The Gray Monk

“What cannot be explained by the science of today will be explained by the science of tomorrow.”

When viewed in an historical context, this statement seems quite reasonable. Since the conception of science, humanity has, (barring a few hiccups), managed to understand more with every few generations. In recent centuries in particular, scientific advances have occurred at a hectic pace, opening up hundreds of new and more specialised areas of research.

Every new discovery or theory presents a new set of questions to scientific minds, which, after a wait of anything from a few years to several centuries, are matched up to answers. There are many examples of this, one of which is the movement from Ptolemaic astronomy to Copernican astronomy.

Ptolemaic astronomy assumed that the Earth was the centre of the universe, and took the romantic view that, if Earth was a place of disease, decay and death, the heavens must be pristine and perfectly predictable. Ptolemy devised a system where the planets and stars revolved neatly around the Earth in circular orbits, while distant stars, which appeared not to move when viewed with the naked eye, were a sort of fixed spherical backdrop. Astronomers spent centuries working with Ptolemy’s model of the heavens, which was very much the accepted explanation for movements of the stars, particularly because he had founded his ideas on Aristotle’s work. Despite the fact that some awkward planets didn’t play along with the geocentric view of Ptolemaic astronomy, astronomers persevered with his model. (Mars is still being awkward today.) They even updated it to the point that what had started out as a diagram showing a series of concentric circles, (see previous page), which represented the orbits of the main observable heavenly bodies, ended up with a huge number of smaller circles, each with their focus on yet another circle (see figure to the left for simplified example).

Copernicus was taught the same theory as a student several centuries later, as part of his training for life in the Church. Astronomy and mathematics, among other things, were considered vital for holy men at the time, because calculating the dates of holy days relied on understanding how the calendar had been derived from the motion of the heavens. Fortunately he became a keen observer of the stars and from careful observation and a bit of lateral thinking, came to the conclusion that the irregular orbits everyone had observed were due to the fact that the Earth and all of its sister planets were actually orbiting around the Sun. The resulting theory answered questions that had been waiting for an answer for 1,400 years… and landed the next generation of astronomers, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, in a lot of trouble with the Church.

So, humanity may take a while to get there, but with persistence, new ideas and subsequently more knowledge does arrive on the scene sooner or later. Perhaps we should examine the origins of science in order to find out where humanity’s expectations of “more knowledge tomorrow” come from.

The first “scientists” wouldn’t be called such today. When humanity was made up of small tribes of people, mostly hunting, gathering and later farming, the world seemed to them to be filled with unpredictability and mystery. There were warm seasons and cold seasons, migration patterns to follow and water to find. Even at this primitive stage of development, humanity had some use for science.

To start with, science only consisted of knowing how many full moons there are in a year and how many moons you had left until the cold weather arrived or the herds departed, yet we should not be dismissive of this; recognising patterns is a skill that has got us to where we are today. Those who were careful in observing the world around them and good at telling the rest of the group when to prepare for various events were a valuable asset to their social group, so there was an evolutionary advantage to becoming a curious observer. The social sciences tell us that the need to understand the world around us prompted our first attempts to explain phenomena through metaphor, which became the basis of many early religions, and observation, which is the basis of science.

So, our first flirting with science was born of a need to know what was going to happen tomorrow. Eventually, what was going to happen from year to year became common knowledge – in terms of planting, harvest and migration at least. Yet for some reason we still sought to know more.

Why? Humans must have an overriding need to not only ask questions, but to persist in asking them until they are answered. (Anyone who remembers being a small child, or who has been in the company of one for any length of time will have experienced this sort of curiosity at close hand.) Perhaps the constant straining to see over the horizon, in the physical and metaphorical sense, is the cause of our ever-looking forward mentality?

Curiosity seems to be a critical part of what makes humans human, therefore we can expect our curiosity to continue to propel our scientific development until evolution throws a spanner into the works. It’s unlikely that there’s a single “curiosity gene”. It’s more likely to be a trait which several genes work on, which suggests favourable odds of survival for our favourite trait.

Another argument in favour of this statement being true is that our past experience tells us that there will always be better means of measuring the world tomorrow. The first common means of measuring the length of something was to use parts of the human body, like a cubit, which is helpfully defined by google.co.uk: “1 cubit = 45.72 centimetres”. The original meaning was the distance between the elbow and the tip of the middle finger, which varies substantially from person to person.
We have come a long way since then, with vernier callipers, micrometers, electron microscopes and even telescopes in space, so why shouldn’t we get even better at measuring everything to an even higher standard of accuracy?

