Theory of Everything

[Gweihir]

The game presents this like it would solve everything. I do not think so at all.

Let me use a CS comparison: The Theory of Everything is basically every primitive and base-mechanism in a programming language (libraries already not included). Now, if knowing these were enough, we would have secure, reliable and easy to use software for anything that matters a long time ago. But we do not, because while not having the basics of the programming language is a major hurdle, having them does not actually give you much.

Thoughts?

[👾]

It is kept (intentionally?) vague, but phrased like this I think it is a scientifical concept first and foremost. And it is clear that Drennan/Athena is very much a scientist. She does however call it "The Ultimate Knowledge" at some point, or even "Ultimate Truth", which to me sound more like spiritual concepts, especially the latter. In my view, there is a big difference between the two. The scientifical theory is quite small in scope compared to spiritual truth.

Athena mentions at some point that the truth did not set her free. And she keeps being concerned about the Earth and the people living on it, wanting to save it and so on. She stays very much a person, a human. From a spiritual, you could say cosmic, standpoint, this does not make sense if she would actually have realized Ultimate Truth, or you could say, herself.

If I am to take the story seriously and choose to trust the writers to have a sufficient level of understanding of these things, it would mean that she found the "ultimate" as far as science is concerned, thinking that it is the "ultimate ultimate". She is caught to some degree in what I call "scientifical tunnel vision", looking too much outwardly and not enough inwardly. She might have gained some kind of control over matter/manifestation, which is to say, the outer world, but she has not found the inner truth and has not become liberated.

Which would mean that when seen from the ultimate standpoint, she has not achieved much at all, however magnificent it might appear within her relatively narrow perspective of life.

[Gweihir]

Makes sense to me. It also depends on whether the "Theory of Everything" does actually include individual, conscious existence or not. It can be done either way.

[Locane]

My interpretation of this in the game is that they're robots and have the same kind of computing / thought capacity as whenever-this-happened-era's super computers. Maybe more.

If a 2023 LLM can read The Internet and then spit out philosophies on existentialism, draw a picture of a hamburger shoveling snow while Bing Crosby sings in the background (https://i.ibb.co/NVY543G/369d7749-1b0d-4555-8d02-0657686d087a.webp), and do your AP physics homework for you, pretty sure these robots can zip right through effectively and reliably iterating on a mathematical formula that describes Everything.

[TheTitaniumDragon]

Yeah, it's definitely magical in nature.

The RL theory of everything, while potentially useful, would not lead to being able to do magic the way that the game shows.

[Corrie]

Yeah I got the impression the theory of everything in the game is not the same theory of everything we are currently chasing, which is to unify quantum theory and relativity. The theory of everything in this game went far deeper and was more like a theory of creation. It allowed them to manipulate the base layer of reality which lets them do basically anything. It was more like a theory of creation and when one figures it out they become no different from a god.

[mreed2]

It is true that, on its own, a Theory of Everything would have little value.

However, in the game Athena and company also came up with practical applications of the "Theory of Everything," and if you keep the Machine running, you get those practical applications as well.

[Cello4ever]

It's a bit... lazy. Like bad science fiction. Rest of the game is amazing though but the world is broken.

[Pocahawtness]

Originally posted by Gweihir:

The game presents this like it would solve everything. I do not think so at all.

Thoughts?

You are correct. If a theory of everything exists, then it gives an understanding of how the universe works, it doesn't necessarily give a way to achieve anything, let alone everything.

Knowing how something works, doesn't automatically give you ways to travel the stars and build new things.

The game seems to suggest that because the theory has been developed than there is some magical way to implement solutions to everything.

Because you have a theory of everything and you have built a toaster, doesn't mean it can do anything more than produce toast. It's kinda nuts to suggest that you can implement a machine that can do everything just because you understand everything.

[Bleep]

42....

[Vaxxman💉]

While I also felt the Theory of Everything jumped me a little bit, it reminded me of the tragic comedy The Physicists[en.m.wikipedia.org] which is also about the discovery of the "Unitary Theory of Elementary Particles", and the "Principle of Universal Discovery", and the responsibility of knowing these things, knowing they could be abused by humans. So very much one of Athena's problem, too, and this was written in 1961.

I didn't have problems just accepting these ideas when I read this play in school even though I knew it wasn't real, because being realistic wasn't the focus of the story here. Maybe we are supposed to allow us believe a little fantastic science fiction element to focus on the message of the story here as well.

[The Sojourner]

Interesting thread, and one I'm sure Jonas has given some thought, as evidenced by the visions featuring Athena and Miranda. They talk about how somehow they "obsoleted quantum physics", and were able to not just gain an understanding, but also a control over... well, everything — and it seems that latter point is where the game starts appearing fictional, despite that this presumably takes place a few millennia into the future, with hyper-advanced machine minds that are probably more enabled than ours (though the plot point of having essentially androids replace (biological) humans is a discussion for another thread).

[Jonas Kyratzes]

Athena's Theory of Everything is not the same as our usage of that term, since it's very explicitly stated that she discovered the "language of creation" - a completely new layer of physics underlying everything we know, including quantum physics.

This is not really a particularly outlandish concept, given the very brief history of modern physics, nor is it particularly magical. Unless you'd say a 3D printer is magical, or CRISPR gene editing. They'd seem magical and far outside of the human ability to control nature to someone born a few centuries ago, of course, but that's the point.

[Sipher]

Originally posted by Jonas Kyratzes:

Athena's Theory of Everything is not the same as our usage of that term, since it's very explicitly stated that she discovered the "language of creation" - a completely new layer of physics underlying everything we know, including quantum physics.

This is not really a particularly outlandish concept, given the very brief history of modern physics, nor is it particularly magical. Unless you'd say a 3D printer is magical, or CRISPR gene editing. They'd seem magical and far outside of the human ability to control nature to someone born a few centuries ago, of course, but that's the point.

Thats an very intersting point! I think if we could build a timemachine and go back intime, the technology that is totally normal to us today, would look like the weirdest magic for people only a few hundret years back. Just imagine how it would look like for an medieval peasent, when you could explain to him that you can see and talk to people who live on the other side of the word via video-chat, move comfortable at 10 times the speed of a charging horse with trains, fly in the sky even leave the planet and take a walk on the moon. And thus it is only natural, if somehow a timetraveler from the future would come to our time, he would most likely also have so many new technologies to show that we cant even imagine in our wildest sci-fi novels right now! So only because the thing at the megastructure looks like magic to us, doesnt mean that it cant somehow be explained via an deeper understanding of the universe, that we currently just lack.

[General WVPM]

Originally posted by Jonas Kyratzes:

Athena's Theory of Everything is not the same as our usage of that term, since it's very explicitly stated that she discovered the "language of creation" - a completely new layer of physics underlying everything we know, including quantum physics.

This is not really a particularly outlandish concept, given the very brief history of modern physics, nor is it particularly magical. Unless you'd say a 3D printer is magical, or CRISPR gene editing. They'd seem magical and far outside of the human ability to control nature to someone born a few centuries ago, of course, but that's the point.

I got the impression the world of the game is a simulation and Athena found a way to alter it, like the Matrix.

So yeah a layer underneath the physics simulation.

[Jonas Kyratzes]

No, the world is not a simulation in that sense, that would invalidate the themes of the entire series. It just has rules that can be understood and manipulated, exactly like we do in our world when we use advanced science. We figure out how our universe works and use those mechanics to our own ends (for example, to store, process and transmit information via computing, or even quantum computing).

The premise is simply that Athena has discovered a ruleset that goes deeper than what we have so far, that underlies and explains the others. This is just one more step in the kind of process we've been engaged in ourselves.

None of this is magic, it's just the manipulation of matter and energy (and what produces them) at a more profound level than what's currently available to us.

Another way of putting it is that it's taking what science and technology are (control over the machinery of the cosmos) to their ultimate conclusion. Going from partial to full understanding and control.