[pbecke]

Guille, maybe there is a theory no-one has yet hit upon, to unify the various forces constituting a unified field theory; maybe there is not.

It seems to me that what you state as a requirement of science is simply what you consider to be desirable. Science can and does exist without meeting your demand for an irreducible minimum key to explain everything.

Whatever TOE may or may not be, what I am sure it cannot be, is something co-terminous with the reductionist, closed physical system that many scientists today as well as many naive non-scientists, who are only aware of Newtonian mechanistic physics, feel they must insist upon as the paradigm of all knowledge; particularly in the US, where atheists seem almost unstable in the hositility of their convictions, or rather the manner in which they presume to impose them. They "insistently insist upon insisting upon" a belief in a wholly materialist view of everything. Reductionist empirical science is therefore God, and they are its high priests.

This despite the hilarious fact that the greatest, most innovative scientific thinkers have generally been, not just theists, but religious "nuts". Galileo (yes, Galileo had wanted to be a priest, but his very powerful father prevented him), Newton, who scorned even mathematics, I believe, though it may have been physics or perhaps more likely both), and Einstein, who most significantly - particularly in view of your social concerns for science - once stated:

"I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical conduct of people today stems from the mechanization and dehumanization of our lives - the disastrous by-product of the scientific and technical mentality. Nostra culpa. Man grows cold faster than the planet he inhabits."

For me, physical light is the interface with the world of the spirit, with the creator/matrix of any cosmos and all possible creations; a world of unfathomable mystery.

I should mention in relation with an earlier post of mine that I posited a paradox, a physical light-spiritual light continuum, but however plausible and eventually even accepted as a genuine paradox it may be, (I place immense store on anecdotal evidence, most notably re the existence and appearance of ghosts, for example) - it is a bit unsettling even to me to posit it other than in a tentative manner, since it takes us into an altogther new and infinite framework of reference, in which mysteries are going to supersede empirically demonstrable facts: an impassable frontier of empirical science. It's a hybrid, so I wouldn't claim it to be more than a putative paradox.