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<figure class="aside-banner large-up-hide"><a
name="blogs_scientificamerican_com_g"
href="http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=18&ms=NTM1ODI4NjUS1&r=NTM5NzI1MDA2MAS2&b=0&j=MTEyMTQxNTc4NAS2&mt=1&rt=0"
style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: none; border-radius: 3px;
text-decoration: none; color: #000000;">The Most Important Idea
about the Universe</a></figure>
<div class="article-block article-text">
<div class="mura-region">
<div class="mura-region-local">
<p>Archimedes, Pythagoras, Democritus. The history of science
famously dates back to the brilliant minds of classical
Greece. Another beginning is attributed to the Scientific
Revolution of the seventeenth century, culminating in Isaac
Newton’s discovery of order in the heavens, and the founding
of the Royal Society in London.</p>
<p>For me, however, there was a much more fascinating reboot
in the 1850s, when two near-simultaneous events changed the
landscape for all time and transformed our understanding of
what science <em>is</em>. These events were: (1) the new
understanding of energy and its conservation; (2) Charles
Darwin’s idea about evolution by natural selection.</p>
<p>These breakthroughs, arriving in the same decade, were
important not just for themselves, but also because each
brought together what had hitherto been seen as disparate
disciplines. These were the two greatest unifying ideas of
all time and this was when the process of <em>convergence</em>
was first observed.</p>
<p>The conservation of energy, first codified by Hermann von
Helmholtz in Berlin, brought together the sciences of heat,
optics, magnetism, electricity, food- and blood-chemistry.
It identified the concept of “energy,” an entity which
cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form
to another.</p>
<p>With evolution, Darwin collected copious results from
zoology, botany, geology and astronomy to show that there
was an “order in the rocks”, that living forms varied across
the geological ages in systematic ways and that the heavens
were themselves evolving, providing ample time for natural
selection to have produced its effects.</p>
<p>The importance of these two insights was the way they
brought seemingly different activities under the same
umbrella. This was doubly important because it showed that
the sciences, <em>unlike other forms of knowledge</em> (and
this is the crucial point), support one another in a
reciprocal framework.</p>
<p>Since then the convergence has gathered pace: Niels Bohr’s
discoveries showed how physics and chemistry are intimately
linked (through the electrons that orbit the nucleus, which
give the different elements their properties; Albert
Einstein famously linked space and time, to create
spacetime; and Max Planck’s discovery of the quantum, that
matter is itself discrete and not continuous, linked up with
Mendel’s discovery that genes produce discrete effects—blue
eyes or brown, but never blends. During World War II Erwin
Schrödinger showed how physics governed the characteristics
of the gene. Since the war astronomy and physics have been
married. “Early cosmology has become synonymous with
particle physics”—this is Abdus Salam, the Indian winner of
the Nobel Prize in his Dirac lecture in Cambridge, UK, in
1988.</p>
<p>More recently various aspects of biology—photosynthesis and
the remarkable ability of birds to navigate huge
distances—have been shown to be explicable by quantum
physics. And psychology has been amalgamating with
economics. Richard Thaler has described how the economic
profession has been transformed by the experimental
discoveries of behavioral science. In his 2015 book, <em>Misbehaving:
The Making of Behavioral Economics</em>, he charts its
advances over a forty-year period, from the wilderness to
the point where he himself became (in 2015) the president of
the American Economic Association.</p>
<p>Convergence is not a trivial matter. Steven Weinberg, the
Nobel Prize-winning professor of physics at the University
of Texas, Austin, says it may be “the most important thing
about the universe.”</p>
<p>I agree. The way the disciplines have come together, in a
reciprocal framework, has produced the greatest story there
could ever be—the history of the universe 13.8 billion years
ago right up until now, with all discoveries fitting on one
coherent line.</p>
<p>This unique success means, I feel sure, that the sciences
are set to invade other areas of life not traditionally
associated with science: law, the arts, politics, morality,
social life. Sam Harris, the American philosopher and
neuroscientist, has described morality as “an undeveloped
aspect of science” and believes we shall eventually be able
to define “human values” satisfactorily. Patricia
Churchland, the Canadian-American neuroscientist, argues
that our understanding of “human nature” can be refined by
neuroscience, to the benefit of all.</p>
<p>The latest developments are aided by the recent
accumulation of big data sets and our snowballing abilities
in computation. For example, mathematicians, physicists and
psychologists have all examined aspects of capitalism. If
there is an overriding focus it is what <em>Science</em>
magazine, in a special issue, called “The Science of
Inequality.” This stems from the realisation that under
capitalism, except for a few decades following the two world
wars in the twentieth century, when many industrial states
were on their knees financially, the basic economic order
has been a growing wealth disparity within populations.</p>
<p>This finding—which applies to many countries—appears solid
and has emerged from a wave of big data, tax returns for the
past <em>two centuries</em>. This richness means that, as <em>Science</em>
put it, the “stuff of science” can be applied to
it—analysis, extracting causal inferences, formulating
hypotheses.</p>
<p>In other words, the <em>methods</em> of science, which
have proved so successful—observation, quantification,
experimental testing—are being increasingly applied in new
areas. By the same token, the personality of jurors is being
investigated to see how psychology influences their
understanding of evidence and the bringing of verdicts. In
political research, psychology—again—is being used to assess
which voters vote <em>for</em> a candidate and which vote <em>against</em>,
and which aspects of a candidate’s personality appeal to
which type of voter. How much do politics and psychology
overlap?</p>
<p>These are exciting but challenging times. As Robert
Laughlin, the Nobel Prize-winning professor of physics at
Stanford, has pointed out, all areas of life—economics no
less than psychology or quantum biology—are getting more
accurate and therefore more predictive. The speed of light
in a vacuum is now known to an accuracy of better than one
part in ten trillion, atomic clocks are accurate to one part
in one hundred trillion.</p>
<p>If science can likewise improve accuracy in our legal,
educational or financial lives, we shall be making real
progress. The very existence of convergence—which lies at
the heart of the scientific endeavor when we examine its
history—should give us optimism for the future.<br>
</p>
<section class="article-author">
<div class="article-author__main">
<p class="article-author__name t_body t_body--article">Peter
Watson</p>
<p class="article-author__desc t_body t_body--article">Peter
Watson is an intellectual historian, journalist, and the
author of thirteen books, including Ideas: A History,
The Age of Atheists, The German Genius, The Medici
Conspiracy, and The Great Divide. He has written for The
Sunday Times, The New York Times, the Observer, and the
Spectator. He lives in London.</p>
</div>
</section>
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