Why The Simplest Theory Is Never The Right One: Occam's Razor Has A Double Edge

Theories with the fewest assumptions are often preferred to those positing more, a heuristic often called "Occam's razor." This kind of argument has been used on both sides of the creationism vs. evolution debate (is natural selection or divine creation the more parsimonious theory?) and in at least one reductio ad absurdum argument against religion. Simple theories have many advantages: they are often falsifiable or motivate various predictions, and can be easily communicated as well as widely understood.

But there are numerous reasons to suspect that this simple "theory of theories" is itself fundamentally misguided. Nowhere is this more apparent than in physics, the science attempting to uncover the fundamental laws giving rise to reality. The history of physics is like a trip down the rabbit hole: the elegance and simplicity of Newtonian physics has been incrementally replaced by more and more complex theories. At the time of writing, this has culminated in M-Theory, positing no less than 10 dimensions of space and the existence of unobservably small "strings" as the fundamental building block of reality. It seems safe to assume that the fundamental laws of reality will be even more complex, if we can even discover them.

So where did Occam's Razor go wrong?

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