It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

– Thomas Henry Huxley

The basic assumption underlying all science and rational thought in general is that the physical world exists, and that it is possible to understand the laws governing objective reality. The great majority of working scientists accept that the universe is governed by natural law, a fact pointed out by Philip Anderson:

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how science could exist if they didn’t. To believe in natural law is to believe that the universe is ultimately comprehensible – that the same forces that determine the destiny of a galaxy can also determine the fall of an apple here on earth; that the same atoms that refract the light passing through a diamond can also form the stuff of a living cell; that the same electrons, neutrons, and protons that emerged from the big bang can now give rise to the human brain, mind, and soul. To believe in natural law is to believe in the unity of nature at the deepest possible level.[26]

The same is true of the human race in general. Every new discovery of science and technique broadens and deepens our understanding, but by so doing, also poses new challenges. Every question answered immediately raises two more questions. Like a traveller who, with growing excitement, approaches the horizon, only to discover a new one, beckoning him from afar, the process of discovery unfolds with no end in sight. Scientists delve ever deeper into the mysteries of the subatomic world, in search of the “ultimate particle”. But each time they reach the horizon with a triumphant cry, it stubbornly recedes into the distance.

It is the illusion of every epoch that it represents the ultimate peak of all human achievements and wisdom. The ancient Greeks thought that they had understood all the laws of the universe on the basis of Euclid’s geometry. Laplace thought the same in relation to Newton’s mechanics. In 1880, the chief of the Prussian patent office declared that everything that could ever be discovered had already been invented! Nowadays, scientists tend to be slightly more circumspect in their pronouncements. Even so, tacit assumptions are made that, for example, Einstein’s general relativity theory is absolutely true, and the principle of indeterminacy has a universal application.

The history of science shows how economical the human mind is. Very little is actually wasted in the process of collective learning. Even mistakes, when honestly analysed, can play a positive role. Only when thought becomes ossified into official dogma, which treats new ideas as heresy to be prohibited and punished, is the development of thought paralysed and even thrust back. The dismal history of science in the Middle Ages is sufficient proof of this. The search for the philosopher’s stone was based upon a mistaken hypothesis, yet the alchemists made important discoveries, and laid the basis for the development of modern chemistry. The big bang theory, with its search for a non-existent “beginning of time”, has scarcely any better scientific credentials, yet, despite this, there is no doubt about the big advances which have been, and are being, made.

As Eric J. Lerner correctly observes:

Good data, competently obtained and analysed, is of scientific value even if the theory that inspired it is wrong. Other theorists will find uses for it that were little imagined when it was first gathered. Even in theoretical work, honest efforts to compare a theory to observation almost always prove useful regardless of the theory’s truth: a theoretician is bound to be upset if his idea is wrong, but time won’t have been wasted in ruling it out.[27]

The development of science proceeds through an infinite series of successive approximations. Each generation arrives at a series of fundamental generalisations about the workings of nature, which serve to explain certain observed phenomena. These are invariably considered to be absolute truths, valid for all time in “all possible worlds”. On further examination, however, they are found to be not absolute, but relative. Exceptions are discovered, which contradict the established rules, and, in turn, demand explanation, and so on ad infinitum.

The first discoveries were the realisation that each change of scale brought new phenomena and new kinds of behaviour. For modern particle physicists, the process has never ended. Every new accelerator, with its increase in energy and speed, extends science’s field of view to tinier particles and briefer time scales, and every extension seems to bring new information.[28]

Should we therefore despair of ever achieving the whole truth? To pose the question in this way is not to understand the nature of truth and human knowledge. Thus Kant thought that the human mind could only ever know appearances. Behind the world of appearances lay the Thing-in-Itself, which we can never know. To this Hegel replied that to know the properties of a thing is to know the thing itself. There is no absolute barrier between appearance and essence. We start with the reality that presents itself to us in sense perception, but we do not stop here. Using our intellect, we penetrate ever deeper into the mysteries of matter, passing beyond appearance to essence; from the particular to the universal; from the secondary to the fundamental; from the facts to the law.

To use the terminology that Hegel used to answer Kant, the whole history of science and of human thought in general is the process of changing the Thing-in-Itself into a Thing-for-Us. In other words, what “cannot be known” at a given stage of the development of science is eventually explored and explained. Every barrier placed in the way of thought is broken down. But in solving one problem, we immediately come up against new ones which must be solved, new challenges to be overcome. And this process will never come to an end, because the properties of the material universe are indeed infinite.

“To pursue our analogy further, we may say that with regard to the totality of natural laws we never have enough views and cross-sections to give us a complete understanding of this totality. But as science progresses, and new theories are developed, we obtain more and more views from different sides, views that are more comprehensive, views that are more detailed, etc. Each particular theory or explanation of a given set of phenomena will then have a limited domain of validity and will be adequate only in a limited context and under limited conditions. This means that any theory extrapolated to an arbitrary context and to arbitrary conditions will (like the partial views of our object) lead to erroneous predictions. The finding of such errors is one of the most important means of making progress in science.

“A new theory, to which the discovery of such errors will eventually give rise, does not, however invalidate the older theories. Rather, by permitting the treatment of a broader domain in which they are inadequate and, in so doing, it helps define the conditions under which they are valid (e.g. as the theory of relativity corrected Newton’s laws of motion, and thus helped to define the conditions of validity of Newton’s laws as those in which the velocity is small compared with that of light). Thus, we do not expect that any causal relationships will represent absolute truths; for to do this, they will have to apply without approximation, and unconditionally. Rather, then, we see that the mode of progress of science is, and has been, through a series of progressively more fundamental, more extensive, and more accurate conceptions of the laws of nature, each of which contributes to the definition of the conditions of validity of the older conceptions (just as broader and more detailed views of our object contribute to defining the limitations of any particular view or set of views).” (Bohm)[29]

In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution, Professor Thomas Kuhn pictures the history of science as periodic theoretical revolutions, punctuating long periods of merely quantitative change, mainly devoted to filling in details. In such “normal” periods, science operates within a given set of theories which he calls paradigms, which are unquestioned assumptions about what the world is like. Initially, the existing paradigm stimulates the development of science, providing a coherent framework for investigation. Without such an agreed framework, scientists would be forever arguing about the fundamentals. Science, no more than society, cannot live in a permanent state of revolutionary upheaval. For this very reason, revolutions are relatively rare events, both in society and science.

For a time, science is able to advance along these well-trodden paths, piling up results. But in the meanwhile, what were originally daring new hypotheses become transformed into rigid orthodoxies. If an experiment produces results that conflict with the existing theories, scientists may suppress them, because they are subversive to the existing order. Only when the anomalies build up to the point where they cannot be ignored is the ground prepared for a new scientific revolution, which overthrows the dominant theories and opens up a new period of “normal” scientific development, on a higher level.

While it is undoubtedly over-simplified, this picture of the development of science, as a broad generalisation, can be accepted as true. In his book Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels explains the dialectical nature of the development of human thought, as exemplified both in the history of science and philosophy:

“Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained.”

And again: “For it [dialectical philosophy] nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side: it recognises that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute – the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits.”[30]

  1. Quoted in Waldrop, M. Complexity, The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, p. 81.

  2. Lerner, E. The Big Bang Never Happened, p. 155.

  3. Gleick, J. op. cit., p. 115.

  4. Bohm, D. op. cit., p. 32.

  5. MESW, Vol. 3, pp. 339-340.