I only knew why I’d been driven to write You Are Here some months after I’d actually completed it. At the time, I was too busy worrying if I could write at all. And if not worrying about that, worrying about how I was ever going to organise the ridiculously free-ranging material I’d collected. Actually, it was the working out of a structure for the book that distracted me from the fear of writing it. Once I knew what I had to say, I just got on with saying it. Seems like an obvious strategy, but it took me by surprise. (In that perennial argument about style versus content I’ve always been a style man. I can’t imagine how a writer who knows how to say something hasn’t also got something to say. Whereas the reverse is certainly not the case. Plenty to say but no style: no thanks.)
I’ve always been interested in science. As an editor at Fourth Estate, I worked with many science writers: Simon Singh, Matt Ridley, Peter Singer, V S Ramachandran, Peter Forbes, Marcus Du Sautoy, Henry Gee, Timothy Taylor, James Gleick, Eric Drexler, and Dava Sobel, among them. Some of these writers are also actual scientists. I am not a scientist of course, and it’s over thirty years since I read mathematics, and then history and philosophy of science at university. I never thought I’d end up writing a science book myself. Not in a million years (or even a billion years now that we know what a really long time looks like). Despite my science-based education, I’ve always felt like an outsider from the world of the arts daring to peek in. I haven’t had a mathematical thought since I left university, and even during those years long gone, I spent most of my time reading novels and going to the opera. (Mathematics is the perfect subject for the lazy student.) I like that thing Auden said about scientists, that whenever he found himself in their company he felt like some shabby curate who had stumbled into a drawing-room full of dukes. There’s something about the way scientists think that can be really intimidating. It’s hard to live in a world in which even one’s most casual remarks are liable to be scrutinised for logical inconsistency.
What really interests me, and interests very few scientists, is what it is that they are doing when they do science, and whether it leaves room for anything else. Scientists are just happy to get on with what it is that they do. And very successful they are at it too. But I’m interested in the philosophy of what that is. On the whole, scientists despise philosophers. As the biologist Steve Jones once remarked: ‘philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex.’ He’s not being complimentary.
Science really got going 401 years ago when Galileo first raised a telescope to the Heavens and described what he saw there. What he saw was a reality made out of things that move. Science tells us what the stuff of reality is made out of, and what we mean by motion. It turns out that it is hard to answer these questions. The material of reality takes us on a voyage down to ‘virtual’ particles that exist (if they can be said to exist) in a so-called vacuum of writhing energy. And what we mean by motion takes us in both directions: out into a possibly infinite universe in which all motion is related to the motion of light in a four-dimensional space-time continuum, and back down to a quantum world in which the motion of even a single atom is unpredictable (and where space and time may exist in 11 dimensions). But for all the subtlety of our current scientific theories, the story of creation can be reduced to a single sentence: The universe is a patch of radiation that expanded. Alternatively, we can say that the universe is a patch of radiation that evolved. The expansion and evolution are equivalent terms. Evolve is merely what radiation does in an expanding universe. Various fields, including the famous Higgs field, explain how radiation becomes matter. As the expanding space cools down, these primeval parts of matter coalesce into atoms, and eventually under the force of gravity into large agglomerations that ignite, and which we call stars. Some of the larger stars explode and spew heavier elements into the universe for the first time. Simple compounds like water and carbon dioxide emerge, and other more complicated molecules like hydrocarbons. And if the conditions are just so on small planets that are not too cold, and not too hot, with just the right sort of gravitational stability, and protected from damaging radiation by a strong enough magnetic field, then just possibly these conditions are fair for life to emerge. These so-called goldilocks conditions have existed at least once in the universe, and perhaps exist prolifically across it. The jury is still out on that one. An opinion either way has to be a matter of belief at this point.
Science is about separating and naming, and looking and describing. Science isolates phenomena and names them before it attempts to describe them. The world is a world ‘out there’ of separateness. This is very different from, say, a Buddhist description of nature, which tells us that the separation is an illusion. Curiously, the different stances aren’t as far apart as it seems. What science does is relate separate phenomena together into descriptions, or theories. Science advances by relating more and more things together into a unified whole. The methodology is one thing, and what comes out of the methodology something else altogether. If you like, the methodology is the illusion, and the wholeness the reality. Such a philosophical understanding of what it is that science does, also helps to explain why science can make us feels so isolated from nature. The separation is the starting point, but not the end point. Ultimately, science has to account for us - we human observers - at the end (as far as we can tell) of a chain of complexity that stretches from the Big Bang to what we call ‘now,’ the present moment. After four hundred years science has only just begun to understand how to address such complexity as we are.
Science has a methodology that it uses to approach the truth. Observation, measurement, theory and technology feed into each other into a positive feedback loop that we call progress. Finer measurement leads to deeper theorising. Theories come and go, each encompassing the one that precedes it, showing where the previous theory holds and why it breaks down. The current theory is always truer than the one that came before because it has greater explanatory power. Science moves from true to truer. It’s great strength is that it never has to use the demon word ‘truth’. There is no such thing in science as ‘the truth’ only theories that are truer than what has gone before.
In his wonderful The God Delusion Dawkins distinguishes between deists, theists and atheists. For atheists there is nothing other than the evolution of stuff. Theists believe that God created and continues to interfere in his creation. And for deists, God created the universe and stepped back from his creation. Dawkins writes of his youthful attraction to deism, before his later adherence to full-blown atheism. In typical Dawkins fashion he is most scornful of those who claim to be agnostic. He tells us that science has no need of a creator only an explanation of the universe’s starting conditions. Well, I don’t see how this gets us very far. The starting conditions merely get more elusive, as indeed does the universe itself, the more we know about those conditions. God simply has got nothing to do with a scientific description of the universe, the only real question is whether one believes, or not, that a scientific description is all that there is.
Well, there’s art. Here’s Peter Campbell writing in the London Review of Books about the current exhibition of Henry Moore at Tate Britain:
‘Yet it is the sense one has when faced with ancient or exotic things that there is something beyond what can be grasped by mere inspection, if only some priest or shaman could give the correct interpretations, that makes the obscure impressive. We don’t necessarily need to know what things mean, but we do like to think they mean something: we want to know what Stonehenge was for.
No modern sculpture is embedded in systems of belief of that sort. With Moore you must look to your own responses for explanations of what you see and feel.’
Agnosticism is the acknowledgement that there things - most things I would say - that are beyond what can be understood, and always will be. A certain kind of rationalist will put aside the unknown and be happy to wait for a rational, scientific description later. I say, if we wait too long we might forget what the questions are that we don’t know the answers to. I’m happy to stand up for agnostics.
To read an extract of You Are Here, click on the window below:
