I don't really know what to call this one

mdlbear has a rather lovely poem posted up here, all about the amazing paradigm shifts that knowing about science can bring you. Go read. Savour your own reaction before you decide if you want to come back here. Tell him how good it is. I'll wait.

Finished?

Okay.

This poem made me sad. Because none of it means a thing to me.

It doesn't matter to me that science thinks particles aren't really particles or waves aren't really waves, because it was science that called them particles and waves in the first place. So the chair I'm sitting on is mostly empty space; in that case, it's a kind of empty space which, from the point of view of my amply supported bottom, is neither empty nor space, so really, what's the point of knowing that it's empty space? It may be a fact. It may even be a useful fact to someone, though it's hard to see how. It neither helps nor hinders me, fills me with neither wonder nor terror. Almost the entire universe is composed of different flavours of diluted empty space. So what? Let's talk about what is there. Cancel out the common factors on both sides of the equation and work with the numbers that matter.

A lot of it, I'm sure, must be because I don't understand. What does a phrase like "simple rotation in four-space" mean? It's just a different way of talking about what's there. Geometry is just a language we can use to describe things; calling the chair a Stuhl or a fauteuil or a collection of mathematical relationships between probabilistic tendencies floating in otherwise empty space doesn't make it other than what it is. Algol 60 is another language we invented. Hooray for us. How does it change the way I see the universe? I love language, but I know its limitations.

And that's why Goedel didn't blow the top of my head off, not even a little bit. Of course you can say things in any language that may be true but that you can't prove; people have been doing it for thousands of years, and other people have been shouting back that if you can't prove it then it can't be true. Even now, nearly a hundred years after Goedel, people are saying that if you can't prove the truth of a statement then that's a reasonable ground for saying that the statement isn't true. So what actual difference has Goedel made?

Science used to shift paradigms. It revealed that the universe is very big, that the sun is just one of countless stars in countless galaxies and that each star may have planets and those planets may have life on them which may be intelligent and may also think of itself as the crown of creation. Science has also given us new technologies that have changed our lives, not always for the better, and some of those technologies have been based on these relatively recent theoretical developments about which the poem talks. That's all fine. I get that. But this stuff...it's all just using different words to say the same thing, or alternatively using the same words to talk gobbledegook, while cheerfully acknowledging that the fault is in the language. That's not what I want science to do. I want science to find me a way to the stars. I want science to tell me things that matter. I want science to make sense of the universe, not nonsense.

And when I consider mdlbear's reaction, as given in the poem, to revelations that literally mean nothing to me, it's as if I'm watching a play from an alien culture, written by a being whose thought processes are further from mine than mine are from those of a hummingbird or a rhinoceros. I can't rejoice in the idea that we can't know things. I can't simply accept that because we haven't invented a language that works properly, the universe is forever unknowable.

My hope is that we just haven't got there...yet.

Because if all science can tell me is that we can't know anything more, I'll be very, very disappointed.