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Frank Munley, munley@weebly.com

ESSAY 1:
MIND AND MATTER
A. Introduction: Subjective and Objective
Colour and sound, hot and cold are our immediate sensations;
small wonder that they are lacking in a world model from which we have
removed our own mental person. Erwin Schrödinger, Mind and Matter 1

Imagine we take a hike to McAfee Knob on the Appalachian Trail. At the top, we stand near the
edge of a cliff about 40 meters (130 feet) high. Weʼre both cautious because we know that a fall from the
cliff will surely cause very serious injury or death. Clearly, the danger of a fall is not a matter of taste or
opinion--it is based on an objective assessment of what happens when a hunk of matter--one of which
could be you or me--collides with the ground at high speed.

On the way down from the top, I gaze upon a wild rhododendron and am struck by the
arrangement and blending of its dazzling colors, the graceful shape of the flower, and the setting of the
flower among the leaves of the plant. You see the same flower I do, and thatʼs the objective part of our
shared experience. And yes, the colors are pretty and the setting is nice, etc., but so what? The
rhododendron just might not evoke much of an emotional response in you. Clearly, an individualʼs
emotional reaction to a rhododendron is subjective, i.e., in the mind--it is opinion rather than fact, even
though we both agree that there is an objectively real rhododendron in sight. Dream experiences, on the
other hand, are purely subjective. While dreaming, we are absolutely convinced our experiences are real
only to find upon waking that itʼs all “just a dream.” Nevertheless, the dream experience and the
emotional response to the rhododendron are subjective in precisely the same way: the emotional
experience is uniquely ours. Other examples of subjective experiences are a flowerʼs smell, the taste of a
vegetable, and the appreciation of a work of music or literature, because in each case thereʼs always the
possibility that two reasonable people might substantially differ in their essentially subjective appreciation.

Letʼs explore a little more deeply the subjective nature of our reactions to a flower and how they
differ from our understanding of the danger of falling 40 meters. I wonder if you donʼt appreciate the
rhododendron because you see it differently than I do. After all, from the point of view of science, your
subjective experience of the flower is caused by a series of objective events. Specifically, light energy
comes into your eyes, whereupon it is converted to nervous impulses which then cause a reaction in your
brain which finally causes your conscious experience of the flower. Think of the brain as a collection of a
hundred billion special cells called neurons, which are interconnected in a pattern of bewildering
complexity. If your brain is different than mine, i.e., if the number and arrangement of your neurons and
the connections between them are different, then your subjective experience of the flower might be
different too. And for the same reason, you might have a deep emotional reaction to a Haydn symphony
while I would be totally nonplussed. Taken to an extreme, it might even be possible that my experience of
what I call a brilliant pink color is experienced by you as a kind of unappealing muddy brown color of no
special beauty, even if you are not color-blind; and I might not be able to perceive the multiple
counterpoints in a Bach fugue that you can. How can I ever know that your experience of the
rhododendron's color is different than mine? As a child, you were taught to use the word "pink" to
describe that muddy brown color you see because that's the word everybody uses to describe the color of
something the same color as the rhododendron. So the only thing we can be sure of is that we agree on
the word to use to name this color.

1
Erwin Schrödinger, “The Principle of Objectivation,” in What is Life? & Mind and Matter
(Cambridge University Press, London, 1969), p. 128. Schrödinger’s term will be spelled
“objectivization” in what follows.
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The danger of a fall from 40 meters is another story. Weʼve both been hurt by falls in our
lifetimes; perhaps we know friends or relatives who have been seriously injured or killed in automobile
accidents. The effect of a high-speed impact between material bodies is not a matter of opinion; it does
not depend upon the way our neurons are connected; it is an objective fact. This is not to deny that there
is an emotional, i.e., subjective, aspect to our approach to the edge of the cliff, because caution is an
emotion. But our common judgment of the consequences of a fall is based on objective evidence.

Humanities and sciences are distinguished mainly by their “subjective” and “objective” characters.
Appreciation of art, music, drama, literature, history and languages (particularly the cultures which speak
the languages) are concerned largely with the subjective human experience--the tragedy, joy, defeat,
love, hate, victory, wonderment, struggle, and pain which make human life so interesting and important.
Reasonable people can certainly differ regarding their subjective judgments of, say, a chapter of human
history or the aesthetic value of a work of art. But at the same time there is widespread and well-founded
agreement on some points, e.g., the importance of the Renaissance in world history or the artistic value of
Leonardo da Vinciʼs Mona Lisa, so the humanities arenʼt completely subjective.

Of course, general agreement about something doesnʼt guarantee that it comprises objective
knowledge. For example, at one time almost everyone believed the sun revolved around Earth, but we
know objectively that it is Earth that revolves around the sun. But in the case of the Renaissance, the
magnitude of the event and the historical consequences which flowed from it tend to command agreement
on its importance, so although reasonable people might differ on the precise importance, there are very
few if any who would claim its triviality. In this sense, the Renaissance was an objectively important
event, although the degree of objectivity doesnʼt match that of a truly scientific statement.

The actual occurrence of the Renaissance is even more objective than its importance, because
the wealth of historical evidence for it, and the integrity of that evidence, command our agreement that it
really occurred and is not just a fictitious story passed off as real. The Mona Lisa, on the other hand, may
be best appreciated by someone with an understanding of Western culture, so its value, while objective,
is of a lesser degree. These examples illustrate that there are degrees of objectivity, and it is a mistake to
deny some degree of objectivity to the humanities.

Science deals consistently with happenings which have a high degree of objectivity. The
devastating effects which follow the triggering of a nuclear weapon are not a matter of opinion, and it
would be the height of foolishness to think so. But like the humanities, science is the product of human
effort, and it would be surprising if it werenʼt also subjective to some extent. As the quote by the great
quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger at the beginning of this section suggests, the beginning point of all
human knowledge is subjective, starting from the tactile feelings of a fetus to the dazzling splash of colors
experienced by a newborn, to the slow but sure development in the child of senses of three-dimensional
space and inner time within which sense impressions and memories are organized, and finally on to the
powers of reflection and wonder of the mature adult. But the goal of science is to “objectivize” this
everyday view of the world by stripping away, as much as possible, any subjective aspects of experience
and organizing what is left into a more objective scientific-mathematical framework of space and time.
For example, we both look at a flower and note a certain color in it; our subjective appreciations of the
color may be very different, but for science the color is reducible to a length--specifically, a wavelength of
visible light. About this wavelength there can be no serious disagreement, so science has objectivized
the color by investigating its physical nature. Of course, by doing so, science also eliminates what
appeals to most people about a color--its appearance to them.

Science may successively objectivize our subjective experience, but the raw stuff from which its
concepts are constructed will always be subjective impressions and thoughts, especially visual perception
of space and inner sense of time, so science cannot be totally objective. Our perceptions are filtered
through our cultural, psychological, and biological faculties, and as these faculties progress through
evolution, it is quite possible that our progeny in the distant future will be capable of perceiving and
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comprehending not just physical, but also philosophical and psychological aspects of reality that are
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presently beyond us.

The challenge is to study the subjective and objective contents of science so that the similarities
and differences between science and humanities can be more properly understood.

B. Cultural Conflict
Science is the noblest of the arts and men of science the most artistic of all artists. For science,
like art, seeks to attain aesthetic satisfaction through the perceptions of the senses; and science, like art,
is limited by the impositions of the material world on which it works. The lesser art accepts those
limitations; it is content to imitate or to describe Nature and to follow where she leads. The greater
refuses to be bound; it imposes itself upon Nature and forces her to submit to its power. Norman Robert
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Campbell, Foundations of Science.

Humanities and sciences form separate cultures not just because the subject matter differs, but
also because creative work in each field requires different habits of thought and views about the world at
large. The subjective/objective split between the two cultures has led to conflict and even disrespect, with
some scientists thinking of humanists as soft-headed, emotional, and incapable of rigorous thinking and
some humanists thinking of scientists as coldly calculating unimaginative fact-gatherers who are naïvely
optimistic and unaware of the terms of the human condition. Even when a scientist recognizes the
subjective aspects of science, as in the quote heading this section, there can be a tendency to indulge in
a sort of scientific chauvinism which claims that science is the “noblest of the arts,” the “greater” of the
two.

A notorious example of the conflict occurred in 1996 when physicist Alan Sokal spoofed a special
issue of the social science magazine Social Text, devoted to “deconstructing” science. Deconstruction in
this case involved showing that scientific theories of reality are nothing but a fashion of the time,
influenced largely by cultural beliefs and prejudices rather than by the objective behavior of nature. In this
view, scientific “truth” is not objective to any great degree but is primarily opinion. There is certainly a
small degree of validity to this claim, and it is large enough for the issue to have been seriously addressed
over the years by quantum physicist and Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger and a number of other
scientists. But like most valid ideas, this one has been exaggerated by some social scientists to the point
that the true nature of science is completely distorted.

