Probably the best know symbol for
the
doomsday clock in the atomic age appears on the cover of each issue of
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The fact that the minute
hand has remained perilously close to midnight over the past few years
signals the awareness of the concerned physicists that nuclear holocaust
is close to becoming a reality. What interests me most about this
drawing, however, is that it represents a clock. The classical
physicist conceived of the universe as a clockwork in which discrete,
immutable substances (atoms or masses of atoms) meshed smoothly and
deterministically together in accordance with the influence of
disembodied physical laws. We now have good reasons to believe that
this conception of physical reality is no longer valid. In the January
1981, issue of the Bulletin, the Nobel prize winning physicist
Hannes Alfven cautions us not to be fatalists in our dealings with the
nuclear dilemma and then adds: "Second, we should not be defeatists.
Omnicide is not an approaching natural catastrophe against which we
cannot fight. It could be avoided if everyone understands what is
approaching and does what he or she can to avoid it. Probably a rather
drastic change in our thinking and general attitude is necessary; but is
not our survival worth it?" The answer is, or certainly should be,
"yes." But how is such a drastic change to occur; where is the source of
the radically new ideas that could possibly have force, or authority
enough, to alter the way in which we use our minds? Ironically to be
sure, our salvation might lie in the same area of investigation that
allowed us to develop the technology that appears to be ticking away
toward our impending doom—it is our knowledge of the special character
of subatomic processes. It is what we know about nature on the most
fundamental and most pervasive level.
All that is required to understand what I am about to say in
this chapter is the ability to follow an argument to its conclusions.
But the implications of recent advances in physics are not likely to
assist us in our dealings with the threat of nuclear holocaust—and this
applies to those schooled in the physical sciences as well—unless we
approach them with almost childlike wonder and openness. The greatest
obstacle to new truths, a William James pit it, is old truths, and that
might well be the case here. The old truths in this instance are
common-sense assumptions about what material reality is or should be that
were developed in large part in ancient Greece and incorporated into
classical physics.
During roughly the same period in which the migratory peoples
who established Greek civilization were taking possession of cities and
farm-lands in Greece and the Aegian islands, another migratory peoples,
the Hebrew tribes, were settling Palestine. It is impossible for even
the most intelligent and imaginative among us to know how they thought or
felt. What we do know of that experience, from sources like Homer and
the Hebrew prophets, suggests that the world "out there" for members of
each culture was charged with a spiritual presence and dynamism that
would seem quite alien to virtually everyone in our own time. Although
you were probably taught in school, as I was, that there are few
similarities between the religious thought of the ancient Greeks and
Hebrews, there is one fundamental notion that emerged in both traditions
that proved incalculably important in the history of Western science.
When we investigate the process through which creative
thinkers in science build scientific theories, we discover as the
historian of science Gerald Holton puts it, "explicit or implicit
decisions, such as the adoption of certain hypotheses and criteria of
preselection that are not at all scientifically 'valid' in the sense in
which that phrase is normally understood." The most pervasive of
unexamined scientifically invalid hypotheses in the history of science is
a singularly Western notion called Logos. This notion, broadly defined,
affirms that the controlling principle of the cosmos is an immaterial
idea or essence that exists in a realm above, or distinct from, the
material world. The Hellenic and Hebraic conceptions of Logos are not
precisely the same. But the fusion of the two in the scientific work of
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton resulted in the creation of
classical physics.
The brooding presence of Jehovah, like that of any effective
tribal leader, could be angry at the violation of his word. But the
word over time was not viewed simply as a list of prohibitions,
requirements, directives—it became, most fundamentally, Logos. The
children sown by the cosmic seed believed that they were of the
Father, that they partook of his nature, and that they were capable
of hearing the Word and discovering its sense in their experience in
time. In this religious cosmology, man remained apart from nature
with the ability to unravel the occasionally discernable workings of
immaterial hands.
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