The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  Science is full, in fact, of cases where perfectly workable, fruitful productions have been organized on grounds later found fallacious. Gone, Popper says, is the old scientific ideal of 'episteme,' the absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge. Every scientific statement, he claimed, must remain tentative forever.

  Warren Weaver likens the foundations of science to piles driven into soft and swampy terrain. We simply stop driving the piles down, he said, when we are satisfied that they are firm enough to carry the kind of structure we want, at least for the time being. Euclid called "axiomatic" the step on which he stood to build his system. Weaver says this bottom step is not axiomatic but simply a postulate, assumed to be true in order to obtain what we hope to find by following it to its conclusions. He speaks of an "ultimate mysticism" at the bottom of this type of scientific explanation.

  Such attitudes are new in the history of thought. They might well be luxuries of mind that only a very rich discipline can afford. We are on the way, at least, to opening to both mirrors of reality -- mind and its source of possibilities -- and perhaps this could not have been done earlier.

  Whitehead traced the rise of science from its religious conviction that God being rational, His Creation must also be rational and, therefore, available to the process of reasoning. The early scientist saw subjectivity as the illusion. Since Augustine, the neoplatonic view had held full sway, and one got outside such quicksands by concentrating on the "natural world." An interest in natural objects of the most mundane sort for their own sake grew. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries displayed a mania for labeling and cataloging every commonplace item on the globe.

  This encyclopedic name-passion was another chapter in the building of a semantic universe. These obvious and self-evident events made up those "irreducible and stubborn facts" so loved by the earlier scientists. Whitehead felt that several centuries of contemplation of this basic stuff was needed. What grew from all this was a method of agreement -- agreement on the kinds of phenomena that could be "objectively" considered, and the way by which such speculation could be verified. The method of agreement was strengthened by its own careful restriction to those events amenable to the same "common objectivity." This kept intact the particular fabric of belief in process of being woven. Thus the growing frame of reference centered on a desire for an order of nature that would reflect the medieval faith in the rational order of God. The transition was slow, orderly, and smooth. The name displacement, the change of metaphor that would allow mutations of a more direct sort, followed a certain protocol of decorum.

  Faith in the rational order of God, and thus of His Nature, was perfectly genuine. This faith gave the prism through which those events examined were seen. Events not fitting the prism were simply ignored. Order was imposed upon basically random disorder through this prism of prejudice. The prism dictated the kinds of events which were given the energy of attention. Whitehead pointed out that the narrow efficiency of the scheme was the very cause of its "supreme methodological success." The scheme directed attention to the groupings and correlations that lent themselves to that kind of investigation, and that in turn verified the system.

  The efficiency, while narrow and selective, gave success within its confines. The success gave ever-growing boldness for speculations. This enlarged the selectivity itself. Whitehead observed that the early scientists confined themselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which those facts occurred. This gave rise to the materialistic assumption of "simple locations in time and space," an assumption which fit to perfection the facts so abstracted. The given confines were expanded by this very activity, and the store of "facts" grew apace. Postulating empty categories, for instance, gave the passionate focus of attention to find the particular facts that would fill the categories. Trial and error determined the general nature of empty categories likely to be filled by the accepted kinds of facts.

  Eventually these self-verifying successes built a system of hypotheses that became self-sustaining. Science became a reality-shaping structure, creating its own unique ecology, much as the Pentagonian mind tends to produce the very events which make necessary an ever-expanding Pentagon structure, and justify such things as Pentagons.

  The original "stubborn and irreducible facts" of science faded into the background as they were no longer needed. An equally stubborn fact, that of science as an event-producing activity, rooted itself into the growing reality structure that science itself had fostered and brought about. Scientific growth became a process of metaphoric combinations and mutations of existing scientific metaphor, a continual expansion of an inherited web of ideas.

  Though nothing in this web remains static, each generation's "facts" produce the reality which that generation finds itself in, facts with which it must deal. Feinberg feels confident that we have found the basic substructure of matter. Yet a short two generations or so ago an eminent scientist could write, rather with a sigh, that at least one sure fact could finally be counted on by science, and that was that 'ether' filled all space.

  A certain egotism marks all men of science simply because nothing less than sureness can sustain any system, much less give the confidence to blithely contradict their elders and "discover" anew the real way things work. McKellar speaks disparagingly of the "certainty systems," religions and cults, and lauds the reality-adjusted methods of the humble scientists who only serve truth. The reality adjustments of science are made to the continual metaphoric mutations occurring in the scramble for success and fame within the brotherhood. The only humility ever exhibited is when their systems fail or are in process of being outmoded by their very techniques.

  Edwin G. Boring writes that examination of new facts, new truths, new theories, immerses one in the history of controversy. Men get their egos tied up with their theories and their facts and "fight one another for intellectual self-preservation." Boring speaks of science as a policy, not a picture of truth, but a policy that has to work to be retained.