Sokalʼs spoof consisted of submitting to the journal an article, "Transgressing the Boundaries:
Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which he knew was, by any scientific
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standard, pure silliness. He claimed, for example, that a very abstract theory of physics called quantum
gravity has something to do with biological “morphogenic fields” (an idea far out on the edge of
speculative biology), and that quantum field theory, a well-established branch of modern physics, has
something to do with psychoanalysis, claims which anyone with training in physics would recognize as
absurd. Sokal went so far as to claim that physical reality itself, and not just the physicist's theoretical
conception of it, is a “social and linguistic construct.” Sokal wanted to make fools of the editors, and they
all-too-willingly fell into his trap by publishing his article presumably because it supported their own
idiosyncratic ideas. The sad aspect of this episode is that by publishing Sokalʼs spoof, the magazineʼs
editors did a disservice to the articles in the special issue which really had something serious to say about
cultural influences on the practice of science.

2
Ditfurth, H. von, The Origins of Life: Evolution as creation , trans. by Peter Heinegg (Harper & Row, New York,
1982). Ditfurth expounds this idea, drawing parallels between the future consequences of evolution for science and
its impact on religion.
3
N.R. Campbell, Foundations of Physics (Dover, New York, 1957; a republication of Physics: the Elements,
Cambridge University Press, London, 1919), pp. 227-228.
4
The word :hermeneutics" in the title is a study of the methodology of interpretation and explanation, e.g., a study
of the methods used to interpret the Bible.
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The perspective of this essay, which sees the main difference between science and humanities
as an objective/subjective one, could itself be a source of conflict if it is taken to mean that humanistic
scholarship is “just a matter of opinion, just relative.” As mentioned in the previous section, the
humanities are not totally subjective since even a piece of art or music can have a degree of objectivity
as evidenced by widespread agreement that the work is significant.

Nowhere is the charge of relativism in the humanities more damaging than in ethics, where
decisions have objective consequences oftentimes of a life-and-death nature. To claim that ethical
judgements are “just a matter of opinion” is to consign ourselves to a future bereft of social cooperation
and civility, and threatened by chaos and violence. Compassion, desire for love and respect, and
revulsion to wanton harm, while essentially subjective in nature, are so deeply rooted in our psyches and
culture, and perhaps even in our genetic makeup, that the traditional ethical norms which protect these
sentiments are imbued with a strongly objective character.

Some humanists might claim that the social interactions of human beings, which form much of the
subject matter of the humanities, are far more complex than the physical and chemical workings of nature
which science studies. If true, the proper distinction between science and humanities would be
“simple/complex” rather than “objective/subjective.” This is an interesting and important claim which
deserves consideration.

If by "complex" is meant "unpredictable and hence incomprehensible," then the humanities are
certainly more complex. Human beings, being free and creative agents, certainly exhibit a wider range of
behavior than inanimate matter or sub-human living organisms do. One can spend a lifetime getting to
know another person or even oneself, so deep and unpredictable is the reality of personhood. But just as
it is incorrect to think that science is totally objective and humanities subjective, so it would be a source of
unnecessary conflict to exaggerate the differences between the two regarding complexity and freedom.
For example, is our modern scientific understanding of nature really simpler than the insights the
humanities bring to the human condition? Certainly not in its intellectual and creative dimensions, which
only minds of particular inclination are able to grasp. (Of course, science has no monopoly on intellectual
and creative complexity; it shares with the humanities the dubious distinction that its great achievements
fail to be adopted by popular culture and are even held in contempt by a fashionable anti-intellectualism.)
And are humans really so free and unpredictable compared to the rest of the natural world? Judging from
the advertising industry's ability to promote wasteful consumer fads by using sophisticated psychological
techniques, the ability of governments around the world to whip their citizens into war-like frenzies, and
increasing realization that various mental dispositions are, at least to some degree, chemically and
genetically based, there appears to be a predictable if subtle side to human behavior which forms the
common themes of great literature and art but which is also amenable to scientific investigation.

Part of the complexity of the humanities arises because it is deeply concerned with subjective
personal experiences or past events, i.e., unique occurrences with a historical record less complete than
we'd like. Because of their uniqueness, they cannot be repeated and hence are not subject to controlled
scientific experimentation. For example, the decision to bomb Hiroshima was made only once by a
collection of people with diverse and complex motivations, and only the incomplete historical record
remains. A similar situation holds in ethics. Moral judgements can be properly made only if we know the
motives of the judged. But motives, like feelings, are quintessentially subjective, so we can never directly
experience or intimately know another person's motives. Consequently, we must often be content to infer
motives by carefully studying outward behavior--a not impossible task but one fraught with difficulty as the
imperfections and occasional false convictions and even death penalties in our criminal justice system
attest to. But science too must sometimes operate in the face of incomplete knowledge and an inability to
perform repeatable experiments. This is particularly true in the theory of evolution, astrophysics, and
geology, because it is impossible to re-run the history of life, of a star, or of Earth's geology. Even in
laboratory science, where experiments consistently produce repeatable results, the inability and even
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impossibility of obtaining sufficiently accurate data forces us to describe systems only statistically
(especially at the microscopic level--see Essay 2 of this series) , much as scholars studying people and
their cultures are often forced to do.

Clearly, the difference in complexity between science and humanities can be exaggerated, but at
the same time it can be reasonably argued that, on balance, human actions and the subjective
experiences which underlie them have a hiddenness and complexity which, by some vague measure,
may surpass that of science. This argues for adopting the "simple/complex" distinction between the two,
but the "subjective/objective" one still seems more desirable for the following two reasons. First, the
greater complexity of the humanities is already implied by the "subjective/objective" distinction, because
when subjective taste, opinion, and creativity are given free rein (i.e., unbeholden to empirical testing),
there is bound to be less predictability than in scientific thought which strives to conform its ideas to the
objective behavior of the world. And second, the subjective/objective distinction focuses on the crucial
difference in methodology between the two: science strives to discover the objective content of our
subjective impressions of the world, while the humanities focus on the meaning of the subjective
experiences themselves.

The science/humanities conflict is not new. Its roots go back at least to the Renaissance, when
Copernicus feared to publish his sun-centered model of the solar system and Galileo was put under
house arrest for his support of Copernicus. A particularly influential analysis of the conflict was publicized
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by C.P. Snow more than thirty years ago in his book The Two Cultures. Snow, a scientist and novelist,
had a foot in both camps and was well-suited to analyze the conflict and its consequences. He
perspicuously pointed out that the solution of the worldʼs major problems, such as peace and poverty,
require the gap between science and humanities to be bridged; no citizen can afford to be ignorant of
either.

Snow emphasized that modern professional life is characterized by an extreme degree of

specialization not just between the sciences and humanities but within each of these two categories. How
many physicists, for example, are familiar with the intricacies of molecular biology? How many biologists
can appreciate the physics of transistors and other electronic devices which are commonly used in
biologistsʼ laboratories? And just because someone writes a great literary work, does that insure that he
or she will comprehend the deeper aspects of a work of art or music drama? Of course not. So maybe
the gap between the humanities and sciences is a consequence of specialization. And just as there is a
commonality of method and perspective between physicists and biologists, or between artists and
novelists, perhaps there is more common ground between the sciences and humanities than most people
think. Let us seek to discover such a common ground.

5
C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look (Cambridge University Press, first part 1959, second part 1964).
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ESSAY 2: METAPHOR, BEAUTY, AND CREATIVITY

At the leading edge of experience in philosophy, science
and feeling there is inevitably a groping for language to translate
the insecure novelty of noticing and understanding into a
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precision of meaning and imagery. Frank Oppenheimer

A. Science and Humanities

A hallmark of the humanities is the use of metaphor, i.e., the recognition and exploration of
similarities between essentially different things. Skillful use of metaphor can help a writer or painter
enhance and deepen the message or image being conveyed. Take, for example, the following line from
Shakespeareʼs Romeo and Juliet, uttered by Romeo as an expression of his feelings about Julietʼs death:

Death that hath suckt the honey of thy breath.

This exquisitely beautiful expression is analyzed by Jacob Bronowski in his influential book Science and
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Human Values. Like C.P. Snow, Bronowski, a scientist and a poet in his own right, was well-prepared to
constructively analyze the gap between science and humanities. He writes of the foregoing Shakespeare
quote:

“...the sting of death was a commonplace phrase when Shakespeare wrote. The sting
is there, under the image; Shakespeare has packed it into the word honey; but the very
word rides powerfully over its own undertones. Death is a bee that stings other people,
but it comes to Juliet as if she were a flower; this is the moving thought under the
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instant image. The creative mind speaks in such thoughts.”

Bronowski sheds further light on Shakespeareʼs phrase by reminding us of the great poet Coleridgeʼs
definition of beauty as “unity in variety.” Shakespeare has skillfully taken two opposing ideas, the
sweetness of honey and the association of a bee with the sting of death, and welded them into a moving
and beautiful thought about the death of Juliet.

