Monday, August 13, 2012

Technology

With all of the publicity surrounding the latest NASA lander to arrive on the surface of Mars, America is once again in the thrall of our so-called “best and brightest” – the physicists and engineers who have managed to conjure up yet another high-tech miracle. As an amateur aficionado of both astronomy and physics (and who in bygone undergraduate days came within a few courses of achieving a minor in physics), I confess to being as enamored as the next nerd of the high-resolution images now effusing from Mars’ Gale Crater. The possibility of discovering extraterrestrial life – if not on Mars, then perhaps on one of our solar system’s many quirky moons, like Jupiter’s Europa or Saturn’s Enceladus – is exhilarating to me, while the romance of someday launching interstellar probes and starships is intoxicating stuff. Since boyhood, I’ve been waiting for the staples of 20th Century science fiction to arrive on the scene. Space stations are here, but manned interplanetary travel is not. Video telephoning, aka Skype and its imitators, has come of age, but flying cars have not. Computers, though still lacking the precocity of Hal, are ubiquitous, but domestic robots, alas, are not.

In some regards, technology has failed to live up to its promise of a half century ago. When I was born, passenger jets, flying with the same approximate speed as those that still ply the skies, were already in use. Present-day automobiles, while more fuel-efficient and gizmo-laden, are not extraordinarily different from cars in the 60s. And while medical science has certainly advanced, there have been no dramatic advances in the never-ending drive to stave off, or even reverse, aging.

Regardless, modern man’s love affair with technology has been intensifying for more than four hundred years. Because of technology’s undeniable successes, man, or at any event Western man, has adopted a technocentric worldview, according to which the universe is merely a great Machine, and all phenomena therein its myriad moving parts. This accounts for the primacy of physics, which, from a science with the legitimate aim of describing the physical universe, has morphed into a sort of scientific materialist creed.

The other day, I was watching, as I am wont to do, a youtube video of a certain celebrated physicist lecturing to a Caltech audience on the virtues of the late Richard Feynman, generally regarded as one of the greatest physicists who ever lived. It was Feynman who gave physics the theory of quantum chromodynamics and who contributed so many crucial elements to the piecing together of quantum field theory. Like most physicists, Feynman saw his chosen field as the central human intellectual endeavor and its apostles as the world’s deepest thinkers. According to the Caltech lecturer, who had been a colleague and close friend of Feynman, the two of them once met with and debated a couple of philosophers interested in the problem of consciousness. Of them the man of science spoke with undisguised derision. “They [the philosophers] tried to philosophize when they should have been ‘scientifizing’”, he said, calling their discussion of notions like monism “baloney” and “pretension.” While admitting that he could not understand what the philosophers were talking about, the physicist went on to laud Feynman, who reportedly demolished their feeble arguments with pointed and relentless scientific logic.

This tendency to pooh-pooh all domains of thought not encompassed by a differential equation is by no means confined to Sheldon Cooper-esque self-parodies like this particular scientist; it is endemic in the scientific community. “It is we who have built humanity’s great machines – who have conquered flight, split the atom, and peered into the remotest reaches of interstellar space,” say the men of science. “We possess, therefore, the only True Creed, of which all other thought and belief systems are but pallid derivatives.”

A generation or two ago, it was tough to argue with such men and their Universe-as-Machine dogma. After all, had not the twin triumphs of early 20th Century physicists, quantum mechanics and general relativity, given rise to a cornucopia of technological achievements, from silicon chips to moon landings? Thirty years ago, it seemed, the relentless logic of field theoreticians, combined with ever-more-powerful atom smashers and telescopes, would give us a Grand Unified Theory of physics (and therefore a Theory of Everything, or TOE, as many scientists preferred to style it) within a few more years.

Yet here we are in the second decade of the 21st Century, and the pretentiously-named Theory of Everything is proving as elusive as ever. There is, to be sure, a new generation of physicists laboring away on several popular fronts, still looking for this “Holy Grail of physics.” Many of them, the so-called “string theorists,” have created a theory so elaborately complex and counterintuitive that no one – not even other theoretical physicists – outside their arcane subdiscipline can understand it (or at least, the mathematics of it). String theory is impossible to verify experimentally, since it would require levels of energy impossible to create in any earthly laboratory. String theory, in other words, is pure mysticism – a term “hard scientists” routinely invoke to belittle philosophers, psychologists, and intellects of every stripe who do not necessarily subscribe to the Gospel of Scientific Materialism. The protestations of Ed Witten and other celebrated string theorists to the contrary, even many eminent physicists, like Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow, who hail from the not-long-ago day when cutting-edge physics had an empirical component, do not see the point of string theory.

Meanwhile, in the heady province of cosmology, scientists like the celebrated Stephen Hawking regularly hold court for the media, expostulating on mini-black holes and inflationary universes, which non-physicists are not in a position to challenge because the language of mathematical physics requires years of postgraduate training to master. Again, no one has ever seen a mini black hole, much less witnessed the alleged inflationary phase in the very early universe, and such are unlikely ever to be recreated in the laboratory. Yet the men of science – Hawking, Weinberg, Dawkins, Sagan, Gould, and many others – are routinely accorded the status of universal sages, entitled to make grand pronunciamentos on theology, moral philosophy, and all of the “great questions.” And, not surprisingly, almost to a man, they have concluded that God does not exist, that human beings are highly evolved, soulless meat machines, and that the great religions of the world are but futile graspings of a remnant of superstitious knuckle-draggers (the revered Feynman at least had the humility to admit not being able to see the point of religious faith, while refraining from deriding those who did not share his views).

But the proponents of cutting-edge science, especially theoretical physics, have grown more and more strident even as the science they venerate has managed to emancipate itself from the fetters of empiricism. With such unreasoning dogma it is impossible to argue, but we must note that the arid and often self-referential equations of string theorists and cosmologists smack every bit of the same pretension and exclusionism that thinkers outside the province of hard science so often use to camouflage shoddy reasoning.

Consider what revealed religion (admittedly, dogma of another flavor, but withal one that does not aspire to replace science) has to say about the universe we live in. We are reliably informed (there can be no voice more authoritative than authentic revelation!) that the universe is composed of both matter and spirit, whereof the latter is a refined version of the former. They both are suffused with a mysterious property, intelligence, which permits them to act with a degree of autonomy in the spheres of existence where they are placed. God the Father and Jesus Christ are literal and tangible beings of flesh and bone, of the same species as us, albeit in immortal form. They, and all who enjoy their level of glory (which we call exaltation or eternal life), can span the cosmos in an instant, in mind or in person, without the aid of starships or satellite phones. They can assemble giant fusion reactors – the stars – without the aid of tokamaks. They extol immaterial things like charity, forgiveness, and faith, while condemning hatred, sloth, and the like. It would seem that, contra the scientific materialists, we live in a moral, spiritual, and intellectual universe, where a particular race more advanced than us has no need of the machines we idolize. Despite what von Daniken, Dione and so many others now seem to believe, God does not drive a flying saucer.

Now here are a few things that modern materialistic science, its many extraordinary achievements notwithstanding, is not capable of explaining: consciousness, loyalty, love, semiosis, near-death experiences, final causation, empathy, aesthetics. We have accorded primacy to the sciences that have given us our machines and the other works of our own hands we so fervently worship – the Science of Time. But there must be another science, far beyond our own – the Science of Eternity -- where the entirety of phenomena, including the universe of consciousness, is taken into account, and where the barriers of physical space-time – the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and the tyranny of distance, among others – are apparently irrelevant.

No comments: