The End of Science
What happens when discoveries leave us more mystified than before?
One of the challenges facing contemporary science is that not all, or even most, scientific theories or discoveries are especially exciting or interesting — unless you’re a scientist.
Historically, science has had two motivations: (1) to improve the quality of life through technology and medicine, and (2) to satisfy our curiosity about how the world works.
Traditionally, science operated under the assumption that nature is mysterious to the degree that we don’t understand it. The aim of science was to demystify nature. Once you understand natural causes and effects, or what things are made of, everything is clear. By unraveling the mysteries of nature, nature becomes transparent to reason. This, for example, was the effect of Newtonian physics.
But Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the various proposals for an explanatorily satisfying quantum mechanics, have had the opposite effect. And this is true on two levels. Independently, each theory has introduced mystifying elements into our understanding. And when taken together, the project of finding a way to harmonize the two has been just as elusive.
To the extent that these two theories are at least approximately true, nature becomes even more mysterious, more inexplicable, than before we peeled the layers back.
It’s no longer the case that the more we know, the less mysterious it all is; knowledge now intensifies the sense of mystery. The more we understand nature, the less understandable it is. We discover that nature is inherently baffling.
By contrast, there was nothing unexpected about Newtonian physics; nothing very surprising. Newton’s theories were breakthroughs, certainly, but they were not revolutionary in the same way quantum mechanics and relativity have been; they weren’t deeply puzzling the way the latter two are. Before these theories, we had a more straightforward understanding of time and space. Now, in light of their counterintuitive implications — the Twin paradox, EPR paradox, Schrödinger’s cat, the double-slit experiment, etc. — these theories have washed away our prior conceptions.
The end-result has been to mystify nature, not to demystify it.
That’s not to say their aim is to confound; obviously, the scientific enterprise is designed to seek explanatory success. Consider a recent write-up, in Wired, in which the suggestion is made that quantum mechanics could “unearth the true nature of time.”
Despite this, these theories have augmented our sense of mystery. Yet this is also what makes them so interesting to scientists — much more so than Newtonian physics, at any rate. What’s more, they are theories about the fundamental features of human experience: time and space. Proposing a counterintuitive theory of time or space should be fascinating, as it could turn our world upside down (as it were).
Yet in terms of captivating the public interest, some scientific discoveries, despite being less scientifically significant, are more enthralling than other ones. The space probes to Mars and Venus were more thrilling than the discovery of the Higgs boson particle — unless you’re a particle physicist. For the first time we got a ground-level view of other planets.
A challenge facing contemporary science is whether the most interesting theories now lie in the past. Does future science consist of filling in gaps, refining established theories, and improving technology?