Beauty and creative metaphor--what have they to do with science? Precious little, according to
most non-scientists and many scientists too. But such is the complexity and subtlety of nature that
scientists are often at a loss for words to describe it, whereupon they must follow the lead of the poet and
rely on metaphor. For our first example of scientific metaphor, consider Sir Isaac Newtonʼs discovery of
the law of universal gravitation. The story is well-known: Newton, a student at Cambridge University in
England, had to flee to his familyʼs farm when an outbreak of the plague forced the school to close down.
“Far from the madding crowd,” Newton had time aplenty to ponder the world about him, and his efforts
paid off handsomely. In that fecund period and following years, he performed a number of important
optical experiments, succeeded in developing a complete system of mechanics, invented a form of
calculus, and in his crowning achievement he discovered the law of universal gravitation. This law states
that all material bodies--you, me, Earth, mountain, sun, moon, and distant star--attract each other. Of
course, we feel an attraction to Earth; this is the well-known phenomenon of gravity. But we canʼt feel a
physical force from another person, much less the moon and sun which are much more distant, because
the forces are too tiny to be detected. How, then, did Newton reason to such a far-reaching law?

Newton describes how he was sitting in an orchard and a falling apple set him to thinking about
the moon. What makes it travel in a curved, circular path around Earth, he wondered. A daunting

1
Introduction to a series of readings at The Exploratorium on "The language of poetry and Science," quoted in K.C.
Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on physics as a way of life (William Morrow & Co., New York, 1985).
2
Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values, Revised ed. (Harper & Row, New York, 1965), p. 16.
3
Ibid., p. 16.
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question, since the phenomenon of gravity itself lacked a truly complete explanation until Albert Einsteinʼs
great work on general relativity in 1915, long after Newton. “At a loss for words,” Newton grasped for a
metaphor. His creative moment was primed by a daring thought: the moon is no different in its material
substance from the apple, and the same force which causes the apple to fall might also reach out into
distant space to affect the moon. David Bohm, the famous quantum physicist, describes Newtonʼs insight
as a metaphor which says, in stark form, THE MOON IS AN APPLE, or as a simile, THE MOON IS LIKE
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AN APPLE. Just as the apple falls to Earth, so the moon must fall too! But the moon never gets closer
to Earth, so how can it be falling? Newton understood why: the moonʼs horizontal motion parallel to
Earthʼs surface is unhindered by gravity which pulls perpendicular to the horizontal, i.e., towards Earthʼs
center. This horizontal motion, in the complete absence of gravity, would by itself carry the moon farther
from Earth as shown in Figure 1. On the other hand gravity, in the absence of horizontal motion, would
cause the moon to fall closer to Earth. When horizontal motion and gravity are both present in the proper
proportions, the tendency of the horizontal motion to carry the moon farther from Earth is exactly balanced
by gravityʼs tendency to pull the moon closer. In this case, the two opposing tendencies cause the moon
to fall around Earth while never getting closer to it.

Newton's discovery of the law of gravity illustrates Coleridgeʼs “unity in variety”: the moon and
apple appear to be very different, but in their common responses to Earthʼs gravity there is a most
wonderful, indeed beautiful, unity between them. In search of an even greater unity, Newton generalized
his “moon is apple” metaphor to include any two bodies in the universe: you are an apple, Earth is an
apple, and the moon is Earth, so that everything attracts everything else. Newton and his contemporaries
realized that the universality of gravitational attraction means that so-called “heavenly” objects are made
of the same sort of “stuff” as the apple is, and hence must exhibit common properties such as gravitation.
Today, Newtonʼs metaphor has lost much of its grandeur because we take for granted that moon, Earth,
planets, stars, and galaxies, are all made of common stuff, viz., the atomic elements. This more recent
atomic insight also portrays a beautiful unity--we are part of the far-flung universe in an intimate way, and
not below or above it. But in Newtonʼs time, the traditional view that the moon and other heavenly objects
were fundamentally different from Earth was still a lingering dogma, and Newtonʼs metaphor is a
testament to his courage and the skill of his intellect.

The “moon is Earth” twist of the basic “moon is an apple” metaphor also means the moon must
attract Earth, and an exploration of this metaphorically-based insight lead Newton to an explanation of
Earthʼs ocean tides in terms of the difference between the pulls of the moon on the oceans on the near
and far sides of Earth. Turned around, the tidal effect of Earth on moon serves to explain why the “man in
the moon” is always looking at Earth, i.e., why the moon always keeps the same side towards Earth as it
goes around its monthly orbit. (See Figure 2.)

4
David Bohm and F. David Peat, Science, Order, and Creativity (Bantam Books, New York, 1987), p. 33.
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horizontal vertical circular

motion motion motion
Figure 1: The moonʼs orbital motion is a combination of horizontal
motion and vertical (falling) motion. The horizontalmotion tends to carry
the moon farther from Earth, while the falling motion carries it closer.
Acting together, thesetendencies balance out and create a circular orbit.

Another interesting example of physics metaphor concerns the phenomenon of heat. Rub your
hands together for a minute or so and they will not just feel hot, they will actually be hotter (have a friend
feel them). Clearly, the rubbing motion produces heat, and in a metaphorical sense we might say that
HEAT IS MOTION. The same concepts which apply to an ordinary moving body, such as speed,
acceleration, kinetic energy, and momentum, should then apply to warm bodies such as your hands,
even if you place them at rest after rubbing them together. The question then arises: what moves in a hot
body which, from all appearances, is sitting at rest? The answer is found in the kinetic theory of heat,
which states that it is the warm bodyʼs molecules that are moving: the temperature of an object sitting at
rest and exhibiting no apparent motion at all is determined by the speed of its “hidden” molecules, as
shown in Figure 3. To heat something up is to add energy of motion to the molecules, i.e., to make them
move faster; and likewise, to cool something down is to remove energy and make the molecules move
slower. Clearly, an object canʼt be colder than it is when all molecular

Figure 2: Tidal effects cause the moon to always show the same side to
earth.
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Figure 3: A warm object appears to be at rest, but its

molecules are moving.

motion ceases, and this leads to the idea of an absolutely lowest temperature. The modern Kelvin
temperature scale has its “absolute zero” point at this coldest state of no molecular motion. (The zero
point on the Kelvin scale is minus 273 degrees Celsius or minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit--very cold
indeed.)

The “heat is motion” metaphor is, like gravitation, beautiful in Coleridgeʼs sense that unity has
been discovered in the face of diversity. Unity appears in the guise of concepts such as speed,
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acceleration, mass, and kinetic energy which origina ted to describe the properties of visible human-size
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objects in motion but also apply to an objectʼs hidden molecules even though the object as a whole can
sit motionless in front of us. Further development of the metaphor allows a wealth of experimental data
concerning gases, solids, and liquids to be understood. The studentʼs discovery of this unity provides an
“Ah-ha!” experience similar to the original discoverer/creatorʼs joy of enlightenment. Norman Robert
Campbell gives eloquent expression to the commonality of experience between discoverer and student:

Nobody who has any portion of the scientific spirit can fail to remember times
when he has thrilled to a new discovery as if it were his own. He has greeted a
new theory with the passionate exclamation, It must be true! He has felt that its
eternal value is beyond all reasoning, that it is to be defended, if need be, not by
the cold-blooded methods of the laboratory or the soulless processes of formal
logic, but, like the honour of a friend, by simple affirmation and eloquent appeal.
The mood will and should pass; the impersonal inquiry must be made before the
new ideas can be admitted to our complete confidence. But in that one moment
we have known the real meaning of science, we have experienced its highest
value; unless such knowledge and such experience were possible, science would
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be without meaning and therefore without truth.

Jacob Bronowski recognizes a similar process in the humanities when he emphasizes that
sincere appreciation of an artistic work (artistic in the broad sense, i.e., including literature, drama, etc.)
requires the reading or viewing audience to re-enact the creative process--to experience the artistic
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creatorʼs insights. Deeper appreciation requires a serious study of what others think of an artistic work,
as reflected in commentaries and scholarly articles. And so it is in science: to truly appreciate the
significance of an explanation, the student must undergo a creative “Ah-ha!” discovery process similar to
5
Molecules can be seen only in solid materials with the help of the most sophisticated equipment, and even then
their exact positions are somewhat blurred out by their rapid vibratory motions.
6
N.R. Campbell, Foundations of Physics (Dover, New York, 1957; a republication of Physics: the Elements,
Cambridge University Press, first part 1959, second part 1964), pp. 228-229.
7
Bronowski, op. cit., p. 19.
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that of the original scientist, and must also strive through serious study for a deepened appreciation of it.

A number of other examples of metaphors used in the creative processes of science can be
given. For example, both sound and light exhibit many of the properties of waves. But unlike the more
familiar waves on a string or the water waves shown in Figure 4, sound and light waves canʼt be directly
seen, and this “failure of vision” raises the possibility that we cannot know their precise nature in
everyday terms. Sound waves turn out to be simply pressure variations in air, but as weʼll see later on,
the true nature of light continues to elude us. The wave nature of sound was suspected much earlier, in
the first century BCE by the Roman architect Pollio, and today we understand sound to be literally, and
not just metaphorically, a wave. But todayʼs literal truth shouldnʼt obscure the fact that the initial act of
discovery required imaginative thinking rooted in the creative metaphor that SOUND IS A WAVE.

