If you want to find a real need for meaningful, world-changing unity, though, look no further than into the world of physics, where two disputatious theories continue to beguile the best minds, no matter how hard they have tried.
Which was part of the reason there was a sold-out august August gathering in Vancouver in recent days of many of the world’s premier physicists, commingled with some of the region’s most significant business-oriented philanthropists. Three Nobel laureates – two in person , one virtually – participated, and the lineup was pretty much a who’s who in the field. A major driver of the project is Philip Stamp of the University of British Columbia’s Pacific Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Last week’s conference was pretty trippy. Even the day set aside for public consumption, for the “non-scientists” as it was put, still felt like you’d arrived at a party where everyone was discussing people you’d never met, in places you’d never been, speaking a dialect you’d never heard. They envision finding funds for the institution to produce a robust engine of collaborative research and dialogue, an environment sufficiently supported to permit the emergence of a solution to the irreconcilable theories.