We have overcome several obstacles that stood in our way to achieving greater accuracy in measurements. Discovering a means by which items could be mass produced with minimal variation in quality was unthinkable to many of the civilizations that preceded us, even though some of them gave us the framework that we’ve built modern science on. No wonder then that so many believe that the future holds all the answers.

There are barriers to further development in some areas of science at the moment, for instance the problem of how to miniaturise all of the components in computers. We have managed to miniaturise the main components, like the silicon chip and circuit boards, so that what started out the size of a room can now be squeezed into a laptop. The next barrier for computers is finding a replacement for wires that is cheap and increases data transmission speeds between components within computers, since speed is the main quality that is constantly in need of improvement as far as consumers are concerned.

Some are pessimistic about the possibility of overcoming this barrier and economists are already anxious that a failure to find a solution may tip the world into another recession. The answer may not come in time to prevent a dip in technology-orientated economies, but there’s good reason to believe that science will eventually answer this question too.

So why am I now going to tell you why science will not always have the answer? From the point of view of scientists, the assumption that tomorrow’s science will explain today’s mysteries holds true, purely because the explanations they require are for questions that current research has raised.

There is also the problem that sometimes science gets it wrong; as with astronomy in Ptolemy’s day. His ideas seemed perfectly reasonable to all of his peers and predecessors, because the scientists of the day had no reason to suspect that the universe was as gigantic as it is. No observations that they had been able to make at the time could have prepared their imaginations for the idea that the Sun was the centre of just one of millions of solar systems. One could argue that observations from Earth should have hinted that we are not the centre of the universe, but we’re talking about people who were not only as flawed as ourselves, but did not have the tools or knowledge that we do. So here we have, not only an example of how science can leap ahead and provide answers to long-standing questions, but also how science can get it badly wrong.

There is no guarantee that everything we regard as fact today won’t be blown out of the water at some date in the future, which would mean that today’s science was no better than yesterday’s. The centrifugal force versus centripetal force debate proves that much-loved theories can be discredited quickly, as does the case of Galen’s anatomical research, which was adopted, accepted as absolute irrefutable fact and defended by the Church for so long, only to be proved wrong by Andreas Vesalius’ more detailed work.

And finally, there is the matter of whether science really has the capacity to explain everything that is outside our ken today. Religion contains many ideas that may never be proved, even though some have tried. Interpreting the results of such experiments is made difficult by controversy, regardless whether the experimenter claims to have found a positive or negative result.

For example, the emotional and spiritual side of humanity wants to believe that near death experiences are proof of the afterlife. Studies have been attempted on this topic, but nothing conclusive has ever been found. When one rules out the fact that we may never manufacture instruments that are capable of detecting a soul, (if one exists of course), there is a second problem with this kind of research. Any findings, no matter how respected the scientist is, how precise the instruments are or how certain the result is, will be bitterly resented.

A negative result would probably result in a lynching carried out by religious groups, while a positive would produce millions of sceptics who would wade through the results trying to refute the claim. Both outcomes would probably spontaneously create groups who would be happy to blacken the name of that scientist .

I also think that humanity is too afraid of what the answers to some questions might be. Religious figureheads would probably welcome conclusive scientific proof of the existence of God, but that doesn’t mean it would be a good idea to pursue that proof. It may not be a coincidence that most religions call for followers not to seek proof, which one can either interpret as a fear that the religion won’t stand up to scrutiny, or a very wise observation on human nature.