In the case of light, the potential usefulness of the wave concept lead Christian Huygens of the
Netherlands in the 17th century to postulate that LIGHT IS A WAVE, thus contradicting Newtonʼs particle
theory of light. Another example of unexpected unity, this time involving light, was discovered about 150
years ago by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell who cast the laws governing the behavior of
electric and magnetic fields into precise mathematical form. He discovered, through further

Figure 4: A surface wave on water. Sound and light waves are

similar, but they are “volume” waves which spread out into
three-dimensional space and cannot be directly seen.

mathematical analysis of the laws, that these fields, acting back and forth on each other, could behave
like waves which we call “electromagnetic” or, for short, “EM” waves. The most astonishing part of his
work was the discovery that EM waves travel at the speed of light, thus suggesting that perhaps light itself
is just an EM wave, which we know today is true. Who could have guessed that the properties of a
compass needle, which is just a small magnet, and of a current in a wire, which is just a flow of electrons,
are intimately related to the seemingly different phenomenon of light! The resulting metaphor, A
COMPASS AND CHARGE ARE LIGHT, is a wonderful illustration of “unity in variety,” and there is even
more to the story. Radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, visible light, ultraviolet radiation, x-rays,
and gamma rays exhibit quite different properties when they interact with matter. One type (microwave)
can be used to heat our food, another (ultraviolet) cause skin cancer, infrared transmits the warmth of an
object to us, visible waves make it possible to see, and the double-edged swords of x and gamma
radiation can induce cancer and can also be used to kill cancerous tumors. And yet, all are just EM
waves of different frequencies, radio waves having the lowest and gamma rays the highest.

B. Metaphor: the Importance of Difference

So far, we have been emphasizing the “unity” side of metaphorical “unity in difference,” because it
is the creative visualization in the mindʼs eye of unity between apparently different things which
contributes to scientific understanding. But the unity side can be overemphasized to a fault. The danger
 11

was put forcefully if somewhat excessively by the philosopher John Locke, writing in the 17 th Century:
8

Figurative application of words...are for nothing else but to

insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead
the judgment, and so indeed are perfect cheats.”

To illustrate the value of Locke's caution, it was mentioned above that sound and light both have
wave properties. We might stretch the point and speculate that there is an even more substantial
similarity between them, leading to the metaphor SOUND IS LIGHT. In fact, the metaphor is excessive
To have a sound wave, it is necessary to have a material medium--solid, liquid, or gas--to carry the sound
wav For this reason, there is no sound in the vacuum of outer space because there is no material there to
speak of. Light, on the other hand, can travel through apparently empty space, for example, from sun to
Earth. The assumption that light is very much like sound brought scientists of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries to the conclusion that empty space is not really empty. They assumed instead there must be
some fluid called the “ether” which carries light waves much as the air around us carries sound waves.
This ether had to have rather bizarre properties, such as being extremely rigid and at the same time
offering no resistance to the passage of planets and moons through it. The assumption that an ether
exists in a vacuum led to great confusion in physics until 1905, when Albert Einstein showed that certain
subtle behaviors of light could be much better understood if one threw out the idea of the ether without at
the same time discarding other useful aspects of the wave-like similarities of sound and light.

Clearly, moon and apple, light waves and sound waves, and heat and motion are different in
obvious ways, and to see unity in spite of the differences requires the creativity to imagine what is not
apparent to the senses. Because the difference is real, the assumed similarity is, to a certain extent, a
free act of the imagination, i.e., free of the necessity of conforming precisely to the “real” world. This
freedom of invention lends a subjective character to scientific thinking. The point was well-stated by
Einstein when he said “Science in the making, science as an end to be pursued, is as subjective and
9
psychologically conditioned as any other branch of human endeavor.”

C. Abstracting: the Limits of Science qua Science

A less dramatic but equally important form of free creative thinking occurs in the process of
“abstracting,” or selecting out, which is so vital to the scientific enterprise It is quite common for the
scientist to freely choose to emphasize only those aspects of a complex phenomenon which are thought
to be most relevant to the particular problem at hand. For example, if we are interested in the exact
motion of Mars around the sun, we must include the effects of gravitational pulls of all other objects in the
solar system on its motion. Unfortunately, this makes it very difficult to calculate the motion, but we can
greatly simplify the problem by neglecting the gravitational effects of other planets on Mars and consider
only the sunʼs much larger attraction. Unless exquisite accuracy is needed, say if we must predict the
exact position of Mars in order to land a space probe on a particular spot of its surface, this
simplification leads to a tremendously good approximation to the actual motion and it suffices for most
purposes. In this case, we can choose to abstract the most important thing, the sun, and ignore other
minor effects.

Another example of abstraction is provided by the hydrogen atom. This atom, as you may know,
is the simplest one in nature, normally consisting of a single electron and a single proton. (A small
fraction of hydrogen atoms also have a neutron or two attached to the proton.) If the hydrogen atom has
extra energy, obtained perhaps by another hydrogen atom banging into it, this energy can be released in
the form of EM energy of a particular frequency. Alternatively, EM energy of this same frequency can be
absorbed by a hydrogen atom. We typically study hydrogen by studying the frequencies of the EM
radiation it absorbs and emits. Someone once compared this way of studying hydrogen to figuring out the

8
Quoted in Anne Eisenberg, "Metaphor in the Language of Science," Scientific American (May, 1992).
9
Robert Root-Bernstein, "Art, Imagination and the Scientist," American Scientist, 85, 6 (1997).
 12

construction of a piano by listening to the sounds it makes as it tumbles down a flight of stairs, as shown
in Figure 5--a difficult task indeed! Precise details of hydrogenʼs emission and absorption processes are
described by the Schrödinger equation, named after Erwin Schrödinger whom we met earlier. But to
apply the Schrödinger equation to any physical system, we must know a mathematical quantity called the
“Hamiltonian.” If we arenʼt too worried about preciseness, we can just treat hydrogenʼs electron and
proton as two tiny charged particles, in which case the Hamiltonian is the “Coulomb potential” which is
very simple,

Figure 5: Low-pressure hydrogen gas heated to a

high temperature emits a variety of colors of light. The
behavior of electrons in the atoms can be digured out
by studying the light. this is like figuring out the nature
of a piano by studying the sounds it makes when
crashing down a flight of stairs.
10
similar in form to the potential associated with Newtonʼs law of gravitation. Further refinement requires
that we ascribe a magnetic nature to the proton and electron, and to go even further we must include
rather complex effects of the surrounding ever-present electromagnetic fields on the atom. At this point,
the Hamiltonian is very complex and only approximate calculations of the frequencies of emitted and
absorbed radiation are possible. In any particular experimental situation involving hydrogen atoms, it is
necessary to determine exactly how complicated the analysis has to be to still get meaningful results, i.e.,
we must “abstract.” As MIT physicist Philip Morrison puts it, the process of abstraction consists of

...the distilling from some bit of the real world a more cleanly defined system that will, one
hopes, still exhibit the properties of the real [world] in which he [or she] is interested.
Much of the excitement that can be found in the practice of physical science has to do
with seeking clever abstractions for complicated physical systems and then justifying the
11
choice of the abstraction.

Science journalist K.C. Cole goes on to say:

The abstractions of science are stereotypes--as two-dimensional and as potentially

misleading as everyday stereotypes. And yet they are as necessary to the progress of
understanding as filtering is to the process of perception. Science would be impossible
without them--if only because the real world of nature is much too complicated to deal
12
with in its natural form.

10
More precisely, the gravitational potential is inversely proportional to the distance between the interacting masses
and can be derived from Newton's law of gravitation which is an inverse square law, i.e., the force is proportional to
the inverse square of the distance between the interacting masses. Just as the gravitational potential can be derived
from Newton's law of gravitation, so can the Coulomb potential be derived from "Coulomb's Law" which is an
inverse square law describing the electrostatic force between electric charges.
11
K.C. Cole, op.cit., p. 168.
12
Ibid., p. 168.
 13

Training to be a physicist clearly requires the development of a “sixth sense” which can take
advantage of simplifying abstractions, and like the exploitation of metaphor, it adds a subjective color to
scientific theories. The task of abstraction is made easier if the physicist has an intuitive understanding of
the theory being used. Unfortunately, the microscopic properties of nature--the properties of atoms,
molecules, and nuclei--are rather weird and not very intuitive. The theory of quantum mechanics,
formulated in the late 1920s, is used to explain these weird microscopic properties of nature and is highly
successful in predicting the results of experiments. But in spite of the great successes of this theory, it
mirrors the weirdness of microscopic nature and there is great confusion in how it should be interpreted.
Again, at a loss for words, physicists have been forced to resort to metaphor.
 14

ESSAY 3:
CAN PHYSICS DISCOVER REALITY?
Cyril: But you donʼt mean to say that you seriously believe that Life
imitates art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?
Vivian: Certainly I do. Paradox though it may seem--and paradoxes are
always dangerous things--it is none the less true that Life imitates art, far more
than Art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain
curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two
imaginative painters, has so influenced Life, that, whenever one goes to a private
view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossettiʼs
dream...there the sweet maidenhood of the “Golden Stair,” the blossom-like
mouth and weary loveliness of the “Laus Amoris,”...And it has always been so. A
great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular
form, like an enterprising publisher...Literature always anticipates life. It does
not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is
6
largely an invention of Balzac. --Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying.

