From a western perspective, it all started in ancient Greece, around 600 BC. This occurred during the Axial Era, a somewhat controversial term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers to designate the remarkable intellectual and spiritual awakening that took place in different parts of the world in about a century. In addition to the explosion of Greek thought, this is the time of Siddhartha Gautama (also known as Buddha) in India, of Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, of Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) in ancient Persia – religious leaders and thinkers who would reformulate the meaning of faith and morality. In Greece, Tales of Miletus and Pythagoras of Samos were the pioneers of pre-Socratic philosophy, (more or less) shifting the focus of investigation and explanation from the divine to the natural.
Certainly, the divine never left the initial Greek thought, but with the beginning of philosophy, trying to understand the workings of nature through logical reasoning – as opposed to supernatural reasoning – would become an option that did not exist before. The history of science, from its earliest days to the present, could be told as an increasingly successful division between belief in a supernatural component of reality and a strictly materialistic cosmos. The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Age of Reason, literally means ‘seeing the light’, the light here clearly being the superiority of human logic over any kind of supernatural or unscientific methodology to arrive at the “truth” of things .
Einstein, for example, was a believer, preaching the fundamental reasonableness of nature; no strange and inexplicable thing, like a god playing dice – his ironic criticism of the belief that the unpredictability of the quantum world was truly fundamental to nature and not just a deficiency in our current understanding.
The extent to which we can understand the workings of nature only through logic is not something that science can answer. This is where the complication begins. Can the human mind, through diligent application of scientific methodology and the use of increasingly powerful instruments, come to a complete understanding of the natural world? Is there an “end to science”? This is a sensitive subject. If the division that started in pre-Socratic Greece were completed, nature in its entirety would be liable to a logical description, the complete collection of behaviors that scientific studies have identified, classified and described by means of perpetual natural laws. All that scientists and engineers would have to do would be the practical applications of that knowledge, inventions and technologies that would meet our needs in different ways.
This kind of vision – or hope, in fact – goes back at least to Plato, who, in turn, owes much of that expectation to Pythagoras and Parmenides, the philosopher of being. The dispute between the primacy of that which is timeless or immutable (Being) and that which is changeable and fluid (Becoming) is at least as old. Plato proposed that truth was in the unchanging and rational world of Perfect Forms that preceded the deceptive and deceptive reality of the senses. For example, the abstract form Chair incorporates all chairs, objects that can take many forms in our sensory reality while serving their functionality (an object to sit on) and basic design (with an adjustable surface and a few legs below it). According to Plato, Forms contain the key to the essence of all things.
Plato used the allegory of the cave to explain that what humans see and experience is not the real reality.
Credit: Gothika via Wikimedia Commons CC 4.0
When scientists and mathematicians use the term Platonic worldview, this is what they mean in general: reason’s limitless ability to unravel the secrets of creation, one by one. Einstein, for example, was a believer, preaching the fundamental reasonableness of nature; no strange and inexplicable thing, like a god playing dice – his ironic criticism of the belief that the unpredictability of the quantum world was truly fundamental to nature and not just a deficiency in our current understanding. Despite his strong belief in this underlying order, Einstein acknowledged the imperfection of human knowledge: “What I see from Nature is a magnificent structure that we can only understand in a very imperfect way and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.” (Quoted by Dukas and Hoffmann in Albert Einstein, The Human Side: Glimpses from His Archives (1979), 39.) Einstein embodies the tension between these two conflicting worldviews, a tension that still exists between us today: on the one hand, the Platonic ideology that the fundamental material of reality is logical and understandable to the human mind and, on the other hand, the recognition that our reasoning has limitations, that our tools have limitations and, therefore, to reach some kind of final or complete understanding of the material world it is nothing more than an impossible semi-religious dream.
This kind of tension is palpable today when we see groups of scientists passionately arguing for or against the existence of the multiverse, an idea that claims that our universe is one in a large number of other universes; or for or against the final unification of the laws of physics.
Nature, of course, is always the final arbiter of any scientific dispute. The data decides, in one way or another. That is the beauty and power at the heart of science. The challenge, however, is to know when to abandon an idea. How long should one wait until an idea, however seductive, is considered unreal? This is where the debate becomes interesting. Data to support more ideas “out there”, such as the multiverse or extra symmetries of nature needed for unification models, have refused to appear for decades, despite extensive research with different instruments and techniques. On the other hand, we only find it if we look. So, should we continue to defend these ideas? Who decides? Is it a community decision or should each person follow their own way of thinking?
In 2019, I participated in an interesting live debate at the World Science Festival with physicists Michael Dine and Andrew Strominger and presented by physicist Brian Greene. The theme was string theory, our best candidate for a final theory of how particles in matter interact. When I completed my doctorate in 1986, string theory was The manner. The only way. But in 2019, things changed quite dramatically due to the lack of supporting data. To my surprise, Mike and Andy were quite open to the fact that that certainty of the past was gone. String theory has taught physicists many things and perhaps that was their use. The Platonic perspective was in danger.
The dispute remains alive, although with each experiment that does not show evidence of support for string theory, the dream becomes more difficult to justify. Is it a generational thing, as the famous physicist Max Planck once joked: “Ideas don’t die, physicists die”? (I paraphrase.) I hope not. But it is a conversation that should be more openly, as was the case with the World Science Festival. Dreams are hard to die. But they can die a little more easily when we accept the fact that our understanding of reality is limited and does not always live up to our expectations of what should or should not be real.