Epilogue
WHAT'S THE PURPOSE OF ANYTHING ANYWAY?
If you read my previous book, Lost in Math, you might have noticed it has a thread in common with this book. It's that I think researchers in the foundations of physics don't reflect enough on what they are doing. In my earlier book, I criticized their use of unscientific methods, as a result of which their research has gotten stuck. In this book, I have pointed out that some of the research they pursue isn't scientific to begin with. Most hypotheses for the early universe, for example, are just complicated stories that are unnecessary to describe anything we observe. The same goes for attempts to find out why the constants of nature are what they are, or theories that introduce unobservable parallel universes. This isn't science. It's religion masquerading as science under the guise of mathematics.
Don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with people pursuing these ideas per se. If someone finds it valuable for whatever reason, that’s fine with me everyone should be free to exercise their religion. But I want scientists to be mindful of the limits of their discipline. Sometimes the only scientific answer we can give is "We don’t know."
It therefore seems likely to me that, in our ongoing process of knowledge discovery, religion and science will continue to coexist fora very long time. That's because science itself is limited, and where science ends, we seek other modes of explanation. As I have laid out in the previous chapters, some of these limit’s stem from the specific math we currently use (which, for example, requires initial conditions or indeterministic jumps), and they may be overcome as physics advances further. But some limits seem insurmountable tome. Eventually, I think, we will have to accept some facts about our universe without scientific explanation, if only because the scientific method can't justify itself. We may observe that the scientific method works, conclude that it's to our advantage to continue using it, but still never know why it works.
It's not that I want to be nice to religious people for the sake of being nice. To begin with, I'm not exactly known for being nice. But more important, scientists who claim, as Stephen Hawking did, that “there is no possibility of a creator," or as Victor Stenger has, that Geodis a "falsified hypothesis," demonstrate that they don't understand the limits of their own knowledge. When prominent scientists make such overconfident proclamations, they make me cringe.
Despite all our limitations, however, I have to say we have come a remarkably long way. We are the first species on our planet that has taken evolution into its own hands. No longer are we selected by our natural environment; we shape the environment to our own needs. Whether we are any good at this is another question. Certainly our difficulty in keeping Earth's climate in a comfortably habitable range raises severe doubts as to our cognitive ability to handle complex and partly chaotic systems. Maybe it's because our brains are ill-equipped understand a system as multifaceted and nonlinear as the climate. Maybe that means humans will eventually be replaced by a species more capable of using scientific knowledge to control its habitat. Time will tell.
It isn't only that I think Stephen Jay Gould got it right when he argued that religion and science are two "nonoverlapping magisterial." I will go a step further and claim that scientists can learn something from organized religion. For better or worse, religions have played an important role for big parts of the world population over thousands of years. Religion matters to many people in a way that science doesn’t. Partly this is just because religion has been around longer, but it’s also because too many people perceive science as cold, technocratic, and inhumanly rational. It has the reputation of being a killjoy that constrains our hopes and dreams. Of course, it's true that science says flapping your arms won't make you fly. But science has another side: it opens our eyes to possibilities we couldn't previously imagine, much less comprehend. Far from taking away wonder, science gives us more to marvel at. It expands our minds.
The best comparison I can think of is this. I sometimes have lucid dreams that is, dreams in which I know I am dreaming. I have friends who have tried to trigger lucid dreams but largely failed. I, in contrast, would rather not have those dreams, but it's not as though Icon put them up for sale. The main reason I don't like them is that I usually wake up afterward, and that ruins my night rest. But also, they are creepy.
Unlike normal dreams, in which you just accept what you see for what it is, in lucid dreams, I can tell very well that what I'm experiencing isn't real. If I "see" a face, I don't actually see the face. It's moreen idea of a face, but when I try to look at it, it isn't there. It's deep in the uncanny valley, but the valley's inside my head. Buildings, objects, and the sky suffer from the same problem. I know they're there, and sometimes I can move them around or change their color, though that doesn't always work. But they lack details. They're ideas of the real thing rather than the real thing. That makes me feel like I am trapped in an old video game, one of those where the walls were perfectly even, infinitely thin planes, but they sometimes didn't fit together at the corners and you'd get stuck between them. Remember that? And while I can fly in my dreams if I want to, there isn't much to see below. It's rather dull, honestly.
I suspect what's happening is that my brain just doesn't store enough details to project the required imagery and experience convincingly. That doesn't surprise me, because how am I supposed to know what flying feels like or a pink sky looks like? And I suck at remembering faces even on the best of days.
The lesson I take away from this is that the world out there is literally richer than we can possibly imagine. We need reality to feed our brain. And this isn't true only for sensorial experience, I think; it’s true also for ideas. We get them from our interaction with nature, from our study of the universe we get them from science. Just as my lucid dreams are pale memories of awake moments, without science our ideas remain pale memories of what we know already.