Physics claims to deal with real things—atoms, molecules, electrons, gravity, and light, to name
just a few. But none of the things mentioned can be seen directly. They are instead inferred from the
behavior of everyday objects. In Essay #2 we explored at some length the metaphorical aspect of certain
physical concepts and constructs. In this essay, we seek to determine if it is possible to move from
metaphor to reality.

A. Freely Chosen Concepts

Physics, like any science, is built on concepts that scientists freely choose to define. For
example, in everyday life distance is defined as the straight-line separation between two points of interest.
Since physics is an experimental science, every pure definition, like distance, makes sense only because
we have procedures for measuring it, i.e., for providing a numerical value to a distance. Distance is very
easily measured by using a meter stick. In contrast, time is measured by a clock which is a much more
complicated instrument than a meter stick.

The very idea of measure is founded on the more basic ideas of quantity and counting. Humans,
and perhaps some animals, have an inherent notion of quantity, but counting and the idea of number are,
in their highest forms, human inventions.

We have an intuitive sense of speed from our sense of vision. But like counting, distance, and
time, the physical concept of speed is also a human invention. If you measure the distance between two
points and the time it takes to travel from one point to the other along the straight line connecting them,
you can divide the distance by the time to get your average speed on the trip. Throughout physics, we
find other concepts like velocity, acceleration, and energy which are pure definitions. Many other
concepts could be invented, e.g., the cube of the distance divided by time, the acceleration divided by
distance squared, etc., etc. But these concepts are not found to be useful in describing the real world.
On the other hand, distance, time, speed, velocity, etc. are useful not just in everyday affairs such as
carpentry and traveling but also in describing how nature behaves. Nature, in other words, behaves as if
these concepts are part-and-parcel of its actual make-up.

6
Quoted in N.R. Campbell, Foundations of Physics (Dover, New York, 1957; a republication of Physics: the
Elements, Cambridge University Press, London, 1919), p. 228.
 15

B. From Metaphor to Reality via Simplicity

The phrase “as if” raises a serious philosophical issue. Does the subjective and approximate side
of physics mean that subatomic concepts such as electrons and protons, and more abstract ideas like
gravitational and electric fields, are not real but are just convenient metaphorical artifacts designed to help
us understand how nature behaves? Not at all. As the epigram quoting Oscar Wilde at the beginning of
this section indicates, art, with its distinctly subjective nature, can point the way to reality and we should
expect at least as much from science. For example, in the age of nuclear weapons, no one can seriously
doubt the existence of protons and neutrons (even though our knowledge of them is incomplete). The
challenge is to grasp to what extent physics is a free creation of the human mind and the extent to which
it represents the reality of the world around us.

As we saw in Chapter 1, the motions of the stars and planets behave “as if” they revolve around
Earth. Strictly speaking, there is no reason why we canʼt insist that Earth is at rest with the universe
revolving around it, but as Copernicus taught us, this would be a much more complicated way to look at
things. This complication would spill over into our attempts to formulate theories to explain how matter
behaves. Physics is complicated enough as it is—it would be much more complicated if forced to
accommodate an Earth which is at rest. We are forced to conclude from a wide variety of evidence that
although the world seems to behave “as if” Earth is at rest, it is much more reasonable and simpler to
build an understanding of the world on the assumption that Earth revolves around the sun. It is also
beautiful in Coleridge's sense of beauty as "unity in variety," because the Copernican model fits in neatly
with so many other neat theories of physics, particularly mechanics, as explained in Chapter 1 (Section
1.5.7(3)).

The simplicity argument also underlies the belief that velocity, acceleration, and other basic
concepts are embedded in nature's inherent behavior. When these concepts are applied to nature, we
can see a simplicity and orderliness emerge. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to say that nature suggests,
and even imposes, these concepts on us as we match our curiosity and intelligence with nature's own
built-in logical structure.

Likewise, we know that many properties of gases, e.g., the increase of pressure when volume
decreases as discussed in Chapter 1, can be explained “as if” gases are made up of material particles,
i.e., molecules. Again, the ability of these ideas to lend a simplicity to the behavior of gases leads us to
believe in their reality. This belief propels our curiosity to discover more about their actual construction
and their roles in liquids and solids and more complex properties of gases. In this way, we learn more
and more about nature's behavior, a behavior which lends itself more agreeably to our curiosity and
intellectual abilities.

At first sight, it seems wrong to base our sense of reality so much on the idea of simplicity. And
simplicity isn't the whole story—as was emphasized in Chapter 1, good theories involving indirectly
observed things such as atoms and molecules, must exhibit consilience and be falsifiable. Furthermore,
we strive for direct observation of hypothetical constructs as much as possible. But for each and every
one of us, the central role played by simplicity is an old story. From the time we are infants, we construct
a simple view of the world around us which helps us to make our way in it safely and with maximum ease.
Take, for example, a chair sitting in a room. As you walk around it, the two-dimensional image of the
chair on the retina of your eye changes continuously, but any reasonable person believes that a three-
dimensional persistent object, the chair, continues to exist unchanged even when we don't see it. In a
sense, we construct this persistent and objective three-dimensional chair from or sense impressions of it,
a process which arises largely because of the inherent abilities of our senses and our need to survive.
But in spite of the construction process involved, the vast majority of people will admit to the robust
objective reality of the chair. A belief in the reality of solid objects around us lends simplicity to our world-
view without which we couldn't live.
 16

By the criterion of simplicity, objective reality has been extended from objects immediately
experienced, like chairs, to inferred microscopic or sub-microscopic objects like atoms and molecules.
For many years molecules, and the atoms from which they are made, were thought to be just convenient
tricks for remembering the complex ways in which elements chemically interact with each other and how
materials like gases behave. Atoms are believed today to be not just a metaphor for how gases and other
materials behave, but a reality since we can now actually photograph them. No serious person can doubt
the existence of atoms, but at the same time we cannot claim to have complete knowledge of what atoms
are and how they behave. So in this case we can say that science has truly discovered something about
the reality of nature—the existence of atoms—but much remains to be discovered about their internal
workings.

C. The Endless Approach to Nature's Reality: the Roadmap Analogy

Even though atoms are real and Earth really revolves around the sun, we still must admit that all
our knowledge of the real world is filtered through our human senses. In addition, the creative use of
concepts and the construction of abstract models produces a physical view of the world which is at least
partially subjective, i.e., dependent on free choices of scientists to describe nature in terms of freely-
defined concepts like distance, speed, etc. More seriously, even our most successful theories of matter
and energy are only partially successful in describing the extreme complexity of nature discovered by very
precise and sophisticated modern experiments. In other words, science is not describing the world “just
as it is.” It is not capable of constructing a “true-to-life” exact representation of nature.2

John Polkinghorne, a physicist-turned-theologian, portrays the relationship between physics and

3
reality by the use of a road map analogy. Just as an ordinary roadmap fails to tell us when roads go up
and down or what trees, bushes, and buildings are along a roadside, so does a physical theory fail to
describe in detail the great complexity of even a hydrogen atom. But at the same time, a road map tells
us much that is accurate about a road, specifically the cities on or near it, its intersections with other
roads, distances between intersections, and the general direction of the road at any point. All of these
representations are true to life because the actual road also shows the same characteristics. And so it is
with a physical theory: it doesnʼt tell us everything, but it tells us enough about the real world to be a
highly useful representation of important characteristics of that reality, viz., those which are objective in
the sense that they can be verified by experimental testing to be either correct, incorrect, or a more-or-
less-useful approximation. To continue with Polkinghorne's analogy, as science progresses, we flesh out
our roadmaps to include blades of grass here and there, an occasional bush or tree. But the job will
probably never be done, because of the limitless complexity of nature even in its objectivized logical
aspects.

D. Waves and Particles—Tough Nuts to Crack

One of the most interesting questions about physical reality involves wave phenomena. Suppose
you pluck a guitar string at an arbitrary spot along its length. The string will vibrate in a complicated way
and if you listen closely, you can hear the fundamental, first overtone, and maybe the second overtone,
depending on your ability to hear separate frequencies. But in general, our ear hears the combined
sound of a mix of frequencies. Presumably, the sound actually consists of these frequencies mixed
together, and likewise for the string. For example, several simple (i.e., sinusoidal) waves can
simultaneously exist on a vibrating string to give it its actual more complicated wave shape at each instant
of time. But it is the complicated shape of the vibrating string, or equivalently the sound wave, that our
ear hears, which is primary to our experience. If we take a high-speed photograph of the string, we can
see the

2
The philosopher of science Karl Popper refers to the world of theories with their mix of subjective and objective
character as “World 3,” World 1 being the actual physical world and World 2 being the purely mental world. See P.B.
Medawar, The Limits of Science (Harper & Row, New York, 1984), p. 95.
3
J. Polkinghorne, Beyond Science (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 8.
 17

complicated shape at each instant, but we cannot see the separate simple waves which we imagine to
add together to give the complicated shape.

Although we know we can describe the complicated shape as the sum of two or more simple
waves, each with their own simple frequency, can we argue backwards and, starting from the complicated
string shape, say with confidence that it is really a superposition of simple waves? And likewise for the
complicated sound wave our ear hears: are the simple waves really there combining to make up the
sound we hear?

