The Majestic Unity of the Natural World
Awhile back I was doing my lunchtime reading in the very interesting book The two-mile time machine : ice cores, abrupt climate change, and our future, by Richard B. Alley. In short, the book is about deep ice cores taken from the ice cap in Greenland and the incredible amount of information they give us about climate in ancient and prehistoric times and then expands on all matter of topics impinging on paleoclimatology, a word that just sounds cool to me (no pun intended). I loved the book and recommend it highly for a number of reasons; my book note is here. Overall the book is a careful and considered look at the history of climate change and the potential for humans to affect it.
I marveled. Even though I am a scientist and I'm accustomed to a naturalistic and reductionist view of the natural world, it is still incredible sometimes to see just how well amazingly intricate and lengthy deductions about how nature must operate actually do work together, fitting one to another like the most precise gears to make a clockwork mechanism of surprising accuracy and precision.
Detractors of science and those who lob in their bizarre "theories" from the fringe usually do not appreciate that new scientific theories are exceedingly constrained things. Any new theory not only has to provide an explanation for some new and troublesome observation, but it has to explain everything in its domain that was explained by the theory it replaces, and it must coexist harmoniously with the very large number of existing theories that surround it in the system of science. That's rarely an easy task.
So I marveled. From those two-mile long ice cores flowed an amazing amount of intricate analyses and consequent deductions about the history of climate before there were humans to record it–or even think of recording it. One could look at the layers of the ice core like tree rings–and fit some of those observations with tree-ring timing. They could tell how much snow fell. They could measure the conductivity of sections of the ice core. They could analyze the relative abundance of gases at various times by actually measuring tiny bubbles of air trapped in the ice. Mass spectroscopy told them about the relative abundance of heavy water and how it varied in the past 100,000 years.
Ah, but that's just the beginning. From some of those observations they first had to build a reliable way of measuring time, answering the question: how old is a particular layer of ice core? Deductions there had to give a consistent picture with every other dating technique it could be made to line up with. Then one could start to build a picture of what the climate was doing, and every deduction was made in a milieu of other deductions and existing scientific knowledge so that everything cohered.
Accomplishing that is an amazing feat although it is what science does all the time. Every bit of scientific theory and observational data is continually subjected to a barrage of attacks from all sides probing for any inconsistency with existing knowledge. It's a remarkable process, but it's maybe even more remarkable that it works at all. That may be the crowning achievement of science.
Of course, the mystery is that it is even possible to create such a coherent whole. This, of course, is the point Einstein was making when he said "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."*
While pondering this great mystery I had a brief moment–a very brief moment–of feeling sorry for people like young-earth creationists and "intelligent-design" creationists, a group that is rarely the object of my pity. But think for a moment on these pitiable ones and all others whose core belief is that their god created all the details of the universe that they can see and the explanation for all of it is "god did it that way".
Young-earthers see–must see–"nature" as a capricious trickster with, for example, fossils laid down according to the whim of their creator and thus allowing no meaningful patterns to be observed, no deductions to be made, no connections to any other physical phenomenon save through the arbitrary hand of their creator. There is no sense that observations must make a coherent whole, nor that historic puzzle pieces have to fit together into any sort of comprehensible, indisputable larger picture.
What poverty of thought that is, what a barren wasteland, an infinity of random and unconnected details about the world that need make no sense. Is this not a recipe for confusion, a path to alienation and despair? How can one move through a world, an existence, where anything is free to change from moment to moment, where nothing can be expected to be predictable, let alone understandable?
For me, nothing rivals the majestic unity of the natural world.
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* [note added 25 august 2008] Or maybe it was this version that Richard Dawkins attributes to J.B.S. Haldane that I was mentally grasping at: "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy."
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science, Reflections
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on Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 15.21
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My, my, you are starting to sound (and write) like an 18th-century "deist" or "rationalist." Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
I've just finished reading Iain Pears' novel "An instance of the fingerpost." Do you know it? It's set in Restoration England — London, but mostly Oxford — with many historical figures (highly fictionalized), most of whom are amongst the earliest members of the Royal Society. Boyle (of the law), Wallis (mathematician and cryptographer), Lower (circulation/transfusion of the blood), Morland (pumps, fen drainage), Locke (political economy) etc.
One of the things the book illustrates is just how far "back" the starting line was for these people, in the earliest days of scientific experimentation and discovery. And the forces that were ranged against them. They were very much part of the "battle of the ancients and the moderns," with all the weight of authority — classical as well as biblical ranged against them. Not just Genesis, but Galen, Ptolemy, and especially Aristotle. The English "philosophers" were also working against the background of the English Civil War and its aftermath, where an absolute uniformity and conformity were understood to be the necessary requirements for peace, and where anyone who challenged the established order, in religion, politics, of "new learning", was regarded as seditious and dangerous.
They were almost all clerics, too, of course, ordination in the established church being a requirement for a position in the universities. There were those, like Boyle, who devoutly believed that the study of the "book of creation" would simply confirm and reinforce the doctrine of the "book of scripture," while others saw that the study of the natural sciences would totally subvert and destroy the established order, the wisdom of the ages, and divine revelation.
The title of the novel comes from one of Francis Bacon's "Aphorisms" from the "Nova Organum." A "fingerpost" (a signpost) is something that leads to, or springs from, insight or inspiration, and therefore points to a inevitable solution of a conundrum. Not that you're interested in that topic, or anything ….
on Sunday, 17 August 2008 at 02.36
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It occurs to me the difference between anti-science, religious people and the rest of us who, faith notwithstanding, value and insist on science and the scientific method, is at basis the difference between those willing to rely on emotion and those committed to discipline.