Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas by Steven Poole

Author:Steven Poole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Inventions, Personal Growth, Philosophy, Popular Culture, Science, Self-Help, Social, Social History, Social Science, Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9781473519152
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-06-29T03:00:00+00:00

Against principles

Much later, Copernicus’s name was borrowed for a guiding scientific assumption known as the Copernican Principle. Just as Copernicus himself had demoted Earth’s place in the grand scheme of things by removing it from the centre of the solar system, so the Copernican Principle says that we – along with our solar system – don’t inhabit any particularly special place in the universe as a whole. We just happen to find our unremarkable star in an unremarkable part of an unremarkable galaxy. What we see around us is a perfectly ordinary part of the universe. There’s nothing privileged about where we live. This is a good working assumption – unless one day we find that it isn’t.

Modern science is underlain by a lot of such assumptions, but they should always be open to question. A bold recognition of the provisional nature of scientific assumptions was a feature, for example, of the revolution in physics in the early twentieth century, with its bizarre ideas that subatomic phenomena could be both waves and particles at the same time, and its overarching notion that reality was probabilistic rather than strictly determined. Albert Einstein famously objected to the latter idea by asking the quantum pioneer Niels Bohr whether he really thought that God played dice. Bohr remembered later that Einstein ‘expressed a feeling of disquietude as regards the apparent lack of firmly laid down principles for the explanation of nature’, while Bohr himself thought that ‘we could hardly trust in any accustomed principles’ save that of logical consistency.9

Another scientific assumption widely shared today is that the laws of nature are the same across space and time. The strength of the gravitational force, or the rate of atomic decay of uranium – these things are the same at the other end of the universe as they are here, and billions of years ago they were the same as they are now. It sounds commonsensical. Which ought to be our first alarm bell. In fact, this too is just an assumption.

For a start, speaking in general philosophical terms, it’s not clear what ‘laws of nature’ really are. The phrase is a metaphor taken from human society, where laws are written statutes that are obeyed or ignored as people choose. It is then applied to the cosmos, where subatomic particles and the rest have no choice but to obey these laws. Indeed, they cannot be ignored, on pain of their no longer being laws. But where do these ‘laws’ exist? In some Platonic realm? How does matter know how to follow them? (How easy it is to revive teleology and panpsychism at this point.)

The phrase ‘laws of nature’ originated in the seventeenth century, and it meant laws that God imposed upon reality. The chemist (and alchemist) Robert Boyle, for example, wrote: ‘The Wisdome […] of God does […] confine the Creatures to the establish’d Laws of Nature.’10 Isaac Newton discovered the laws of motion and gravitation that he believed had been set down at the beginning of time by the Creator.

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