The
importance of metaphor’s role in poetry, science and religion cannot be
overestimated. Metaphor transforms seeing into “seeing as” and, as Thomas Kuhn and
others have demonstrated, this is precisely how students learn to be scientists:
perceptual associations are adjusted and cultivated to form new habits of
observation and thought. Metaphor and myth have guided perception and thought
in crucial periods of scientific history as well; a well-known example is Isaac
Newton’s lifelong commitment to alchemical study and experimentation.
At critical
moments in history, scientists become acutely aware of the inadequacy of
literal language to express new modes of conceptual apprehension and new
integrations of theory and experiment. Niels Bohr pointed out that, “when it
comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry… [we are] not so
concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental
connections.” This kind of thinking dawns on scientists in the throes of
intellectual crisis and rapid scientific change. But, alas, it seems that no
sooner does the new metaphor effect such transitions than it is quickly
literalized. And as dusk approaches,
dogmatic slumbers are not far behind.
If we
abstract from the crush and mangle of the details involved in any given
scientific discovery (or invention), we may see the history of science as a
process of gradual self-consciousness: the story of science gradually coming to
understand itself in the act of
trying to understand the world. There were dramatic opportunities for such
self-reflexivity at various points in the past century but it seems that
science has shrugged these off without rising to the occasion with an attitude
of sustained self-examination. More often than not we see science characterized
by something like Einstein’s aspiration to “read God’s mind,” or Newton’s quest
for “the absolute principles” of nature – such mythological visions have danced
in the heads of scientists for centuries. It seems that materialists,
idealists, atheists and theists alike take comfort in such obvious displays
self-aggrandizement.
A more measured, and certainly less
popular, approach is taken by the likes of Bohr. Unlike Einstein, who saw the
paradoxes of quantum physics as a sign of their radical inadequacy, Bohr saw
these as the feedback of physics on
physics. He set about modulating
this feedback through a unique philosophy
of physics based on the notion
of complementarity. To Einstein this was not scientific knowledge and
more like a metaphysical sleight of hand that merely saved the appearances. But
for Bohr, and nearly every physicist since the mid 1930s, complementarity
became the official understanding of quantum physics. Bohr noted that there is
a limit on scientific knowledge. We cannot know everything about a system at a
given instant in time: our knowledge of one set of canonical variables
precludes the very possibility of knowing the mutually exclusive, or complementary, set of variables at that
same instant. Physical knowledge is limited by the experimental pursuit of
physical knowledge. This situation applies beyond physics to all epistemic
endeavors in which the process of knowing is constitutive of the object of
knowledge. Laplace’s fantasies of scientific omniscience are thereby frustrated
and absolute determinism is an absolutely lost cause.
Objectivity requires that science include itself in its
description of nature. Is this practical? I think that it would require a
poetical mindset that is at home in theatre, wherein players knowingly use
exaggeration for the sake of clarity without losing themselves in the tale.
Historically, science has not been so artful in this respect: between its brief
moments of self-reflexive awareness and explicitly poetic redescription of the
world, science demands dogmatic adherence. It pretends to be pure and
demythologized while steeping its students in mythic thinking. The project of
demythologization unwittingly carries the seeds of remythologization in its
pockets as it merrily fails to achieve its impossible dream.
