Knocking on Heaven's Door (9 page)

I was a little surprised when a young Italian physicist, Michele Doro, who was my guide to the San Gaetano exhibit in Padua, said without hesitation that Galileo had invented the microscope. I’d say that outside Italy at least the consensus is that it was invented in the Netherlands, but whether it was Hans Lippershey or Zacharias Janssen (or his father) is anyone’s guess. Whether or not Galileo invented the telescope (and he almost certainly didn’t), the fact is that he built a microscope and used it to observe smaller scales. It could be used to observe insects with accuracies never before possible. In his letter to friends and other scientists, Galileo was the first we know of to write about the microscope and its potential. The exhibition displayed the first publication to display the systematic observations that could be made with a Galilean microscope: dating from 1630, it illustrated Francesco Stelluti’s detailed studies of bees.

The exhibit also showed how Galileo had studied bones—exploring how their structural properties would need to change with size. Apparently, in addition to his many other insights, Galileo was acutely aware of the significance of scale.

The exhibit left no doubt that Galileo fully understood the methods and goals of science—the quantitative, predictive, and conceptual framework that tries to describe definite objects, which act according to the dictates of precise rules. Once these rules have provided well-tested predictions about the world, they can be used to anticipate future phenomena. Science searches for the most economical interpretation that can explain and predict all observations.

The story of the Copernican revolution nicely illustrates this point too. In Galileo’s era, Tycho Brahe, the great observational astronomer, came to a different—and wrong—conclusion about the nature of the solar system. He supported an odd hybrid of the Ptolemaic system, with the Earth at the center, and the Copernican system, where planets orbited the Sun. (See Figure 10 for a comparison.) The
Tychonic
universe agreed with observations, but it wasn’t the most elegant interpretation. It was, however, more satisfactory to the Jesuits than Galileo’s view, since according to Tycho’s premises—as with the Ptolemaic theory that Galileo’s observations contradicted—the Earth didn’t move.
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[
FIGURE 10
]
Three proposals to describe the cosmos: Ptolemy postulated that the Sun, along with the Moon and other planets, circled the Earth. Copernicus (correctly) suggested that all the planets orbit the Sun. Tycho Brahe postulated that nonterrestrial planets orbited the Sun, which in turn orbited the Earth at the center.

Galileo rightly recognized the jury-rigged nature of the Tychonic interpretation and came to the correct and most economical conclusion. Newton’s rival Robert Hooke later noted that both the Copernican and Tychonic theories agreed with Galileo’s data, but one was more elegant, saying “but from the proportion and harmony of the World, [one] cannot help but embrace the Copernican Arguments.”
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Galileo’s instincts about the truth of the more beautiful theory turned out to be correct, and his interpretation ultimately prevailed when Newton’s theory of gravity explained the consistency of the Copernican setup and predicted planetary orbits. Tycho Brahe’s theory, as was true for Ptolemy’s, was a dead end. It was wrong. It wasn’t absorbed in later theories because it couldn’t be. Unlike the situation with an effective theory, no approximation of the true theory leads to these non-Copernican interpretations.

As the failure of the original Tychonic theory showed, and as Newtonian physics verified, the subjective criterion of the more economical explanation can also play an important role in the initial scientific interpretation. Research involves the search for underlying laws and principles that will encompass the structures and interactions being observed. Once a sufficient number of observations exist, a theory that economically incorporates the results while providing a predictive underlying framework ultimately wins out. At any point in time, logic takes you only so far—something particle physicists are painfully aware of as we await the data that will ultimately determine what we believe about the underlying nature of the universe.

Galileo helped lay the groundwork for how all scientists work today. Understanding the progression that he and others initiated helps us to better understand the nature of science—in particular, how indirect observations and experiments help us ascertain the correct physical description—as well as some of the major questions that physicists ask today. Modern science builds on all his insights—the usefulness of technology, experiment, theory, and mathematical formulation—in its attempts to match observations to theory. Critically, Galileo recognized the interplay of all these elements in formulating physical descriptions of the world.

Today we can be more free in our thinking, allowing the Copernican revolution to continue as we explore the outer reaches of the cosmos, and theorize about possible extra dimensions or alternative universes. New ideas continue to make human beings less and less central, both literally and figuratively. And observations and experiments will either confirm or reject our proposals.

The indirect methods of observation that Galileo employed currently find dramatic expression in the Large Hadron Collider’s elaborate detectors. A final display in the Paduan exhibit showed the evolution of science up to modern times, and even presented pieces of LHC experiments. Our guide confessed he had been confused by this until he recognized that the LHC is the ultimate microscope to date, probing shorter distances than have ever been observed.