Most scientists would argue they are, and as proof they would use the sound wave produced by
the vibrating string, since it will have the same complicated mix of frequencies the string does. The proof
would consist in exposing a tuning fork, with a frequency equal to one of the supposed simple waves, to
the sound wave and seeing if it resonantly responds. If such an experiment is carried out, it is indeed
found that the tuning fork responds as predicted. Such experimental evidence would convince most
scientists that the simple waves pre-existed within the complicated string shape and sound wave.

But it could be argued that the resonant response is really a result of the interaction of the tuning
fork directly with the complicated sound wave, which pushes and pulls on the tuning fork and succeeds
only partially in getting the tuning fork to respond. Such a moment-by-moment pushing-pulling interaction
is very difficult to describe in detail. In this view the tuning fork, which was originally considered a passive
measuring instrument, actively interacts with the complicated sound wave on its own terms and responds
appropriately. A similar argument could be made for the ear, which is, in this context, a rather complex
biological "tuning fork." So it could be argued that the simple wave we might think is hidden in the
observed complex one only appears to be there because of the complex interaction between the tuning
fork (or ear) and air, and did not really exist before the tuning fork responded to the more complicated
wave. True, we can tell how much of the simple wave we would need if we wanted to start with simple
waves, mix them, and produce the complicated wave. But this is not the same thing as saying the simple
waves pre-exist in the complicated wave produced by a simple plucking of the string.

There is another way to try to prove that the simple waves pre-exist. Take a strobe light, fix its
frequency at one of the simple frequencies of the string, and see if you can see the string vibrating in a
simple way. When the strobe light is fixed close to (but not right at) one of the simple-wave frequencies,
you will see the string flipping back and forth between more-or-less complicated shapes. This
presumably indicates that the string's motion has the characteristic of the simple wave's frequency. An
even more vivid demonstration of the existence of the simple wave on the string is obtained in the special
case when the complicated shape can be described in terms of only two simple waves and one has a
much greater frequency than the other. In that case, strobing at exactly the lower frequency will show the
string frozen in that shape but with rapidly vibrating ripples on it that correspond to the high-frequency
simple wave, i.e., we can see, at these instants of time, both waves. The strobing experiment differs
fundamentally from the tuning fork one because the interaction of the measuring instrument, a strobed
light flash, with a guitar string is totally negligible compared to the interaction between a sound wave and
fork. This more convincing evidence, together with the tuning fork behavior, is enough for all but the most
skeptical to believe that the separate simple waves have their own independent existence even when the
string shape is complicated. It appears, then, tht it is not just simpler to assume that the simple waves
exist in the complicated shape, but that they really are there.

The situation is even more puzzling when it comes to light waves. We commonly assume that
white light is a mixture of all colors of the visible spectrum, because when put through a prism (or a
diffraction grating), the colors are separated. In this sense, white light is like a guitar string carrying a lot
of simple waves. Again, it could be argued that the colors which come out of a prism exposed to white
light did not pre-exist in the white light but arise from the interaction of the white light with the material of
the prism, and likewise for a diffraction grating. To refute this view, Sir Isaac Newton took one of the
colors from one prism and putting it through a second one. The second one had no effect on that single
color, so presumably it is a property of the light itself rather than of the interaction between the light and
 18

the material of the prism. This is indeed a very strong argument that the separate colors are not
produced by the prism. But it is not completely airtight. Thinking back to the tuning fork being pushed
and pulled by the complicated sound wave, it can be argued that different parts of the prism (i.e., different
parts of the atoms making it up) get pushed and pulled by the complicated white light in such a way as to
vibrate at a frequencies corresponding to the different colors, which then follow different paths through the
prism. So naturally, when yellow is put into the second prism, the special "yellow-friendly" prism parts
cooperate to vibrate and pass the yellow through.

It would be nice if we could strobe the white light to detect the different colors in it. But what could
we possibly strobe it with? Light does not commonly reflect light, so it is impossible to strobe a light wave
with light to see if the white light has colors pre-existing in it. (Indeed, we can question if light is a thing
that travels from one place to another. We can never see it traveling through space because to detect the
light we must stop and destroy it. This deeper question will not be addressed here.) We are left to rely on
simplicity and analogy as the main criteria for believing that light has a wave character.

Wave-particle duality, which was mentioned in Essay #2, says that light has both particle and
wave properties. But in any one experiment, one or the other property is most manifest. For example, in
Thomas Youngʼs double slit experiment, light exhibits wave properties. So we are back to the possibility
that the manifestation of one or the other is a result of the interaction of light with the observing apparatus
(e.g., the double slit). Likewise, electrons appear to exhibit either wave or particle properties depending
on the type of experiment being done.

Wave-particle duality is a maddening thing, for it suggests that we can only describe the sub-
microscopic world in terms of two contradictory concepts, thus frustrating our ability to say that things are
"really" this or that. As it turns out, the double slit experiment, which can be done with electrons as well
as with light, can be consistently explained by assuming electrons and light are particle-like. This was
th
accomplished by Alfred Landé, a 20 -century quantum physicist and in a different way by David Bohm in
the early 1950s. But it is much, much simpler to explain the double-slit experiment "as if" electrons are
waves, even though in other circumstances they clearly seem to have particle properties. So in this case,
simplicity trumps consistency! But if weʼre stuck at the “as if” stage, we canʼt say we have really
grasped reality through our scientific endeavors.

E. The Scourge of Scientism

Surely, the subjective component of the human experience, which science eliminates as much as
possible from its final product, is an important part of reality. Just as a roadmap doesn't show the
beautiful flowers, bushes, and trees along the roadside, so science intentionally ignores the thrill of
listening to a beautiful piece of music or the personal impact on the reader of a novel about the human
experience. But for this reason, many humanists see a conflict between the objective content of science
and the subjective awe they feel when experiencing beautiful phenomena in nature. This conflict is
vigorously expressed in the following poem by the great English poet John Keats (1795-1821):

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angelʼs wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, the gnomed mine--
4
Unweave a rainbow.

4
Quoted in H.C. von Bayer, Rainbows, Snowflakes, and Quarks (Random House, New York, 1984), p. 32.
 19

In other words, Keats saw “cold philosophy” (i.e., science) undermining our aesthetic appreciation of the
“awful” (i.e., awesome) beauty of one of the most striking examples of natureʼs free gifts of art, the
rainbow.

We might answer Keats by emphasizing that science--in its use of metaphor, its imaginative
construction of theories, and its reliance on imperfect models of nature--is a distinctly human endeavor
and as such it complements, rather than displaces, our spontaneous enjoyment of natureʼs art. And in
spite of itself, science too has a subjective content not just in its theoretical concepts but also in the more
personal and emotional sense of excitement, fulfillment, and awe experienced by the practicing scientist
and the serious student. Why should appreciation of the rainbowʼs beauty be diminished by a scientific
realization that it is caused by billions upon billions of water droplets acting like prisms and splitting the
sunʼs brilliant light? On the contrary, this knowledge can add to the grandeur of the experience. In more
practical terms, a scientific understanding of the rainbow tells us when and where to look for one and
when not to bother.

Scientific knowledge can also enhance the experience of looking at the starry sky from a
mountain top on a dark, moonless summer night. It looks like there are millions of stars, but in fact we
see only about 6,000 with the naked eye. The sight nonetheless is awesome, and a bit of knowledge
about individual stars adds a temporal dimension to the experience. For example, the stupendous
distances of the stars and the great speed of light tell us that the starry sky is actually a one-way time
machine taking us back into the cosmic past. If you know where to look in the summer sky, youʼll see
beautiful bluish-white Vega in the constellation Lyra which sends its light to us from a distance of
246,000,000,000,000 kilometers, so far that it takes the light 26 years to get to us. Therefore, we see
Vega as it existed 26 years ago. For all we know, Vega might have collided with a black hole or neutron
star within the last 26 years and may not even exist now. Science also tells us that Vega's bluish color
means it is very hot, about 10,000 degrees Celsius or twice as hot as our sun. Polaris, the “North star,” is
even farther away and we see it as it was 680 years ago. Even a modest telescope greatly extends our
ability to travel into the past. Through it we can see the great globular cluster in Hercules, which appears
as a fuzzy ghostly patch of light on a dark night. Saturnʼs rings and the moonʼs surface are at first sight
more impressive, but modern astronomy can effectively count the stars in this globular cluster and
calculate its distance. How stirring to know that you are seeing at one instant about 100,000 stars as they
existed about 25,000 years ago! Clearly, scientific knowledge can enhance our experiences of rainbows,
stars, and other artistic gifts of nature if we only take time to study it.

Science, properly understood and appreciated, can complement the vivid but more subjective
reality of the humanist by adding a new dimension to the appreciation of natureʼs gifts.

