There’s a curious property to the universe: It’s describable. And we are the describers. If we didn’t exist, would the universe be describable? (Insert partial apology for the circularity here: “Sorry, reader”) The describability of the universe means, of course, that all our science is ultimately a description of one sort or another, even a mathematical one. Unfortunately, as Bertrand Russell once said, “…infallibility is not granted to mortals…,” and we are those mortals, so our descriptions might not be as permanently applicable as we might think.
Prescribing isn’t what we do when we “discover” a law of nature; again, we describe, and we leave the prescribing to God (or, for atheists, scientists, and humanists, to some as-yet-to-be-discovered Source-of-Everything like Chaos, quantum effects in a vacuum, and any cosmic rebirth theory involving colliding branes).
That we are limited to describing, rather than prescribing the Cosmos as a whole means that we are the artisans of understanding. We draw the picture; we say, “This is how we interpret what we experience, and this is what we think makes sense.” It doesn’t have to be the ultimate description, just one that makes sense in our time and to people who appear to be “in the know.” We always have “experts” to provide descriptions, but there’s a weakness in our dependence on them.
As history has shown, descriptions work for the describers but not necessarily for later generations imbued with greater knowledge and understanding. So, for example, the ancient Greeks, without knowledge of the Copernican Solar System and Keplerian orbits, were still able to predict lunar and solar eclipses. Their astronomical math worked though it was based on a faulty understanding of planetary motions. They effectively described the appearance and not the reality. Thus, Ptolemy was able to describe for his time and ensuing centuries and in a perfectly acceptable way the “retrograde motion” of the planets, which is an effect of our perspective as we travel around the sun and look at other planets orbiting either closer or farther and either faster or slower than Earth. * The description made sense even though it was based on apparent, and not actual, orbits. This is how Morris Kline phrases it: “From the standpoint of the search for truths, it is noteworthy that Ptolemy, like Eudoxus, fully realized that his theory was just a convenient mathematical description which fit the observations and was not necessarily the true design of nature.” **
Are we any different? The so far irrefutable General Theory of Relativity and the almost complete Standard Model are, in my guess, the best descriptions we have to date, though their assumed incompatibility, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy are reasons to think a new description or a new modifier currently lies hidden. Will we eventually arrive at a paradigm shift equivalent to Copernicus’ overturning Ptolemy or Einstein’s overturning Newton? That is, will we discover that our current descriptions so replete with complicated math are just the most convenient descriptions and not “the true design of nature”? ***
What is the endpoint of our descriptions? Pretty much it’s still the mind of God. That means that even humanists’ mathematical descriptions of the Macro Cosmos and the Micro Cosmos have their roots in ancient Greek and medieval Christian attempts to uncover the secrets of creation. It was in the Middle Ages that such describing of Nature came to be closely associated with, in Kline’s words, “a search for God’s mathematical design of nature.” In short, scientific descriptions were meant to provide an understanding of God’s prescription; modern scientific description was born as a religious quest to understand the mind of God (Kline, 38,39).**** One might not adhere to any religious belief, but the root of any quest for the ultimate irrefutable description of the universe lies in that ancient tie between Creator and Creation, even those descriptions that deny any purposeful Prescriber of Nature and accept randomness as the force of creation.
To avoid any sense that science is connected to that ancient and medieval quest, we become the modern version of Pythagoreans, for whom mathematical reality WAS reality. That we describe mathematically is an acknowledgement that we believe math is the key to understanding “laws” that exist beyond our mere describing of appearances. Having removed “God” from the language of science, some believe they have acquired a new approach to describing reality. In contrast, I see what science does as a continuation of that ancient desire to understand the prescription for the cosmos.
We’ve been very good at describing the how of Nature. Our descriptions work. We’re a long way off from settling on the why, however. This is a point Richard P. Feynman makes in QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. He writes, “…while I am describing to you how Nature works, you won’t understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that. I can’t explain why Nature behaves in this peculiar way” (10).***** If you want to know the WHY, you just have to get into the “mind” of Nature’s Prescriber.
One last note: Whys are really difficult, aren’t they? Take human behavior, for example. We should, as humans, understand the why of others’ actions, but we are left after, say, a tragedy like a mass shooting asking, “Why?” We can describe the past influences on an individual mass shooter, but those with similar influences who choose peaceful paths in life don’t shoot people. Why, therefore, is more difficult to explain than who, what, where, how, and when, all of those five having the property of describability.
*Just imagine looking at Mars from Earth. Since we orbit the sun in fewer days than Mars, we pass it. As we begin to catch up to it, it appears to move in one direction (East to West), and after we pass it, it appears to move in another direction (West to East). See the 4-minute video at https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrEZ6of8V1dF0cAjxsPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=retrograde+motion+of+mars&fr=yhs-pty-pty_maps&hspart=pty&hsimp=yhs-pty_maps#id=5&vid=b43946f23d273d5b7cf20a5f90530046&action=view
**Kline, Morris. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. New York. Fall River Press, 1980 and 2011. p. 29. My regular readers will recognize that this is not the first instance of my quoting from Kline’s book. I happen to think it is one of the most insightful books written in the last half century, and I recommend it.
***Discovery of some currently unknown facet of the universe will probably change our description just as discovery of some unknown facet of another person changes our view (“I didn’t know that about him/her”). With regard to people with hidden lives, I think of those we come to know in one venue without knowledge of their lives in another venue, like actors whose fans might be ignorant of their military service. See https://www.historyhit.com/famous-actors-who-served-in-world-war-two/ for some examples.
