There are just two major places
from which to look: The Physical
Sciences and the Philosophical and
Spiritual realm.
In February, 2006, almost a
decade ago, Scientific American published a special edition on scientific
frontiers – topics, theories and questions – that were yet to be resolved,
answered, or settled. I kept a copy and
today, some were answered but a lot more still remain as frontiers. According to Moore’s Law, computational power
doubles every two years. Surely, by the
end of the century we will have had enough in computing power, technological
advances in new measuring tools and theories to finally know everything. But something tells me, “Not so fast, old man.”
What has propelled our
development as a species is our ability to collectively learn and more
significantly to become adept at passing on what we learn from generation to
generation with logarithmic multiplying effect. From the discovery of the many ways fire can
be harnessed to the invention of the wheel to gun powder and so on and on, we expect
that we are equipped with almost limitless ability to forever expand our
knowledge. To know everything seems like
something just barely over the horizon.
In the sciences empirical
evidence is obviously the source for answers.
Philosophy and religion begins where the sciences end. But that has not
been the case in the beginning. Philosophy and religion, in fact, preceded the sciences
for far longer time than the latter had existed. We can even say that science
came about because of the questions asked by philosophers early in
history. Science too became an arbiter
between what people believed to be true or assumed to be the truth and the
charlatans, magicians, and the superstitious. Chemistry is the child of
alchemy, in fact. Science, philosophy and religion are believed by most to be seeking
the same answers from three different points of view and via different
processes. Meanwhile, religion is under assault, secularism is on the rise,
and a philosophy degree is considered one of those very low on job prospects.
Science asks, makes conjectures,
it does test after test repeatedly before concluding. Religion and Philosophy can be somewhat
interchangeable if not supportive of each other but both counterbalances the
sciences. What the sciences lack in
assessing morality the latter grapples with those that cannot be tested in test
tubes or with instruments but by the way we live our lives. Where the sciences
say, “we don’t know”, the latter offer what is possible given a set of
suppositions testable only by either logic or belief and faith.
Today, a high school senior with
a B+ average in math and physics knows more about the subject than Isaac Newton
ever did. We know more about relativity
theories than Einstein when he was alive.
The operative word is “know” and not necessarily “understanding”. Einstein died knowing only one element of his
General Relativity Theory and one of Special Relativity that were proven to be
true. Measuring instruments have not yet
been invented then to test the other elements but in less than a century much have
been proven to be correct, including perhaps what he thought he had gotten
wrong but it turned out he was right all along.
And there was one field proposed by others that he could not get himself
to believe or agree with – Quantum Mechanics - that had since been proven and
he was wrong. However, and this is very
significant, and it is the reason he was recognized Person of the 20th
Century by Time magazine because his ideas had the most impact in human
history.
Old Albert’s contribution is the
one I look at because, contrary to popular belief, his theories were not stand
alone or new concepts, but were built upon from previous works by other folks
before him or contemporarily with others.
It was his so called thought experiments that put it all together. And
that was where his genius came from. He
was not even strong in mathematics and needed help to get his thoughts the
mathematical structure. This is a good
example of knowledge building on another, ad
infinitum, but will it really go on?
For one thing the new knowledge he brought up overturned a few of Isaac
Newton’s concepts that stood for over two centuries. Einstein was known to have apologized as he
stood in front of Newton’s statue at Cambridge University, England.
Albert was the man all right but two women, relatively unknown to
the general public, made significant contributions in their own right to
deserve a mention here. And I promise to
quote only one three-lettered formula, E=mc2.
Emilie du Chatelet was born in
1706, died at age 42, and would have lived in obscurity as an aristocrat’s wife,
albeit with a checkered romantic life, if not for her other ardent love - science. As a side note, Voltaire, himself an
intellectual giant and one of several of du Chatelet’s paramours praised her as
a great man who just happened to be a
woman. Her French translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica is still textbook material in France today.
She improved on Newton’s theory on momentum and energy ideas but more
importantly her advance ideas on light and its velocity was way ahead of her
time.
It was on those foundational
thoughts on conservation of energy and light that, in no simple but indirect
ways, led to E=mc2. We know
‘m’ to be mass but why ‘c’ for the speed of light? It is from “celeritas”, Latin for swiftness or as an attribute of something
very fast. And what can be faster than
light itself?
