• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

There are people who want everything to be possible, to have their reality unconstrained. Our imagination and our needs require more, they feel, than the comparatively little that science teaches we may be reasonably sure of. Many New Age gurus - the actress Shirley MacLaine among them - go so far as to embrace solipsism, to assert that the only reality is their own thoughts. ‘I am God,’ they actually say. ‘I really think we are creating our own reality,’ MacLaine once told a sceptic. ‘I think I’m creating you right here.’

If I dream of being reunited with a dead parent or child, who is to tell me that it didn’t really happen? If 1 have a vision of myself floating in space looking down on the Earth, maybe I was really there; who are some scientists, who didn’t even share the experience, to tell me that it’s all in my head? If my religion teaches that it is the inalterable and inerrant word of God that the Universe is a few thousand years old, then scientists are being offensive and impious, as well as mistaken, when they claim it’s a few billion.

Irritatingly, science claims to set limits on what we can do, even in principle. Who says we can’t travel faster than light? They used to say that about sound, didn’t they? Who’s going to stop us, if we have really powerful instruments, from measuring the position and the momentum of an electron simultaneously? Why can’t we, if we’re very clever, build a perpetual motion machine ‘of the first kind’ (one that generates more energy than is supplied to it), or a perpetual motion machine ‘of the second kind’ (one that never runs down)? Who dares to set limits on human ingenuity?

In fact, Nature does. In fact, a fairly comprehensive and very brief statement of the laws of Nature, of how the Universe works, is contained in just such a list of prohibited acts. Tellingly, pseudoscience and superstition tend to recognize no constraints in Nature. Instead, ‘all things are possible’. They promise a limitless production budget, however often their adherents have been disappointed and betrayed.

A related complaint is that science is too simple-minded, too ‘reductionist’; it naively imagines that in the final accounting there will be only a few laws of Nature - perhaps even rather simple ones - that explain everything, that the exquisite subtlety of the world, all the snow crystals, spiderweb latticework, spiral galaxies, and flashes of human insight can ultimately be ‘reduced’ to such laws. Reductionism seems to pay insufficient respect to the complexity of the Universe. It appears to some as a curious hybrid of arrogance and intellectual laziness.

To Isaac Newton - who in the minds of critics of science personifies ‘single vision’ - it looked like a clockwork Universe. Literally. The regular, predictable orbital motions of the planets around the Sun, or the Moon around the Earth, were described to high precision by essentially the same differential equation that predicts the swing of a pendulum or the oscillation of a spring. We have a tendency today to think we occupy some exalted vantage point, and to pity the poor Newtonians for having so limited a world view. But within certain reasonable limitations, the same harmonic equations that describe clockwork really do describe the motions of astronomical objects throughout the Universe. This is a profound, not a trivial parallelism.

Of course, there are no gears in the solar system, and the component parts of the gravitational clockwork do not touch. Planets generally have more complicated motions than pendulums and springs. Also, the clockwork model breaks down in certain circumstances: over very long periods of time, the gravitational tugs of distant worlds - tugs that might seem wholly insignificant over a few orbits - can build up, and some little world can go unexpectedly careening out of its accustomed course. However, something like chaotic motion is also known in pendulum clocks; if we displace the bob too far from the perpendicular, a wild and ugly motion ensues.