several very different points of view (cosmic microwave background, expansion, nucleosynthesis….). Journalists often fail to explain this—which is one reason I believe the whole ID issue has been so badly handled in the press. It’s not enough to say “most scientists think evolution is correct….” That leaves the reader in the position of choosing who to believe—the NAS, or the president, for example. It’s not so difficult, I think, to explain that evolution is an answer to specific questions about the fossil record, morphology, DNA, embryology, etc. But it’s rarely done.

What really seemed to get people’s goat (goats?) was my statement that how you look at something determines what you see. I fail to understand the problem. If I look at light with a certain kind of apparatus, it’s a wave; if I look with another, it’s a particle. Reality is always reality, but how we choose to ask the question does determine the answer. So the only way to get an “objective” answer to is say how you asked the question! (And if I’m viewing the world through the eyes of an educated middle aged white woman living in LA–which I am–then I’d better take that into account as well.)

An astronomer friend told me he was upset because my wording played into the hands of the “relativists” (not that kind); that it was understood as “code” to mean “there’s no reality,” or some such. But I’m really tired of other people telling me what my words mean—whether the subject is objectivity, “family values,” “culture of life,” “liberal,” “feminist,” or any of the rest.

So, yes. Objectivity—meaning looking at a situation from a supposedly privileged frame from which you can see the unbiased “truth” —is, as I said, “not only unattainable, but intrinsically fraudulent and ultimately counterproductive.” Science understands this; it’s journalism that has the problem.

This looks interesting. I don’t know if you and KC are aware of a certain resonance in the title “Categorically not”. There are mathematical and physical formulations of how to “put the point of view squarely in the equation” and the math involved is closely related to category theory. More precisely, to topos theory, which is a development of intiutionistic logic expressed in category theory terms. I am not an expert on the math, but my understanding is that you can construct logics where truth value depends on point of view, for example, you can make sense of the fact that the set of propositions we can give truth values to grows in the future.

Markopoulou used this to express a quantum theory of cosmology in terms of information that a real observer, inside the universe, has access to. Since no observer has access to more than the information coming from their backwards light cone, different observers have access to different observables and states. See,

Fotini Markopoulou,“The internal description of a causal set: What the universe looks like from the inside”, Commun.Math.Phys. 211 (2000) 559-583, gr-qc/9811053;” An insider’s guide to quantum causal histories”,hep-th/9912137, Nucl.Phys.Proc.Suppl. 88 (2000) 308-313;
“Quantum causal histories”,hep-th/9904009, Class.Quant.Grav. 17 (2000)
2059-2072; E. Hawkins, F. Markopoulou, H. Sahlmann, {\it Evolution in quantum causal histories}, hep-th/0302111.

In an earlier appraoch, Crane proposed expressing quantum cosmology in terms of a set of Hilbert spaces, each associated to a boundary in space. The idea is that each Hilbert space codes the information that an observer on one side of the boundary can have about the system on the other side. This led him to anticipate the holographic principle, it also led to the use of Chern-Simons theory to formulate the boundary observables, which is used in LQG to describe the states on black holes and cosmological horizons.

See L. Crane hep-th/9301061; Topological Field theory as the key to quantum gravity, hep-th/9308126, in Knot theory and quantum gravity
ed. J. Baez, (Oxford University Press); Clocks and Categories, is quantum gravity algebraic? J. Math. Phys. 36 (1995) 6180-6193, gr-qc/9504038.

-Lee

-cvj

Because
[a] They want to politicize *everything*
[b] Because we, or rather those who, by writing pop sci books, presume to speak for us, do such a crappy job of explaining these things. *Especially* relativity.