Last time I wrote about the pinnacle of the Christian calendar—Easter. This time I’m also heading into territory where I’m no expert—science. We all know that religion and that relentless quest for facts about Nature have been getting into skirmishes, sometimes all-out battles—for eons. These days, though, with the future of the Earth looking especially precarious, it feels more and more as if it’s “all faiths on deck” for our home planet.
But it turns out science doesn’t speak with one voice any more than any other subject does. In fact, if what I’ve been learning recently is accurate, in many ways the whole thrust of science itself is about figuring out, pushing through paradoxes at every turn. Something is proven, or just about, but then there’s that other pesky thing that used to make complete sense but maybe doesn’t anymore; do we throw it out entirely in favor of the newcomer? Find a way for them to co-exist? Stall?
Maybe one of these days I’ll write about something I really know a whole lot about. But you can tell by now that I enjoy doing plenty of wondering, so I’m pretty comfortable rummaging around in places maybe I have no business going.
I haven’t heard much yet about this past weekend’s Climate marches; more power to all of you who may have participated on the front lines, who are working tirelessly to bring about positive, urgent changes.
The weekend before, though, I joined a very friendly and well-behaved group of people down at the State House here in Concord; we heard from a number of thoughtful scientists about what we’re up against these days— the worrisome and indisputable changes happening all over the globe; the resistance on the part of the current administration to tackle carbon levels—and, partly to keep our collective spirits up no doubt, we also heard about promising new developments, how we can keep the good momentum going. Tables offered plenty of information about organizations we can join; I lapped it all up.
Everybody there seemed energized and in complete agreement. And yet, I heard on the radio that there are a whole lot of scientists who balked at this kind of demonstration, believing that it might just accentuate the divisions that we know are already cutting into us, all across the country. Disagreeing about the right strategies to use going forward to solve a problem sure is a whole lot better than disagreeing about the nature of the problem itself, but of course there’s plenty of that too in the wider country.
Here’s a kind of twist, though. In the wonderful world of physics, or at least the part of it that I can almost understand, conflict, far from something to be avoided, is apparently the force that often spurs the whole enterprise forward.
In keeping with my zest for getting the lowdown on big subjects in manageable chunks, I’ve been enjoying Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli (Riverhead Books, New York; 2014). In truth, only if I tackle it first thing in the morning can I make good progress; and the diagrams sometimes help and sometimes don’t. But still, I push on, with a certain degree of joy even.
In about the middle of the book, in the section called “Quantum Space and Relational Time,” he lets us know that there’s been some trouble going on. I need to quote at some length here:
There is a paradox at the heart of our understanding of the physical world. General relativity and quantum mechanics, the two jewels that the twentieth century has left us, have been prolific in gifts…
And yet between the two theories, there is something that grates. They cannot both be true, at least not in their present forms, because they appear to contradict each other.
And then, a couple of pages later…
It isn’t the first time that physics has found itself faced with two highly successful but apparently contradictory theories. The effort to synthesize has in the past been rewarded with great strides forward in our understanding of the world. Newton discovered universal gravity precisely by combining Galileo’s physics of how things move on Earth with Kepler’s physics of the heavens…
A theoretical physicist is thus only too happy when she discovers a conflict of this type: it is an extraordinary opportunity. (p. 147-149)
Oh, to be as happy as a theoretical physicist stumbling upon a beautiful brawl out in a lush field full of equations!
It’s definitely not hard to believe that there can be plenty of competing theories out there, all the time going at it, each trying to squelch the other out. But do they make legitimate paradoxes? Apparently good ol’ Galileo was skeptical of this. Here’s what he had to say:
For a guy who was a genius with scientific instruments, and brave enough to stick up for Copernicus, he really knew how to wield a stinging pen, too. Apparently he wasn’t a big fan of paradoxes, but maybe he didn’t get the benefit of several additional centuries showing us how essential they are to modern life. Personally, I’m not sure how I would live without them, and on most days curved spacetime and quantum fields– vast as they are– are not even my main considerations.