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Atom and Void (Essays on Science & Community)

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Author:: Robert Oppenheimer

Chapter One. Newton: The Path of Light.

Science has changed the conditions of man's life.

What does Oppenheimer mean by science?

Certainly he is referring to physics, but also likely engineering ("material conditions"), telecommunications, ("means and instruments") weaponry, medicine ("our life's span", "labor and rest"), and the automotive/airplane industry.

Some of these, such as "the terms and form in which...right and wrong come", refer to things that are downstream of science, such as educational and judicial institutions needed to teach and and govern the kind of civilization that is possible because of science, and the dangers the capability of science lends said civilization.

In fact "the communities in which we live and cherish, learn and act" seems to refer directly to cities themselves, which are certainly due to the extensions of science listed above.

It is also worth considering what is meant by conditions: likely the degrees of freedom that constitute the entirety of the possibility of the state of man, and the upper and lower bounds on these dimensions.

Interestingly enough, it seems that any necessary increase in the upper bound generally corresponds to some extension of the lower bound: the better things get, the worse they can get. While medicine has done great things for humanity, in terms of the eradication of polio, there's also the great damage done by Thalidomide, and while engineering and materials science has allowed us to construct grand structures to conduct our lives in, we had to deal with the problem of asbestos, and lead paint, and so not only has the conditions of mans life changed for the positive, but these conditions have changed for the negative, at least in terms of potential.

The description of these changes is not simple.

When one considers the vastness of the learning required to do to become proficient in all of the fields of science which have revolutionized the way in which humanity conducts its business, it certainly follows that to really explain the degree to which science has advanced the status of man, is genuinely impossible. It would take several extremely robust lifetimes to cover just all of the ways in which science is currently operating in modern life, and this was before the real advent of computing technology and the internet as we know it, and there was no hint of the staggering AI capabilities that we possess as a species now.

What is meant by "rich in opportunity for error"?

One thought is that when he lists the areas of change, and states "these are but part of the materials for the analysis of political economy and the wisdom and insight of history", he might mean that in explaining the true nature of these changes, the changes themselves are only a part of what needs to be considering when analyzing the changes of science on the condition of man.

The phrase "the wisdom and insight of history" seems to imply that there is great knowledge to be gained from thinking about the progress of science in a historical context, because there's more to be considered than just the advancements made: one has to consider the conditions, the culture, the capabilities and the prevailing school of thought in some field, with respect the things listed before.

This very well could be the error he alludes to, which would be attempting to describe these changes, and understand them such that one can benefit from knowledge of how they came to be, in terms of the changes themselves, hence why he refers to them as "strands in the tangled affairs of men", because science does not take place in a vacuum, but rather a civilization, an institution, a field, a time, a region, etc.

Also, no analysis of such things is likely to be "final and exhaustive", because science is foremost an ongoing process, which means it is unfolding in the very moment that one seeks to explain it. And of course, because this process is one of the "tangled affairs of men", one can consider the following excerpts from Against Method:

"[History is full of] accidents and conjunctures and curious juxtapositions of events...[and demonstrates the] complexity of human change, and the unpredictable character of the ultimate consequences of any given act or decision of men." - Herbert Butterfield

"History generally, and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and subtle than even the best historian and the best methodologist can imagine" - Lenin.

, as perhaps Oppenheimer rightfully understood just how recursive and continuous the process of science was, being at the forefront of one of, if not the most generative era, and that truly explaining what all took place, would not be feasible.

__As for the more direct effects of discovery in science on

the way men think about things which are not themselves part of science, the historian of ideas has a similar problem.__

Oppenheimer seems to somewhat agree with my thoughts on finality and exhaustiveness, as he says "Noting what men have said about what they thought, who...thought it, and why he thought it, one finds...that the contingent and unpredictable, peculiar greatnesses and blindnesses of...men play a determining part". These are the "act(s) and decision(s) of men" to which Butterfield refers, the "unpredictable character of the ultimate of consequences" of which are the changes Oppenheimer refers to.

Another issue, particularly for the historian, is that "one...finds the science of great scientists, taken in the name of those science, for views and attitudes wholly foreign and sometimes repulsive to them", which presents an additional load of meta-work: not only must you trace the genealogy of the idea in terms of the gestational environment, but you must differentiate the abuses of the scientific concept, from the intention of the concept itself, which may in many cases result in a higher level of understanding, as the scientist who produced the abused concept, may not have ever caught wind of it, or bothered to acknowledge it if he did.

Newton was a victim of this, in that his work was heralded by members of the enlightenment, who had an entirely different perspective on the nature of reality and existence with regards to the significance of religion: Newton was thoroughly religious and even ventured into the areas of esotericism, notably Alchemy, and likely did not see the efficacy of his work as proof of the value of reason over religion, or as a detractor for the value of religion entirely.

