Where Science Meets Philosophy

Science and philosophy are, as we know, two different disciplines with very different public faces. Philosophy at its most modern has fought top conjoin ideals of gender, politics, morality, while still confronting age-old questions of what it is to be human and how modern artefacts like the television further distort our understanding of what it is to exist and how we define the world around us.

Equally, these questions brought science as a whole to the place it is at today, in which theoretical physics allows us to measure the age and shape of the Universe, biologists have the technology to print human skin or clone perfect copies of plants and animals, and Heston Blumenthal can use liquid nitrogen and small centrifuges to create the perfect blancmange.

It’s an incredible world fuelled by the possibility of human thought. And it was Plato who originally speculated that perfect Forms must exist somewhere outside of our sensory experience which allow us to recognise a tree as a tree whether leafless, short, flowering or fallen down: there must be an archetype of tree that means we understand what Tree-ness is.

Science today, while not directly related to Plato’s line of thinking, similarly relies on essences that we cannot necessarily see: whether working at a sub-atomic level to break down the components of DNA, to using multi-dimensional mathematics to calculate the shape of space-time.

While Plato’s Forms have been argued as too reductive and unnecessary for the existence of tree or any other thing, it is this ability to speculate and imagine so laterally that inspires the discoveries mankind makes today.

Maybe not the Form of Tree-ness, but maybe a multi-verse of ever-expanding dimensions; because not being able to see it doesn't mean it can’t exist.