A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

Albert Einstein

The creative scientist studies nature with the rapt gaze of the lover, and is guided as often by aesthetics as by rational considerations in guessing how nature works.

Timothy Ferris

Preface (First Edition)

Albert Einstein supposedly once remarked that everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. His remark is well suited to the task of writing a book on some of the major scientific and philosophical issues of our time, of simplifying a number of complex and specialized subjects for the nonspecialist and the inquisitive reader, without oversimplifying the careful conclusions of contemporary science and insulting the many undaunted and persevering men and women who have attempted to understand this marvelously strange universe.

Several years ago a report from the Association of American Colleges, Integrity in the College Curriculum, lamented the fragmented state of a college education. Among other things, the report noted that most college programs have failed to keep pace in providing a broad understanding of science, that in the light of the overwhelming recent scientific and technological developments a college education should produce graduates that are "intellectually at ease with science." This cannot be accomplished, the report noted, with a quick exposure to skills and content or with more emphasis on specialized research, but must involve a wider invitation to philosophic and intellectual growth, to critical inquiry, and to understand the crucial connections of science to other fields, to our historical roots, to the human prospect, and to life itself. It is one thing to have the important and irreplaceable experience of the laboratory, learning how to observe, experiment, and infer, and another to understand the imposing human questions generated by the results of the laboratory. As Charles Stores, a master science teacher has stated, "Few curricula are not compartmentalized . . . to the point of suffocation and few teachers dare to venture beyond the safe harbors of their own disciplines to bring together . . . the sciences into a coherent and historical whole and fewer still relate the sciences to the humanities."

This book addresses this problem by providing a supplement to an introductory science, history of science, philosophy of science, or interdisciplinary course. Its aim is to honor science by helping the reader understand not only the unexpected beauty of the modern scientific picture of the universe, but also the remarkable process by which this picture has been, and is being, achieved. In addition to reinforcing the goal of scientific literacy in terms of content and method, Science and the Human Prospect will concentrate on the philosophical implications and questions generated by the method and its stunning results. It will show that philosophical analysis, reflection, and contemplation are an inseparable part of the continual process to understand what science has discovered.

This book is also dedicated to the proposition that thinking about and exchanging opinions regarding the big questions of life are very much related to dealing with our more immediate practical problems. Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the nature of reality? What is the nature of a reasonable belief? Are we alone in the universe? Will the human species survive this present state of technological adolescence? Can such questions be answered? Can something important be learned, even if such questions cannot be answered?" Although the connection with such lofty questions may seem tenuous, recent studies of the imaginative and innovative management of successful businesses have revealed that a significant percentage of its leaders have a broad liberal arts background rather than degrees in business administration. This indicates that people who have addressed the larger questions of life have not wasted their time with ivory tower pursuits, but have learned to think critically and to be adaptable to new situations and, most importantly, have learned how to learn. The connection between the philosophical contemplation of science and the human prospect is similar. The abstract quest for the truth of nature and the nature of truth is pursued by scientists and philosophers not only for its own sake but also because such a venture has a crucial bearing on understanding who we are and what choices we should make in determining our future.

We have discovered only recently that our Earth is but a fragile speck of dust floating in an unimaginably vast sea of space and time and that, from a biological perspective, human life is precious and unique but not necessarily special. In a world beset by so many pressing global problems, requiring so many daily global decisions, we should all make it our business to discuss what this means. In a world of lasers, space shuttles, and computers, in a world culture linked by instantaneous telecommunications, we should have made some progress since a more primitive time when people burned witches and books, and indulged in human sacrifice. Yet today we witness the plague of terrorism spreading throughout the world, where the psychology of righteousness has degenerated to where one person's "freedom fighter" is another's terrorist. Also, the mass hysteria over AIDS is producing the same psychology of fear, prejudice and bigotry that produced witch and book burning. Daily news clips from all over the world demonstrate repeatedly the tendency to commit the logical fallacy of ignorance and the average person's lack of understanding of scientific method. People who would not think twice of smoking cigarettes or of not wearing seat belts in driving their children to school demand that science prove beyond any doubt that AIDS cannot be acquired by breathing the same air as an AIDS victim. And because science cannot prove this absolutely, these same people too often conclude that it is true, and another round of persecution begins.

The truth is, spite of the tremendous success of applying the scientific method to the problems of starvation and disease, in spite of the astounding vision produced by science of our home in the universe, most human beings on this Earth still require a popular, quasi-religious, security-psychology for belief and action. Even informing the public about the dangers of smoking requires a media blitz replete with Madison Avenue advertising techniques; we assume that no one would pay attention if the scientific evidence and the controlled experiments were presented instead. Religion has contributed much to life, and in this book we will see that it has played a very positive role in the development of scientific ideas, but scientists should not need to become priests or authoritative TV personalities before their message is understood.

