Hot Air and Cold Science
Philosophers have been almost profoundly wrong in almost every question under the sun over the last 2000 years. You should never listen to the answers of philosophers, but you should listen to their questions.
- Christof Koch
One poetic myth I hear every now and again is the one about the cold, know it all scientist. Perhaps the most famous incarnation is Blake's image of Newton, a classically beautiful male, sat naked on a rock resplendent with many coloured minerals, ignoring it all to concentrate on the perfect circles that he renders with his compass. Look at the crude image, the circle and triangle, it is nothing compared to the beauty of his own body or the grandeur of all those vivid colours in the rock behind him, pointing out all the beauty of this world that will never be explained by science...
I bite my tongue.
Last night, during the open mike that I run, the same apparition rose again, within a couple of poems written by an avid Wittgensteinian. Like the Blake print above, the poem was beautifully rendered and a pleasure to listen to even though the subtext ( which I shall crudely render from memory without the skilled poetic framing ) set my hair bristling. It went a little something like this.
" The scientist can try saying he has the only way of reaching the truth. But be it from the question of what lies beyond the electron and neutron or what exactly happened before the big bang; science inevitably collapses into metaphor. Therefore, what is wrong with choosing metaphor now? I can stare at the light playing across these hills and enjoy the sensation, but science will do nothing to explain or intensify this enjoyment."
Once again, I bite my tongue.
Well.... I loosen the knot a little to make cursory mumbles about how accommodating one would be if their gas engineer took a purely metaphorical slant on the carbon monoxide levels emitted from their boiler. Or whether we'd stay on a plane on finding out that it wasn't checked by a group of engineers but by a poetry group that meet in a Newbury back room to concentrate on an alternative metaphorical exploration of aerodynamics.
One thing I shall point out is that I don't know of a single scientist who has assumed the attitude of knowing everything. More than anyone, it's the scientist that admits to not knowing all the answers. The whole process of scientific theory is to find a falsifiable hypothesis and to then go about trying to falsify it. The way of becoming great in science is to prove your own heroes, the greatest theories, wrong. The search for scientific truth can indeed be a thankless task, it involves lots of lab work where nothing happens, lots of fuzzy inconclusive results, and if you find something new....get ready for the shitstorm. Because you better have your figures right, you better have checked all the possible fault lines because peer review is a bitch. Everyone will try their best to shoot you down. Nope, scientists do not have any exclusive claims to know the truth but I could point out a lot of Pastors, Rabbis, Imams, artists and astrologers that do. Let me steal some words from Picasso about art and truth. "We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies."
Newton admitted to the things he didn't know, but his way of admitting to ignorance is somewhat traditional. From the Principia -
"Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from the phenomena, and I frame no hypothesis; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterward rendered general by deduction. Thus it was the impenetrability, the mobility, and the impulsive forces of bodies, and the laws of motion and of gravitation were discovered. And to us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and acts according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea."
So he'd worked out many of the laws that govern the motion of planets, but he was still reaching his own personal limits when he tried to consider the momentary tug that planets experience when nearing each other's orbits, and he was of course stumped by their origin. So, as our poet pointed out earlier, he moves into the realm of metaphor:
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the
counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."
But this was the standard answer given by the scientists before Newton when they couldn't explain the fixed orbit of the planets; when they reached the limits of their explanatory ability they invoked God as the answer. God was the answer for the diversity of life before the discovery of evolution by natural selection. Vitalism was taken seriously as an irreducible essence of life before Watson and Crick gave us the double helix and the humble deoxyribonucleic acid. However, in the past century and a half, probably because of the discoveries of Darwin, God has had to share elbow room in the unknowable with other theories. Scientific hypotheses, such as time coming into existence alongside matter with nothing before it or the birth of our universe as part of a multiverse, are suddenly sharing elbow room with the Prime Mover in metaphorical space. But this is where I have to concede to the philosophers, the Wittgensteinians and the post-modernists. In this realm of what is yet to be discovered we have to concede that without the necessary evidence what we postulate is another metaphor. Fair enough, but science is the only discipline with the ability to have the final say.
And finally, back to Newton and the attitude towards science as "cold" in comparison to looking over some hills or at a work of art such as Blake's. We all know that the science that lobs rockets from the surface of earth into the cosmos is still fundamentally Newtonian. In 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft left our solar system, and got to turn around and take one last look at our planet from a distance of four billion miles. The image below is that photograph. The pale blue dot caught within the sunbeam to the right, about halfway down, is our planet. Before this image was taken you could say that this view was the luxury of God. I leave you with the joy of looking at the Blake image and the Voyager 1 image. It's up to you which one you deem to be the most humbling.
