Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

The Matter Myth: Towards 21st Century Science by Paul Davies and John
Gribbin, Viking, pp 314, £16.99

Popular accounts of modern science usually try to connect with the general
reader in one of two ways. There are those that lean toward religion and
metaphysics, raising questions about the existence of God or the validity
of free will, and those that dabble in science fiction, teasing the mind
with speculation about time travel or alternate universes. The Matter Myth
offers a bit of both, reflecting the tastes of its two authors: Paul Davies,
whose books, such as God and the New Physics and The Cosmic Blueprint, address
old theological concerns with fresh insight, and John Gribbin, who, as in
The Omega Point and Cosmic Coincidences, likes to explore matters of paradox
and physical enigma. This makes it a doubly rewarding work by two of the
most polished and prolific science writers around.

The ‘myth’ in question here is the mechanistic world-view of Newton:
‘the fiction that the physical universe consists of nothing but a collection
of inert particles pulling and pushing each other like cogs in a deterministic
machine’. This might seem rather a dead horse to be beating, but Davies
and Gribbin bring a spirited wit and sophistication to the task. While the
‘monumental paradigm shift’ they explore may seem too modestly defined to
those whose preferences run to ‘dancing wu-li masters’ or the ‘tao of physics’,
they do an authoritative job of charting the surging theoretical currents
of mainstream science. As well as deftly rehearsing all the more familiar
refutations of atomistic determinism (Schrodinger’s cat, time dilation and
so on), Davies and Gribbin add a wealth of new conundrums: solitons and
superstrings, chaos theory and QED, Ilya Prigogine’s dissipative structures
and Stephen Hawking’s black holes.

The authors save the final chapter in the book to discuss life and mind,
emphasising the degree to which issues of observership have come to assume
an ever greater epistemological importance for the working scientist. The
Universe, Davies and Gribbin conclude, is ‘an interlocking network of information
exchange – a holistic, indeterministic and open system – vibrant with potentialities
and bestowed with infinite richness’. The magnitude of the modern paradigm
shift might be gauged by asking what sense Galileo would have found in such
a definition of natural philosophy.

But the fact that the authors feel they must pile an even greater weight
of contradiction upon poor Newton’s grave leaves a nagging question. Why,
after all this time, should the classical world system still be in need
of debunking?

Obliquely, Davies and Gribbin offer an entertainingly original answer.
In an ‘Interlude’ entitled ‘Confessions of a Relativist’, an ‘I’ who seems
to speak for both authors lets down his hair about an aspect of modern science
that has always perplexed me. Since school days I have struggled through
many strenuous but less than illuminating explanations of relativity and
‘quantum weirdness’. The exercise has left me wondering: how do professional
scientists really cope with these mind-numbing concepts? Do they go about
translating two-dimensional analogies of three-dimensional things into three-dimensional
analogies of four-dimensional things?

In his interlude, the Relativist admits that he, too, has had a battle
with riddles such as curved space and multiple realities; he also found
it a matter of ‘believing the impossible’. He goes on to show how he discarded
one misconception after another until he finally got a practical grip on
the concept. In most cases, the Relativist’s problems arose from his irrepressible
need to ‘visualize the invisible’, only at last to discover that ‘weird
and wonderful’ ideas like space-time and singularities defy the effort.
‘In the end,’ he tells us, ‘my taste for science fiction helped me over
these difficulties.’ But the resolution involved a major sacrifice. ‘I believe
that the reality exposed by modern physics is fundamentally alien to the
human mind and defies all power of direct visualization.’

For the scientific outsider like myself this is a welcomely frank admission.
I, too, finally realised that what the Relativist calls ‘the God’s-eye-view’
of reality is no longer available to us. What modern physics offers as models
of space-warps or cosmic strings are loose verbal translations of intractably
mathematical abstractions. While the Relativist finally found it ‘liberating’
to realise that the world he studies radically resists visual imagination,
many have surely found it a stern rebuff that places science beyond public
knowledge. The rejection of the visual imagination is is perhaps the greatest
and most troubling of all scientific revolutions. At its outer theoretical
boundaries, the Universe we live in has lost touch with its most engaging
dimension. We can no longer see it as it really is.

That may be why the Newtonian world-view endures. As inhospitable as
that austere machine might be, it remains the universe of common sense.
We fall back on it because beyond it there lies a forbidding intellectual
void that cannot be adequately bridged even by first-class books like this.

Theodore Roszak is a writer. His new book, Flickers, appears this spring.