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There was no room for the mystical, the mysterious, the illusory in his temperament. Anything that did not stand the test of practical experience or the scrutiny of analysis he rejected as an optical illusion, some kind of interplay of light and colour on his retina, or else a phenomenon that still lay beyond the reach of experience. There was in him nothing of the dilettante who loves to delve into the realm of the fanciful and idle speculation about the wonders and marvels that lie a thousand years into the future. He took a firm stand on this side of the threshold of the mysterious, free equally of a childlike credulity and the doubts of the over-sophisticated, and patiently reserved judgment until the evidence came in and provided a key to the mystery.
Konstantin Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
5 | There are also these days:
i Days when I feel like Fotherington-Thomas
– ‘who sa hello clouds hello sky’, and who ‘like all goody-goodies he believe in fairies father xmas peter pan etc and unlike most boys they are kind to their sisters’ – days when ‘I simply don’t care a row of buttons whether it was a goal or not nature alone is beautiful.’
ii Or like the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin when he writes that science is ‘filled with the violence, voyeurism, and tumescence of male adolescent fantasy. Scientists “wrestle” with an always female nature, to “wrest from her the truth”, or “to reveal her secrets”. They make “war” on diseases and “conquer” them. Good science is “hard” science; bad science (like the refuge of so many women, psychology) is “soft” science, and molecular biology, like physics, is characterised by “hard inference”. The method of science is largely reductionist, taking Descartes’s clock metaphor as a basis for tearing the complex world into small bits and pieces to understand it, much as the archetypal small boy takes apart the real clock to see what makes it tick.’
6 | But there are days, perhaps most days, when it is not clear which side to be on.
7 | When told of Bishop Berkeley’s fashionable new philosophy of immaterialism Dr Johnson
said, ‘I refute him thus,’ and kicked a rock. I’ve always had a soft spot for Dr Johnson. He preferred people to places, and loved his cats. When he first read Hamlet he was so frightened by the ghost of Hamlet’s father that he rushed outside in order to have living people about him. According to his friend Jonas Hanway, he was ‘a hardened and shameless tea-drinker’. He devoted himself to conversation. He was terrified of eternal damnation. As an entertainment to his guests, he pulled up his tailcoats to form a pouch and jumped about in imitation of a kangaroo. When he was four years old his mother called him a puppy and he said to her: ‘Do you know what they call a puppy’s mother?’ He rolled down a hill in Lincolnshire when he was in his fifties. He leapt a wall in his seventies. When William Hogarth met him he mistook him for an idiot, ‘shaking, twitching, pock-marked, half-blind and distinctly careless about his dress’. He compiled a dictionary of the English language from scratch, and although after two years he got stuck on the word ‘carry’, he persevered. In 1755, nine years after he had begun, the dictionary that made his name was published in two volumes, each volume weighing in at fourteen pounds. He said he had tried studying philosophy, ‘but cheerfulness was always breaking in’. In that unsubtle, if entertaining, gesture Johnson kicks more than a rock; he directs a kick in the general direction of all philosophical argument that goes against common sense. And it’s common sense, the gesture insists, that makes us human, and not some illusive philosophical argument. Dr Johnson kicked His Grace into the sidelines of history.
8 | And yet, if Dr Johnson has about him the no-nonsense mien of the Roundhead, it is surely as a shield to protect the heart of a Cavalier. Tolstoy’s Levin could hardly be less like Dr Johnson (for one thing he is fictional), but he too combines traits of both Cavalier and Roundhead, idealist and materialist. Levin wants to believe but cannot. Yet it is his unbelief that tortures him. As a child and adolescent he had turned to Christianity to try to address the questions of life: ‘whence it came, wherefore, why, and what it was’. Finding no answers there, he turned as a young man to science: ‘involuntarily, unconsciously, he now sought in every book, in every conversation, in every person, a connection with these questions and their resolutions’. By his mid-thirties he found that even scientific answers no longer satisfied him: ‘he became convinced that those who shared the same views with him simply dismissed the questions which he felt he could not live without answering … He was in painful discord with himself and strained all the forces of his soul to get out of it … He read and pondered, and the more he read and pondered, the further he felt himself from the goal he was pursuing … Convinced that he would not find an answer in the materialists, he reread, or read for the first time, Plato, and Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer – the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic explanation of life.’ But nor does philosophy bring consolation: ‘Following the given definition of vague words such as spirit, will, freedom, substance … he seemed to understand something. But he had only to forget the artificial train of thought and refer back to life itself … and suddenly the whole edifice would collapse like a house of cards.’
But Levin did not shoot himself or hang himself and went on living … not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance … and at the same time firmly laying down his own particular, definite path in life.
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Anna Karenina
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Nothing → something → everything (#ulink_f30d30f8-7cc6-5e13-bc1d-f23900f1768b)
1 | Physicists don’t pack up just because some philosopher or other points out that what they are doing is paradoxical. Particle physicists accept that elementary particles are not required to extend into space, nor to exist. If that means redefining what it means to exist, then so be it.