Keatsʼ complaint about “rainbow science” should not be dismissed too quickly, because there is
an interpretation of science called “scientism” or “atomic materialism” which claims that the totality of
reality is contained in, or at least faithfully approximated by, the theories and models of science. In this
view, conscious impressions of the world around us--all of the subjective experiences of colors, sounds,
and emotions which make life meaningful to us--are mere “epiphenomena,” i.e., psychological effects of
more real physical events. For example, your perception of the color “red” is caused by an EM wave with
a wavelength of about 700 nanometers (i.e., 0.0000007 m). Scientism says that the true reality of this red
light is the EM wave, while your experience of the red color is no more real than a character in your
dreams or the image of redness you can conjure up in your imagination with your eyes closed. This could
certainly dampen someoneʼs experience of the rainbowʼs colors! The contrary spirit of this essay is that
science itself is ultimately constructed out of our sense impressions, e.g., our subjective experience of the
color red. And although these subjective experiences are largely eliminated from the end product of
science, it is impossible for the concepts of science to be more real than the impressions it originates
from.
 20

Science, in its confrontation with experimental verification, is objective in a way that the
humanities cannot (and should not) be, but contrary to the claim of scientism, it has an irreducibly
subjective component in its most creative theoretical form. Scientism is not as widely accepted by
science today as it was when Keats wrote his poetic criticism, but Keatsʼs lament still persists among
humanists who fail to understand the true nature of modern science.
 21

ESSAY 4: THE VALUES OF SCIENCE

The business of the royal society is: To improve the knowledge of
naturall things, and of all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practices,
Engynes and Inventions by Experiment--not meddling with Divinity, metaphysics,
Morals, Politics, Grammar, Rhetoric, or Logicks. Robert Hooke, 16637

A. Ethical Commitment and Neutrality in Science

Ethical and moral values are an integral characteristic of the humanities, since literature, history,
and art are constantly challenged to mirror or pass judgment on the moral significance of social
happenings. Even music can reflect moral norms in the form of tension between sacred and secular
music, e.g., between rhythmic music with its overt or covert sexual overtones, and non-rhythmic music. In
contrast to the humanities, science is commonly considered to be ethically neutral. There is a sense in
which this is true and an equally important sense in which it is not true.

To understand the ethically neutral and ethically relevant aspects of science, consider the
process which transforms a scientific discovery into a practical application, as shown in Figure 1. (The
Figure also shows other components of this process which will be discussed shortly.) The process starts
with what is called "basic research," i.e., research motivated largely, if not solely, by curiosity about the
workings of nature rather than any practical applications which society might use the research for. If
successful, the basic research results in a new laboratory gadget, usually in a primitive form not easily
manufactured, or in new theories and ideas about nature's behavior. So far, there is no ethical content to
the activity, anymore than there is an ethical content to solving a crossword puzzle. But then the results
are published and read not just by scientists performing basic research, but by engineers and non-
scientists in government and industry who are interested in transforming the basic research into
technologies that can be used not just in the laboratory but in the world at large by industry, consumers,
or government. It is this "application" step of the process where ethical considerations come into play,
because technologies can be designed and used for good or ill.

Consider the laser, for example. When it was developed as a tool of basic research in 1960, the
scientists involved were delighted with the almost perfectly pure frequency of light it produced, and the
fact that the laser light could be used in other areas of basic research to investigate the nature of matter.
But they could not foresee the precise peaceful and violent applications it would be put to, so the basic
research and indeed the laws it discovered are ethically neutral. Today, lasers are used for
communications and to correct eye problems--largely peaceful applications--and to guide “smart bombs”
to their targets, which often involves the death of innocent civilians. These specific applications are,
unlike the basic research, subject to ethical judgment. The laser example is typical. Look hard enough
and a mixture of potentially good and bad consequences can be imagined for the applications of just
about any scientific discovery. For example, basic research in biology, chemistry, and physics has been
utilized by government and industry to develop pharmaceuticals for the purpose of curing illness. But
these same techniques can also be used to produce chemical and biological weapons to be used by
aggressive armies bent on subjugating neighboring states or promoting and perpetuating domestic
corruption and oppression. It is the peole exploiting the basic research for applications who bear the
ethical burden of doing good or ill. The scientists who make the basic discoveries can only hope they will
be used by others for good, but they cannot usually see years into the future what the applications will be.

To every rule there is an exception, and there are indeed examples of basic research in which
the scientists involved knew more or less how it would be applied. This was true, for example, of the
Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb during World War II. The effort involved much basic

7 Quoted in Brown, Robert Hanbury, The Wisdom of Science: its relevance to culture and religion
(Cambridge University Press, New York), p. 131.
 22

research into the fundamental properties of nuclei, but most if not all of the scientists knew their work was
devoted to building a bomb of unprecedented explosive energy. In other cases, the application of the
basic research may not be as obvious, but some intelligent guesses can be made. For example, a
biologist working for a pharmaceutical company and doing basic research on cell physiology can be pretty
sure that the company will use the research results to develop a drug to fight disease. At the same time,
the biologist might worry that his or her research might also be used to develop a biological weapon to kill
people. But it is more generally true that scientists doing basic research have little or no ability to see
how their discoveries will be used in the future.

Basic discovery leads to

new theory or novel
gadget
New technology
Basic research
Good?

Bad?
d#
E = "N
dt

Scientific work requires universalism,

communalism, disinterestedness, and organized
skepticism,!which are ethical practices and
must be followed if good science is to be done.
But the discoveries which the work results in
are ethically neutral, because it cannot be
known if they will be used for good or ill.
Engineers, government, and
businesses put basic discoveries to
use. This process is not ethically
neutral, because the specific uses to
which the discoveries can be put an
be good or bad.

Figure 1: The chain of processes leading from basic research to discovery and finally
the technological applications. Also shown are the separate ethical values in the entire
process from basic research to new technology.

While the basic discoveries of science tend to be ethically neutral, the same cannot be said for
the process of scientific discovery, i.e.,. the process of basic research, which could not succeed without a
deep commitment to honest communication with colleagues and a humbleness and open-mindedness in
the face of natureʼs independent responses to our experimental inquiries. Such attitudes and practices
are moral at their root. The keystone of scienceʼs values is what Jacob Bronowski calls “the habit of
truth,” a habit which has been taken up by the wider culture in the centuries since the scientific revolution:

In science and in art and in self-knowledge we explore and move constantly by turning to
the world of sense to ask, Is this so? This is the habit of truth, always minute yet always urgent,
which for four hundred years has entered every action of ours; and has made our society and the
value it sets on man, as surely as it has made the linotype machine and the scout knife, and King
Lear and the Origin of Species and Leonardoʼs Lady with a Stoat.8

8 Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (Harper & Row, New York), p. 46. Bronowskiʼs
references are to Shakespeareʼs play King Lear, Charles Darwinʼs Origin of Species which laid the
groundwork for the modern theory of evolution, and Leonardo da Vinciʼs painting Lady with a Stoat.
 23

Scienceʼs hallmark is the rigorous and continuous testing of its concepts in the face of new
experimental evidence. Should scienceʼs values, and indeed values in general, be subject to testing and
revision as new circumstances and experiences are encountered? In other words, should we be ethical
pragmatists? Bronowski answers with a resounding “yes” and he rues the opposing view, held by most
people, that “concepts of value--justice and honour, dignity, and tolerance--have an inwardness which is
inaccessible to experience.”9 Bronowski then traces the history of the realization that ethical concepts,
like scientific ones, can be tested by their perceived consequences.10 He cites Peter Abelard, the 9th
Century theologian and philosopher, who challenged reliance on faith and authority and perceived the
modern scientific value of skepticism, when he wrote: “By doubting, we are led to inquire, and by inquiry
we perceive the truth.” But his argument did not win the day. Four centuries later, St. Thomas Aquinas
philosophically rationalized the centuries-old belief and practice that faith was a more reliable guide to
truth than knowledge of the world.11 Aquinas was for many centuries, and in some circles still is, the
greatest authority of Christian philosophy whose views on truth held the scientific impulse in check. The
tide reversed only hundreds of years later, when Martin Luther claimed the right of an individual to appeal
to the bible to override authority. Copernicus finally set the stage for modern science by extending
Lutherʼs appeal to include Godʼs “great work of nature.”

B. Scienceʼs Values in its Process

Science sociologist Robert Merton has identified four key values which are vital to the sound
practice of science: Universalism, Communalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized Skepticism. 12
What precisely are these values and what kinds of challenges have they had to withstand in recent times?

Universalism refers to scienceʼs rejection of racist, religious, and even political prejudice in favor
of an internationalist “one world” philosophy. One of the finest examples of scienceʼs universalism
occurred during the cold war stand-off between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, when many U.S. and
Soviet scientists, some of whom were employed by defense establishments, collaborated against the will
of their governments to warn of the dangers of nuclear war, the acute need for serious arms control, and
the the need to allow person-to-person contacts between the two science communities. They also
publicized the political oppression of Soviet scientists such as Andrei Sakharov, who spoke out against
their government.

The danger and outright foolishness of allowing racist and political prejudice to influence science
was painfully demonstrated by Hitlerʼs Nazis, who tried to stamp out so-called “Jewish” science and
thereby deprived Germany of many of its best thinkers when they fled Hitlerʼs empire to avoid persecution
or even death. Consistent with such stupidity, Heinrich Himmler, head of the infamous Nazi SS, together
with his scientific yes-men, established an institute, the Welteislehre, devoted to spreading the crazy idea
that stars are made of ice. Another 20th Century example of prejudice in science occurred at the opposite
extreme of the political spectrum when Soviet biology was forced for ideological reasons to adopt the
absurd genetic theories of communist party ideologist and biologist T.D. Lysenko. Soviet agriculture and
Soviet society in general suffered needlessly from “Lysenkoism.” The utter failure of the Nazis and
Soviets to successfully inject prejudice into science is just one example of the resiliency of the value of
universalism.

