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Sport 7: Winter 1991

Variations on a Divine Gift

Variations on a Divine Gift

Because of the way science has developed over the last three hundred years, we do live in a time when we expect truth to be objectively provable. Measurement is a vital part of our lives today. We live, our children along with us, in a very mathematised society. In the past, before Tycho Brahe, if a minor detail did not fit into a major hypothesis it was easy to shrug it away. The idea that anyone might be accountable to that sort of truth was a foreign one. But Kepler, in computing the orbit of Mars, acknowledged as page 16 significant an error of eight minutes of arc which Copernicus had been able to ignore. Kepler wrote, 'But for us, who by divine kindness, were given an accurate observer such as Tycho Brahe, for us it is fitting we should acknowledge this divine gift and put it to use,' and what Whitehead describes as 'stubborn and irreducible fact' became increasingly important. Like Kepler I believe intricate and accurate measurement is a gift we are given by divine kindness, and that the inventive mind, coming up against stubborn and irreducible facts, has to capitulate and look for richness and amazement within that capitulation. Today 'stubborn and irreducible facts' seem paramount because of the kind of power that attention to such details confers, including the power to make money which often involves the power to get one's own way—very seductive powers indeed. So 'stubborn and irreducible facts' are frequently seen as coinciding with truth, or truth is seen as being the same sort of thing as the facts are and nothing more. It seems to me that deterministic accounts of existence never quite face up to the fact that they don't eliminate mystery but merely shift it into areas where it can be acceptably labelled. And history shows all sorts of aberrations built even into part of the truth we shelve in the 5005. For example, in the beginning of chapter sixteen of his book New Astronomy, Kepler, who thought of accurate observation as a divine gift, absentmindedly put three erroneous figures for three vital longitudes of Mars and then towards the end of the chapter committed several mistakes in simple arithmetic which virtually cancelled his first mistakes out so that he got more or less the right answer. At the most crucial point in the process of discovering his second law Kepler again made a series of mathematical errors that cancelled themselves out allowing him to arrive at the correct result. What sort of truth was operating there? Perhaps something was so determined to be discovered that even mathematical error was forced to yield a true result? I recently read that Mendel cheated in recording the results of his experiments on genetic inheritance in peas and produced a nice pattern that illuminated what currently passes for truth and used to be taught as such in sixth form biology in New Zealand schools. Perhaps something wants to be found. Nowadays it is suggested that even chaos has a structure.

Earlier this century, 1903 to be precise, at the time when there was much thrilling new information on radiation coming to hand, René Blondlot, an experienced physicist, discovered a new ray which he called an N ray, one of the characteristics of which was that it treated substances opaque to page 17 visible light, including wood, iron, silver etc., as if they were transparent. Many notable scientists, particularly French ones, subsequently detected the same ray. But the American physicist R.W. Wood found he was absolutely unable to reproduce Blondlot's striking results. Blondlot and his colleagues then declared that it was the sensitivity of the observer not the validity of the phenomenon that was in question, but by 1905 only French scientists, and by no means all of them, believed in the N ray (though some of them still maintained that only the Latin races had sufficient sensitivity to detect the N ray, that fog had ruined the perception of the Anglo-Saxon observers and beer the perception of the German ones). Nowadays no one believes the N ray ever existed. The Scientific American May 1980, from which I got much of this good information, says that the times had psychologically prepared Blondlot to discover a new sort of radiation. I suggest that one might say with equal truth that he was imaginatively prepared to eat leaves and drink from puddles, but the way in which he did this matched up so closely with accepted reality or behaviour or desire that he temorarily [sic: temporarily] did what I was not able to do—he actually altered perception for a while and won people to his side.

Scientific truths, which should be pure and objective, can stagger and sway on their way to becoming recognised as scientific truths, can be as bizarre as the plots of the stories they partly resemble, or the stories that are told about them afterwards. Yet though the scientists who advised the editors of Arthur Mee's Encyclopedia about the beginning of the world had made what I now take to be a genuine mistake, it was a mistake that fixed my attention in childhood, and (it is even tempting to think) enabled me to see something true which stayed true, even when the actual information turned out to be false. If so, the true thing was wonder ... wonder which dissolves into Tolkein [sic: Tolkien]'s desire, an aspect of our approach to truth which our physical systems are anxious to conceal. A perpetual state of wonder and desire (which seems to me the truest state with which to confront the universe) is certainly not the most practical state to try and live in. We are biologically engineered to have the wonder filtered out of our lives, to learn to take astonishing things for granted so that we don't waste too much energy on being surprised, but get on with the eating and mating, gardening, feeding cats, complaining about taxes and so on. We have the power to entertain visions, but operate most practically when life is mainly humdrum. When I first flew in an aeroplane it was an experience of amazement. Now page 18 I think of the flying time (a time when gravity is confounded, when a metal machine filled with people rises more or less safely into the air), as time when I am going to get a chance to read without any guilty feeling that I should be doing something else. To encounter the amazements, partly compounded of fear and beauty, which I recognised so eagerly when I was a child, I now have to give myself the space to achieve a rare and difficult mood, or search through the various disclosures of science and history, or, more frequently, read a story someone else has written.

I've certainly never had any trouble abandoning the falling-off-the-sun theory in favour of the Big Bang and slow condensation out of the stuff of the primordial universe. I know by now that facts, even marvellous ones, slide around, and that people get things wrong, and the truest thing in science is wonder, just as it is in story. And I never forget that story is as important to human beings as science, more powerful at times because it is more subversive.