Because this book represents an attempt to provide perspective to a general science education, let me make clear from the beginning what my perspective is. Although there is an inherent risk in life and this is reflected in the uncertainty in the application of the scientific method, and although there has been much bad science⁽¹⁾ in the pursuit of ideology and the same need for a security-psychology, science, as an inherently self-corrective process, remains one of the most effective methods for dealing with risk and uncertainty. Problems never end, and a problem such as AIDS is not a new test for our humanity; it is the same test. To solve such difficult problems we need to bring out the best of our "humanness," not the worst. And science, in spite its fallible human elements, in the long run is a powerful method for bringing out the best in us; in spite of the puzzling nature and arguability of its self-correctiveness, science brings out our ability to be humbled by the world, to figure out our mistakes, and in the words of Melvin Konner, to feel "a sort of wonderment at the spectacle of the world, and its apprehensibility by the mind: a focusing, for the purpose of elevation."

This book is for any curious person, but it is best suited for an honors high school or freshman or sophomore college course. Its hope is to generate in the reader an understanding of the philosophical drama that lies behind humanity's attempt to embrace nature with a human conceptual framework. In the process it will survey the major developments of this attempt, both modern and historical, to allow the reader to be intellectually and emotionally at ease with science.

It is also a textbook with a tangential theme, no doubt a controversial one. In addition to the usual presentation of the necessary rigor of scientific method, it will present science as part of the process, noted by Einstein in the opening epigraph of this book, of "widening our circle of compassion." It will show science to be far from being a cold, heartless, sterile probing of nature, but a passionate enterprise, involving all that we are as human beings. This book will openly flaunt what Robert Oppenheimer used to call the "sentimental" aspect of science; it will present science as a romance with the universe, a fervent striving to understand, where ideas are cast out like romantic gestures for acceptance from this great presence that is our home. It will show that science stirs the heart as well as the mind. Most importantly, it will claim that without the nonrational elements expressed in this human romance with the universe, scientific progress as we know it would not have been possible.

Although this book adopts controversial perspectives and arguments, readers should profit even if they disagree with the validity of the concepts. Because the book cuts across many disciplinary boundaries, normally jealously guarded by the scholar specialist, its content is meant to be argued about, in particular to provoke discussion at the introductory level. Each chapter is deliberately open-ended and should be thought of as a guide to discussion or a point of departure. And each chapter includes a Concept Summary and Suggested Readings, a reviewlike annotated bibliography presented in an order from introductory to more technical. Some of these books will have been cited in the chapter preceding the bibliography, and some will be recommended reading on the topics discussed.

One final prefatory comment. The reader should not be put off by such terms as epistemology, ontology, and relativity theory. Each philosophical and scientific term is defined and developed in a step by step manner, assuming only curiosity and an average reading level as a prerequisite. However, in following the development of the factual and philosophical details of each chapter, keep in mind that there are different levels of understanding and confusion. In the many years of teaching a philosophy course covering the topics of this book, I have often had students complain to me, "It's all so amazing, but I do not understand." Students will complain that they do not understand how a subatomic particle that is supposed to be an object in one place at one time can also be a wave that is in many places at the same time. Or how the entire universe, with its incomprehensible amount of matter, can have started from a single dimensionless point, a point that is not even surrounded by space or in time, because space and time are also "in" the point. Or how it is possible that the universe can be expanding, but not have a center. Or how natural selection could produce the anglerfish. On such occasions, after a brief discussion, I will often find that the student has understood the lecture or reading material. Then we both realize that the problem does not involve reading or listening comprehension but that the student wants to have a complete "feel" for the material; he or she wants to feel as comfortable with these new ideas as with the idea that a circle is not a square, that 2 plus 2 is 4, not 5, or that people have parties in the United States on Super Bowl Sunday. What the reader must understand about science is that there are many examples of scientific knowledge that no one understands in this sense. As the English writer G. K. Chesterton once stated, "We have seen the truth, and the truth makes no sense."

Many great scientists have declared that most of the scientific knowledge of the twentieth century can be understood only mathematically, and like mystics professing that they cannot tell the rest of us the truth because such truths expressed in ordinary language will sound foolish, they often choose public silence as the most prudent course. Strip the great mathematical physicists of their mathematics, ask them to confront the universe as regular human beings who must explain to their children what it all means, and they will be equal to the student in humble perplexity. As physicist Nick Herbert in his book Quantum Reality has confessed,

When my son asks me what the world is made of, I confidently answer that deep down, matter is made of atoms. However, when he asks me what atoms are like, I cannot answer though I have spent half my life exploring this question. How dishonest I feel -- as "expert" in atomic reality -- whenever I draw for schoolchildren the popular planetary picture of the atom; it was known to be a lie even in their grandparents' day.

