Some amazing things about the universe that make science possible

 This post takes off from the following Einstein quotes.

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible"

from "Physics and Reality"(1936), in Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonja Bargmann (New York: Bonanza, 1954), p292.

"...I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way .. the kind of order created by Newton's theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different." 

Letters to Solovine, New York, Philosophical Library, 1987, p 131.

There are several dimensions to the comprehensibility of the universe. The dimension highlighted by Einstein is that there is order in the world, reflected in laws that can be succinctly stated and mathematically encoded. These laws seem to hold for all time and everywhere in the universe. Here I suggest there are three other dimensions that make science possible. 

A second amazing dimension is that humans have the rational ability to do science: to reason, to understand, to communicate, and to make instruments such as telescopes and microscopes. There seems to be somewhat of a match between the rationality of the universe and human rationality. This is written in the spirit of arguments about fine-tuning, where one imagines alternative universes.

Humans could have been different. Suppose that the amount and variation of human intelligence (at least that aspect of intelligence relevant to doing science) were different, and the mean and standard deviation were lower. Suppose that intelligence was lower so that there were no brilliant humans like Darwin, Einstein, Newton, Pauling, ... In fact, suppose that even the brightest people were as good at science as I am at music and dancing. Scientific progress would be rather limited.

But it is not just human intelligence that matters. A third amazing dimension is that of manual dexterity. I am "all thumbs" and not particularly good in the lab. There are some gifted experimentalists with an outstanding ability to do things most people cannot, even with training. Such abilities allow them to fabricate precision instruments, grow crystals, see faint images, ... If some humans did not have such abilities scientific progress would have been much slower, or possibly non-existent.

A fourth crucial dimension concerns the availability and processability of certain materials that are central to scientific progress. Making instruments requires particular materials such as metals, glass, and semiconductors. Suppose we lived in a world where some of these were very rare or just could not be processed to the purity or malleability required.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is it an Unidentified Superconducting Object (USO)?

If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new material. There is a long history of this and it is worth considering the wise observations of Robert Cava , back in 1997, contained in a tutorial lecture. It would have been useful indeed in the early days of the field [cuprate superconductors] to have set up a "commission" to set some minimum standard of data quality and reproducibility for reporting new superconductors. An almost countless number of "false alarms" have been reported in the past decade, some truly spectacular. Koichi Kitazawa from the University of Tokyo coined these reports "USOs", for Unidentified Superconducting Objects , in a clever cross-cultural double entendre likening them to UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects, which certainly are their equivalent in many ways) and to "lies" in the Japanese translation of USO.   These have caused g
Read more

What is Herzberg-Teller coupling?

Image
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thrown around. Google scholar yields more than 3000 hits. But I have found its precise meaning and the relevant physics hard to pin down. Quantum mechanics in chemistry by Schatz and Ratner is an excellent book , but the discussion on page 204 did not help me. "Herzberg-Teller" never appears in Atkins' Molecular quantum mechanics. So here is my limited understanding. Herzberg and Teller wanted to understand why one observed certain vibronic (combined electronic and vibrational) transitions that were not expected, particularly some that were expected to be forbidden on symmetry grounds. " Intensity borrowing " occurred. Herzberg and Teller pointed out that his could be understood if the dipole transition moment for the electronic transition depended on the nuclear co-ordinate associated with the vibration. In the Franck-Condo
Read more

What should be the order of authors on a conference poster or talk?

I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With regard to paper authorship my general rule is that the person who does the bulk of the work, including actually writing the paper should be the first author. Doug Natelson has a good post on co-authorship , that I largely agree with. My only difference is that I am not really convinced that good practice prevails in the majority of circumstances. I fear there are increasing numbers of co-authors, particularly senior ones, with marginal contributions. But, what about conference talks and posters? Many of these are based on work that is already or about to be published. Should the author order be identical as the associated papers? I am not sure it should necessarily be. My tentative view is that the person who writes and submits the abstract and actually prepares and presents the post/talk should be the first author. Perhaps they should also highlig
Read more