Burbles

My last post, Bubbles (see below), attracted an elegantly pointed missile. In that missile, the artillerist wondered why an alchemist would be so harsh on the sciences.

I have to reply, mildly (and hopefully as elegantly), that to say science or mathematics is beautiful requires one to first appreciate what beauty is. We appreciate the beauty of Euler or Einstein, Newton or Liebniz, only because they are islands of symmetry and simplicity in an ocean of chaos. And to make that distinction - that isolated symmetry is beauty but pervasive symmetry is stasis - requires that we see more than the islands themselves. In fact, we require a cartographic knowledge of the shores and coastlines of human endeavour before we can say, "This, this is a beautiful island; this is a peninsula of note."

An equation or a theorem of itself has no elegance or beauty except in comparison with what it describes, or with its own context. Science is not beautiful unless one can see what is indeed not beautiful, not elegant, not true. Science is unclear (and even nuclear, as the old radiologists' joke goes) and imprecise simply because it is the process of making the unclear clear and the imprecise precise, with a limit which approaches an unknowable extreme. It is still clearer than its antecedents in the business of the lower-order truths (primitive deism, animism, atomism, magic - all these come to mind), but it is only clear by contrast. It is only elegant by contrast, and sometimes it is not even that. Consider Newtonian mechanics and the considerations of the quantum and relativistic extremes; consider the ideal gas law and the work of Johannes Diderik van der Waals.

Firstly: I am saying that yes, emphatically, science and mathematics are profound and beautiful. I am also saying that our appreciation of that beauty does not come from something intrinsic to them, but from a higher-order awareness of aesthetics, of the interplay of reason and vision, of reality and dream. The Greek word technë probably comes closest to bridging the grand divide. It is a word which means 'art', 'craft', 'engineering' and 'precision' all in one. And of course, it is the root of our words 'technique', 'technical', and 'technology'. It is a far more powerful word than the Latin scientia or even its own compatriot, sophia.

Secondly: I am also saying that I understand what my friend means when wondering about alchemists. But I must sternly say that the fundamental and discrete elements of this world lack meaning on their own; they need the grand perspective, the great unifying gaze, in order to be of value to us all. Alchemy itself is based on one key tenet - as above, so below. The alchemists of old, and the last great member of that brotherhood, Sir Isaac Newton himself, realised that to understand the role of the smallest of elements, one had to seek understanding of the masterplan.

Thirdly: I agree that the sciences should not be condemned or consigned to the slush-heap. I do not quite say that anywhere, despite my insistence that the sciences provide no meaning on their own. I am merely pointing out that the sciences are small elements of a large tapestry, and that when we pit the humanities against the sciences, as so many have done (e.g. C P Snow), we tend to lose out as a species. The picture begins when we register the world around us, it continues as we analyse its smallest elements, and continues when we expand our vision to larger and more complex things. Without language and art, the sciences per se are in fact of no significance to the majority of the human race.

Virgil quite rightly said, "Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas." But one should note the counterpoint that the great scholar added, and agree at last with Aquinas, "The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things."

That is why I teach, least of all, the sciences; I teach what I can grasp of philosophy; and I look as much as I dare upon the vast fields of human endeavour and try my best to contribute what I can to that enormous tapestry. No betrayer of the sciences, I - but rather, a scientist and sportsman who dares say that we might know much of the rules, but lose sight of how the game is played.