Vice-Chancellor K. Rajagopal wrote:
In the early days, people had a complete “general theory” through their religious beliefs. Gods were responsible for everything and mere mortals were helpless. As mankind evolved and became more aware of what was around him, those beliefs were replaced by the sciences, generating non-godlike, physical, general theories to explain the new behaviors seen through microscopes and telescopes. In recent days, those scientific beliefs are being challenged by metaphysical principles; another layer of understanding which will eventuate in yet another general theory to represent mankind’s pioneer level of understanding.“It must be noted that there cannot be more than one correct general theory. … Thus we can see that once we have a valid general theory then it would be the general theory.”
As we become more conscious of the Universe about us, we learn to understand where we have been with a continuing clarity, but will still be faced with the challenge of the unexplained—that which we are currently investigating and are yet to become aware of—and that will result in even more “general theories.”
There can never be “a” valid, general theory of everything. Only the occasional snapshot of a theory as mankind walks the garden of the Universe. The further he walks, the larger his photo album becomes. But man needs to realize that there are still a lot of blank pages in that album, waiting to be filled with more snapshots of theories, yet to come.
When it comes to Dewey Larson’s Reciprocal System of theory, I can only speak from the 20 years I have personally worked with it. I do not consider it a “theory of everything”, but a snapshot of a really good first draft. Larson’s work represents a new page in the photo album, opening the door to other theories to explain the unexplained.
When first confronted with Larson’s ideas, it is very difficult to stop flipping through the “relativity” and “quantum mechanics” photos in the album and reminiscing on past successes. The Reciprocal System is a new snapshot, a single picture that contains the same amount of information as pages of past pictures. But you need different eyes to look at it… not eyes that see either space or time, but eyes that can see both space and time, working together as a single entity—motion.
The concept of motion is not an easy bias to overcome, as we are trained to view space as the setting for motion; a grid upon which we tack objects to locations, then slide and spin them around to different locations. Our conventional view of motion is nothing more than a “change of space” and it is from that change that we deduce a thing called “time”.
Larson’s snapshot of a general theory includes a picture of a temporal grid, as a setting for temporal motion. He also realized that any time you tack an object to the spatial grid; you also tack it to the temporal grid—one cannot exist without the other. This linkage between these two grids is his concept of motion—physical structure—the “things” of the Universe being nothing more than a connection between space and time.
What Larson’s snapshot theory does not include, however, is the observer,the biases inherent in the observer, and the methods of observation.
Several years ago, Prof. K.V.K. Nehru and I got out the camera and took another snapshot, what we now call “RS2”, the re-evaluation of the Reciprocal System, taking into account concepts introduced from Theosophy, Anthroposophy and what we have learned from creating “virtual realities” on computers—projective geometry—where nothing but pure magnitudes of numbers inside a computer are transformed into images so accurate that they are difficult to tell apart from reality. But RS2, like Larson’s original RS, is yet another snapshot in the album—just a bit better focused than Larson’s—and simply a second draft on a general theory based in the newly discovered reciprocal relations between space and time. I’m sure that the next generation of researchers will devise yet a better camera to take even clearer pictures.
One can never find “one correct general theory”, because theory is linked to our ability to perceive and understand. As we grow, our theories grow with us. But as the legacy scientists demonstrate, if one ever does claim to find “the general theory”, then we have gotten stuck in the mud on the road to discovery and it’s time to pull out the camera, add a new snapshot to the photo album, then get out the chains and pull ourselves free. The best is yet to come, just over the horizon, so why stay stuck in the mud?