****Should we argue that Galileo and Newton told us “how” things fall, whereas Einstein told us “why” they fall? If so, then we argue that Einstein did discover both the nature of the prescription and the mind of the Prescriber. Of course, one could argue that Relativity’s “why” is merely another manifestation of “how.”
*****Princeton. Princeton University Press. 1985, 2006.
Prescribing isn’t what we do when we “discover” a law of nature; again, we describe, and we leave the prescribing to God (or, for atheists, scientists, and humanists, to some as-yet-to-be-discovered Source-of-Everything like Chaos, quantum effects in a vacuum, and any cosmic rebirth theory involving colliding branes).
That we are limited to describing, rather than prescribing the Cosmos as a whole means that we are the artisans of understanding. We draw the picture; we say, “This is how we interpret what we experience, and this is what we think makes sense.” It doesn’t have to be the ultimate description, just one that makes sense in our time and to people who appear to be “in the know.” We always have “experts” to provide descriptions, but there’s a weakness in our dependence on them.
As history has shown, descriptions work for the describers but not necessarily for later generations imbued with greater knowledge and understanding. So, for example, the ancient Greeks, without knowledge of the Copernican Solar System and Keplerian orbits, were still able to predict lunar and solar eclipses. Their astronomical math worked though it was based on a faulty understanding of planetary motions. They effectively described the appearance and not the reality. Thus, Ptolemy was able to describe for his time and ensuing centuries and in a perfectly acceptable way the “retrograde motion” of the planets, which is an effect of our perspective as we travel around the sun and look at other planets orbiting either closer or farther and either faster or slower than Earth. * The description made sense even though it was based on apparent, and not actual, orbits. This is how Morris Kline phrases it: “From the standpoint of the search for truths, it is noteworthy that Ptolemy, like Eudoxus, fully realized that his theory was just a convenient mathematical description which fit the observations and was not necessarily the true design of nature.” **
Are we any different? The so far irrefutable General Theory of Relativity and the almost complete Standard Model are, in my guess, the best descriptions we have to date, though their assumed incompatibility, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy are reasons to think a new description or a new modifier currently lies hidden. Will we eventually arrive at a paradigm shift equivalent to Copernicus’ overturning Ptolemy or Einstein’s overturning Newton? That is, will we discover that our current descriptions so replete with complicated math are just the most convenient descriptions and not “the true design of nature”? ***
What is the endpoint of our descriptions? Pretty much it’s still the mind of God. That means that even humanists’ mathematical descriptions of the Macro Cosmos and the Micro Cosmos have their roots in ancient Greek and medieval Christian attempts to uncover the secrets of creation. It was in the Middle Ages that such describing of Nature came to be closely associated with, in Kline’s words, “a search for God’s mathematical design of nature.” In short, scientific descriptions were meant to provide an understanding of God’s prescription; modern scientific description was born as a religious quest to understand the mind of God (Kline, 38,39).**** One might not adhere to any religious belief, but the root of any quest for the ultimate irrefutable description of the universe lies in that ancient tie between Creator and Creation, even those descriptions that deny any purposeful Prescriber of Nature and accept randomness as the force of creation.
To avoid any sense that science is connected to that ancient and medieval quest, we become the modern version of Pythagoreans, for whom mathematical reality WAS reality. That we describe mathematically is an acknowledgement that we believe math is the key to understanding “laws” that exist beyond our mere describing of appearances. Having removed “God” from the language of science, some believe they have acquired a new approach to describing reality. In contrast, I see what science does as a continuation of that ancient desire to understand the prescription for the cosmos.
We’ve been very good at describing the how of Nature. Our descriptions work. We’re a long way off from settling on the why, however. This is a point Richard P. Feynman makes in QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. He writes, “…while I am describing to you how Nature works, you won’t understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that. I can’t explain why Nature behaves in this peculiar way” (10).***** If you want to know the WHY, you just have to get into the “mind” of Nature’s Prescriber.
One last note: Whys are really difficult, aren’t they? Take human behavior, for example. We should, as humans, understand the why of others’ actions, but we are left after, say, a tragedy like a mass shooting asking, “Why?” We can describe the past influences on an individual mass shooter, but those with similar influences who choose peaceful paths in life don’t shoot people. Why, therefore, is more difficult to explain than who, what, where, how, and when, all of those five having the property of describability.
*Just imagine looking at Mars from Earth. Since we orbit the sun in fewer days than Mars, we pass it. As we begin to catch up to it, it appears to move in one direction (East to West), and after we pass it, it appears to move in another direction (West to East). See the 4-minute video at https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrEZ6of8V1dF0cAjxsPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=retrograde+motion+of+mars&fr=yhs-pty-pty_maps&hspart=pty&hsimp=yhs-pty_maps#id=5&vid=b43946f23d273d5b7cf20a5f90530046&action=view
**Kline, Morris. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. New York. Fall River Press, 1980 and 2011. p. 29. My regular readers will recognize that this is not the first instance of my quoting from Kline’s book. I happen to think it is one of the most insightful books written in the last half century, and I recommend it.
***Discovery of some currently unknown facet of the universe will probably change our description just as discovery of some unknown facet of another person changes our view (“I didn’t know that about him/her”). With regard to people with hidden lives, I think of those we come to know in one venue without knowledge of their lives in another venue, like actors whose fans might be ignorant of their military service. See https://www.historyhit.com/famous-actors-who-served-in-world-war-two/ for some examples.
****Should we argue that Galileo and Newton told us “how” things fall, whereas Einstein told us “why” they fall? If so, then we argue that Einstein did discover both the nature of the prescription and the mind of the Prescriber. Of course, one could argue that Relativity’s “why” is merely another manifestation of “how.”
*****Princeton. Princeton University Press. 1985, 2006.
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