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RE:
THE NEW HUMANISTS
From:
Carlo Rovelli
Date: 4.17.02 Once more, John Brockman reclaims the cultural centrality of scientific thinking in our civilization. John tells us that a new "intellectual whole", a fresh reading of the world, is being developed by advancing contemporary science. This is the central role, recalls John, science had in the Renaissance that opened the modern age. Scientists today, or at least some scientists today, are the new humanists, searching and offering a powerful evolving, complex and articulated reading of the world, which is the core of today's culture. I'd like to tell a story in this regard. It is a story that offers a perspective, and has a moral. Many and many centuries ago, a young king of a small mountain kingdom had the wisest of all men as his teacher. The teacher taught the young king that knowledge is the source of civilization. And that rational scientific thinking is the way to knowledge. He nurtured in the king the immense dream of a novel world civilization, founded on knowledge. The king went to war. In his army, he did not have just soldiers, he had scientists, mathematicians, natural philosophers, engineers, writers, historians. People were amazed by the power of this army, that seemed capable, at times, to bend the world at his will. A city on a small island was considered impregnable: the scientists and engineers build a novel stretch of land to reach the island and took the city. The king conquered an immense empire, all the way to India. His life was brief and his empire fell rapidly apart. But his companions and the descendants of his companions inherited pieces of the empire, became wise kings and preserved the faith in knowledge. They built a great library to guard and propagate knowledge, and they keenly nurtured science. And science and knowledge developed astonishingly. The greatest scientist of all times lived then, medicine was born, optics was born, astronomy was born, physics was born, the basic book with the grammar of science, which we have all studied in school, was written in those times ... a way of enquiring the world had been found... With it, new huge ships were built, commerce flourished, new lands were reached, industries developed, people were healed, and the city of the wise king was diverse, prosperous, tolerant, intellectually vibrant and projected towards the future... This is not a fairy tale. It is the true story of our civilization. The number of centuries ago is precisely twenty three. The young king is of course Alexander the Great. His wise teacher was Aristotle. The kings that continued his cultural politics are the Ptolemies in Alexandria. The great scientist is Archimedes. The book with the basic grammar of science we all have studied is Euclid's Elements, which created geometry. This is our deep heritage. But did this inheritance continue across the centuries? No. Civilization fell back to obscurantism. The Romans failed to understand it. The story goes that they murdered Archimedes. Certainly they did not understand earlier theoretical science anymore. Time went on, things got worse and worse. The great library of Alexandria was burned down. Irrational and religious thinking prevailed. The kind of thinking whose effects we can well contemplate today in its very central nest: Jerusalem... Eighteen century later, European men, full of awe and respect, slowly started to search and translate ancient books, where remaining bits of the old knowledge were still present, copied over and over by innumerable hidden and devoted hands. It took sometime, but soon some of these men, courageously, decided not to just rediscover, but to start the path again, push the path ahead. Galileo Galilei was one of these, well aware, as is clear in his writings, that he was doing again, eighteen centuries later, what had begun in ancient times. The path of rational knowledge had restarted. To a large extent, the modern world exists thanks to cumulated rational knowledge: the Greeks' recipe has worked. Why tell this story? For various reasons. One is to remember that when we teach, say, elementary physics, we are not just training bored students to technical problem solving. We are telling them the story of one of the most extraordinary of the human adventures, the successful paths to knowledge. This is the story of human intelligence used at its best, with advantages for anyone of us. We are teaching the ways of the path to knowledge in our species, nothing less. The second reason is that I do not think Plato or Kant, or Wittgenstein, or so much of western philosophy, could be comprehensible, without the full understanding of the mathematics and the science of their times. And so many are the cultural misreadings of the historians who failed to understand the relevant mathematics and science (on this, and on others of the ideas presented here, see Lucio Russo's La Rivoluzione Dimenticata, Feltrinelli). But the main reason for keeping this story in mind is that the Greeks had the far reaching intuition of the identity of civilization, knowledge, and rational thinking: but the they eventually lost. It took humanity eighteen centuries to restart the experiment. The path was lost once, and could be lost, in larger or smaller part, again. That we stay this direction is far from being granted. We are certainly far away from obscurantism. But there are also signs of reaction against scientific thinking, and John's optimistic essay is also a warning against these. There are heavy signs of irrationalism all other the planet, and also in the words of our very top leaders. Our guarantee against obscurantism is not democracy alone: peoples have often voted into power forces that openly adhered to irrationalism such as the Nazis, or some current governments. Our guarantee against obscurantism is the widespread recognition of the vital and clear force of rational scientific thinking. This can help us finding a better world, if irrationalism (or the thirst of power and wealth concentration of our political leaderships) don't drive us down. When I talk with cultivated people that happily claim they know nothing about math and science, I get even more scared than when powerful people say they do not read books. The control might fall in the hands of people that have no understanding of the basics of our understanding of the world, of our capacity of getting to correct answers and correct predictions. There is much that is not science and that we want to defend around us. This does not change the core of John's thesis, that scientific thinking is at the core of our knowledge based civilization. We can add to this our thirsty belief in justice; our faith in dreams; our deep awareness of the emptiness of life; or our faith in humanity as a value; our desire of beauty; our joy in talking to all objects with a song; our sense of the mystery; and anything else that the wonders of the human adventure have given us. Nothing of this is challenged by science or challenges science. To the very contrary. The scientific quest for knowledge is deeply emotional in its ways and motivations. But if we resist it, we resist reality. Reality, however complex and unknowledgeable in its deepness, is there, and fights back. This is why rational scientific thinking is stronger. Whenever science has an answer to a well posed question, this answer is, at present, by far the best available answer.
More than that, science is intrinsically capable of multiplying
well posed questions. And in this way it leads us continuously
to unexpected new realms. The intensity with which this is
happening in the last decades is wonderful. Yes, I agree with
John that we are in a moment of splendid explosion. Science
has opened new realms that no unrealist could ever dream of.
Myself, I work in science because I believe in dreams. Science
offers such magical dreams, so much more colored and so much
more real than the tenuous dream called everyday's reality. |
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John Brockman,
Editor and Publisher |
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