Once Before Time - Martin Bojowald [151]
An undeserved privilege of humankind is to have reached such a pronounced understanding of nature at all. Limitations in no way diminish this achievement, but rather confirm what Immanuel Kant had already identified as the nobility of nature, starting with human nature, characterized as follows in his Critique of Practical Reason:
This respect-inspiring idea of personality which sets before our eyes the sublimity of our nature (in its higher aspect), while at the same time it shows us the want of accord of our conduct with it and thereby strikes down self-conceit, is even natural to the commonest reason and easily observed.
By the end of his Critique, he is drawn to apply his insight to the whole of nature:
The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe).… But though admiration and respect may excite to inquiry, they cannot supply the want of it. What, then, is to be done in order to enter on this in a useful manner and one adapted to the loftiness of the subject? Examples may serve in this as a warning and also for imitation … so as to prevent on the one hand the errors of a still crude untrained judgment, and on the other hand (what is far more necessary) the extravagances of genius, by which, as by the adepts of the philosopher’s stone, without any methodical study or knowledge of nature, visionary treasures are promised and the true are thrown away.
Kant even attempts to found hereon the possibility of moral law in all regards. For cosmology, it is sufficient to correctly value the scope of scientific knowledge about the whole world and to appreciate it—in as broad a frame as warranted but no broader. Success often blinds, nowadays as before the advent of general relativity and quantum mechanics:
Hubris today characterizes our whole attitude toward nature, our rape of nature with the help of machines and the completely unscrupulous inventiveness of technicians and engineers; hubris characterizes our attitude to God, or rather to some alleged spider of purpose and ethics which is lurking behind the great spider’s web of causality.2
Recognizing the nobility of nature also demands a sense of the incompleteness of our description of it. How is this realized in quantum gravity? String theory impresses with its magic and its possibly unique mathematical formulation, but like the Mephistophelian sulfurous smell there remains a bitter aftertaste of a wide, vast, and disorderly landscape of solutions. And the dynamics of loop quantum gravity is so complicated that it probably repelled many a researcher at first sight, as the Earthly Spirit did Faust. Perhaps we glimpse the true nature of the world in one of these forms, but we do not know and may never find out.
So often in this context has an end of physics been proclaimed—in the positive sense of putatively complete knowledge, and in the negative one of incurable estrangement from reality. Throughout, one should bear in mind how far physics has come from its beginnings to its current state. New insights will be added, mistaken ones expunged. This process—not a complete dominance over nature, even if it may be understood “only” in the form of perpetually valid natural laws and not direct influence—is the aim of science. Here one acknowledges the incompleteness of our description, for that is unavoidable. Incompleteness of understanding in no way diminishes the sense of wonder about nature, which probably has moved most scientists to choose