The other woman was Lisa Meitner
who, like Einstein, was also a Jewish scientist but of Austrian citizenship who
happened to do her research in Germany before the country fell into
Nazism. Albert was lucky to get out
before Hitler’s campaign against the Jews begun while Meitner had to be
smuggled out by Dutch scientist colleagues later. Her work on nuclear physics is barely a
footnote because her German mentor received the Nobel Prize for physics when
Meitner had much to contribute to it; at the very least, she should have been a
co-awardee. Unfortunately, at that time women were kept out of research
leadership positions. Ironically, the
German mentor who remained in Germany in pursuit of splitting the atom
corresponded with Meitner while she was in exile and continued to consult her
ideas. It was, in fact, her insight and calculations that gave his mentor the
edge towards nuclear fission to produce the first atomic bomb. Fortunately for the Allied Forces, Germany
was then under a barraged of U.S. and British air bombardment curtailing
drastically its ability to produce heavy water.
Lisa Meitner solved the puzzle that physicists were grappling with. They were bombarding the nucleus of uranium
atoms hoping to see the nuclei increase in mass. Instead what they observed was the
opposite. There was a loss of mass. Meitner concluded that the loss of mass was
due to the fact that some of it was being converted into energy as the atom’s
nuclei were being split.
Meanwhile, Einstein wrote to FDR
about unleashing the power of the atom by converting matter into energy through
nuclear fission. He warned that the
Germans were close to doing it as he was tuned to the development there from
fellow scientists. Thus began the
Manhattan Project and the rest is history.
This is just an example of how
the speed of knowledge and information can perhaps lead humanity towards
knowing everything. It does seem like a
feasible track, but is it? It took less
than seventy years from the first 120 foot flight at Kitty Hawk to landing on
the moon. The science for the lunar trip
was Newtonian cosmology and the on board computer on the moon lander paled in
comparison to a $10 hand held calculator today in terms of computational
power. We can go on to talk about leap
frogging development in medicine, machines, engineering, computers,
telecommunication, manufacturing, etc. and we will have to say that the
multiplying effect will have no boundary by which to curtail our ability to
know everything. I happen to believe we are not likely ever to know everything.
1) For every knowledge we gain about anything
new questions emerge
When Anton van Leeuwenhoek first
improved the microscope and saw clearly the structures of cells, when before
that a bacterium was thought to be the smallest living matter we can see,
scientists thought they had reached the wall on magnification. Now, electron
microscopes had gone down to the level of the structure of DNA and we now can
see a picture of the individual atom.
When we thought the atom, the nucleus and electrons comprised the
smallest components of matter we now know about quarks and the Higgs boson. But
the curtain is about to open up to “strings” as the basic building block of
matter that are so small they can only be conjured in eleven dimensions. String theory is sure to blow our mind, but
eleven dimensions? We can barely deal
with four – Time being the fourth dimension.
2) The Enigma of Time
Speaking of time, Einstein died
not knowing that his theory on time was correct all along when solid proof later
on was provided by super accurate atomic clocks. Now we know that an atomic clock at the top
of the Empire State building will run a little faster compared to a similar
clock at the basement. So, an executive
who spends more time at the penthouse office will age faster than the janitor below
by 100 millionth of a second in their lifetime.
That’s negligible, obviously, but when we’re talking GPS satellites 250
miles out in space the time differential can be so great that if it is not
correctively synchronized every hour on the hour, you can be off by 6 miles
after just a day of driving without correction; in a month, you could be in
another time zone. Additionally you must also account and adjust for the speed
of the satellite, because speed causes the clock to slow down. I don’t think we will ever know why time
behaves that way, except via Einstein’s equations. We will not know for example if the twin
paradox theory is true. That is, if a
twin astronaut leaves in a spaceship and travel at 90% the speed of light, he
will come back (still alive, aging normally) but find that his twin brother is
long gone because a few hundred years had elapsed. But Old Albert’s theory says
that to be true. Einstein doubted too
that black holes could exist because his theory predicted that in a black hole the
laws of physics will no longer work and time
may actually stand still.
When Thomas Edison was asked what
he thought of Einstein’s theories. He
replied, “I don’t think much about it
because I don’t understand it”.
3) Size Does Matter
Will the average human mind, even
collectively of the six billion people in the world, be able to comprehend a
solid block of iron the size of Mt. Everest compressed to a space occupied by a
grain of sand? Try contemplating a star ten
times bigger than our sun, collapsing on itself from a sphere of 8.6 million
miles in diameter into the size of a small city in a matter of ¼ of one
second. Einstein predicted it and today
cosmic black holes are widely accepted to exist. Short of actually taking a
picture of a black hole – we cannot because no light can escape from its
clutches – it is beyond doubt that it exists.
