Yesterday my piece “The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore” appeared in The Atlantic. It seemed to touch a nerve becoming the most popular story for the magazine all day (it’s #2 as I’m writing this). The piece also led to a surge of new subscribers to the newsletter. So, if this is your first time here, welcome.
Today, I wanted to expand briefly on an idea that was central to the Atlantic piece but was still in the subtext. When you only have 1200 words, there’s only so much can you explore a “Big Idea”.
So, what’s the real Big Idea of the piece? Simply this, how we think about science needs to go beyond the pop culture view that it's a machine for explaining everything. In so many popular science communication videos, TV shows and books, I see this picture painted that all truths must ultimately reduce to scientific truths. That everything in life can be reduced to facts about matter and motion.
I think this view is narrow, doesn’t serve science very well and is, ultimately, wrong. I say this as a theoretical astrophysicist who has been practicing science for 30 years and who still loves that practice with all my heart.
A year and a half ago I co-authored a book called The Blind Spot. Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience. Written with my friends the philosopher Evan Thompson and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, the book was an extended argument for developing a new vision of Nature. Such a new vision would understand that science does not give us a perfect, disembodied God’s Eye view of the Universe. Instead, it shows us how profoundly enmeshed we, as examples of life, are with the cosmos.
Science, along with the arts, the humanities and even human spiritual endeavor, put us squarely in the middle of things. There is no story, scientific or otherwise, that we can tell without ignoring our place as storytellers.
What we called the Blind Spot was a set of philosophical (or better yet metaphysical) ideas that, over the centuries, claimed to speak for science. It is important to be clear that these ideas are not Science itself. In essence science is simply a remarkable way to enter into a dialogue with Nature. But what happened over the years was folks with a particular philosophical inclination – like reductionism where you are “nothing but” your atoms – claimed “that’s what science says”.
In the book we are saying “no”. That is not what science says.
In fact, there many ways to understand science that don’t reduce you down to nothing but a computer made of meat or a robot made of muscle and bone. The new physics of life I was writing about in The Atlantic article is just one example of how life points to something different than Blind Spot philosophies. Something different and something richer.
Along with wanting to nerd out on cool science, space, and pop culture topics, this is the Big Idea we will be returning to a lot in this newsletter. It’s one of the main reasons I started it. Something wonderful is happening in spite of the mess the world is in right now. It's reason for hope.
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PS. Do you think a new vision of Nature is needed or not? Leave a comment on the website version of the post or email me at [email protected]
PSS. I was not able to have this post proof-read so please excuse any typos.
— Adam Frank 🚀
