There’s an upsurge of books in which physicists confidently wade into philosophy and history in what might be called do-it-yourself humanities.
Take The Big Picture, by the Caltech physicist Sean Carroll. It’s a masterful portrait of the subatomic world as scientists now understand it. But the book also attempts to describe the implications of quantum field theory for meaning and moral behavior. “Our values,” writes Carroll, “have not yet caught up to our best ontology.” The book tackles such issues as consciousness (not fundamental) and the existence of God (highly improbable), and morphs the Ten Commandments into “Ten Considerations.”
Other examples include To Explain the World (Harper, 2015), in which the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg found the history of science too important to be left to historians. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010) asserted that “philosophy is dead,” for scientists are the ones to call about the nature of things like space and time. The physicist Carlo Rovelli’s book Reality Is Not What It Seems (Penguin, 2016) is a first-rate popular account of loop quantum gravity, but also dispenses wisdom about space (granular), time (doesn’t exist), and reality (covariant quantum fields). A recent issue of New Scientist is titled “The Metaphysics Issue.” Its cover story is “How Science Answers Philosophy’s Deepest Questions.”
Physicists who undertake DIY humanities typically identify themselves as “naturalists,” a philosophical position that embraces natural properties and rejects spiritual reasons in explaining the world. They share the conviction that what they are finding in their laboratories has important and exciting implications for human life that deserve to be communicated. They tend to proceed on their own, as if centuries of work in the humanities is of little import. Since we are a species in the universe, the thinking goes, understanding the ways of the universe scientifically will help us find proper ways to behave as well. What could be wrong?
Plenty. Naturalism has been extensively analyzed by philosophers. The problem is not with naturalism per se, but with where you stand when you commit to it. Laboratories are special environments with trained workers and unusual practices. If you commit to naturalism as a scientist, the danger is that you are predisposed, intentionally or not, to assume that all thinking is laboratory thinking and that the world is as science says it is. But scientific thinking is only one dimension of human experience.
Let me give an example of what can go wrong. Both Rovelli and Weinberg are intent on proving that Socrates, the purest example of a philosopher, was disdainful of physics and astronomy. They think they clinch their case by citing a passage from Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates appears to criticize astronomers for being unable to tell him why it is good for Earth to be flat, round, or at the center of the cosmos. Rovelli concludes triumphantly, “How completely off track the great Plato was here!”
A robust humanities cannot be either DIY or reactive, nor can it simply add the two approaches together.
No, Rovelli is off track. Socrates’ remark, like all else in Plato, has to be read in context. Socrates is recounting the three phases of his intellectual awakening. As a youth, Socrates says, he was entranced by materialism, or the view that only matter exists (Phase 1). Then he fell under the spell of Anaxagoras, who said he could describe the universe as constructed by a divine and good mind (Phase 2). But Anaxagoras described only the physical mechanics of the world, and not very well, and never delivered on his promise to show why these mechanics are the wise and inevitable choices of the divine mind. Indeed, Socrates decides, we humans can never fully know this divine mind. Disappointed that Anaxagoras can’t deliver on his promises, Socrates moves on (Phase 3) to forge his own method, a logical one, in which he would begin with the hypothesis that looked the strongest and subject it to questioning — an approach that in many respects is a forerunner of the scientific method. One has to be extremely careful interpreting the Greek terms translated as “reason,” “hypothesis,” and “logic.” But in developing his own achievable method of inquiry, Socrates was right on track.
What went wrong is not just that Rovelli and Weinberg pluck the passage out of context: Socrates ultimately does not embrace but rejects Anaxagoras’ approach. More significantly, Plato is drawing our attention to a complex unfolding event — how Socrates came to see new meanings in the world through his persistent questioning of it — but all Rovelli and Weinberg notice are the theories involved. This is not surprising; reading Plato is a skill one does not hone in a lab. But it shows how easy it is for a naturalist to mistranslate the multidimensional character of human experience into making and defending claims.
