Three Roads To Quantum Gravity

CHAPTER 2
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IN THE FUTURE WE SHALL KNOW MORE
One of the things that cannot exist outside the universe is
ourselves. This is obviously true, but let us consider the
consequences. In science we are used to the idea that the
observers must remove themselves from the system they
study, otherwise they are part of it and cannot have a
completely objective point of view. Also, their actions and
the choices they make are likely to affect the system itself,
which means that their presence may contaminate their
understanding of the system.
For this reason we try as often as we can to study systems in
which a clean boundary can be drawn separating the system
under study from the observer. That we can do this in physics
and astronomy is one of the reasons why those sciences are
said to be `harder'. They are held to be more objective and
more reliable than the social sciences because in physics and
astronomy there seems to be no dif®culty with removing the
observer from the system. In the `softer' social sciences there
is no way around the fact that the scientists themselves are
participants in the societies they study. Of course, it is
possible to try to minimize the effects of this and, for better
or worse, much of the methodology of the social sciences is
based on the belief that the more one can remove the observer
from the system, the more scienti®c one is being.
This is all well and good when the system in question can
be isolated, say in a vacuum chamber or a test tube. But what
if the system we want to understand is the whole universe?