2 | In the main, scientists working at the coalface have little time for the fine distinctions made by philosophers. They are interested in what is in front of them. They are Dr Johnson not Bishop Berkeley, Romeo not Friar Laurence.
3 | Philosophy is adversity’s sweet milk, says Friar Laurence. Hang up philosophy! says Romeo in reply. Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, Displant a town, reverse a prince’s doom, It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more.
Philosophy is dead.
Stephen Hawking, on the first page of his book The Grand Design
Philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex.
Steve Jones, biologist
Philosophers keep out. Work in progress.
A notice pinned to the laboratory door of the physicist Niels Bohr (1885–1962)
If you ask in how many cases in the past has a philosopher successfully solved a problem, as far as we can say there are no cases.
Francis Crick (1916–2004), biologist
4 | In refutation of Zeno’s paradox,
Diogenes got up and walked across the room.
To study Metaphysics as they have always been studied appears to me to be like puzzling at astronomy without mechanics.
Charles Darwin (1809–82), in his notebook
Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, ‘Why?’ and sometimes he thought, ‘Wherefore?’ and sometimes he thought, ‘Inasmuch as which?’ – and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.
Eeyore the philosopher in A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh
Philosophers have been profoundly wrong in almost every question under the sun over the last 2,000 years. You should never listen to the answers of philosophers, but you should listen to their questions.
Christof Koch, neuroscientist
Philosophers will tell you the whole idea of science is just a subset of philosophy.
David Rothenberg, philosopher
5 | Philosophy used to matter more. Of Plato’s five kinds of imagined regimes, the greatest – named Kallipolis – was ruled by philosopher kings.
Socrates had to die because philosophy was seen as a threat to society. These days philosophy matters only to philosophers.
Philosophy is the highest, the worthiest, of human endeavours.
Slavoj Žižek, philosopher
6 | Scientists have a habit of dismissing the questions they don’t want to answer. They call them philosophical. For many scientists, philosophy is a step too close to theology. Scientists eschew philosophy for logic or even for just plain common sense.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
It is generally thought that common sense is practical. It is practical only in a short-term view. Common sense declares that it is foolish to bite the hand that feeds you. But it is foolish only up to the moment when you realize that you might be fed very much better.
John Berger, writer and art critic
7 | If, as philosophers have concluded, there is nothing that the universe can be made out of, scientists have wondered what that nothing might be.
8 | Science, philosophy and religion have this in common: that they all must account for how nothing became something. Philosophers have worried for centuries about the nature of substance and of nothingness. Religions have their various creation myths. Science too tells its own creation story. The triumph of particle physics is that it so nearly explains how nothing became everything.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), philosopher and mathematician
All things are born of nothing and are borne onwards to infinity.
Blaise Pascal (1623–62), philosopher and mathematician
9 | If only we knew exactly how the story began. If only we could say, ‘Once upon a time’ and know what follows.
10 | An ancient Greek cosmology has the world created out of a pre-existing condition called chaos. Kaos is not emptiness but formlessness. It was the world before there were things in it. The word nothing, like some fossil of ancient thought, still retains that original concept of no thing. The universe emerged when Logos, meaning variously form, knowledge and word, came into contact with Kaos. Out of their union comes Cosmos (beauty or order, as in cosmetics, which bring order to the face). The opening words of St John’s gospel repeat this ancient prescription: In the beginning was the Word. In the original Greek the word translated as ‘word’ is Logos. And in Genesis we find God creating nature by separating out from chaos what then become things with names. Naming is a process of separating out, and the first step in any scientific investigation of the world. Before explanation must come the naming of parts. The idea of nothing as emptiness came later. That the universe was created out of emptiness, ex nihilo, is a radical departure from how creation was envisaged by certain ancient Greek philosophers, and was an interpretation imposed on the Biblical story by medieval scholars.
11 | Our current best modern-day creation stories are variants of the Big Bang theory, a mathematical description of the universe coaxed out of the equations of general relativity. Even though they were his equations, Einstein at first denied the Big Bang. Later he changed his mind.
The most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.
Einstein, of an exposition of the Big Bang given by its inventor (discoverer?) Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), priest and physicist
12 | All matter can ultimately be reduced to constituent particles – bosons and fermions – that are the excitations of various types of energetic field. At the Big Bang there may have been a single kind of energetic field which, in an expanding universe, evolved into other kinds of energetic field.
Within a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe is a cascade of particles decaying into other particles. Whole eras of the universe passed before it was even a second old.
13 | We know what happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, but what happened in the beginning?
14 | In the beginning everything was in the same place at the same time. In the beginning the physical world is pure energy, whatever that is. In the beginning the universe is some condition of form, number and energy held in perfect symmetry. It cannot last. The symmetry breaks and becomes a world of asymmetries, imperfections and accidents. The world falls into existence.
