"...nothing is clear, all is chaos, all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him" - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
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The man from which the above book get its title from, Sisyphus, was a deceitful man, who tricked and schemed his way into power and fame. For his final trick, he managed to wrangle his way out of the Underworld, returning to the world above to try to cheat death. As punishment, he was forced for eternity to push a boulder up a hill. However, before he reaches the top, the boulder slips and rolls back to the bottom. The only thing for him to do is to return to the bottom, and start again, pushing for the top, pushing with all his being, pushing for nothing.
Indeed, I guess most people, when hearing this story feel at least a bit of resonance with their own lives. What the hell are we doing? Why do I wake up every morning at 8.30AM, go into a device that sprays hot water onto my body, wipe my body with 'cleansing' chemicals, then use a sharp blade to cut bits of hair off my face? Then, why do I go to work (or, whatever passes for work as a PhD student) and spend hours working on some fairly abstract problem in plasma physics that has no obvious value to anyone? How do we even define value anyway? Well, maybe this is something to discuss another time. As a human, as in science, it seems all we can do is start with the complex, and work our way down the ladder of simplicity, a race to understand things as fundamentally as possible before we die. So, what is the value of science?
When I started getting interested in physics, if someone asked me why, I might have replied something like "I want to understand the universe in a more comprehensive way", or maybe, more simply, "I want the truth". If you asked me why I'm still interested in it, the best I'd be able to do is "I find it intellectually stimulating", or maybe "It allows me to be around lots of smart people who help develop my mind".
Why the change of heart? The main issue facing me is the link between physics, that is a physical model of our world, and the world itself. Up until the start of the 20th century, humankind had a pretty nice model of how the world worked. Newton's laws were the cornerstone. It all 'made sense' - if you push something, it moves, if you jump, you come back down. That is, it blended in perfectly with our every day observations. It was, you might say, logically sound. However, 100 years later, and we know have a completely different view of the way the world works. The concepts of quantum phenomena and relativity now seem to explain more accurately the way the world works - things that are, on the face of it, much less sensible, but continually come up with the right experimental results, over and over again. There was a sudden paradigm shift in our perspective of the way the world works.
So, why am I not happy with this? As I alluded to before, physics started at a complexity level matched to what we see in our world around us. That is, the first thing that physics set out to do was to try to create a model of the way our macroscopic world works. We are not proving anything - we don't have any basic axioms on which our model is set on, just that it agrees with what we see in the world. When I write in a scientific paper that the electric field of the laser acts on an electron, what I am really saying is that "it appears as though I can model what happens in the external world, if we say that a piece of energy called an 'electron' interacts with a field of energy called an electric field". Does the 'electron' actually exist? Is it a 'true' thing? Almost certainly not - if there's anything history of science tells us, it's that all we ever have is the approximation of the truth, and however far down the rabbit hole we go, the deeper it gets. Furthermore, as our predicting model (ie. science) now appears to be at its base, something that doesn't necessary 'make sense' or appeal to our logic as humans, which makes me wonder how much we can trust logic. If we start doubting that, then we doubt everything.
Perhaps that's another story for another day, though. It seems a natural thing for a human to look for facts, gain knowledge of a system, and exploit that knowledge. That's why we're so damn successful. But what makes a fact? What can we really believe? Indeed, what value does believing in something have? Something tells me I'll be asking these questions till the day I die.
----------------------------
The man from which the above book get its title from, Sisyphus, was a deceitful man, who tricked and schemed his way into power and fame. For his final trick, he managed to wrangle his way out of the Underworld, returning to the world above to try to cheat death. As punishment, he was forced for eternity to push a boulder up a hill. However, before he reaches the top, the boulder slips and rolls back to the bottom. The only thing for him to do is to return to the bottom, and start again, pushing for the top, pushing with all his being, pushing for nothing.
Indeed, I guess most people, when hearing this story feel at least a bit of resonance with their own lives. What the hell are we doing? Why do I wake up every morning at 8.30AM, go into a device that sprays hot water onto my body, wipe my body with 'cleansing' chemicals, then use a sharp blade to cut bits of hair off my face? Then, why do I go to work (or, whatever passes for work as a PhD student) and spend hours working on some fairly abstract problem in plasma physics that has no obvious value to anyone? How do we even define value anyway? Well, maybe this is something to discuss another time. As a human, as in science, it seems all we can do is start with the complex, and work our way down the ladder of simplicity, a race to understand things as fundamentally as possible before we die. So, what is the value of science?
When I started getting interested in physics, if someone asked me why, I might have replied something like "I want to understand the universe in a more comprehensive way", or maybe, more simply, "I want the truth". If you asked me why I'm still interested in it, the best I'd be able to do is "I find it intellectually stimulating", or maybe "It allows me to be around lots of smart people who help develop my mind".
Why the change of heart? The main issue facing me is the link between physics, that is a physical model of our world, and the world itself. Up until the start of the 20th century, humankind had a pretty nice model of how the world worked. Newton's laws were the cornerstone. It all 'made sense' - if you push something, it moves, if you jump, you come back down. That is, it blended in perfectly with our every day observations. It was, you might say, logically sound. However, 100 years later, and we know have a completely different view of the way the world works. The concepts of quantum phenomena and relativity now seem to explain more accurately the way the world works - things that are, on the face of it, much less sensible, but continually come up with the right experimental results, over and over again. There was a sudden paradigm shift in our perspective of the way the world works.
So, why am I not happy with this? As I alluded to before, physics started at a complexity level matched to what we see in our world around us. That is, the first thing that physics set out to do was to try to create a model of the way our macroscopic world works. We are not proving anything - we don't have any basic axioms on which our model is set on, just that it agrees with what we see in the world. When I write in a scientific paper that the electric field of the laser acts on an electron, what I am really saying is that "it appears as though I can model what happens in the external world, if we say that a piece of energy called an 'electron' interacts with a field of energy called an electric field". Does the 'electron' actually exist? Is it a 'true' thing? Almost certainly not - if there's anything history of science tells us, it's that all we ever have is the approximation of the truth, and however far down the rabbit hole we go, the deeper it gets. Furthermore, as our predicting model (ie. science) now appears to be at its base, something that doesn't necessary 'make sense' or appeal to our logic as humans, which makes me wonder how much we can trust logic. If we start doubting that, then we doubt everything.
Perhaps that's another story for another day, though. It seems a natural thing for a human to look for facts, gain knowledge of a system, and exploit that knowledge. That's why we're so damn successful. But what makes a fact? What can we really believe? Indeed, what value does believing in something have? Something tells me I'll be asking these questions till the day I die.
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