The Davey Dialogues - An Exploration of the Scientific Foundations of Human Culture. John C. Madden
I certainly hope so.
I was torn by a desire to follow up this lead and a wish to complete my thoughts about the key role of literature. I opted to return to Shakespeare.
– By the way, Polonius’s advice ends with the following three lines:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
If this is good advice (as I believe it is), it begs the question of how we humans know what is involved in being true to ourselves. A crucial first step in getting to the answer was carved in stone at the temple of the oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece. The carved words were very simple: “Know thyself”.
But that invocation, too, leaves unanswered questions. How do you get to “know yourself,” or, from your viewpoint, Davey, come to know and understand us?
Literature and philosophy primarily illuminate the what of human nature and often suggest to us (directly or indirectly) good strategies for successful behaviour. But ultimately, insofar as we are able, we need to understand why we do the things we do. A complete answer to the why question will often lead us back to the need for an understanding of how the universe, including us, came about and how it works. It is thus primarily in the realm of science that we seek and, especially in recent times, sometimes find, the answers to the why and sometimes also the how questions.
Despite the fact that we keep telling ourselves that each human being is unique, we all know that it is only true up to a point. We are defined as a species not only by similarities in our outward appearance but also by similarities in behaviour. Hence, without in any way denigrating our individual differences – a mixed source of joy and frustration for most of us – it is beneficial to our long-term happiness as well as to long-term species survival, if we understand what science has learned about shared innate human characteristics and behaviour.
After some thought on the subject, it seems to me that you, Davey, probably seek the same knowledge in order to better understand us and perhaps as a result, to better understand the fate of your vanished friends.
That is all I want to say today. At our next meeting you will see that as humans became better organized, and job specialization made a steadily improving standard of living possible, science became better organized, as well.
But despite your apparent surprise at our ignorance, for us humans the story of our accelerating understanding of the world about us is dramatic and full of surprises along the way. Inevitably, it has shaped the way most of us view ourselves and our role on Earth.
Davey replied with a drawn-out “Mmmmm”, and then his voice faded away.
PART 2
ORIGINS
Part 2 is a record of my discussions with Davey that relate to humankind’s attempts to determine the age and extent of the universe and of our planet Earth using what came to be called scientific methods.
Once human civilizations reached a stage where some individuals had both the means and the time to pursue science on a near full-time basis, (the early scientists were almost all amateurs), discoveries started to come apace. It is hardly surprising that some of the discoveries shattered previously accepted conceptions of our universe, and of how and when it grew to be what we observe today.
In the last five hundred years or so, humanity has moved from a simple and unsophisticated view of the age and extent of our universe to a gradual realization that it is very much older than human memory, and very much larger than Aristotle’s concept of the spherical Earth plus a smallish outer layer holding all the celestial objects. This transformative expansion in humankind’s horizons was not accomplished quickly or easily.
By definition, we have no records of life in prehistoric times, other than some bones and artifacts left or lost by early humans. Like us, our forebears would almost certainly have possessed an active curiosity, and must have been continually looking for ways to improve the odds of survival. I had already told Davey that it is not unreasonable to speculate that religion and scientific curiosity initially developed together, as humankind sought explanations for rain, sunshine, the moon and stars, as well as drought and pestilence, disease and a thousand other afflictions suffered by Homo sapiens in those dangerous times. During the Renaissance in Europe (roughly the period between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries), religion and science drew apart, as scientific investigators began to make discoveries that were antithetical to established religious dogma, which quite naturally was largely based on earlier scientific investigations.
The first dialogue in this part (Dialogue 4) skips lightly over some of the most important findings in astronomy, many of which are standard topics in high-school science classes today but all of which were portentous and exciting at the time, and proved to be of great interest to Davey.
But there is still a lot we don’t know about our universe. For example, we don’t know if the universe explored by our astronomers and astrophysicists is the only universe, or if there are other universes, perhaps in countless numbers, which are invisible to us. Even in our own universe, our scientists are challenged by the mysteries of “dark matter” and “dark energy”, phenomena that the observed behaviour of the stars and galaxies seem to require to explain their behaviour, but that, so far at least, are invisible to us.
Some of the ideas and the evidence in their favour are difficult to comprehend, but I was sure that I had to make the effort, since humanity’s view of itself and of its own importance has been, and continues to be, strongly influenced by its beliefs about the role of humans in the universe as we see it. The succeeding dialogues in this part were attempts to equip Davey with the tools to better understand these ongoing mysteries.
DIALOGUE 4
How Big Is My Universe?
The highest endowments do not create – they only discover. All transcendent genius has the power to make us know this as utter truth. Shakespeare, Beethoven – it is inconceivable that they have fashioned the works of their lives; they only saw and heard the universe that is opaque and dumb to us. When we are most profoundly moved by them, we say, not “O superb creator” – but “O how did you know! Yes it is so.”
RUTH BENEDICT In Margaret Mead’s Ruth Benedict, 1974
– Well, I hope you have a good story to tell me today. I have just been listening to an astronomer give me his version of what I hoped you were going to say. He was very nice, but he fed me a lot of equations, and showed me a lot of pictures, which as you know I cannot see. All astronomers seem star-struck by the beauty of the heavens. I gather from him that what they see through their telescopes far surpasses the beauty that often causes wonder to non-astronomers when viewing the sky at night while far removed from city lights.
Davey and I had not spoken for a week, during which I had a wonderful time reminding myself about the historical peaks of astronomical research.
– I have to agree that for most of us humans, the night sky can be staggeringly beautiful, and for astronomers, who commonly see relative close-ups of a great variety of stellar events, the sights are even more moving and beautiful. Personally, I find it hard to improve on the photographs of our own planet taken from outer space or from the moon.
I have worked hard in the past week to assemble an overview of advances in human understanding of the heavens since those first discoveries of a thousand or more years ago. However, it appears that you may have heard about this already, and I don’t want to bore you.
Figure 4.1 – Earthrise over the lunar surface as photographed from the Apollo 8 spacecraft in 1968.
I was feeling just a little bit piqued that despite my hard work over the past week, he was evidently