The positive energy within matter can be counterbalanced by the negative sink of the all-pervading gravitational field such that the total energy of the universe is potentially nothing; when combined with quantum
uncertainty,
this allows the possibility that everything is … some quantum fluctuation living on borrowed time. Everything may thus be a quantum fluctuation of nothing.
Frank Close, particle physicist
Zero exists now, it has always existed, and it will always exist. It is the native state of existence. It is what the physicist David Bohm called implicate order. It is the timeless quantum superposition of all universes and all life in an infinite universe. As the most brilliant physicists have long held, a perfect zero is the most ordered state of all, it just isn’t found in the past where time begins. It exists in the future where time ends.
Gevin Giorbran, science writer
15 | Energy leaks out of the vacuum for no reason at all except randomness and the pressure exerted by a sink of infinite negative energy. Overall the universe is nothing at all.
16 | Take matter out of the universe and reality becomes unstable, liable to give birth randomly to new universes. The vacuum is the birthing ground of universes; like the silence of the mystics, a roiling place of visions and madness, of annihilating forces.
17 | In the outer reaches of the universe, as far away from here as it is possible to be, beyond time and space and meaning and matter, nothing was happening. And the nothing was without form, pure potential for becoming, an evanescent yet heaving sea of energy coming into and out of existence. For reasons not yet understood, a bubble of energy that should have burst back into non-existence breaks free with the rage of Achilles from the conditions of the quantum world and sweeps out a universe.
18 | The universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time. Everything that is exists only by happenstance, randomly, out of nothing.
19 | If less is more, is nothing too much?
20 | For now the most widely-agreed-on model that describes how the universe got going is the theory of eternal inflation. An infinite number of ‘bubbles’ arose in an eternally inflating quantum landscape. One of these bubbles became the island universe we call home. An infinite number of other island universes exist in all the possible forms determined by some constraining mathematical model, most popularly string theory.
The landscape out of which these island universes emerged is called the multiverse.
21 | Inflation is happening eternally, elsewhere. Our ‘island’ universe inflated briefly. It doubled in size every 10
seconds. After about a hundred such doublings it had grown to about the size of a grapefruit, at which point the period of inflation came to an end.
Why inflation came to an end locally is not yet known.
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space.
Shakespeare (1564–1616), Hamlet
22 | i You do not need God in order to create a universe, says Stephen Hawking. All you need is gravity, quantum electrodynamics, special and general relativity, M-theory and a few other bits and pieces of physics. But where these ingredients come from remains, for the moment at least, an unanswered question.
ii M-theory (no one can remember what the M stands for) is a formulation of string theory, and a quantum theory of gravity – an abstract and mathematical theory, as yet without physical proof. M-theory describes a multiverse of eleven dimensions in which there may be many island universes like ours, adrift in four dimensions of time and space; and many other kinds of universes adrift in different numbers of dimensions of space, some perhaps with several dimensions of time (whatever that might look like). M-theory describes 10
different universes.
Consider the most obvious question of all about the initial state of the universe. Why is there an initial state at all?
Lawrence Sklar, philosopher of physics
The desire to find a beginning comes from the idea that everything has the real, solid existence that our minds generally perceive.
Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus
As far as I can see, such a theory [as the Big Bang] remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being … For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God. It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the Universe.
Georges Lemaître
23 | In saying that the universe randomly evolved out of some initial energy condition that we don’t yet fully understand, we sweep everything we don’t know about the universe under the carpet. All the unanswered questions about the physical universe get pushed to its horizons, far away from where humans are. The horizons of the universe are the limits of what we can see and what we can understand. The universe disappears over its own horizon, taking with it the laws of nature, forever just out of our reach. For a while, the more we found out about the physical universe the larger it became. But largeness itself has become passé. The universe shows itself to be subtler than mere size. All our creative speculations, even when they harden into theories, merely push the mystery of what we are and where we come from to ever more distant regions of an ever more elusive universe.
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What is science? (#ulink_2fb8d9f7-8871-58ad-b468-f43972196aad)
Science (a term in itself inoffensive and of indefinite meaning).
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), The Secret Agent
That bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progression.
Terry Eagleton, literary theorist and critic
1 | Life may be messy, but in the physical world there appears to be underlying order. Evidence of this order has encouraged scientists to believe in the existence of physical laws of nature. Why nature should have unifying features is a deep mystery. That physical laws of nature are ultimately reducible to mathematics is an even deeper mystery.
2 | The difference between the ways of science and the ways of other truth-seeking enterprises is that science has a method.
First find what you think might be a solution to a problem, then express it as a mathematical model, then test it.
David Deutsch, physicist
3 | In science, to look is not enough, there needs also to be intervention in order to affirm what it is that is being looked at. A testable theory is required, not just mere description, though a description is a start. A theory is proven for as long as it is confirmed in that repeatable process of measurement called experiment. Sometimes we improve our ability to measure and theories are further confirmed, and sometimes theories fail when examined more closely.
If the explanation of physical phenomena were evident in their appearance, empiricism would be true and there would be no need for science as we know it.
David Deutsch
