How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence. Christopher Potter
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.
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.1
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
‘We admit the existence of electricity, which we know othing about, why can’t there be a new force, still unknown which …’
‘When electricity was found,’ Levin quietly interrupted, ‘it was merely the discovery of a phenomenon, and it was not known where it came from or what it could do, and centuries passed before people thought of using it. The spiritualists on the contrary, began by saying that tables write to them, and spirits come to them, and only afterwards started saying it was an unknown force.’
Vronsky listened attentively to Levin, as he always listened, evidently interested in his words.
‘Yes, but the spiritualists say: now we don’t know what this force is, but the force exists, and these are the conditions under which it acts. Let the scientist find out what constitutes this force. No, I don’t see why it can’t be a force, if it …’
‘Because,’ Levin interrupted again, ‘with electricity, each time you rub resin against wool, a certain phenomenon manifests itself, while here it’s not the same each time, and therefore it’s not a natural phenomenon.’
…
‘I think,’ he continued, ‘that this attempt by spiritualists to explain their wonder by some new force is a most unfortunate one. They speak directly about spiritual force and want to subject it to material experiment.’
They were all waiting for him to finish, and he felt it.
‘And I think that you’d make an excellent medium,’ said Countess Nordston, ‘there’s something ecstatic in you.’
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
4 | The astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) wondered if there might be some sort of inclination in matter that causes matter to be drawn to itself. But his was a vague poetic notion; it didn’t have what elevates Newton’s description – of what was later named gravity – to the level of theory. Newton writes in mathematics how the force works even as he fails to tell us what it is. Since it acts at a distance without any visible means of action, Newton’s gravity has no material existence, for which lack the theory was criticised by followers of Descartes, who believed that physical actions must result only from physical causes. But in physics mathematics trumps material means. The theory works, and that is enough, particularly when the theory is as encompassing as this one: explaining as it does both why an apple falls to earth and why the earth falls perpetually towards the sun.
A force without materiality looks indistinguishable from magic, but mathematics is what makes the reality of gravity testable. The lack of visible means was first criticised, then overlooked, and finally forgotten about.
If they don’t depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000), The Gate of Angels
5 | Science is an attempt to make knowledge collective. Science separates out from the world what can be repeated. Scientific experiments are repeatable (in theory at least) by anyone, ideally not just any competent human but any competent alien. Art is collective evidence of shared experience too, but science goes further; its knowledge means to be universal, not ‘merely’ human.
6 | Science searches for evidence of stability in the world out there. At one time we saw stability in the so-called fixed stars, until it was discovered that they are not fixed, just moving very slowly relative to each other, and only appear fixed because they are so far away. We used to think space and time were immutable, until Einstein showed otherwise. Today we begin to wonder if even the speed of light is a constant.
7 | Science organises the meaning of the world into what it is hoped are irreducible statements called the laws of nature, but every seemingly irreducible statement is doomed ultimately to be replaced by another attempt at the irreducible; and so science makes progress. There are no truly fundamental theories in science. Something more fundamental always comes along, eventually. ‘Fundamental’ theories are the theories that are currently most effective, but they are never complete. And never being truly fundamental, we cannot know if they are ever truly universal. In science, to understand more deeply is to get under what it is that is currently being stood on. What science stands on is continually being replaced by lower floors.
8 | Science has this particular strength, that theories are only overthrown when a new theory encompasses more phenomena than the previous theory encompassed. In this sense, old theories do not die, a new theory reveals the limits within which the old theory was, and still