Another victim was Einstein, whose theory put forth the nature of space and time as relative, as opposed to absolute, which philosophers took as evidence for the position of relativism, which confers less objectivity to things than would be conferred to them without it.

The contradiction here is that while relativity may have shown us that space and time are not absolute, that lack of absoluteness is in fact the objective truth of the world, which as per Spinoza, is the highest objective of man. Relativity is still arguing an objective truth, albeit one about the relative nature of things.

 Additionally, there seems to be a jump made by such philosophers, which is that if the most fundamental aspects of reality are relative, how can anything contained in them have any true objectivity, which is a semi-logical deduction, but the issue is that relativity theory only makes claims about the base layers of physical reality, and the nature of that which is assumed to be relative by way of the theory, exists far and away from where the theory does.

Often the very fact that the words of science are the same as those of our common life and tongue can be more misleading than enlightening, more frustrating to under­ standing than recognizably technical jargon.

One of the main reasons for this difficulty is that "the words...have been given a refinement, a precision...a wholly altered meaning", and so the every day use of the word, is in line more with the denotative definition of the word within science, and its connotative definition therein almost never enters into every day life.

A word such as "mutation", has a strict meaning in the biological sense, referring to a change in the arrangement of nucleotides such that the expression of a gene leads to a different gene product than one would typically expect. This contrasts to the every day use of the term which means a change, typically unexpected, in any and all things that could possibly change.

Action has even more variance, having a home in the cliché phrase "lights, camera, action", calling to mind the film industry, and adjacently, the "action film", as well as being a euphemism for sex, or general excitement in some context. However, within the context of science, particularly physics, it can refer to a property of physical systems that describes how it changes over time, and is a vector quantity, or the concept of action at a distance, over which a debate still rages regarding the nature of wave function collapse.

Thus we may well be cautious if we inquire as to whether there are direct connections...be­tween the truths that science uncovers and the way men think about things in general.

Oppenheimer points to "their metaphysics...what is real and primary", "epistemology...understanding of what makes human knowledge", and "their ethics...ways of thinking, talking, judging and acting in human problems of right...wrong...good and evil", laying out the various aspects of thinking that may be done, with or without the correct application of concepts of science, for more clear or murkier thought and speech.

This is a poignant section: there's obviously immense difficulty in properly relating the discovery of science to things which are not necessarily scientific, but are nonetheless affected by said discoveries, which is in part due to the double, triple and perhaps even quadruple meanings words have laid on them due to the precision given them in scientific contexts, which is why we must be cautious (though I would rather say meticulous, avoiding rigor because that has a mathematical meaning much like action has a physical meaning), in ascertaining the connections between these discoveries and ethical, metaphysical and epistemological perspectives on things- the meaning of these discoveries for these perspectives.

This caution is again validated by the statement the "relations between scientific findings and man's general views are...deep, intimate and subtle", and perhaps it is this complexity and nuance that leads to the misapplication/misrepresentation of ideas of scientists by practitioners of other fields.

It is pointed out that these relations "are not...relations of logical necessity", that they are not consequences of the definitions of things in the realm of science, for example, the fact that relativity theory does not imply relativism, partially because "science is...if not an unmetaphysical, at least a non-metaphysical activity".

While science may not be diametrically opposed to Metaphysics (unmetaphysical), it does not necessarily impose itself upon metaphysics as a source of illumination regarding the problems therein (and thus is only non-metaphysical).

The stark separation of Physics from Metaphysics always seemed a bit odd to me: considering that Metaphysics is "beyond Physics", there should be a bridge between the two, so that there can always be information shared about what belongs to who, and where that boundary is.

Also, at some point, Physics is going to either only be left with, or begin approaching unintentionally, problems that have traditionally been considered the realm of Metaphysics, and the chasm between the two will only make this more frustrating.

In fact, in some ways, the time may be nigh, as one of the biggest issues in physics, regarding gaining greater understanding of time, reconciling QM & GR, and deciding how to interpret QM's meaning for physical reality.

Oppenheimer states that science "...takes common sense for granted, as well as most of what has gone before in the specialized sciences", and that "where it adds, alters or upsets, it does so on the basis of an uncritical acceptance of a great deal else", and that "to the irritation of many, the assertions of science tend to keep away from [...] words like real and ultimate", and expounds upon this in the following paragraph:

He points out the discovery of the atoms, which do keep some of the properties outlined by the Greek atomists, but lack the chief properties expected of atoms, being fundamental and indivisible building blocks, being that they have a known internal structure, and neither the internal components or the whole structure is unchanging or permanent in nature. Despite this, it is still not within the nature of science to be able to declare these objects as fundamentally, or ultimately real, as one can simply conjecture that the real, indivisible atom, exists beyond what we've discovered, and that we must wait until this discovery. Not only that, one can posit that while these indivisible atoms exist, they can simply never be observed by physical experiment.

Referenced in

Atom and Void (Essays on Science & Community)