Another example: In The Big Picture, Carroll complains that Descartes, whom he calls “nobody’s naturalist,” provides an unsatisfactory explanation of the mind-body relation. Like Plato, Descartes must be read in context. Again and again Descartes tells critics that the mind and body are linked despite being different substances. As he told the Dutch theology student Frans Burman, “This is hard to explain; but here our experience is sufficient, because it declares the fact so loudly that we simply can’t deny it.”
Isn’t Descartes right? Like any careful scientist, he said something he knew to be true while refusing to guess how or why it was true. A closer philosophical-scientific description of the mind-body relation would have to wait three centuries for phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Besides, theorizing the mind-body relation is not what Descartes was principally after in his Meditations, which was to show how to do science on a sound footing.
It’s not that physicists cannot contribute constructively to the humanities. Many have engaged humanistic matters insightfully and even brilliantly. Peter Galison, of Harvard, is a physicist who has ingeniously explored the role of scientific cultures and the “trading zones” between them. In The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton University Press, 2015), Jimena Canales, a University of Illinois historian with a background in physics, explored the clash between the scientific and humanistic understanding of time. The physicist and philosopher Richard Dawid’s book String Theory and the Scientific Method (Cambridge University Press, 2014) shows how philosophy must reconceive the scientific method. These authors show a deep appreciation for philosophical literature.
But the less nuanced, more reckless DIY humanities is immensely popular. In Italy, one of Rovelli’s books briefly outsold Fifty Shades of Grey.
Two factors, I think, are at work. One is that the success, utility, and beauty of science tend to foster the cultural belief that the way one thinks in laboratories — making and defending claims — is just the way people think, or should think, about everything, including consciousness, values, and behavior.
The second is a pushback from the sciences against years of what I’d call reactive humanities. Many humanities scholars shun science, regarding it as having little significance for human experience. Far safer to stick with untainted humanities subjects like aesthetics, literary criticism, and textual analysis. Consider the historian Howard Zinn’s popular and widely assigned textbook A People’s History of the United States (Longman, 1980). It is almost exclusively about class and political ideologies, with next to nothing, say, about transformations in childhood mortality, life expectancy, or systems of mass transportation. These, evidently, have nothing to do with “the people.” Science and technology are mentioned only occasionally in passing — mainly as tools of oppression.
Likewise, Simon Schama’s three-volume A History of Britain (Hyperion, 2000-2), made into a multipart documentary film, omits contributions by British scientists and engineers (such as Michael Faraday and the Scottish-born James Clerk Maxwell) to electrification, communication, and the electronics revolution. Even radar, which was made possible by Faraday and Maxwell’s work, gets only a passing mention for its wartime role. In comparison to books like these, DIY humanities can seem a breath of fresh air.
In his famous lectures on physics, Richard Feynman commented that “from a long view of the history of mankind — seen from, say, 10,000 years from now — there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.”
Feynman wasn’t joking. The advent of electromagnetism was a world-changing event. By making possible electronics and cyberspace, Maxwell’s equations affected human beings far more profoundly than any war has. Feynman’s remark exposes the shallowness of a reactionary humanities that ignores scientific and technological discoveries while pretending to articulate how human beings live and interact with themselves and the world.
Plato is a skill one does not hone in a lab.
But simply noting the significance of scientific developments by itself does little to help understand modern human experience. Feynman’s remark makes it seem like Maxwell’s equations dropped into human life out of the blue rather than being one dimension of a complex event. What compelled Maxwell to work on electricity? How did he see new meanings in the concepts he inherited to produce the equation? What cultural and intellectual environments are necessary for equations to become significant?
A robust humanities cannot be either DIY or reactive, nor can it simply add the two approaches together. It requires developing another framework in which humanists and scientists collaborate in crossing hallowed disciplinary boundaries to address human experience so that science is one aspect of a multidimensional story.
Robert P. Crease is a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University. His books include The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty, co-written with the physicist Alfred S. Goldhaber (Norton, 2014), and he writes regularly for Physics World.