As we enter new regimes of precision in measurement and theory, Galileo’s understanding of how to design and interpret experiments continues to reverberate. His legacy lives on as we use devices to create images far from visible to the naked eye and apply his insights into how the scientific method works, using experiments to confirm or refute scientific ideas. The conference participants in Padua were thinking about what might be found soon and what it could mean, in the hope we will soon once again cross new thresholds of knowledge. In the interim, we’ll keep knocking.

LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD

In February 2008, the poet Katherine Coles and the biologist and mathematician Fred Adler, both from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, organized an interdisciplinary conference entitled “A Universe in a Grain of Sand.” The meeting’s topic was the role of scale in various disciplines—a theme that could capitalize on the wide-ranging interests of the diverse group of speakers and attendees. Dividing up our observations into different-sized categories so that we can make sense of and organize them and piece them back together was a subject to which our panel—consisting of a physicist, an architectural critic, and an English professor—could all contribute in interesting ways.

In her opening talk, the literary critic and poet Linda Gregerson described the universe as “sublime.” The word precisely captures what makes the universe so wonderful and so frustrating at the same time. A great deal seems beyond our reach and our comprehension, while still appearing to be close enough to tantalize us—to dare us to enter and understand. The challenge for all approaches to knowledge is to make those less accessible aspects of the universe more immediate, more understandable, and ultimately less foreign. People want to learn to read and understand the book of nature and accommodate those lessons into the comprehensible world.

Humanity employs different methods and strives toward contrasting goals in the attempt to unravel the mysteries of life and the world. Art, science, and religion—though they might involve common creative impulses—offer distinct means and methods of approach toward bridging the gaps in our understanding.

So before returning to the world of modern physics, the remainder of this part of the book contrasts these various ways of thinking, introduces some historical context for the science-religion debate, and presents at least one aspect of that debate that won’t ever be resolved. In examining these issues, we’ll explore science’s materialist and mechanistic premises—an essential feature of a scientific approach to knowledge. In all likelihood, those who are at extreme ends of the spectrum won’t change their minds, but this discussion might nonetheless help in more precisely identifying the roots of the differences.

THE SCALE OF THE UNKNOWN

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke rather dramatically captured the paradox at the heart of our feelings when faced with the sublime when he wrote: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.”
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In her Salt Lake City talk, Linda Gregerson addressed the sublime in subtle, illuminating, and somewhat less intimidating words. She elaborated on Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the beautiful, which “would have us believe we are made for this universe and it for us” and the sublime, which is far more scary. Gregerson described how people feel “apprehension in beholding the sublime” because it seems to be “a poorer fit”—less suited to human interactions and perceptions.

The word “sublime” reemerged in 2009 in discussions of music, art, and science with my collaborators on a physics-based opera about these themes. For our conductor, Clement Power, particular pieces of music occasionally achieved the epitome of simultaneous terror and beauty with which others had defined it. Sublime music for Clement was at a pinnacle beyond his usual powers of comprehension—resisting ready interpretation or explanation.

The sublime proffers scales and poses questions that just might lie beyond our intellectual reach. It is for these reasons both terrifying and compelling. The range of the sublime changes over time as the scales we are comfortable with cover an increasingly large domain. But at any given moment, we still want to gain insights about behavior or events at scales far too small or far too large for us to readily comprehend.

Our universe is in many respects sublime. It prompts wonder but can be daunting—even frightening—in its complexity. Nonetheless, the components fit together in marvelous ways. Art, science, and religion all aim to channel people’s curiosity and enlighten us by pushing the frontiers of our understanding. They promise, in their different ways, to help transcend the narrow confines of individual experience and allow us to enter into—and comprehend—the realm of the sublime. (See Figure 11.)

Art allows us to explore the universe through a filter of human perceptions and emotions. It examines how our senses access the world and what we can learn from this interaction—highlighting how people participate in and observe the universe around us. Art is very much a function of human beings, giving us a clearer view of our intuitions and how we as people perceive the world. Unlike science, it is not seeking objective truths that transcend human interactions. Art has to do with our physical and emotional responses to the external world, bearing directly on internal experiences, needs, and capacities that science might never reach.

[
FIGURE 11
]
Caspar David Friedrich’s
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
(1818), an iconic painting of the sublime—a recurring theme in art and music.

Science, on the other hand, seeks objective and verifiable truth about the world. It is interested in the elements of which the universe is composed and how those elements interact. Although referring to his trade of forensic investigation, Sherlock Holmes admirably described science’s methodology in his inimitable style when he advised Dr. Watson: “Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid… The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it.”
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