Communalism requires that information should flow as freely as possible within the science
community. Many scientists have been troubled by the knee-jerk tendency of government and industry
officials to restrict publication of military and commercially sensitive basic research, even though these
officials should know that open research efforts will sooner or later duplicate the same results. The

9 Ibid., pp. 37-8.

10 Ibid., pp. 45-6
11 Ibid., pp. 45-46.
12 Brown, Robert Hanbury, op.cit., pp. 134-35.
 24

antagonism goes back at least to World War II's Manhattan Project, when scientists developing the first
atomic bomb had to fight against the excessive compartmentalization and secrecy the FBI was pushing
for. The director of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, wisely sided with the scientists. More
recently, military scientists developed a system of “adaptive optics” which neutralizes the distorting effects
of the atmosphere on telescope images in their efforts to create anti-ballistic missile systems. Civilian
astronomers, in the meantime, had to make due with much less public financing to try to develop the
same technology to improve observations of stars and planets, etc. Eventually, they did succeed in
developing adaptive optics systems, but only after the military had already developed even better
systems. In general, restriction of information flow, which results in the duplication of effort, slows down
the overall progress of science and in the long run also retards the progress of society.

Disinterestedness, which is a synonym for impartiality and open mindedness, requires that
scientists should present their research in an honest way, warts and all, and avoid glossing over its
shortcomings. Lysenko, mentioned above regarding Universalism, also failed to practice his science in a
disinterested way. Here at home, a troubling breach of this value occurred in the 1980s when some
government scientists hyped the capabilities of exotic space-based “star wars” anti-ballistic missile
weapons such as the x-ray laser. A more objective analysis, carried out by scientists opposed to the
dangerous strategic assumptions underlying the star wars effort, proved that there was little or no chance
for such technologies to be effective in the foreseeable future. A related example is the performance of
the Patriot missile in the Gulf War. Within a month or two of the warʼs end, MIT physics professor
Theodore Postle carefully analyzed video shots, released by the Pentagon, showing the Patriot in action.
The Pentagon meant for the videos to impress the public with the effectiveness of Patriot, but Postleʼs
careful analysis of them showed that the missile was successful in destroying Iraqʼs Scud missiles in only
about 4% of its attempts, the remaining 96% resulting in fragmentation of the scud missile bodies which
simply added to the area of destruction on the ground. The militaryʼs claim of 90% or better effectiveness
was disputed even by the Israelis who were supposedly being protected by the Patriot. Further
information obtained since the Gulf war has substantiated Postleʼs initial critique. This example shows
the disinterestedness and also the courage and patriotism of Postle, who had to give up his position as
consultant to the Defense Department.

Organized Skepticism promotes and protects the right of every scientist to critically question
statements or theories made by well-known “authoritative” scientists. Truth in science comes not from
authority but from conformance with experimental results. An open and questioning mind is the key to all
worthwhile scientific effort. Unfortunately, the scientific community isn't always as skeptical as it should
be. The wide acceptance of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, discussed above, is
an example of authoritative individuals aggressively pushing their ideas to the exclusion of other
deserving ideas such as Bohmʼs interpretation.

Carl Sagan, in his book The Demon-Haunted World, emphasizes the challenge of adhering to the
ethical ideals of disinterestedness and organized skepticism. These values require the scientist to be, at
the same time, both open minded to new ideas and ruthlessly skeptical of them. Most people tend to
latch onto one extreme or the other, but to yield to such temptations is to cut oneself off from the scientific
enterprise.

C. Scienceʼs Impact on Ethical Culture at Large

Starting from the Renaissance, scienceʼs most cherished values have slowly percolated into the
wider culture. However imperfect we might judge a particular democratic societyʼs commitment to
honesty, fairness, freedom of information, and questioning of authority to be, substantial curtailment or
rejection of these values of science is unthinkable if democracy and freedom are to survive. But it is a
distortion to see science as the sole source of modern democracyʼs values. More accurately, science has
affected, and has been affected by, progressive movements in the wider culture. But it is fair to say that
 25

science in its everyday practice has embraced its characteristic values more tightly than society at large.
As J.W.N. Sullivan put it many hears ago in his book The Limitations of Science:13 )

Science is the activity where truthfulness is most obviously an essential condition for success.
Its success, in fact, is measured by its truthfulness. Of hardly any other human activity can this
be said. In nearly everything else truth is a means and not an end. And if it turns out to be an
unsatisfactory means, it is quite natural that it should be replaced by something else. But a
scientific man who should misrepresent his observations, or deliberately concoct arguments in
order to reach false conclusions, would merely be stultifying himself as a scientific man. He
would not be prosecuting science. An advertisement may tell lies, but then telling the truth is not
its object. Its object is to sell the stuff, which is an entirely different object. This is not to say, of
course, that scientific men invariably tell the truth or try to, even about their science.

Scienceʼs passion for the truth doesnʼt sell to the wider culture as well as we might like.
According to Sullivan, the reason is quite practical: scientific objectivity requires flashy catchwords to be
avoided and issues to be presented in their full complexity, so any politician who practiced it would be
incapable of inspiring popular conviction and moral fervor in support of his or her policies.14

We end this essay with a quote from Bronowski which cogently illustrates how the creative
processes of science and humanities inform our ethical strivings:15

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs
who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved. The
shame is ours if we do not make science part of our world, intellectually as much as physically,
so that we may at last hold these halves of the world together by the same values. For this is the
lesson of science, that the concept is more profound than its laws, and the act of judging more
critical than the judgment. In a book that I wrote about poetry I said,

Poetry does not move us to be just or unjust, in itself. It moves us to thoughts in

whose light justice and injustice are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.

What is true of poetry is true of all creative thought. And what I said then of one value is true
of all human values. The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust
conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil,
means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.

In other words, no set of rules can encompass the infinite variety and complexity of situations we deal
with in life. Rules of conduct must be supplemented by a framework of values which give us a general
perspective to guide us as we make ethical judgments about situations which are often far too complex to
be resolved by a set of rules. Situational ethics, loudly denounced by conservative ethicists, recognizes
the complexity of life and, a la Bronowski, the corresponding failure of any set of behavioral rules to cover
all cases.

Consider, for example, the value of empathy with the downtrodden, especially children who are in
poverty-stricken circumstances. What should public policy be? One approach might be to give financial

13 Sullivan, J.W.N., The Limitations of Science (The New American Library, New York, 1959, a reprint of
the original Viking Press edition of 1933), p. 173.
14 Ibid.
15 Bronowski, op.cit., p. 73.
 26

support to the parents, with the hope that this support would not be squandered but would be used to help
the children. This liberal approach could be coupled with public programs, like school lunch programs
and special education programs (e.g., the federal government's successful "Head Start" program)
designed to lift the next generation out of poverty. But some of a more conservative bent might argue that
outright grants of financial support can breed dependency on the part of the recipients, and that the
financial support should be coupled with or even replaced by a program to provide meaningful jobs and
job training for parents who would be required to work. So although the policies are different, the value is
the same: don't visit the sins of the parents on the children, though the conservative policy can be
implemented only with a certain callousness for short-term effects.

Contrast this empathy-laden value system with a distinctly different racist-classist policy which
believes that some people are more human than, and inherently superior to, other people. One policy of
this alternative mean-spirited value system is either to provide absolutely no time or money for the "low-
class born-to-lose" people--let them sink or swim--or to give them just enough resources to work and to
raise children solely for the purpose of helping the privileged make money through the work of those
children who work when adults. In other words, the downtrodden are viewed only as a means to an end
and lacking inherent human value.

Either liberal or conservative value system illustrates what Bronowski is saying: good values
which help us to survive don't tell us how to conduct our affairs, but they do provide a framework for
judging if conduct or policies are just or unjust, good or evil. The racist-classist value system has
distinctly different values and vastly different policies.

As John F. Kennedy said, “Life is not fair,” and this forces us into situational ethics. All
too often, we must choose between the lesser of two evils, or more appropriately, between two
ethically unsettling alternatives, but always with the “deeper illuminations” cast by our deepest
values in mind. Albert Schweitzer, who formulated the great (some would say the greatest)
ethical principle of “Reverence for Life,” knew it was sometimes necessary to choose between
one life and another. But the choice was always with a sense of regret that such a choice had to
be made. Schweitzer’s regret, based on the principle of Reverence for Life, prompted him to call
himself a mass murderer when he injected antibiotics into a person. In such actions and many
others, he bit the bullet and put human life first, recognizing that he was beholden to a hierarchy
based on the reflective consciousness of that most potentially ethical species, homo sapiens.
Reverence for Life was not a rule for behavior in specific circumstances, but a guiding principle,
a deeper illumination, to make the best choice possible under difficult circumstances.