Paradox
Lost

Somewhere in the last century or so, fundamental physics formally discarded the search for mechanistic explanations of light, gravity, electricity and magnetism. Instead, it began to focus on producing increasingly accurate mathematical descriptions of these phenomena. This shift has resulted in a magnificent corpus of precise predictions about the outcome of experiments but has failed to produce a theory that can explain what causes the outcomes. As a consequence of this, physics has become a deeply paradoxical field that assumes basic features of our world cannot be understood.

Luckily, fixing the problem is simple. We don’t have to build another ten-billion-dollar supercollider that lets us rip apart the next “particle,” we do not need another multinational scientific collaboration that spends decades working out the 13th decimal place of the fine structure constant, nor do we (yet) need a new kind of mathematics. All we have to do is redirect physics towards a truly scientific pursuit of knowledge is to take a long, hard look at everything we already know, and find a material, mechanistic story to tell about it, rather than a purely mathematical one.

At its core, such a story needs to follow one very simple rule: it must always maintain a strict separation between the physical and the abstract. In other words, a truly physical story about reality is one that never confuses a material body, a surface-bound volume with a defined location relative to all other bodies, with ideas – the actions taken by that body.

If we can consistently apply this principle to the wealth of experimental results compiled across the last few centuries of physics, then we will be able to resolve the confusion, mysticism, and paradox that so clearly rule our day. We will suddenly be able to understand mysterious concepts like charge, energy, and warped spacetime; we will be able to see the beautiful simplicity of wave-particle duality; we can find the cause of mass, and why it makes objects fall to Earth.