Quantum generations, p.58
Quantum Generations, page 58
A REVOLT AGAINST SCIENCE
Science criticism on a fundamental level, sometimes including the rejection of science as such, was not an invention of the 1960s. Throughout its history, science has been attacked continually and much of the criticism that became so visible in the 1960s and 1970s had its roots in the nineteenth century or even earlier. According to one strand of criticism, typically to be found in the writings of the British Marxist crystallographer John D. Bernal in the 1930s and 1940s, science is socially organized in the wrong way and used for the wrong purposes; it therefore needs to be changed. Yet Bernal and his comrades in the “red scientists” movement of the 1930s did not reject the values of science as such; they merely argued for deep changes in the social practice of science. Change the society from a capitalist structure into one based on socialism and science will be cured of its sickness. But there were other, older versions of science criticism that took a more radical position and the consequence of which was a negation of science rather than a redefinition of science. The romantic or utopian, and often anti-intellectual, tradition emphasized subjectively and intuitively gained insight in nature and opposed the canons of objectivity characteristic of ordinary science. Vitalism, antirationalism, and versions of Lebensphilosophie go back to about 1800, if not earlier. They experienced a revival in the 1970s.
Feeding on a variety of sources, some of them hardly compatible, there emerged from the late 1960s a new and vigorous form of science criticism which, in its more extreme form, argued for an abolition of science as ordinarily understood. Some of the criticism was inspired by the views of a group of mainly European sociologists and philosophers, including Herbert Marcuse in the United States, Jürgen Habermas in Germany, and Louis Althusser and André Gorz in France. In his influential One Dimensional Man, a classic of the student revolt, the German-American Marcuse argued that Western science was directed inherently toward domination of nature, as well as people. According to Marcuse and other philosophical gurus of the period, the essence of science was exploitation. Nature in her original or “anarchistic” state had been mutilated raped by the enforcement of scientific abstractions from outside; the scientific knowledge of nature had thereby become identical with dominance and exploitation. Moreover, the repressive technological society was founded on the physical sciences, and these sciences were therefore responsible for the repression and dehumanization that were characteristic of modern society. Marcuse claimed that “the mathematical character of modern science determines the range and size of its creativity, and leaves the nonquantifiable qualities of humanitas outside the domain of exact science” (Schweber 1994b, 144). That Marcuse and the other gurus of the period knew little about science, and even less about physics, is true but historically irrelevant. Their views were taken seriously by a large part of the younger generation, who rejected the scientific project and accepted the picture of physicists as soulless machines in the service of the military and industrial rulers. It is worth noting that there were distinct, although at the time unnoticed, parallels between the antiscience and radical-science movements of the 1970s and the attitude toward science that flourished in Germany in the early 1920s under the spiritual leadership of Oswald Spengler (see chapter 10). Likewise, there were parallels to the situation in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, and elsewhere in the late 1930s. In 1942 the sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote about “a frontal assault on the autonomy of science” and warned against what he saw as a threatening anti-intellectualism. “The revolt from science,” he wrote, “which [until recently] appeared so improbable as to concern only the timid academician who would ponder all contingencies, however remote, has now been forced upon the attention of scientist and layman alike” (Merton 1973, 267).
Belonging to a quite different tradition than the European social critics, Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 analysis of the historical development of science unintentionally became another source for the discontent with science. With a Ph.D. in physics under John Slater, Kuhn had no wish to join the antiscience trend. In his best-selling The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argued against the positivistic view of science, suggested that there is no such thing as scientific progress across periods of revolutionary change, and hinted that science develops in a nonrational manner. The message, it seemed to many of his young readers, was that physics was no more scientific than psychology, art history, or literary criticism. Nor was modern astronomy to be believed any more than astrology. Developing some of Kuhn’s themes, the Austrian-American philosopher Paul Feyerabend went further and attacked science and the scientific method as purely ideological notions in line with religion, myth, and propaganda; only science, contrary to religion and myth, had come to be the dominating dogma of modern time, executing a mental dictatorship on a par with that of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Feyerabend argued for an abolition of obligatory science instruction in schools and for a cessation of any kind of government support of science activities. “What’s so great about science?” he asked. “What makes modern science preferable to the science of the Aristotelians, or to the cosmology of the Hopi?” (Feyerabend 1978, 73). According to Feyerabend, nothing at all.