It is estimated that our galaxy alone may contain millions of them and
at the center is one super massive black hole that feeds on other very large
objects, stars and even other black holes that come close to it. We’ve established that light travels very
fast – 186,000 miles per second – incomprehensibly swift but try to imagine
that one of those flickering lights in the night sky left its source long
before the collapse of the Roman Empire.
What about light that left its source when the dinosaurs were still
roaming around? That might seem
frivolously pointless to even imagine the source of that light but think that
its distance from us is a mere fraction of the girth of the universe. Some
places we will never see because there is not enough time for light to reach
us. And yet, as incomprehensibly huge
the universe is, the entire amount of visible matter (all the galaxies and
stars combined) is a mere 5% or less of the total. Now, we’re being told that 68% is dark energy
and 27% dark matter. If you say, “that
is insane”, I am there to agree with you.
Then, are there intelligent
beings somewhere in the vast universe who may know?
4) We will not know what we cannot know
Let’s go inside the mind of a
single fish, perhaps pretend to be one of hundreds in a school, lazily swimming
around under twenty feet of water. Think
for a minute when out of the surface of the water from above came down a thin
filament with a morsel of food attached to something like a curved fin and the
fish next to you grabbed it quickly. It
was running away with the food when suddenly it was pulled up, yanked away with
such force that it disappeared from view entirely in an instant. It was gone.
How were you to explain what just happened? Something from out of your world caused one
of you to disappear. You could be the
Einstein of fishes but there was no way you could ever imagine what it is like
above the surface of the water. You were
captive by the dimension of your own watery world. You have no idea that other living things
breathe not through the gills as you do and they inhabit the bottom of an ocean
of air. As a fish you cannot know what you do not have the ability to know.
5) Will we be able to read the Mind of God as
Stephen Hawking suggested?
I recall a scientist, a Jesuit priest, if I remember
correctly, who gave this analogy.
Suppose we live as characters in
a comic strip, drawn by an illustrator, who is thus the creator of the two
dimensional world that we inhabit.
Suppose the creator gave us the power of life, the intelligence and free
will to go about our life as we pleased; however, we are still confined to the
pages of a flat paper. One day, we began
asking, “What is out there beyond our flat world? Who created us?” We do not see the extra third dimension, the
depth that the illustrator has so he can actually see from above, while holding
a pen or pencil, and see his characters “come to life” as he draws them. He not only lives with the extra dimension to
see from above what he was drawing, he was also experiencing the concept of
time differently from how we do.
As hard as we try to know, using
all the knowledge we can muster, we are still confined to a world from which we
cannot get out from to see, “what’s out there?” We will never know using only
the information we get from our own flat world to understand what’s outside of
it. We need to transcend from that world in order to understand what’s outside
of it. It is only then that we can get a
glimpse of who illustrated us. That is
where possibly, in my opinion, science can transition to philosophy and
religion, just as the latter had transitioned to the former early in history. How else do we go about it? Insisting on only using science, with all its
limitation, and ignoring another method of thinking to achieve the goal of knowing
everything is sure to limit our ability to understand.
This takes us back to the
anonymous writer who said,
“I’d rather
not know some things than know absolutely about everything. Trust me I know.”
6) It is next to impossible to define
consciousness
To quote Einstein again, he said,
“Imagination
is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know
and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever
will be to know and understand.”
The source of imagination is as
varied as there are individual minds. So,
what is the human mind? To have a
working mind means to have consciousness.
And consciousness seems to defy science.
Something seems to be working outside of the physical brain. At least many of us think so. It is only through our mind that we can
transport ourselves from here to somewhere else or to places only we can
imagine, to any time other than now or yesterday, to what could have been
instead of what really happened. Only in
our mind can we look at as many scenarios as we want before we decide to do
anything, but alas, why are we only able to do or experience only one of them?
Finally, I leave you with
this. Today it is no longer just matter
and energy that make up our world because information is admittedly the third
component. Information – light, sound, touch, etc. – is how individual cells
survive, how our ancestors made our journey to today possible, how everything
works in nature, in fact. Information is
the medium by which we perceive reality.
Without information we, everyone and everything around us, the whole
universe, in fact, ceases to exist. And the most important of all is the
information we have in our mind. It must be conserved the same way as matter
and energy, so where does it go when we cross the threshold of the great
beyond?
