The end of certitude

Beyond Science

December 6, 1996

We are in a period of "science wars". For some people science and technology are leading us straight to the apocalypse, for others science is our hope to improve the dignity of humanity. Some see science as mainly a social construct, others, such as John Horgan (writing recently in The New York Times), believe we are at the "End of Science, facing the limits of knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age"! The first of these contrasts was the main theme of the discussion at the 1991 Nobel meeting held to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Nobel prize. There was a vote - and the optimistic option won by a slim margin.

In this atmosphere of turbulence and paradoxical claims it is refreshing to read John Polkinghorne's Beyond Science, a fascinating account of his dual experience as a high-energy physicist and as a theologian. Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been "About Science and its Limits". I shall come back to this point. Polkinghorne calls his view, "critical realism". In his words: "Realism, because it claims that science actually does tell us about the physical world, even if it does not do so finally and exhaustively. Critical, because it recognises the subtlety and ultimate unspecifiability of the scientific method." He concludes this section: "Science should be part of everyone's world view. Science should monopolise no one's world view."

There are excellent sections, too, on "Working together" and "Fame and fortune". However, there are some recent aspects which should have been mentioned. The election of scientists to academies and even the award of the Nobel prize have become more and more the result of subjective choices. As particular sciences develop in more and more directions, what is more fundamental, what is less? How to choose between advances in elementary particle physics and in biophysics? Scientific information multiplies at a rate which makes it difficult to identify the authors of original, fruitful ideas. I have noticed many times that this situation generates discomfort and even bitterness in the younger generations.

I found section four of Polkinghorne's book quite entertaining. It presents short portraits of the physicists Polkinghorne most admires. Here we are far away from traditional hagiography. Scientists are not saints, and personal ambition, resulting from an inflated ego, often plays an important role - as it does among writers or artists.

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With section five, "What happened to the human mind?", we come to basic - and therefore controversial - questions. Polkinghorne rightly rejects the computer analogy for the mind. At a recent conference in Kyoto, this reviewer heard an internationally famous computer expert seriously propose that in about 50 years nobody would care to read Shakespeare, as all the psychological conflicts described by Shakespeare would have been solved by artificial intelligence. Still Polkinghorne sounds to me too pessimistic.

What do we mean by "understanding the mind"? Has Einstein's theory of relativity improved our understanding of the Newtonian description of gravitation? It has, in the sense that there are a number of new situations we can now describe more accurately. Similarly, in the description of the mind-brain, great progress has been achieved through neurophysiology. But as long as fundamental physics was associated with determinism, mind could only be conceived as an automaton. This was Einstein's view, as expressed in his conversation with Tagore. Now, however, we have physical models (such as chaos) in which probability plays a fundamental role. Polkinghorne rightly refers to dynamical chaos and attributes to it "some degree of ontological openness in (its) behaviour".

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This brings us to section six, "What does it mean?" Is the universe the product of blind chance or a purposeful Creator? We all have a deep feeling of astonishment before the image of nature as it emerges from contemporary science. More and more we deviate from the classical deterministic concept of nature towards a description involving a narrative element at all levels, be it in cosmology or in biology.

In this situation it requires courage to draw theological conclusions. Polkinghorne presents a detailed discussion of the so-called anthropic principle. He concludes: "I believe that in the delicate fine-tuning of physical law, which has made the evolution of conscious beings possible, we receive a valuable, if indirect, hint from science that there is a divine meaning and purpose behind cosmic history." Polkinghorne likes the philosophical parable told by John Leslie, that if there is a single fly on a big blank wall, its being hit by a single bullet surely calls for some sort of explanation.

It is true that there is "fine-tuning", but is the existence of those universal constants which make the self-organisation of the universe possible a result of chance or the result of the laws of nature? Are there other universes in which this fine-tuning does not occur? Similar remarks apply to Polkinghorne's discussion of the "end of the universe". As in most books on cosmology he presents two alternatives both leading to death: "In the end all is condemned to futility." But is this so certain? Is our universe like a fruit fallen from the tree, or is it not, rather, still in contact with the medium which gave birth to it? We know so little about quantum gravity (and especially about negative energy states). Is our universe an isolated system in the sense of classical thermodynamics? It may well be that the creation of matter, and "minor" big bangs, may still occur within our universe.

I must call a halt to this speculating. Polkinghorne has written an interesting, thought-provoking book. He addresses difficult problems to which different responses can be propounded. Even the title and subtitle of his book strike me as potentially ambiguous. What does he mean by "the wider human context"? Is science not already an integral part of human culture? Do we not create false problems by separating science from culture?

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In a recent article in The New York Review of Books), Steven Weinberg defended dualism, a complete separation between science and culture. In contrast, Erwin Schrodinger wrote, in 1952: "There is a tendency to forget that all science is bound up with human culture in general." I too believe that science is part of the "human context". Western thought has greatly suffered from fragmentation, from its split into C. P. Snow's "two cultures". The originality of recent developments in science emphasising instability, fluctuations and evolution are leading, perhaps for the first time, to a noncontradictory view of nature in which there is a place for laws of nature as well as for creativity and human values. It seems to me that the old choice between Newton and the Bible has lost its pertinence. We are all astonished by nature. For some, this astonishment leads to God, for others to the vision of a self-organising universe which produces the very rules which make its evolution possible. We are not at the end of science, but at the end of certitudes. Let us keep the options open.

Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, is director, Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry, Brussels, and director, Ilya Prigogine Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems, University of Texas, Austin.

Beyond Science: The Wider Human Context

Author - John Polkinghorne
ISBN - 0 521 57212 6
Publisher - Cambridge University Press
Price - £13.95
Pages - 131

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