This blog is a new group effort, a collaboration by a team of scientists and science journalists who want think out loud about a new vision of Science and its role in human culture. Each of us has our own take on what that means and I will let my colleagues explain their own perspective for themselves but today I just wanted to riff on the importance of Johannes Kepler for me in thinking about this project.
We live in an era that is saturated by the fruits and poisons of Science. There can be no doubt have the boons that the scientific world-view has brought to our now global culture (it is what allowed that global culture to form in the first place).
Science has allowed more people to live longer more healthy lives and has increased the material well-being of many. It has been an integral part of ever widening program of freedom of inquiry and intellectual discourse that has helped shaped the modern world as one with a promise (at least) of progressive and egalitarian standards. At the same time, and you don’t need me to tell you this, it has played an integral role in the creation of the very real and very dangerous challenges we face heading deeper into the 21st century. Every generation tends to think it is on the cutting edge of history but its hard to not believe that those human beings alive today really will be present for a cusp - a change - in the trajectory of the species for better or worse.
So what does this have to do with Kepler? To answer that question, it's best to turn to another eminent scientist a little closer to our era. Wolfgang Pauli was a Noble prize winning scientist who was a key player in the foundations of modern quantum theory. He was a hard-nosed theoretical physicist who was known as the conscience of his field (he is also the originator of the worst insult in science – “not even wrong”). In the 1950s Pauli wrote an essay on Kepler in which he recognized the renaissance science as one who stood between two worlds – worlds which Pauli thought might need to be bridged again.
Throughout his intense mathematical work on the shape of planetary orbits, Keller never stopped thinking in terms of the symbolic. He valued the Copernican Model because the Sun was the rightful “ruler” of the heavens. Platonic forms embodied mathematical harmonies and so the world must be constructed in the likeness. He was a scientist who respected data as the final word in scientific inquiry but was convinced that the world spoke to us in both number and meaning. For Wolfgang Pauli whose vivid dreams often spoke in the language of mathematical physics, Kepler’s instance on the importance of symbolic meanings that rose above specific scientific investigations held a kind promise of recovery. Pauli knew Kepler’s 17th century worldview could not and should not be recovered (the platonic solids don’t have anything to do with planetary orbits after all). But what mattered for Pauli was the recognition that science - its metaphors, symbols and narratives - carry meaning beyond mere results. They can speak beyond just science practice because the have a broader human context
And that is where we begin.
There are those who say science shows us a Universe without meaning. I say that is a tragically narrow perspective. Science shows us a universe full of meaning because we create it, we imagine it, we respond to the world as it reveals itself to us. In that way we create meanings for the Universe and we do so in the ways that are innate to our species – through metaphor, symbol and narrative.
It is true that science as a discipline needed to mature past the symbolic. The problem came science is only way to express our humanity. The entirety of human culture could not fully leave the realm of meaning behind. It always reappears in our art, our music, our politics and our longing for a sense of what is sacred in our lived experience. The trick now will be to understand how a human culture saturated with Science can find the proper context for the symbolic, for the deeply felt, character of life that also expresses through Science and the cultures broad contact with Science.
Somehow we must integrate our manifold ways of known without losing our way. The trick now is to set science into its proper context.
Adam Frank
5 comments:
That's a wonderful start. Kepler is my hero, the man who bridged, as Adam said, two worlds; he was both ancient and modern, a true pythagorean and a path-forger who saw, before anyone else, that the cosmos is ruled by interactions and that these, in turn, can be translated through mathematical relationships. It is quite interesting that both Pauli and Einstein wrote about Kepler but not, say, about Newton or Galileo. There is a dreamy dimension to Kepler's musings that touches us all. The tragedy of his life, the constant struggle to rise above the chaos of his surroundings, makes him the archetypical hero, someone who fought for what he thought was true. Yes, his vision was sheer lunacy; but what mattered in the end was not the vision but its enchantment, the energy that it channeled into Kepler's creative imagination. As those who searched for El Dorado and charted whole new continents on their way, Kepler's scientific legacy remains, in spite of his longing for the harmonies. The challenge, of course, is to know when to let go of a dream, when it morphs from motivation into blind obsession.
There are echoes of this in modern science, in particular in the search for unified field theories, the so-called theories of everything. It's not a coincidence that Kepler's vision was a search for a unified description of the cosmos. It is also not a coincidence that both Einstein and Pauli, who were taken with Kepler, were also after a Final Theory. Here is another archetype of science, the search for the One. Has it taken us too far? I'll leave this for a real post soon enough...
@Marcelo
Your points speak to what Pauli found compelling in Kepler. That mathematical mysticism of Kepler often put the idea ahead of the data which is something the modern version of science has tried to rightly to purge. Still its the emotive response which Pauli understood to be something which we moderns ignore.
As to your point about searches for unity - its why both of us probably became theorists. So is it now one of the "dreams" that we give up because we have learned better?
Adam! I like this project! As I get to know you, I would say we have at least these two things in common: we are reaching beyond a reductionism that begins in physics but has somehow become our sense of being as a culture; and, as you identify yourself as a theorist I would also describe my "theological" thinking along those lines as well. For me, the thinking that Jesus embodied serves as one place among others from which to think and imagine our lives together.
One of the ways our reductionist manner shows up is in our experience of time. As we discussed in your ealier posts Adam, we easily get the clock sense of time, but we strugle to grasp that irreducible sense of time. I would like to throw into this mix a similar phenomena: our understanding of meaning. Like time, we're accustomed to meaning's "clock sense" in the form of definitions; but when it comes to that irreducible quality, we're back to mystery.
I would argue that meaning is every bit as fundamental and irreducible as time. But what do we do with this thing that is as crucial to us as time, but can't be forced into a double slit experiment to show its own brand of wierdness? We're in awe of mathematical coherence to reality, but we lack the context to feel a similar awe of our verbal coherence to reality.
@mike. So where does meaning reside? One of the reasons science has been seen as skeptical of intrinsic meanings is that it was seen as being anthropocentric or needing to be imposed by a concept of divinity.
@Adam. Where does meaning reside? In the same place time resides. I'm centering here on that dual nature of time, where there's the part that is readily understood through clocks, and then there's that underlying part that we struggle to get our minds around and argue whether it's fundamental or not.
I think meaning fits this pattern we see in time. Meanings make meaning apparent in the same way a clock makes time apparent. But without meaning itself existing as a fundamental reality, could we experience meaningfulness? We recognize when something is deeply meaningful; but I don't think we can explain meaningful-ness in terms other than itself.
Meanings, as in definitions, give us orientation. But the experience of meaningful-ness is more like a force than an orientation; out of deep meaning one offers their life in the saving of another. Take the sense of meaning out of one's life and you'll take away a significant amount of vitality.
It's kinda funny- while my thinking has a basis in theology, the concepts of divinity and sacred hold little meaning for me; they connote a sense of grandma's special china to me now. Concepts like elegance, beauty and aptness carry my sense of awe that I experience as I notice life.
So the question I would put forth here in this project, is not one of whether or not something divine exists, but rather, is life alive? And if it is alive, what is the nature of aliveness? And, does aliveness for human being entail something more than basic animation?
While I would argue against meaning being anthropocentric, I would offer that it takes a human level of order to participate in meaning, regardless of the specicies such a level could be embodied.
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