New Yorker article: "A Different Theory of Everything"

Interesting piece on physics in The New Yorker; I hope that this link will work for anyone who might find this interesting.

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-different-kind-of-theory-of-everything?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_021919&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9fbc03f92a4046938fb3d&user_id=54201441&utm_term=TNY_Daily

Why am I posting this here?

Basically because one paragragraph therein (see below) gave me pause.

"We" seem to get stuck, in hifi, in certain arguments that are often classified as objectivist
vs. subjectivist. Sometimes, a slightly different philosophy raises its head -- a philosophy that I think is related to HH Scott chief engineer Daniel von Recklinghausen's famous quip:

"If it measures good and sounds bad, -- it is bad. If it sounds good and measures bad, -- you've measured the wrong thing."

In other words (at least, IMO), "we can't quantify it not because it's fundamentally — we just don't know how to measure it; we don't know what's really important."

In that latter spirit, which has led so many threads on so many hifi forums on cables and quantum purifiers and cable risers and dielectrics and burn in and demagnetizing CDs and... well, you name it... to be locked I offer this excerpt from the article linked to above.

This web of laws [i.e., the accepted 'laws of physics', some of which overlap or interdigitate in puzzling ways] creates traps for physicists. Suppose you’re a researcher seeking to understand the universe more deeply. You may get stuck using a dead-end description—clinging to a principle that seems correct but is merely one of nature’s disguises. It’s for this reason that Paul Dirac, a British pioneer of quantum theory, stressed the importance of reformulating existing theories: it’s by finding new ways of describing known phenomena that you can escape the trap of provisional or limited belief. This was the trick that led Dirac to predict antimatter, in 1928. “It is not always so that theories which are equivalent are equally good,” he said, five decades later, “because one of them may be more suitable than the other for future developments.”

Provisional or limited belief, I would submit, can be a trap for all manner of scientists -- and a trap for audiophiles, too.