[MCTG] The Most Important Idea about the Universebrent

[BC]

The Most Important Idea about the Universe 
<http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=18&ms=NTM1ODI4NjUS1&r=NTM5NzI1MDA2MAS2&b=0&j=MTEyMTQxNTc4NAS2&mt=1&rt=0>

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.

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 /is/. These events were: 
(1) the new understanding of energy and its conservation; (2) Charles 
Darwin’s idea about evolution by natural selection.

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 
/convergence/ was first observed.

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.

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.

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, /unlike other forms of knowledge/ 
(and this is the crucial point), support one another in a reciprocal 
framework.

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.

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, /Misbehaving: The Making of 
Behavioral Economics/, 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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 /Science/ 
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.

This finding—which applies to many countries—appears solid and has 
emerged from a wave of big data, tax returns for the past /two 
centuries/. This richness means that, as /Science/ put it, the “stuff of 
science” can be applied to it—analysis, extracting causal inferences, 
formulating hypotheses.

In other words, the /methods/ 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 
/for/ a candidate and which vote /against/, and which aspects of a 
candidate’s personality appeal to which type of voter. How much do 
politics and psychology overlap?

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.

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.

Peter Watson

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.

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