If science has taught us anything, it is that nature is not in the business of making us feel comfortable in this sense, of presenting a static and predictable personality, one consistent with our provincial expectations. Our romance with this great Being is not like those affairs of an initial great passion that inevitably lapse into a boring, stable routine. Rather, it is like those rare affairs that remain vibrant and exciting for a lifetime, alternating often between confidence and misgiving, ecstasy and despair, with each emergence from despair and uncertainty making the relationship stronger, producing a greater understanding, but never one that is complete. In our relationship with the universe there will always be the next misunderstanding and the next reconciliation. Thus, there is an inevitable element of struggle in our attempt to embrace the universe with human concepts, and no matter how much effort has been made to simplify the topics discussed in this book, some amount of struggle will be required of the reader. Nevertheless, there is something in our nature that makes this alluring task most enjoyable.
 

Acknowledgments

No man is an island, and no book is the result of a single mind. The influences that contributed to the thoughts contained in this book have been many. Any mistakes are, of course, mine alone, but many need to be thanked for their helpful suggestions and insights. First and foremost are the students of Honolulu Community College who's cosmopolitan spirit and multicultural representation never ceased to amaze me, and whose struggle to know and understand in many ways parallels the intellectual struggle to embrace the universe with a human conceptual scheme. When I reflect on a teaching career that is approaching 20 years, I realize more and more each day how much a teacher learns from his students. To name but a few who I am very grateful for having the privilege of being a fellow traveller and guide in our cosmic journey, I wish to thank Sharyn Abe, Kirk Arndt, Robert Bell, Michael Benson, Chris Breininger, Lorie Brinkman, Patricia Calabrese, Alfredo Carma, Jerry Ching, Dan Colon, Nancy Cooper, Barbara Corbin, Ildiko Csontos, Craig Cundiff, Carol Dipiazza, Sharon Fischer, Donnie Hakuole, Alvin Hansen, Laurie Heath, Jennifer Higgins-Ross, Joseph Huster, Chris Jones, Masae Kiyota, Stephanie Kokernak, Grover Lamb, Ted Lieberman, Steve Love, Joanne Muraoka, Wendy Paakuala, Philip Pebenito, Dan Petersen, Lewis Poe, Frank Salidivar, Diane Sasaki, Dominic Setka, Suzette Smetka, Guy Sueoka, Fred Sutter, George Szamosi, Mie Takeda, Laine Uyeno, Nancy Vallely, Jennifer Venezia, Tad Wilkinson, Harry Wong, and Brian Young.

Next are my colleagues. To name but a few who contributed either directly or indirectly to the manuscript, a special thanks to physicist Mark Schindler, who read the entire manuscript several times; his expertise and devil's advocate role were indispensable as a backdrop for Chapters 7 and 8; computer science instructor Sam Rhoads for his helpful editing suggestions and thoughts on artificial intelligence and the Copernican revolution; mathematics and astronomy instructor Jim Reeder for his help in corroborating the quantitative astronomical data and with the math analogy in Chapter 5; psychology instructor Caroline Blanchard for her expertise on aggression and evolution theory; philosophy instructor Terry Haney and English instructor Gloria Hooper for attending my cosmology course; political science instructor Rick Ziegler for his encouragement of the thoughts contained in Chapter 10; and Helen Rapozo for her help in telecommunication data transfers.

I am also grateful to Gary Mcdonald and the production team at Wadsworth for their tireless handling of the myriad publication tasks, and to Joyce S. Tsunoda, Chancellor for the Community Colleges of the State of Hawaii, and Peter R. Kessinger, Provost of Honolulu Community College for their leadership and institutional support.

A very special thanks also to Charles Stores of Highline Community College, who seems to have most understood the lonely path travelled by the thoughts contained in this book.

Finally, I owe much indebtedness to my wife, Carmen, and children, David, Kym, and Reyna, who weathered my obsessiveness, stimulated me intellectually with their perspectives on life, and taught me that understanding a black hole and electron tunneling bestow no guarantee of understanding a single human being.

Notes: (Click Back to return to text.)

1. For instance, within just the past 100 years in the United States, science has been used to justify "niggerology" and "polygenism," the supposed separate evolution of race, the exploitation of the weak by the strong (social Darwinism), and even the idea that some people are "born" criminals, justifying compulsory sterilization and legal castration.