The works of Kuhn and Feyerabend formed the background of other historical, philosophical, and sociological studies of science, the latest fashion being known as the program of sociology of scientific knowledge or social constructivism. Contructivist sociologists of the 1980s and 1990s denied that the scientific world view is grounded in nature and should therefore be given higher priority than any other worldview. Science, they said, is basically a social and cultural construction fabricated by negotiations, political decisions, rhetorical tricks, and social power. Since truth and falsehood are always relative to a given local framework, scientists’ beliefs about nature are not inherently superior to those of any other group. In a book on the history of modern high-energy physics, the author, a young physicist turned sociologist, concluded, “The world of HEP [high-energy physics] was socially produced . . . there is no obligation upon anyone framing a view of the world to take account of what twentieth-century science has to say” (Pickering 1984a, 406). Such views, popular in large parts of the academic world, are not what most physicists like to hear. Social constructivists have been accused of contributing to an atmosphere of “higher superstition” and a revival of anti-science sentiments.
What has all this to do with physics? In a direct sense, very little. The views of Feyerabend and Marcuse were hardly what were most discussed in the physics laboratories. But indirectly, science criticism and the general discontent with science that resulted after about 1970 were also important to physics. As a hard and “masculine” science with a (deserved) reputation for close connections with military applications, physics came under attack more than most other sciences. Many bright students decided that studies in social sciences, or perhaps in the biological and environmental sciences, were more to their taste. In general, the popularity of physics among students fell markedly.
There were other ways to dissent from established physics than riding on the relativist bandwagon or claiming physics to be an expression of masculine and capitalist modes of thought. Fritjof Capra, an American particle theorist, believed that he had discovered a deep connection between modern quantum theory and forms of Oriental mysticism, such as Zen Buddhism. His The Tao of Physics, first published in 1975, became immensely popular because it resonated so well with the spirit of the decade. It was soon followed by a stream of other works in the same dubious genre. Capra’s project was in a sense the very opposite of that of the science critics who accused physics of being a soulless, materialistic enterprise. According to Capra, the insights of quantum physics were the very same as those reached much earlier by Eastern mystics through meditation and intuition. The common insight included that physics was basically subjective, a reflection of the human mind rather than describing an independent nature made up of particles and fields. Moreover, Capra found in the “democratic” S-matrix theory the most convincing parallel with Eastern mysticism. That the S-matrix theory had been abandoned by the large majority of physicists was a fact that seemed to be of no concern to the author and was probably unknown by most of his readers. The Tao of Physics was representative of a trend connected with the counterculture that did not reject physics as such, but suggested alternative interpretations and extrapolations that, to many readers, were more appealing than the authoritative versions. David Bohm’s alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics had its start many years before the 1970s, but it was only with the new cultural climate that he developed his ideas in a direction consonant with the mysticism and holism that characterized the “new age” movement. Bohm’s ideas of an “implicate order” made him a cultlike figure in wide circles, but they made no impact at all on mainstream physics.
THE END OF PHYSICS?
“Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?” was the title of Stephen Hawking’s inaugural lecture when, in 1980, he assumed the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Hawking considered it a realistic possibility that theoretical physics might indeed end in a not-too-distant future, possibly as early as the turn of the century. But what does it mean that physics, or science, comes to an end? According to Hawking, it meant “that we might have a complete, consistent, and unified theory of the physical interactions which would describe all possible observations.” Because of recent progress made in fundamental physics, he felt that “there are some grounds for cautious optimism that we may see a complete theory within the lifetime of some of those present here” (Crease and Mann 1986, 410). Two points are worth noting. First, Hawking understood the phrase “end of theoretical physics” as the establishment of a unified and complete theory that encompassed, in principle, all special theories. Second, Hawking was optimistic that such a theory would be found; that is, he believed it would be a good thing. In the 1980s and 1990s, the end-of-physics theme became widely discussed and was the basis of a minor publication industry. Far from being a symptom of crisis, the popularity of the theme reflected the sense of progress that occurred in attempts to unify the basic laws of physics. After all, many physicists would say, the ultimate goal of fundamental physics is to produce a complete or final theory and then, in a sense, commit suicide. Having digested this final theory of the future, there would be nothing left to do, at least nothing of fundamental interest.