- Christof Koch
One poetic myth I hear every now and again is the one about the cold, know it all scientist. Perhaps the most famous incarnation is Blake's image of Newton, a classically beautiful male, sat naked on a rock resplendent with many coloured minerals, ignoring it all to concentrate on the perfect circles that he renders with his compass. Look at the crude image, the circle and triangle, it is nothing compared to the beauty of his own body or the grandeur of all those vivid colours in the rock behind him, pointing out all the beauty of this world that will never be explained by science...
I bite my tongue.
Last night, during the open mike that I run, the same apparition rose again, within a couple of poems written by an avid Wittgensteinian. Like the Blake print above, the poem was beautifully rendered and a pleasure to listen to even though the subtext ( which I shall crudely render from memory without the skilled poetic framing ) set my hair bristling. It went a little something like this.
" The scientist can try saying he has the only way of reaching the truth. But be it from the question of what lies beyond the electron and neutron or what exactly happened before the big bang; science inevitably collapses into metaphor. Therefore, what is wrong with choosing metaphor now? I can stare at the light playing across these hills and enjoy the sensation, but science will do nothing to explain or intensify this enjoyment."
Once again, I bite my tongue.
Well.... I loosen the knot a little to make cursory mumbles about how accommodating one would be if their gas engineer took a purely metaphorical slant on the carbon monoxide levels emitted from their boiler. Or whether we'd stay on a plane on finding out that it wasn't checked by a group of engineers but by a poetry group that meet in a Newbury back room to concentrate on an alternative metaphorical exploration of aerodynamics.
One thing I shall point out is that I don't know of a single scientist who has assumed the attitude of knowing everything. More than anyone, it's the scientist that admits to not knowing all the answers. The whole process of scientific theory is to find a falsifiable hypothesis and to then go about trying to falsify it. The way of becoming great in science is to prove your own heroes, the greatest theories, wrong. The search for scientific truth can indeed be a thankless task, it involves lots of lab work where nothing happens, lots of fuzzy inconclusive results, and if you find something new....get ready for the shitstorm. Because you better have your figures right, you better have checked all the possible fault lines because peer review is a bitch. Everyone will try their best to shoot you down. Nope, scientists do not have any exclusive claims to know the truth but I could point out a lot of Pastors, Rabbis, Imams, artists and astrologers that do. Let me steal some words from Picasso about art and truth. "We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies."
Newton admitted to the things he didn't know, but his way of admitting to ignorance is somewhat traditional. From the Principia -
"Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from the phenomena, and I frame no hypothesis; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterward rendered general by deduction. Thus it was the impenetrability, the mobility, and the impulsive forces of bodies, and the laws of motion and of gravitation were discovered. And to us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and acts according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea."
So he'd worked out many of the laws that govern the motion of planets, but he was still reaching his own personal limits when he tried to consider the momentary tug that planets experience when nearing each other's orbits, and he was of course stumped by their origin. So, as our poet pointed out earlier, he moves into the realm of metaphor:
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the
counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."
But this was the standard answer given by the scientists before Newton when they couldn't explain the fixed orbit of the planets; when they reached the limits of their explanatory ability they invoked God as the answer. God was the answer for the diversity of life before the discovery of evolution by natural selection. Vitalism was taken seriously as an irreducible essence of life before Watson and Crick gave us the double helix and the humble deoxyribonucleic acid. However, in the past century and a half, probably because of the discoveries of Darwin, God has had to share elbow room in the unknowable with other theories. Scientific hypotheses, such as time coming into existence alongside matter with nothing before it or the birth of our universe as part of a multiverse, are suddenly sharing elbow room with the Prime Mover in metaphorical space. But this is where I have to concede to the philosophers, the Wittgensteinians and the post-modernists. In this realm of what is yet to be discovered we have to concede that without the necessary evidence what we postulate is another metaphor. Fair enough, but science is the only discipline with the ability to have the final say.
And finally, back to Newton and the attitude towards science as "cold" in comparison to looking over some hills or at a work of art such as Blake's. We all know that the science that lobs rockets from the surface of earth into the cosmos is still fundamentally Newtonian. In 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft left our solar system, and got to turn around and take one last look at our planet from a distance of four billion miles. The image below is that photograph. The pale blue dot caught within the sunbeam to the right, about halfway down, is our planet. Before this image was taken you could say that this view was the luxury of God. I leave you with the joy of looking at the Blake image and the Voyager 1 image. It's up to you which one you deem to be the most humbling.
Powered by ScribeFire.
posted by Niall O'Sullivan at 4:29 AM
0 comments
