We are surrounded by scientific knowledge and have become so used to it that we often take science for granted. We may rarely reflect on the amazing revelations of science—and so miss the opportunity to recognize the awesome nature of the universe. Things that we know, learn, and do today in science would have been inconceivable decades, let alone centuries, ago.
Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” For Einstein, the success of science was a wonderful mystery. As he wrote to his friend Maurice Solovine:
. . . 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.
There are several dimensions to the comprehensibility of the universe being mysterious. Einstein highlighted the first mystery, which is that there is order in the world, as reflected in scientific laws, such as Newton’s theory of gravity, and that this order can be succinctly stated in the language of mathematics. To the best of our knowledge, these laws hold for all time and everywhere in the universe. The existence of the orderly behaviour encoded in scientific laws is necessary for science to work, which leads to the second mystery. Why have we been able to discover these laws?
A second dimension that makes science possible is the intellectual abilities of humans. Humans not only have the rational ability to do science—to reason, to understand, to communicate—but also the ability to design instruments, such as telescopes and microscopes. There seems to be a connection between the rationality of the universe and human rationality. The idea that there may be harmony between the structures of the universe and those of the human mind has a long history. In the Renaissance, it was encapsulated in the metaphor of the “music of the spheres”. In his book, Harmonies of the World (1619), Johannes Kepler connected music and his explanations of planetary orbits. Einstein said that “Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.”
Humans might have been different. Suppose that the average human intelligence was lower than it is today, and the variation of human intelligence was smaller. Then, there might have been no Galileo, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Phil Anderson, or Linus Pauling. Without these brilliant figures in scientific history, scientific progress would have been slow.
The third dimension is that human language enables scientists to formulate, represent, and communicate ideas, theories, and the results of scientific experiments. This language sometimes involves mathematics, graphs, or tables of data. Scientists can understand one another. Even though there can be misunderstandings, these can be resolved. There is a scientific culture that transcends the diversity of cultures associated with different countries, linguistic groups, and ethnicities.
The fourth dimension is the physical dexterity of humans. I am a theoretical physicist not an experimental physicist. I am “all thumbs” and not particularly good in the lab. Consequently, I have done no laboratory work since I was a Ph.D. student. In contrast, some gifted scientists have an ability to do things in a laboratory that most people cannot. Their manual dexterity allows them to fabricate precision instruments, grow pure crystals, blow exquisite glassware, see faint images, and fine-tune electronic instruments in extraordinary ways. If some humans did not have such amazing abilities, scientific progress would have been much slower—or possibly non-existent.
A fifth dimension that makes science possible is the availability and processability of materials that have been central to scientific progress. Making instruments requires specific materials, such as metals, glass, rubber, insulators, plastics, and semiconductors. If we lived in a world where some of these materials were very rare or could not be processed to the purity or malleability required for scientific instruments, we would not have supercomputers, electron microscopes, or the James Webb Space Telescope today. We might be struggling to make even the simple telescopes used by Galileo.
These five dimensions are all required for humans to be able to do science. There are several additional mysteries of science. These can be divided into two classes: what science can do and what we can learn about the universe from science. Science allows us to know certain things about reality (epistemology) and also to understand the nature of that reality (ontology). In other words, science helps us make maps of physical reality. The terrain represented by those maps is amazing. And the fact that we can make the maps is amazing.
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