Early morning thought before I start in on the housework

[avevale_intelligencer]

Prompted by this quote, relaed by earth_wizard.

There are two kinds of things we can do, exemplified by washing up and learning a poem. Washing up is always necessary and always there; it doesn't end, it goes on, and even if you use paper plates and plastic cutlery there'll always be something that needs cleaning. Washing up is infinite.

Learning a poem, on the other hand, involves starting at the beginning, memorising each line in its relation to the others, till you get to the end, and there stopping. Once it's done it's done, and as long as you refresh your memory every so often you won't need to do it again. Learning a poem, learning anything, is finite.

But if every time you went back to the book there were a hundred more lines to learn, you'd soon give up in despair.

It's tempting to see this belief (that the task of learning how the universe works is unending) as a desperate grab by some secular scientists at some kind of mysticism. They don't have room in their probably finite universe for an infinite god, so they figure something has to be infinite here. Why not the quest for knowledge? So far it's been a series of Chinese boxes, each one containing a smaller one; why shouldn't that literally go on for ever? Pattern under the chaos, chaos under the pattern, alternating into eternity, and always more to learn. As if, every time you turned up for your driving lesson, there was a new knob or a new pedal or a new lever in the car that you had to learn about before you could take your test, and you knew there always would be, every single time.

I'm quite convinced we haven't cracked the secrets of the universe yet. The task of science is nowhere near complete, and any scientist who says so is mistaken, I think. But that the task is completable--that it is finite--that has to be true, or else there is no point or purpose to learning anything. Understanding must be attainable, or we might as well go and do the dishes. At least they'll be done for a little while.

And speaking of which.

Comments

[earth-wizard.livejournal.com]

What's always been interesting is the divided idea of what scientists mean by a 'Theory of Everything': most layman think of TOE as the idea that science can someday lock down all possible solutions to a description of the universe and its laws; whereas scientists, at least the many I've studied and spoken to over the years, see it not as a finality, some closure to the grand scheme of scientific enquiry that will then say: yes, now we have a fully qualified description of life, the universe, and everything.... no, this is not the real TOE, that is the ficiton, the babble of journalists, instead of scientists.

Instead scientists themselves see TOE as but the apprehension of a special case of theoretical physics that will only give them a limited set of mathematical descriptions and a new foundation for the sciences, a sort of - to use a Arnoldian term, 'touchstone' for all possible cases of the universe. For as most scientists will tell you we are limited minds seeking possible answers to a complex ever-changing universe that can never be apprehended in the moment of now by a finite mind, and even if that mind could formutlate a mathematical theorem to describe those laws that describe the universe: the universe that they describe would always already be a dead universe; i.e., a universe that was past, cut off from our ever-changing time-moving universe we all live in.

The universe is dynamic and our descriptions of it are only and always a topigraphical mapping of its surface tensions, never the actual thing itself; the thing-in-itself will always remain outside our calculations, that is why poetry and the universe are closer to the untruth that is; for truth is always a slice, a partial grasp of the universe through the lens of a finite mind called the human.

As we are discovering, even the brain itself changes, has plasticity: and, from infancy to old age we learn new things about both the universe and ourselves. The universe may be finite: but we do not know that for a fact... It might be stranger than we have yet thought... maybe the poets are closer to the truth or untruth, maybe hyperbole and metaphor reaches into the dark recesses better than scientific description.

Science as we know it now is hooked to technology and industry and is therefore locked into a political and goal oriented system of production rather than some impersonal pursuit of truth.

At least that is my take... although many scientists would love us to believe they are bound to some idealist pursuit of truth rather than the pragmatic ventures of investment bankers that sponsor them and their institutions. But that is another tale...