Complexity and the measurement problem

The promise of science is that it helps us understand reality - why things are as they are. The strongest scientific theories are not only descriptive or predictive, they have explanatory depth - it answers the why. However, in many areas of science we don’t have theories yet that fully explain the why. Darwin doesn’t explain why functional complexity grows over time, inflationary cosmology doesn’t explain the initial condition, quantum mechanics doesn’t explain the collapse of the wave function.

One view is that Nature doesn’t owe us a why and that scientists can be satisfied with something less. Quantum Mechanics is an extra-ordinarily successful theory in terms of predictive power even it doesn’t provide an explanation of what a measurement is. String Theory may not pass the descriptive test in a meaningful way, but it is still a rich mathematical theory and it provides the opportunity to tell speculative stories.

Even if Nature doesn’t owe us a “why”, I believe that we should keep asking the question. It has brought us this far and who knows what new ideas and paths of exploration comes from trying to answer this question.