The Lucy Show (or how to nobble physicists using unfair tactics)

I have never been fond of name dropping, but like Neil Innes, I am prepared to suffer a lot for my music. Now it’s your turn …

However, Martin Rees, astronomer royal, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and all-round respectable clever clogs is on record as saying that there is almost certainly intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. We may indeed be being stared at right now by aliens, but are too conventional in our minds to recognize the stare as a stare. The Carpenters’ song (to be found elsewhere in this blog) is very much to the point.

Now, it may be that Rees was just making polite conversation, as is required at Trinity high table if only to offset the residual sweetness of Trinity Burnt Cream. But it might be that he really meant it. In which case, given that his brain is several sizes larger than anyone else’s, it logically follows that he speaketh the truth.

Trouble is: everybody knows that Star Trek is impossible. It is not just that the transporter fails to preserve a continuous self (we can get over that), or that we cannot visit Alpha Centauri in time for tea (time dilation and travelling at 99.9999999% of the speed of light will take care of that). It is not even that the Twin Paradox ensures that, having swiped a portion of alien cucumber sandwich, we cannot do a same-day delivery to your hot-eyed darling back home unless she is prepared to wait a considerable number of years for her tea. We all know about warp drive, and the non-Euclidean character of the spacetime continuum, full (as it is) of singularities, wormholes and other illicit shortcuts. But the idea that spacetime can be warped to order by a free-will touting Captain Kirk descends irreversibly into philosophical chaos – as any fule kno.

Aha, but perhaps some trajectories through crazy-space are irreversible in the sense of being non-Hamiltonian? Won’t that beat the system, and ensure that information can travel at superluminary speeds? But (cometh the ultimate put-down), this would require a kind of nonlocality, a breach of the Bell Inequality. Now, this is feasible: nobody is impressed by Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, and even Newton himself declared that he could not explain gravitational action at a distance. But, nonlocality is a quantum phenomenon, and quantum theory is notoriously incapable of liaising with gravity-explaining phenomena: the realm of the very little will not extend up to and meeting the realm of the very large. Rather, we get a weird and empirically untestable area, which I shall refer to as a case of HBD (= Here Be Dragons).

Incidentally, HBD is a topological impossibility in itself. Thus consider the demands of the Scottish nationalists. Eurozone in Glasgow plus Pound Sterling in London implies a hard border somewhere on the West Coast Mainline and substantial delays on travelling from Glasgow Central to London Euston, normally a simple four-hour journey. Likewise, there must be an area of concentrated stone, Hadrian’s wall width (tiny), separating Scotland from England – known locally as Sturgeon’s disease (or ‘Scotty Bonnet’, to cognoscenti}.

Quantum gravity HBDs include the bit just next to the event horizon on large black holes, singularities involving non-holomorphic functions, and general theory-busting lawlessness or else indescribably tiny little heavy things (Planck distances apart). Not even the European Union would be stupid enough to vote through the gazillion Euros needed to build CERN mark 5 (or whatever it is) wherever tests need to be made.

But we have been assuming something. Namely, that everything has to be Hamiltonian. Non-Hamiltonian theories are allowed to break all the rules, just like Lucy James.

But, if you want a Theory of Everything today that will survive the discovery of the fifth, sixth and seventh fundamental forces, you need to act sharpish. What you need is an a priori proof that there can be no Hamiltonian TOE. Here it is.