From a Western perspective, it all began in ancient Greece, around 600 BC. This is 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 over the course of a century. Aside from the Greek explosion of thoughts, this is the time of Siddhartha Gautama (also known as Buddha) in India, Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) in ancient Persia: religious leaders and thinkers who would reformulate the meaning of faith and morality. In Greece, Thales of Miletus and Pythagoras of Samos were pioneers in pre-Socratic philosophy, (sort of) shifting the focus of research and explanation from the divine to the natural.
Of course, the divine never left primitive Greek thought, but with the advent of philosophy, trying to understand the workings of nature through logical reasoning — as opposed to supernatural reasoning — would become an option not before. existed. The history of science, from its beginnings to the present day, could be explained as an increasingly successful division between belief in a supernatural component of reality and a strictly materialistic cosmos. The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Century of Reason, literally means “seeing the light,” the light here is clearly 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 who preached the fundamental reasonableness of nature; no strange thing inexplicable, like a god playing dice; his critique of the cross that the unpredictability of the quantum world was really fundamental to nature and not just a deficiency of our current understanding.
Science cannot answer the extent to which we can understand the workings of nature only through logic. This is where the complication begins. Can the human mind, through the diligent application of scientific methodology and the use of increasingly powerful instruments, arrive at a complete understanding of the natural world? Is there an “end to science”? This is the sensitive issue. If the split that began in pre-Socratic Greece were to end, nature as a whole would be susceptible of a logical description, the complete collection of behaviors that scientific studies identified, classified, and described through perpetual natural laws. . Only the practical applications of this knowledge, inventions and technologies that would serve our needs in different ways would remain for scientists and engineers.
This kind of vision — or, indeed, of hope — goes back to Plato, who, in turn, owes much of these expectations 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 changing and fluid (Becoming), is at least as old. Plato proposed that truth lay in the rational and immutable world of perfect forms which preceded the deceptive and deceptive reality of the senses. For example, the abstract form Chair embodies all the chairs, objects that can take many forms in our sensory reality while serving their functionality (an object to sit on) and basic design (with a seated surface and a few legs underneath). According to Plato, forms are 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 true reality.
Credit: Gothika via Wikimedia Commons CC 4.0
When scientists and mathematicians use the term Platonic worldview, this means in general: the unlimited capacity of reason to unlock the secrets of creation, one by one. Einstein, for example, was a believer who preached the fundamental reasonableness of nature; no strange thing inexplicable, like a god playing dice; his critique of the cross that the unpredictability of the quantum world was really fundamental to nature and not just a deficiency of our current understanding. Despite his firm belief in this underlying order, Einstein acknowledged the imperfection of human knowledge: “What I see of nature is a magnificent structure that we can only understand in a very imperfect way and that must fill a person who thinks with a sense of humility. ” (Quoted by Dukas and Hoffmann in Albert Einstein, The Human Side: Glimpses from His Archives (1979), 39.), the Platonic ideology that the fundamental material of reality is logical and comprehensible to the human mind and, for on the other hand, the recognition that our reasoning has limitations, that our tools have limitations, and therefore arrive at a kind of final or complete understanding of the material world is nothing more than an impossible, semi-religious dream.
This kind of tension is palpable today when we see groups of scientists passionately advocating for or against the existence of the multiverse, an idea that states that our universe is one of 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 controversy. The data decides, one way or another. This is the beauty and power of science. The challenge, however, is knowing when to drop an idea. How long do you have to wait until an idea, no matter how seductive, is considered unrealistic? This is where the debate becomes interesting. Data supporting more “out there” ideas such as the multiverse or the additional natural symmetries needed for unification models have refused to appear for decades, despite extensive searches with different instruments and techniques. On the other hand, we only find if we look. So should we continue to defend these ideas? Who decides? Is it a community decision or should each person pursue 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 led by physicist Brian Greene. The topic was string theory, our best candidate for a final theory of how matter particles interact. When I finished my PhD in 1986, string theory was the way. The only way. But by 2019, things had changed and very dramatically, due to a lack of supporting data. To my surprise, both Mike and Andy were open to the fact that this certainty of the past no longer existed. String theory has taught many things to physicists and perhaps it was their use. Platonic prospects were in jeopardy.
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. Will it be a generational thing, as the famous physicist Max Planck once said, “Ideas don’t die, physicists do”? (Paraphrasing.) I hope not. But it’s a conversation that should be kept more open, as was the case with the World Science Festival. Dreams die hard. But they can die a little easier when we accept the fact that our understanding of reality is limited and does not always fit our expectations of what should or should not be real.