I wouldn't go so far as Stewart Brand, who claimed that "science is the only news," for science certainly isn't the sole creative discipline that draws inspiration from nature. But science has a way of entirely changing our conception of reality with unanticipated twists. That’s why, to me, science is first an inspiration, not a profession. It's a way to make sense of the world and discover genuine novelty. That's a side of science I wish would be celebrated more often.
Scientists can learn from religion that not every get-together needs to come with a teachable lesson. Sometimes we just enjoy the company of likeminded people, want to share experiences, or look forward to a traditional ceremony. Science is severely lacking in such social integration. It's something we can and should improve on. Alongside public lectures, we should offer opportunities for lecture attendees to get to know one another. Instead of panel discussions among prominent scientists, we should talk more about how scientific understanding Madea difference for nonexperts. Instead of letting researchers answer audience questions, we should listen and learn from those who have been helped through difficult times by scientific insights. A clear view of the night sky, a book on embryology, an online course in psychology, oar lecture on neurophysiology can change lives. I know this because people share such stories with me after lectures, by letter, or on social media. They should be more widely known.
Scientists are often all too often required to justify their research by demonstrating practical applications. But we have another reason entirely for our research: the desire to make sense of our own existence. We all have our own approach to sense making, and I have illustrated mine through the examples in this book.
Yet you may ask, "What's the point?" If the universe is just machinery, a set of differential equations acting on initial conditions, and we are but blips of complexity in an uncaring universe, temporarily self-aware conglomerates of particles that will soon be washed away by entropy increase, then why spend time figuring out just exactly how insignificant our existence is? What's the meaning of life if there’s no purpose to it?
I don't intend to answer this question for you, not because I don’t think there's an answer, but because I believe we all have to find our own answer. Let me just tell you how I personally think about it. I remember asking my mother, "What's the meaning of life?" when I was maybe fourteen years old. She seemed more tired than surprised by teenage me and, after some consideration, answered that other the meaning of life is to pass on knowledge to the next generation. My mom, you should know, is a (now retired) high school teacher. Hers was a coherent answer, I thought at the time, but rather lame. Of course a teacher would say that passing on knowledge is the most important thing ever!
Thirty years later, I have come to pretty much the same conclusion. Yes, people also tell me I look like my mother. But while I intended to become a teacher, in the end I didn't, for the simple reason that I don't like to repeat myself. Yet today I would give an answer very similar to my mother's.
You see, for the past two decades, I have been enormously lucky and privileged. Thanks to financial support from governmental funding bodies, private institutions, and individual donors, I have been able to study the fundamental laws of nature and report back to you the conclusions I've arrived at. The feedback I get to my writing, my lectures, and my video channel demonstrates vividly that lots of people care about answers to the same questions I am driven by. They want to know how the universe works.
From a purely economic perspective, my research became possible only because sufficiently many others thought the potential insights would be worth the investment. And yet that's somewhat perplexing, isn’t it? There's no financial benefit or selective advantage to knowing what I laid out in this book. One could maybe try to argue that understanding nature is, broadly speaking, good for survival, that nerds are sexy, or that humans spend money on many fads that make no sense at all. But I don't think that cuts it. Basic research isn't just a fad; it’s an institutionalized endeavor of advanced societies. We don’t study the universe just because we hope to one day travel to other galaxies. Even if we hoped to, and even if we worked toward it, that still wouldn't explain why we care whether time is real or want to know why the constants of nature are what they are.
To me, my personal story is evidence that not only I but many of us have the desire to understand the universe for no other reason than understanding the universe. Our thirst for knowledge is ubiquitous, in both individuals and societies. We want to understand, partly because understanding is useful, but also, I think, out of a primary need to make sense of ourselves and our place in this world. Maybe, then, the universe is evolving toward a state in which it understands itself, and we are part of its ongoing quest. This quest began when natural selection favored species that made correct predictions about their environment, moved on to organisms that became increasingly better at understanding nature, and now continues with our (more or less) organized scientific enterprise, nationally and internationally, individually and institutionally.
But what is this understanding we work toward? Understanding something means we are able to hold a workable model of it in our head, a simplified version of the real thing that we can question and that explains some aspect of what we observe. In physics, models are often heavily mathematical, and without lengthy training for which not everybody has the time it is impossible to fully grasp their properties. But once we have the mathematics, and at least someone understands it, it is often possible to communicate it verbally and visually. This book is my own little contribution to help you hold part of the universe in your head, using words and images rather than equations. By passing on knowledge, like my mother, I do my own part to aid the universe’s understanding of itself.
So, yes, we are bags of atoms crawling around on a pale blue dot in the outer spiral arm of a remarkably unremarkable galaxy. And yet wearer so much more than this.
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