Excerpt from Stephen Hawking Smoked My Socks (by Hilton Ratcliffe, Muse Harbor Publishing, 2014), chapter 4: Belief, Instinct, Behaviour - We don’t need to know the origin or cause of a phenomenon in order to understand and quantify its effect on our lives and our environment; gravitation is a good example of well-understood effects of an unknown cause. If we can fully embrace a spirit of pragmatism, it would be clear that our stubbornly determined quest for an origin of everything we study is a distraction that should more sensibly be left for the very end of our investigation, where philosophical implications can be mused upon at leisure, over a cup of tea. What causes gravitation and what it is, are philosophical questions. What it does to us and how it affects objects in our observable environment, on the other hand, are not. They are matters of pure physics. We can observe and measure it and it’s the same for all of us, no matter what we believe. If you and your neighbour’s dog measure the effect of gravity as I jump off my roof, you’ll both get the same answer, every time. Thus, it is a defining property of the common reality that we share in and that treats us all without prejudice. What made gravity, what it consists of, and how it might end are matters of conjecture and opinion; hitting the Earth after jumping off the roof is not. I was asked recently to explain hypothetical sub-atomic particles called quarks in layman’s terms. My questioner, who appeared to know next to nothing about particle physics in general, and sub-sub-atomic particles in particular, nevertheless questioned me in a way that I found extremely interesting. He assumed that particles like quarks exist; his framework of enquiry did not include any doubt that such particles are real. I wondered why he believed in quarks before he had even commenced his investigation. I did not vocalise my thoughts, of course, because that would have blunted his inquisitiveness. This man was not trained in physics at all. His pastor introduced him to an article in popular media illustrating some general principles of sub-atomic physics, but it was an obfustication. Although pretending to appeal to a general readership, the article practiced typical scientific mysticism, with arcane illustrations and impressive-looking but abstruse particle equations, none of which was comprehensible to my questioner. Nevertheless, he accepted without hesitation that what was written there did in fact represent what it claimed. He simply bowed to the authority of jargon and reputation.
Posted on: Fri, 16 May 2014 18:06:18 +0000