  McKellar says the biggest error that underlies much thinking today is the belief that scientific concepts refer to things which actually exist, that science cleverly isolates existing things and measures or uses them. The idea that scientific principles are parts of nature can seriously impede the progress of our knowledge, McKellar wrote. In the same sense, Bruner referred to scientific discovery not as "engineered tinkering," as commonly conceived, but as an enterprise of thinking.

  It is doubtful, however, that science could have built its constructs and sustained its passion without the sure confidence of those earlier scientists that they were only discovering God's preordained secrets and laws. Policies are put into effect by people who believe in them. It is doubtful that even today scientists will concede that they are involved in synthetic creativity rather than discovery of a priori truth. As doubtful, in fact, as that theologians and preachers could open to the same possibility for their own systems.

  Michael Polanyi wrote of the 'metanoia' changing a student into the true physicist. A brilliant array of facts, proofs, laws, theories, and an impressive body of empirical evidence, will not in themselves create a science, Polanyi claimed. Only as all this is given meaning and purpose through the intellectual passion of a true believer does the real science emerge. A belief in the basic tenets determines the criteria by which an investigator works. Science, states Polanyi, can provide no procedure for deciding issues by systematic and dispassionate empirical investigation.

  The scientific audience is won over to a new system by intellectual sympathy. A hostile audience may deliberately refuse to entertain novel conceptions for fear of being led to conclusions they abhor, rightly or wrongly. Sympathetic listening allows one to discover what cannot be understood in any other way. This kind of openness, which alone can lead us into true agreement and "hearing," Polanyi notes, is a self-modifying act. To elaborate on Polanyi a bit, I would explain this self-modifying by saying each of us has an autistic openness for unlimited
synthesis, but agreement on another's synthesis then limits our openness. It defines a specific area that can then no longer be open for us.

  Hardness of heart, the refusal to listen sympathetically and open-mindedly, with its corollary, unbelief, is the stumbling block which no theoretical system can overcome.

  Polanyi claims that "intellectual passions" affirm the scientific interest and value of certain facts as against lack of such interest and value in others. Without this selective function science could not be defined at all. A "vision of reality" serves as the scientific guide to enquiry. Passion and vision are the "mainsprings of originality." A new idea may impel a scientist to abandon an accepted framework of interpretation and commit himself, by the leaping of a logical gap, to the use of a new framework.

  Note how Polanyi's picture fills Bruner's outline for creativity: the scientist detaches himself from the commonplace assumptions of his discipline; commits himself to a new construct; his passion gives him his selective blindness to ignore the contradictions and negatives, and, by his superior degree of attention, he sees what he needs to see; his decorum assures the love of form, the etiquette toward the object of desire, that keeps him in the brotherhood. Having placed his intellectual and professional life on the line (losing his life that he may find it), he has the freedom and willingness to be dominated by the object until the work of creation takes over. Then his life both serves the new work and is justified by it.

  A scientific education does more than develop the skill to handle scientific ideas. It brings about that change in thinking that determines the ideas which will be accepted to begin with, the new ideas most likely to occur to mind, and the phenomena accepted as factual. "Unscientific" ideas tend to be dismissed, should they even occur, and "unscientific" facts tend not to be recognized as phenomena.

  Claude Bernard admits that "facts" are necessary materials, but points out that it is their manipulation by experimental reasoning, or theory, that establishes and builds science. "Ideas given form by facts," was his expression. The idea is the 'prime movens' of all scientific reasoning.

  We point to a "realized fact" that was not a part of former realizations, and insist that the fact must have always existed. Existed as what may well be asked. The atom did not "exist" for Democritus, or even Dalton, as it exists for us today. A rich network of explorers had to develop correspondences to the point where inclusion of the atomic fact would be, if not observable, at least possible and maybe even necessary to the resulting framework -- a framework which itself may prove to have resulted from the acceptance of the idea of atoms. The long-nourished idea may well have brought about the facts to support the idea. This does not imply that we can pull a rabbit out of the hat whether or not there is first a rabbit in the hat. It means that we must question the nature of rabbits and hats. Perhaps we can breed any number of varieties of rabbits in the hat, given time, effort, passion, and all the rest of the triggers for catalytic synthesis.

  Bruner wrote of how science postulates empty categories on purely logical grounds, and then, when appropriate measures have been found, "discovers" the content needed to fill the category. When the neutron was disintegrated, its products, the electron and proton, did not behave according to the law of the conservation of momentum. Something had to yield; surely it was not going to be the law, on which too much else depended, so the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, postulated a third particle of zero charge and zero mass, which he called the "neutrino" or littie neutron. The mysterious third particle, without mass, charge, or much of anything, was finally considered to have a spiral orbit; several years after its hypothetical beginnings, evidence for it took on more and more reality aspects until finally it was "discovered."

