"Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night
God said, "Let Newton be! and all was light."
God said, "Let Newton be! and all was light."
Alexander Pope, c. 1727
“It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles in the physical sciences have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.”
Catalog,
University of Chicago, 1893
"It could not last; the Devil
shouting "Ho!
Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo."
Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo."
Sir
John Squire, c. 1926
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My latest read is William McNeill's Keeping Together in
Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. McNeill is a favorite historian of mine, chiefly for his breath of vision.
His superbly documented works cover world history, disease and history,
environmental history, military history, historiography, and western
civilization. But a history of dance? Who knew?
The book's thesis is
that rhythmically moving muscles produces and enhances group solidarity by
altering our feelings. He traces this
notion from hunter-gather days to the present, and in areas as diverse as
physiology, psychology, human evolution (he thinks we couldn't have become
fully "human" without rhythmic movements), religion, politics, and
war. The clarity of writing is superb,
and footnotes can be just as interesting as the text. And he does all this in 156 pages. Amazing.
More to the point:
this book got me thinking again about the mental spontaneous combustion that occurs
when disciplines converge (cue the Renaissance). How such combustion happens seems chaotic
and unintelligible; but, like the inexplicable quantum world, it gets results (e.g.,
computer chips).
We should carefully attend to this "spontaneous
combustion" because it prompts new questions and new ways of
thinking. For example, take the paradigm
shifts of the late 19th-early 20th century, when people in so many different
fields (Poincaré and Godel, Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Modigliani,
Heisenberg, Yeats, etc., etc.) up-ended, more or less independently, the
Newtonian world view. Or at least they modified
it so drastically as to prompt questions about whether we can know anything at
all. (In retrospect, there is an
exquisite beauty to their findings; I'm not sure their contemporaries saw it as
such.)
This anxiety didn't affect just the upper crust. This was also the age when the Titanic's
plunge undermined popular faith in the technology’s reliability; when a witch’s
brew of nationalism, new weaponry and strategic irrationality produced World
War I; when the 1918 influenza epidemic appeared as the epitome of randomness;
and when the Bolshevik Revolution and Fascism's rise pushed Europe deeper into
the circles of hell. The concatenation
of these events drove history's trajectory from faith in progress to chronicles
of disaster.
For me, the 19th/20th century mindquakes demonstrate the imperative for McNeillean ventures down unknown paths (even while we've got to be well informed
about at least one). It pays to stroll beyond our intellectual comfort zones.
Second, scientific and technological advances can, like
nature, be "red in tooth and claw." Hence the need to seek out the
implications of such advances (in nano-science, for example), not just for
their social, economic, ethical, political, or other implications, but for
their degree of "truthfulness” (read esthetic beauty).
And third, we must be well versed in the very
nature of own disciplines: their
interconnections with other areas of life, which is to say their philosophies,
histories, and impacts on the human arena.
In sum, we've got to take a cue from the McNeill’s breath of vision if
we are to understand our own identities, and shape, let alone cope with, the
future.
Mindquakes--they happen!