I agree with this. I've always found theories of everything to be unsatisfying in this way, because they never explain how the laws of physics got the way they are.
Assuming the existence of some abstraction called spin to derive the fundamental forces is a great exercise in internal consistency, but hardly meets any definition of "bootstrapping" as I understand the term.
The only theory I've ever encountered that passes this smell test to me is the mathematical universe hypothesis[0] because it's intuitive to me that math just "is" in some sense and does not require any upstream mechanisms or assumptions. As far as I'm concerned, if you have to assume the existence of anything whatsoever, it's not bootstrapping.
I was expecting Noether’s theorem to make an appearance in this article, because it is utterly fundamental to this kind of work. Her insight was that mathematical symmetries (like the spin symmetries that the article discusses) lead to laws of conservation, and vice versa. So laws like conservation of momentum correspond to translation symmetry, i.e. the assumption that the laws of the universe apply everywhere equally.
As to how the laws got where they are Lee Smolin and Roberto Ungar say that it's possible they were not always the way they are and that they evolved spontaneously over time. And that the spontaneity just is the way things are i.e. there's no explanation for it. At least that's my recollection from reading their book.
The other explanation seems to be the multiverse. i.e. we just got a random set of self consistent laws. Again there seems to be no explanation as to why or how the multiverse came to be, is there?
> not always the way they are and that they evolved spontaneously over time
But how did they get any way at all? How and why do they evolve?
> multiverse. i.e. we just got a random set of self consistent laws.
This raises even more questions. Why are there any multiverses with any laws at all? From where did the stuff in the multiverses come from? What initiated this chain of multiverse creation, or why is it inevitable?
A bootstrapping theory would explain why anything is inevitable, or why there is something rather than nothing. Otherwise it is just a low-level physics theory.
I don’t think what you’re asking for is possible, and the answer lies more in the realm of philosophy than in physics.
You can always keep asking the question ‘why?’ At some point, either you have just accept something as fundamental, or the answer justifies itself, or you have an infinite regress of whys.
I agree with this generally, but I don't think questions like "why are the laws of physics the way they are" are obviously questions for philosophers only and I'm not simply asking "why?"
Only very low-level ontological questions meet this criteria, like "why is there something rather than nothing," but even then, I am open to the possibility that there are reasonable explanations for these things that we just can't articulate yet.
Mathematics is just a set of internally consistent rules.
There is no reason the universe needs to follow an internally consistent ruleset (although so far our measurements seem to find it to be, quite precisely).
Assuming the existence of some abstraction called spin to derive the fundamental forces is a great exercise in internal consistency, but hardly meets any definition of "bootstrapping" as I understand the term.
The only theory I've ever encountered that passes this smell test to me is the mathematical universe hypothesis[0] because it's intuitive to me that math just "is" in some sense and does not require any upstream mechanisms or assumptions. As far as I'm concerned, if you have to assume the existence of anything whatsoever, it's not bootstrapping.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...