From a western perspective, it all started in ancient Greece, around 600 BC. This happens in the Axial Age, a somewhat controversial term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers to denote the remarkable intellectual and spiritual awakening that took place in various parts of the globe over the course of a century. Apart from the explosion of Greek thought, this is the time of Siddhartha Gautama (aka Buddha) in India, Confucius and Lao Tzu of China, Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) in ancient Persia – religious leaders and thinkers who would reformulate the meaning of faith and morality. In Greece, Thales of Miletus and Pythagoras of Samos pioneered pre-Socratic philosophy, (a kind of) shifting the focus of research and explanation from the divine to the natural.
Certainly, the divine never left early Greek thought, but with the advent of philosophy, the attempt to understand the workings of nature through logical reasoning — as opposed to supernatural reasoning — will become an option that did not exist before. The history of science, from its beginnings to the present, could be said as an increasingly successful division between belief in a supernatural component of reality and a strictly materialistic cosmos. The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Age of Reason, means quite literally “to see the light,” the light here being clearly the superiority of human logic over any kind of supernatural or non-scientific methodology to reach the truth. ”Things.
Einstein, for one, was a believer, preaching the fundamental reasonableness of nature; no strange inexplicable thing, like a god playing dice – his critique in the cheek language of the belief that the unpredictability of the quantum world was truly fundamental to nature and not just a lack of our current understanding.
To what extent we can understand the functioning of nature only through logic is not something that science can respond to. This is where the complication begins. Can the human mind, through the diligent application of scientific methodology and the use of increasingly powerful tools, reach a complete understanding of the natural world? Is there an “end of science”? This is a delicate issue. If the split that began in pre-Socratic Greece were completed, nature as a whole would be subject to a logical description, the complete collection of behaviors that scientific studies have identified, classified, and described through perpetual natural laws. All that remains for scientists and engineers would be practical applications of this knowledge, inventions and technologies that would serve our needs in different ways.
This kind of vision – or hope, indeed – goes back to at least Plato, who, in turn, owes much of this expectation to Pythagoras and Parmenides, the philosopher of Being. The dispute between the primacy of what is timeless or unchangeable (Being) and what is changeable and fluid (Becoming) is at least as old. Plato proposed that the truth lay in the unchangeable and rational world of Perfect Forms, which preceded the difficult and deceptive reality of the senses. For example, the abstract form Seat it embodies all the chairs, the objects that can take many forms in our sensory reality while serving their functionality (an object on which to sit) and the basic design (with a seating surface and a few feet under it). According to Plato, Forms hold the key to the essence of all things.
Plato used the allegory of the cave to explain that what people see and experience is not the true reality.
Credit: Gothika via Wikimedia Commons CC 4.0
When scientists and mathematicians use the term vision of the Platonic world, this generally means: the unlimited capacity of reason to unlock the secrets of creation, one by one. Einstein, for one, was a believer, preaching the fundamental reasonableness of nature; no strange inexplicable thing, like a god playing dice – his critique in the cheek language of the belief that the unpredictability of the quantum world was truly fundamental to nature and not just a lack of our current understanding. Despite his strong belief in such a basic order, Einstein acknowledged the imperfection of human knowledge: “What I see about nature is a magnificent structure that we can only understand very imperfectly and that must fill a thinking person with a sense of humility. ”. (Quoted by Dukas and Hoffmann in Albert Einstein, The Human Side: Glimpses from His Archives (1979), 39.) Einstein embodies the tension between these two visions of the colliding world, a tension that is still very much with us today: On the one hand on the one hand, the Platonic ideology that the fundamentals of reality are logical and understandable to the human mind and, on the other hand, the recognition that our reasoning has limitations, that our instruments have limitations, and therefore that in order to reach a certain of final or complete understanding of the material world is nothing but an impossible, semi-religious dream.
This type of tension is palpable today when we see groups of scientists passionately supporting existence or the multiverse, an idea that states that our universe is one of a huge number of other universes; or for or against the final unification of the laws of physics.
Of course, nature is always the final arbiter of any scientific dispute. The data decides, one way or another. This is the beauty and power at the heart of science. However, the challenge is to know when to give up an idea. How long should you wait until an idea, no matter how seductive, is considered unrealistic? Here the debate becomes interesting. Data that support several “there” ideas, such as the multiverse or the additional symmetries of nature needed for unification models, have refused to appear for decades, despite extensive searches with various tools and techniques. On the other hand, we only find if we look. So should we continue to defend these ideas? Who decides? Is it a community decision or does each person have to follow their own way of thinking?
In 2019, I participated in an interesting live debate at the World Science Festival with physicists Michael Dine and Andrew Strominger and hosted by physicist Brian Greene. The theme was string theory, the best candidate for a final theory of how matter particles interact. When I finished my PhD in 1986, string theory was way. The only way. But by 2019, things had changed quite dramatically, due to a lack of supporting data. To my surprise, both Mike and Andy were quite open to the fact that the certainty of the past no longer existed. String theory has taught physicists many things, and that was perhaps its use. The Platonic perspective was in jeopardy.
The dispute remains alive, although with each experiment that fails to show supporting evidence for string theory, the dream becomes more difficult to justify. Will it be a generational thing, as the famous physicist Max Planck once said: “Ideas don’t die, physicists do”? (Paraphrasing.) I hope not. But it is a conversation that should take place more outdoors, as was the case at the World Science Festival. Dreams die hard. But they can die a little easier when we accept that our understanding of reality is limited and does not always match our expectations of what should or should not be real.