Quote:
Originally Posted by papageno
It can be well argued that the greatest achievement, the what-would-you-take-on-a-desert-island piece of information about Physics, is the understanding that a physical system behaves differently depending the scale (length, time, energy, etc.).
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Yes, I agree that is a biggie. Probably the balancing point to also take along is the "correspondence principle", which basically says that a law that works on one scale should not contradict a larger scale made up of many copies of the smaller scale version. However, even the correspondence principle has a big flaw-- the possibility of "emergent physics" that is not exactly contradicted by the smaller-scale law, but doesn't result from it either. Emergent behavior is often fairly insensitive to details at smaller scales, it is really a new thing appearing on a larger scale. A brain might be a good example. So I would claim that no "theory of everything" will be remotely close to living up to its billing, given that it will give essentially zero insight into what a brain is.