Came accross this editorial in New Scientist on the Templeton Foundation’s latest choice for the $1.4 million Templeton Prize:
This year it goes to French physicist and philosopher of science Bernard d’Espagnat for his “studies into the concept of reality”. D’Espagnat, 87, is a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Paris-Sud, and is known for his work on quantum mechanics.
D’Espagnat’s work has been in trying to map out the implications of Bell’s Theorem, which states “either quantum mechanics is a complete description of the world or that if there is some reality beneath quantum mechanics, it must be nonlocal – that is, things can influence one another instantaneously regardless of how much space stretches between them.”
New Scientist goes on to explain d’Espagnat’s position:
Unlike classical physics, d’Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations.…
Through science, he says, we can glimpse some basic structures of the reality beneath the veil, but much of it remains an infinite, eternal mystery.
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The idea that quantum mechanics may not be able to fully describe the physical realm reminds me of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Embedded in Gödel’s theorems is the assertion that we live in a data set of a universe that is problematic for any kind of universal explanation of how things work.
This rephrasing of Gödel’s second theorem takes the wind out of any mathematical attempt at an all-encompassing ‘axiomatic system’:
If an axiomatic system can be proven to be consistent and complete from within itself, then it is inconsistent.
It sounds like d’Espagnat’s work could be dealing a similar blow to quantum mechanics by articulating its epistemological limitations.
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Bruce Lee had this to say of truth:
All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
I’m guessing Bruce Lee didn’t know much about Quantum Mechanics or Gödel, but his words resonate deeply.
In the end, innovation of modern epistemology may not be in the top down imposition of a unifying pattern, grand theory.
It might be in the pragmatic, eclectic, and self aware methodology that abandons the tyranny of methodology itself…
We might just need Bruce Lee-inspired, Jeet Kune Do science.
Lee also said:
If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.
What is epistemology but a de facto attempt to limit and codify the field of knowledge?
I think science needs to start to move towards a dynamic system of knowing that 1) negates itself as all-encompassing, 2) integrates a level of symbolic representation into its workings, and 3) accounts for the constitutive elements of knowing.
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It’s starting to seem like any system designed to fully know the universe eventually becomes a system of unknowing.
But you could argue that the problem may not be with the system of knowing, but within knowing itself…
That maybe we need some kind of shift into a kind of superknowing… or hyperknowing. A knowing that locates the ‘knower’ in the what seems to be a continuum of structural uncertainty.
I’m hoping that d’Espagnat and possibly even Bruce Lee will help us move in that direction…
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(btw, Templeton Foundation is hiring)
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