Near the end of this amusing article, In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain’t Easy, John Horgan raises an interesting point about theories of physics:
Great scientists are great because they discern patterns in the flux of nature that elude us ordinary mortals; we should not be surprised when some patterns turn out to be illusory. Indeed, whole fields can descend into crankiness. Wertheim serves up her philosophical punch line toward the end of her book, when she turns her attention to mainstream physics and cosmology. She shares my sense that some popular suppositions—notably the notion that reality consists of extremely tiny strings wriggling in hyperspaces of a dozen or more dimensions, or that our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes—verge on pseudoscience, because they are even less experimentally testable than Jim Carter’s circlon theory. [The circlon theory is a ‘crank’ theory by an apparently well-intentioned and competent man, a self-educated amateur scientist, Jim Carter, who has become a friend of Ms. Wertheim, a science-writer who is a friend, in turn, of John Horgan.]
It comes out earlier in that article that Newton wrote much that would have been considered ‘cranky’ by hard-headed advocates of science. Amongst Newton’s voluminous writings can be found much about alchemy, the ridiculous idea that lead can be transmuted into gold while everyone knows that gold is better made by transmuting hydrogen in gigantic nuclear fusion systems called stars, very large stars of the sort which might have been more common in the early years of this expansionary phase of the universe. It’s hard to distinguish between crank science and legitimate speculative work that might guide a more disciplined exploration of the question at issue. If there’s an alternative universe where the possibilities motivating alchemy were strongly despised, it might have taken more time to understand the basic processes of this universe.
It can be hard to distinguish between a mainstream prejudice of a given age, or ages, and a speculation based upon a different understanding of matter or time or whatever which might be closer to the mark even though the specific speculation might seem, or might even be, the stuff of hard and dense Christmas cakes. During his own lifetime, the main objection to Newton’s work in alchemy was the prejudice that lead was lead and gold was gold. That was close to the prejudice held by many that biological species were what they were and couldn’t become something else except in the minds of the superstitious peasants and would-be magicians.
When you realize that much of creative philosophy, of the sort found in Plato or St. Albert the Great (speculated, wildly at times, on the transmutation of species), is distinguishable from the work of cranks only to those who know enough of that particular age to realize how speculative creative philosophy or theology or poetry really was but how it was a legitimate expansion of that age’s understanding of being.
We have to be careful, especially in dealing with the likes of Newton or Einstein, Plato or St. Albert, not to forget that there are multiple ways to deal with truth or speculative possibilities. We did well in the past century in developing the creative ideas of Einstein and Planck and Heisenberg and that expansion was typically done by way of what might be called hard-headed science. This wasn’t just due to the power of that way of exploring empirical reality. It was made possible by the fact that Western Civilization had an understanding of Creation, yes — the Christian Creation, which was large enough and apparently ‘true’ enough to handle quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology and modern mathematics and modern ways of exploring and narrating history and so forth. It’s certainly true that many who thought of themselves as good, orthodox Christians proved to be enemies of modern science, which might prove to have been the final stage of development and expansion for the Western mind. Ultimately, at least in my understanding of the human mind, this means that modern men of the West continue to shape their minds in response to a general understanding of Creation which was more plausible in the 17th century, though it stretched well enough for the early stages of the development of modern physics and biology. Our modern minds are full and also often brittle and we don’t know how to do better, though I have proposed some ways to head in a better direction and to better shape our minds to deal with a Creation which has proven to be far richer and more complex than the greatest of pre-modern thinkers could have guessed.
My suggestions include a change in attitude and belief about human knowledge which will undoubtedly upset many of the advocates of modern science: we should recognize the unity of knowledge and stop pretending we live in a single Creation in which there are separate realms of knowledge. Separate realms of knowledge imply separate realms of being, a chaos of sorts which has been brought about at least partly because of understandable reactions against illegitimate claims to authority and power by kings or popes or academicians who held to single-minded versions of Christian understandings of Creation. I advocate a return to Creation, or at least to a universe united in its being.
After I started writing this essay, I found Michael Gordin’s review, Everyman’s Physics, of Margaret Wertheim’s book. Professor Gordin finds her argument interesting and presents it in terms respectable to that crowd of advocates of hard-headed science, but he comes down pretty solidly on the side of those who would exclude fringe science, which arguably once included some of Einstein’s work before he had a reputation and also included some of the early work in quantum physics. Professor Gordin concludes, “Wertheim shows us just how muddy the waters are on the border between what is classed as ‘legitimate’ and what as ‘fringe.’ However, a murky boundary does not imply that one might just as well drink from any part of the river.”
I would say that, to switch my metaphor slightly, we’ve reached the edge of territory we’re were prepared to explore by our inherited understandings of Creation — of created being if you will. We might have to cross those murky waters, perhaps swallowing some dangerous stuff in the process. In other words, string theory isn’t a failure because it’s too radical but because such efforts need a richer and more complex — a more radical — understanding of Creation or of created being.
There’s more, far more to be found in Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings from 2006 to 2010 — I plan on updating this already large file to include all or at least most of my weblog writings during 2011. You might also find something of interest in Four Kinds of Knowledge, though I admit to being far from satisfied with this effort to argue for ultimate unity of knowledge on the basis of a Christian understanding of God the Creator.