The productive and engaging physicist John Barrow concluded an essay on mathematics punningly entitled “Counter Culture” with the following paragraph.
. . . the world might seem to be nothing but a display of mindless mathematical order. Indeed, you can be a dehumanist if you choose. A work of Rembrandt or Miro, of Mozart or Cage, can always be viewed only as an elaborated form of mathematical pattern if you insist. But while it is possible to analyse musical works in terms of variations in air pressure or paintings as frequency variations in light, it is not terribly useful. These things are somehow only diluted by their superficial encoding in mathematical patterns. Indeed, it is the very fact of this vast subjective realm of complexity, defying quantification for any useful purpose, that all the more impresses on us the miracle of a Universe that elsewhere is so totally, deeply, and unerringly mathematical.
(Appearing in his book Between Inner Space and Outer Space, 1999.) This statement exhilarates me. Firstly because it is a sadly needed reminder that science need not remove the human from the human experience. As we trail conscious and unconscious tendrils in the stream of perceivable interactions with the universe, we draw up fear, awe, wonder, and joy which sustain our being. I can tell you why a sunset is red and how condors glide, but this is not the experience of letting the crimson soak your skin, nor gazing on the bird so long that suddenly you are lifted and see yourself small with her eyes.
Secondly, it sharply focuses the eternal mystery of the comprehensibility of the universe. We comprehend it. We confused, small bags of bones, sitting at the bottom of a deep gravity well around an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy, we beings perceiving only a tiny fraction of the ways in which the universe speaks, we Light Matter things, an incomprehensibly tiny proportion of the 4% of the universe which is visible, existing for not even one tick of the great cosmic clock, can speak of the beginning and end of time and all things, of vast distance, times, masses, of nuclear reactions in distant stars, of cataclysms beyond imagining, of the nerves firing in your skull as you read this, of curing disease, of simulating life. And this just one way of comprehending the universe. What of mythic themes, of stories and music and poetry which unite us and divide by showing how others experience the world, or revealing hidden and dark things within us?
All this is ours for free. It is up to us to enjoy it.
Filed under: big picture, mathematics, science | Tagged: barrow, big picture, mathematics, myth, philosophy of mathematics, physics, poetry, reality, science
Beautiful post.
Thankyou for the pointer to John Barrow’s book. Looks like my kind of book. I think you put your finger on a core critical issue – captured in his word “dehumanist” – lovely!
We need to stand up and be counted I think, in many walks of life. We need to stand up and insist on the humanisation of our work. The human is being lost in science, in medicine and in the workplace. There’s a drive to make us all zombies! (you know what I mean!) – but now we need heroes – like you! Reflective, thoughtful, human-focussed scientists, thinkers, doctors, writers.
More power to you, Phil Wilson. Keep posting
Stop! I’m blushing! Thank you ever so much for the encouragement. I was really inspired recently by a more experienced colleague here at the University of Canterbury who said that when supervising a graduate student, you shouldn’t be doing it “for science” or “for humanity” or for your own publication record (probably the most common motivation) but for the student. We are facilitators of the dreams of the student. It is so easy in academe to get sucked into bean-counting our way to the top, doing safe science, stacking up papers and achievements and crawling to the top of the pile. The human all too often gets lost along the way. (With notable exceptions. Some beautiful people rise to the top of science and maintain a very human view of the world. But it’s a shock when you come across one.)