  Discovery of the planet Neptune followed the same pattern. Twenty-three years separated Bessel's logical conclusions that a trans-Uranian planet should exist, and the computing by Adams and LeVerrier of the possible orbits for the undiscovered planet, which finally led to its "discovery." The elements in the sun were identified through spectroscopic research. During an eclipse in 1869, the solar spectrum was found to include an unknown gas which was named helium. Twenty-seven years later the gas was discovered or at least identified on earth.

  Bode's Law of 1772 offers a fascinaling example. Bode found that if you took the simple sequence; 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, and so on (each number doubling the previous one), and added to each member the number 4, then producing: 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52, 100, and so on, you obtained approximately the proportionate distances from the sun of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn -- but, disturbingly enough, with a blank for the number 28. The numbers game gave rise to a great search for the missing planet (so great our faith in numbers). In 1801 Guiseppe Piazze of Palermo found at the required distance a very small planet, only a fourth as big as our moon, which he named Ceres. The attention of all astronomers then focussed on this orbit and in time over a thousand of these "asteroids" or pieces of planet were found. The lapse between postulate and discovery was twenty-nine years.

  David Bohm notes that the evolution of scientific concept has been due more to scientific experience than to observations of everyday experience. Imaginative analysis of the experimental and theoretical results of the science of mechanics has given rise to our concepts of the motions of bodies. Observing and measuring actual bodies in motion has not played much part. Mathematics in general, (justifying Roger Bacon's thirteenth-century observation), and differential calculus in particular, Bohm says, have played the key role in guiding the development of a clear concept of accelerating motion, just as our concept of wave motion comes from theoretical and experimental studies of the interference and propagation of waves in the various sciences such as optics and acoustics, not from watching water waves themselves.

  The physicist Pauli wrote that intuition and the direction of attention far transcend mere experience in the erection of a system of natural law.

  Polanyi went to great length to show that true discovery, in its scientific sense, is irreversible. That is, the procedure cannot be traced back stepwise to its beginnings and repeated 'ad lib.' any number of times. True discovery is not logical in its performance. Polanyi describes the obstacle to be overcome by any new idea as a "logical gap." 'Illumination' was his term for the leap by which the logical gap is crossed. The scientist stakes his life on his leaps, and science grows and changes thereby.

  Gerald Feinberg spoke of James Clerk Maxwell's desire for a mechanical model of the electromagnetic field, and Albert Einstein's desire for a deterministic substratum of quantum phenomena. The world, Feinberg sighs, is not so simple. The proper understanding of matter requires, he says, the imagination to invent entities not apparent in everyday phenomena. It is the enduring miracle of creative thought, he wrote, that the mind is equal to the task.

  William Blake considered our capacity for imagination to be our "divine genius." Jesus was Blake's most truly imaginative man, since he could bridge the logical gaps. In his marginalia to Reynolds, Blake claimed that our truest self was in our innate ideas with which we are born. He did not mean this in the Platonic sense, but as the capacity for creative and original thinking, independent of mechanical information from a world. Biological and economic necessities as formative devices were denied by Blake. "The eternal body of man is the Imagination, that is, God himself . . . It manifests itself in his works of art (in Eternity all is Vision). Man is all Imagination; God is Man and exists in us and we in Him."

  What Blake's vision releases on earth is released in heaven. If an imaginative seed, the gist of an idea, can be planted, even though contrary to existent evidence, the seed can still grow and sooner or later produce confirmation. Data can be found to bolster the conviction. The desire for conviction can produce its own data, its own metaphoric mutation, even to its visual demonstration.

  A system is outlandish only to opposing systems. How great must be the pressure before a new idea succumbs depends on the "correspondence gap" and the tenacit
y of the believers. Even if the gap is great, even if there is no evidence at all, even if the bulk of current belief would have to be sacrificed to give the new idea grounds for growth, a tenacious adherence in spite of all the contrary evidence will nevertheless slowly build up the possibility for the needs of the new idea to be met. It may take more than one lifetime for the new evidence to accumulate, establish correspondences, and bring about a new seeing.

  Jean Ladrier wondered about the mysterious connection between our own potentials, the power for action we bear within us, and the potentials of the world. In the same vein, the physicist Pauli asks about the nature of the bridge between sense perceptions and concepts. Logic, Pauli notes, has been incapable of constructing the link. Pauli feels it satisfactory, however, and to him necessary, to postulate a "cosmic order" independent of our choice, and "distinct from the world of phenomena." The relation of sense perception and idea remains predicated, he claims, on the fact that perceiver and perceived are subject to an order thought to be objective.

  Pauli's notion is a commonly held one, but questionable. We are prone to resort to a 'deus ex machina' when forced into a corner. We are always plagued with the idea that "out there" is a great, eternal, and a priori state of truth. That the "realness" of our lives might hinge on our choice is disquieting. All postulates, systems, and accepted facts tend to be superseded by future systems, however, as even today the inevitable margin of error grows in the Einsteinian system. Desire frets always at the boundaries.