Going back to near death experiences, which I think are a good example of what makes the experience of being a human being a strange and wonderful thing. If someone experiences something as vivid as a near death experience, how can they look at graphs of their brain activity, reports on their physical death and believe the stack of bland papers over their own senses? As human beings, we rely heavily on the same five senses that we are born with. In the future we may have eye transplants, hand transplants, even olfactory cell transplants, but until then this idea at least holds true. We have to trust our senses, because they are our windows to the world, so when someone lives through something as intense as near death visions, how can we expect them not to trust their senses? Does it matter if no one else saw what they saw? Does it make that experience less important to them if we tell them that souls don’t exist and it was just a dying gasp of chemical activity in their brain that produced what they saw? To quote Neal Grossman in issue 61 of the IONS review:

“When researchers ask the question, “How can the near-death experience be explained?” they tend to make the usual assumption that an acceptable explanation will be in terms of concepts—biological, neurological, psychological—with which they are already familiar… To my knowledge, no one who has had an NDE feels any need for an explanation in the reductionist sense that researchers are seeking… (Patients feel)… the NDE does not need to be explained because it is exactly what it purports to be, which is…the direct experience of consciousness—or minds, or selves, or personal identity—existing independently of the physical body. It is only with respect to our deeply entrenched materialist paradigm that the NDE needs to be explained, or more accurately, explained away.”

I find it hard to believe that science will ever truly be able to describe what being a human being is like and why it is the experience it is. We could map our DNA, give precise descriptions of our cell structure, digestive system, bone structure, brain structure, maps of electrical activity that occurs in the brain for every emotion human beings ever experience, create artificial intelligence and program it to behave and follow the same thought patterns as humans, but would any of it be meaningful? Would it alter the way we understand ourselves that significantly? Would it change our beliefs and instincts?

I loved Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which describes a post-Earth space-travelling humanity. One mathematician develops a statistical method of predicting what humanity will do next, called psychohistory and decides to use it to protect humanity from itself. Asimov’s observation of how humans are resistant to mathematical and therefore scientific prediction is at once reassuring and distressing: reassuring in the sense that our fate is not written in the stars or in a neat formula, distressing in the sense that philanthropic mathematicians will not find it easy to save us. In the same way that individuals often threw Asimov’s characters’ lives into disarray, individuals often surprise us in real life. Did anyone really think the World Trade Center would be destroyed by a handful of fanatics? Do we really know what their motives were? Would we be any wiser if science had perfected a method of scanning brainwaves and using them to interpret thoughts? And how would we know that someone is genuinely thinking of committing an atrocity, rather than just wishing their office would blow up during their lunch break? Some of us have much more vivid imaginations than others.

In conclusion, there are some questions for which science will always be the equivalent of a chocolate teapot. Like the mathematical formulae that turn up from time to time in the popular press, which claim to describe the perfect beach, the perfect method to parallel park etc, science cannot explain the way we are, or what we like, or how we do things. A mathematician might be able to prove that one particular beach is the closest to perfection in the world, but I will still prefer the beach where I used to play when I was five years old. There are some things that are just devalued when science is applied to them, like religion, which is a major source of hope to many people and art, which is as far away from being understood by maths as possible, but obviously entertains us, otherwise we wouldn’t have so many galleries. A formula for the perfect picture would be meaningless, because it’s the imperfections that prove art is a human endeavour. Science is just one of many human inventions and is worth no more, or less, than any of the other many activities that we carry out in the pursuit of being humans.

Bibliography

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=94403786 (Excerpts from “A History of Science, Technology and Philosophy in the 16th & 17th Centuries”, a
book by Friedrich Dannemann, A. Wolf; Macmillan, 1935)

http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Ptolemy.html (A brief biography of Ptolemy and discussion of his work, from the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland website)

http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Things/ptolemaic_system.html (More in depth description of the Ptolemaic system. Images on pages one and two are from this site, by Albert van Helden)

http://muse.tau.ac.il/museum/galileo/geocentric.html (Brief definition of Ptolemaic system, no author named)

http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Science/Copernicus.htm (A brief biography of Copernicus)

http://www.arasite.org/sglitrvw.html (A review of papers on the subject of mythology, mostly claiming that myths were used to understand the world via metaphor, by Sean Gillen)

http://www.chiariglione.org/ride/craft_intellect_and_art.htm (A discussion of how primitive societies worked, no author named)

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=What+is+a+cubit%3F&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&meta= (Cubit definition)

http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~pcara/hobbies/egypres.pdf (Lecture on Egyptian mathematics by Phillipe Cara)

http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/A/anatomists/art1.html (Very brief overview of early anatomists)

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/skeptic01.html (Forum for discussion on scientific evidence for near death experiences)

Issue #61 of the Institute of Noetic Sciences Review, “Who’s afraid of life after death?” By Neal Grossman
The entire Foundation series, by Isaac Asimov