The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [151]
Marine creatures helped to reveal the age of the earth and to show how slow was the process of change. The modern shellfish shown below is virtually identical to its fossil ancestor (top).
Michelson and Morley’s experiment attempted to show the retarding effect on the speed of a beam of light. No such effect was found.
With the investigation of the electromagnetic phenomenon, Newton’s world fell apart. The new force curved; it took time to propagate through space. The universe was a structure based on probability and statistics, an uncertain cosmos. Absolutes no longer existed. Quantum mechanics, relativity, electronics and nuclear physics emerged from the new view.
In the light of the above we would appear to have made progress. We have advanced from magic and ritual to reason and logic; from superstitious awe to instrumental confidence; from localised ignorance to generalised knowledge; from faith to science; from subsistence to comfort; from disease to health; from mysticism to materialism; from mechanistic determinism to optimistic uncertainty. We live in the best of all possible worlds, at this latest stage in the ascent of man. Each of us has more power at a fingertip than any Roman emperor. Of the scientists who gave us that power, more are alive today than in the whole of history. It seems that barring mishaps and temporary setbacks the way ahead lies inevitably onward and upward towards even further discovery and innovation, as we draw closer to the ultimate truths of the universe that science can reveal.
The generator of this accumulation of knowledge over the centuries, science, seems at first glance to be unique among mankind’s activities. It is objective, making use of methods of investigation and proof that are impartial and exacting. Theories are constructed and then tested by experiment. If the results are repeatable and cannot be falsified in any way, they survive. If not, they are discarded. The rules are rigidly applied. The standards by which science judges its work are universal. There can be no special pleading in the search for the truth: the aim is simply to discover how nature works and to use that information to enhance our intellectual and physical lives. The logic that directs the search is rational and ineluctable at all times and in all circumstances. This quality of science transcends the differences which in other fields of endeavour make one period incommensurate with another, or one cultural expression untranslatable in another context. Science knows no contextual limitations. It merely seeks the truth.
But which truth? At different times in the past, reality was observed differently. Different societies coexisting in the modern world have different structures of reality. Within those structures, past and present, forms of behaviour reveal the cultural idiosyncrasy of a particular geographical or social environment. Eskimoes have a large number of words for ‘snow’. South American gauchos describe horse-hides in more subtle ways than can another nationality. The personal space of an Arab, the closest distance he will permit between himself and a stranger, is much smaller than that of a Scandinavian.
Even at the individual level, perceptions of reality are unique and autonomous. Each one of us has his own mental structure of the world by which he may recognise new experiences. In a world today so full of new experiences, this ability is necessary for survival. But by definition, the structure also provides the user with hypotheses about events before they are experienced. The events then fit the hypothesis, or are rejected as being unrecognisable and without meaning. Without the structure, in other words, there can be no reality.
This is true at the basic neurophysiological level. Visual perception consists of energetic particles bouncing off an object or coming from a light source to strike the rods and cones in the retina of the eye. The impact releases a chemical which starts a wave of