As Hawking was well aware, the end-of-physics theme has a long history. We recounted in chapter 1 how, in the 1890s, Michelson prophesied the end of physics, although what he had in mind was not a grand unified theory. Following the early triumphs of quantum mechanics, and especially Dirac’s special-relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics in 1928, several physicists suggested that physics was approaching a state of completeness. The optimism was great and a general feeling prevailed that “physics was almost finished,” as Peierls recalled. The feeling was famously expressed by Dirac in a paper of 1929. “The general theory of quantum mechanics is now almost complete,” he wrote. “The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble” (Kragh 1990, 267).
It soon turned out that Dirac’s optimism was unfounded and that relativistic quantum mechanics instead gave rise to all kinds of serious problems. Dirac’s view of the final theory was, like Hawking’s, reductionistic. A truly complete theory, in the shape of a set of equations, was expected to explain all phenomena in a deductive manner; in this sense, the phenomena could be reduced to special instances of the final theory. The ideal of theory reductionism can be found many years before Dirac and was, for example, the methodological basis of Gustav Mie’s unified field theory from about 1912. Einstein, too, was a subscriber to the view that the ultimate aim of physics is “to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction,” as he wrote in 1918 in an address given in honor of Planck’s sixtieth birthday.
Following the premature optimism of 1928 30, it took a long time until the quantum physicists resumed the discussion of the end of physics. Meanwhile, other physicists pursued the theme in a different manner. The deductive theories of Milne and Eddington, developed in the 1930s and 1940s, promised an a priori knowledge of the entire universe, including “explanations” of the natural constants, such as the fine structure constant. Eddington’s unfinished “fundamental theory” was an ambitious attempt to provide a final theory and differed from earlier attempts only in being more unorthodox and obscure. In a 1949 article titled “Any Physics Tomorrow?” George Gamow asked if the future of physics would “present us with ever broadening horizons offering limitless possibilities for further explorations”; or, alternatively, would physics converge toward “a complete and self-consistent system of fundamental physical knowledge with all the ground thoroughly explored and with no new striking discoveries to be expected?” (PT January 1949, 17). Gamow argued that fundamental physics could, in principle, be based on four constants of nature (he chose c, h, k, and an elementary length), and suggested that if this happened physics would have met its end:
If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine!
Gamow did not require a single unified theory from which all other theories could be deduced, only that the fundamental laws, whether connected or not, were known. In the same year as Gamow published his article, Einstein expressed in his Autobiographical Notes his deep belief that “Nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally, completely determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical values could be changed without destroying the theory)” (Schilpp 1949, 63).
Richard Feynman was one more physicist who believed that scientific knowledge at the most fundamental level is finite, and that there will come a day when physics at this level ends. “This thing cannot keep on going so that we are always going to discover more and more new laws,” he wrote in 1965. Like Gamow, he used the metaphor of geographical explorations to make his point clear: “We are very lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. . . . There will [in the future] be a degeneration of ideas, just like the degeneration that great explorers feel is occurring when tourists begin moving in on a territory” (Feynman 1992, 172). Although the ideas of Gamow, Einstein, and Feynman did not refer to a unified theory, their conceptions of the end of physics were quite similar to the views that became so popular near the end of the century. Steven Weinberg was one of many theorists in the 1990s who believed in a final theory from which flow all arrows of explanation. The theory would not be logically inevitable, but it would be logically isolated, that is, “every constant of nature could be calculated from first principles. . . . We would know on the basis of pure mathematics and logic why the truth is not slightly different” (Weinberg 1993, 237). Whatever the precise shape of the final theory, Weinberg was confident that it would be quantum-mechanical, a view shared by almost all unificationists.
