“I have not reached my peak until I can look down on myself and my stars”
Zarathustra III - The Wanderer
To escape the epistemological paradox of a universe with no edge in space,
no beginning or end in time, lies not within the scope of human intelligence.
For even though the human mind acknowledges the concept of infinity (chiefly
because of the greater difficulty of entertaining that of limited space), it
cannot arrive at infinity by reason. Not only is the truth not ascertainable -
as indeed the idealist philosophers have always held - by the rational process,
but every such process - in view of the twentieth century - is of necessity
hypothetical.
Indeed, there is a succession here from men like Locke, Berkeley, Hume,
Kant and Schopenhauer, or Fichte, Hegel and Heidegger, etc., to the ideas of
many contemporary philosophers of science. Nor was this the final word on the
matter. Nature, it now emerged, was not of a mechanical order. There was
something inherently uncertain in the fabric of reality itself. The word vividly
expresses the process. In fact, it is impossible to state adequately the sheer
force and consequence of the Uncertainty Principle after the invention of quantum mechanics by Heisenberg and Schrödinger in 1925 and 1926. Beginning, perhaps, with Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, and Lorentz etc., Max Planck, already in 1900, had discovered the formula for black-body radiation involving the new constant h. Rutherford and Soddy, in 1903, advanced the theory
of ‘spontaneous disintegration’. Einstein hypothesized the light quantum in 1905. Niels
Bohr’s 1913 theory of the structure of the atom anticipated quantum mechanics
for the first time. Einstein in 1915, succeeded in incorporating gravitation in
his theory of general relativity. Like Picasso in the history of modern art, he
takes on an enormous, unavoidable presence in the annals of twentieth-century
physics. The millennial feat by which de Broglie first suggested that electrons may have the properties of waves was performed in 1924. This was followed by Pauli’s exclusion principle, formulated in 1925 when Dirac also predicted the existence of the
positron.
There is but a sense of genius - of irresistible magical
powers - about twentieth century physics at its zenith, accompanied, perhaps, by
an underlying foreboding that we could manipulate reality as if it were a
fantasy. Like a look from another world the effect on the twentieth century of
the new physics defies any exact examination. Though no exact date can be
applied to it, it was the rising of a curtain. And if we wish to understand the
most charismatic and pervasive of scientific revolutions, we can hardly get
closer to it than this handful of men who were at that time of an entirely new
mind-set. In the eyes of many, their genius and proficiency put them at the apex
of human evolution. What passed largely unnoticed was Bertrand Russell's
premature pronouncement that the history of human knowledge was in the process of completion. In the closing stages of the century in which he came of age, it sounded like an epitaph.
Perhaps the grand manner is unsuited to the rendering of plain physical
objectives, but nothing was ever to be quite the same. For the sceptic who
affects to ignore the ultimate metaphysical problem and fancies that the end of
knowledge is the end of all meaning, takes no account of the fact that meaning
is never single-minded, that it always contains the next source of conflict.
While one puzzle is being solved, new ones are being born. Things change, said
Chesterton, because they are not complete. They accommodate themselves to every
single query the mind of man can possibly devise. From Aquinas to Nietzsche men
are unanimous: nothing is ever allowed to lapse into stasis. Or as a modern
physicist somewhere remarked, the universe is made of processes, not things. It
is transitory, in other words, and therein lies its real significance.
Dreamy
