Summary
Three recent books concerned with time have
lately come my way. So that I will next
conduct a brief commentary on each in turn.
Farewell
to Reality?
First therefore in this mini-Pantheon of time
physics is “FAREWELL TO REALITY”. This
is an erudite and timely work by
independent scientist Jim Baggott, who maintains a broad interest in science, philosophy, history.
Baggott’s argument is that too much of modern
physics has gone badly adrift from its traditional strong moorings in
reality. So that today the public is
being subject to an endless media barrage of ‘fairytale physics’ from populist
science presenters, ideas entirely derived from theory and with little or no
experimental proofs of any kind.
Among these far-fetched notions Baggott lists
String Theory, the possibility of a Multiverse, and the speculation that
reality consists of holographic information stored on the boundary of the universe!
There’s also the Anthropic Cosmological
Principle of which two versions exist. The weak
version holds that our status as observers of this particular Universe is
biased by the fact that we can exist in it.
Which then leaves open the possibility of numerous other regions outside
our own little uinverse, regions forever unobservable because we couldn’t exist
in them.
The strong
Anthropic Principle proceeds even further: “the universe – and all those
fundamental parameters from which it is constructed, must be such as to admit
the creation of observers at some stage”.
This brings in the possibility of divine intervention through
intelligent creation, which would undermine the very basis of science as
practised so fruitfully over the past 500 years.
Baggott therefore dismisses most or all such
scientific theorising as fairytale physics.
They’re more in the manner of metaphyics than useful constructs, for
example those familiar laws of magnetism derived from hard experiment. But ‘if scientists can set themselves up as
the high priests of a new metaphysics, and continue to preach their gospel
unchallenged through popular books and television, then the ctredibility of all
scientists inexorably starts to be eroded”.
To which the more pragmatically minded or even
irreligious among us can only say
‘Amen!’.
Precedents from history
There are of course precedents from
intellectual history. One such might be
early mediaeval concerns about how many angels could dance on a pin. Though that may have been just an
examination test for debate among students, and not a serious intellectual
exercise. But that some of the
brightest mediaeval scholastic considered related problems is quite clear.
More definite is Malleus Maleficarum, a handbook of instructions for recognising and
persecuting witchcraft. This went
through some 30 editions eventually, causing
hundreds of innocent women to be burned throughout the 15th to 17th
centuries. To the modern mind it now
reads as a very evil and mostly quite
mad book. But the point is that its two
authors - Heinreich Kramer and James
Sprenger – were among the brightest Dominican scholars of their day.
Finally there’s the story of James Ussher,
Archbishop of Armagh around the mid-17th century. He’s now infamous and much derided for having precisely dated
the moment of Creation – to the nightfall before Sunday October 23, 4004
BC. Ussher added up the ages of the
patriarchs in the Bible to calculate this date. But a great many scholars of his era – from Isaac Newton to Sir Francis Drake – did much the same
thing, all accepting some Creation date around 4,000 BC as genuine.
Where Ussher excelled was in the meticulous
accuracy of the scholarship he brought to the task. An ardent book collector who owned 10,000 volumes, he was
probably the foremost expert in ancient
manuscripts, for his time. Such is proven
by the fact that his pioneering dates for the deaths of Julius Caesar and
Alexander the Great (44 BC and 323 BC) are still accepted scholarship. In short he was one of the ablest scholars
of his age. His error was just that he
accepted those ancient manuscripts - like the various Bibles that he owned - as
the sole repository of truth.
In our own era also mathematics – perthaps
sometimes developed too far from reality ? - are accepted as a sole and
unquestioned repository of truth likewise.
So concerning those cosmologists who theorise about the first billionth
(or even trillionth?) of a second after the Big Bang, one wonders if our
descendants may not regard them, as we regard brilliant but erroneous Ussher now.
