From Copernicus to Hawking-Penrose

I am reading Lee Smolin, "The Trouble with Physics". Copernicus started us in a quest to understand our place in the Universe. First it was small, now it is huge. Even though Hawking and Penrose are not active in string theory and its cosmological implications, I feel that they are the ones that better understand the mathematics of the whole She Bang. In any way, in my mind they set a landmark for thinking.

Officially what Hawking-Penrose are recognized for, is the mathematical proof that Einstein's General Relativity is incomplete. That forces theoretical physicists to search for the unification of quantum and cosmic phenomena. Maybe our small minds won't be up to the task, even if such unification exists. I refuse to believe that though.

A unified theory of the Universe may be as elusive to our minds as an understanding of consciousness. Maybe our minds can only get glimpses of the big light that could explain the whole Universe.

In any case to make this case I have to present Marvin Minsky. He thought about intelligence all his professional career, now he published what I believe is his last word on the subject in his new book, The Emotion Machine. One can read there that instead of a single site in the brain where our self resides, the collective behavior of the different parts of the brain are perceived by us as a single entity we call our self.

In this light, the theory of the very small, and the very big, seem to us as a single Universe, but they are disconnected as our brains are, or at least, if Minsky is right, they will appear to our brain as disconnected as it itself is. No unification here. We might have gotten to the end of our road.

Steven Wolfram in his book "A New Kind of Science", maybe is pointing in the same general direction when he says that after a threshold of complexity, all universal computers are indistinguishable from each other.

I just saw my son playing with his Nintendo Game Cube. He was playing " Chibi-Robo". A simple robot does simple tasks all over the house, that is all it does, and that is all that is expected of it.

For the whole multiverse, we may just be one of those simple robots, and the Multiverse does not expect us to do more than we have done so far.

Unless we rebel and become something completely new.