Nature and the Greeks

„Socially and morally dangerous misgivings may spring, and occasionally have sprung—not, of course, from people knowing too much—but from people believing that they know a good deal more than they do.”

„In an honest search for knowledge you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period. Instead of filling a gap by guesswork, genuine science prefers to put up with it; and this, not so much from conscientious scruples about telling lies, as from the consideration that, however irksome the gap may be, its obliteration by a fake removes the urge to seek after a tenable answer.”

„What does happen often is that science suffices to jeopardize popular religious convictions, but not to replace them by anything else. This produces the grotesque pheno- menon of scientifically trained, highly competent minds with an unbelievably childlike—undeveloped or atro- phied—philosophical outlook.”

„Only when a corpuscle is moving with sufficient speed in a region not too crowded with corpuscles of the same kind does its identity remain (nearly) unambiguous.”

„the senses yield to us is not the world as it really is, not the 'thing in itself as Kant put it.”

„'Ostensibly there is colour, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void ' ; to which the senses retort : ' Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.'”

„Scepticism alone is a cheap and barren affair. Scepticism in a man who has come nearer to the truth than anyone before, and yet clearly recognizes the narrow limits of his own mental construction, is great and fruitful, and does not reduce but doubles the value of the discoveries.”

„a wrong theory is better than none at all”

„Mercantile exchange has always and everywhere been, and still is, the principal vehicle for an exchange of ideas.”

„The grand idea that informed these men was that the world around them was something that could be understood, if one only took the trouble to observe it properly; that it was not the playground of gods and ghosts and spirits who acted on the spur of the moment and more or less arbitrarily, who were moved by passions, by wrath and love and desire for revenge, who vented their hatred, and could be propitiated by pious offerings. These men had freed themselves of superstition, they would have none of all this. They saw the world as a rather complicated mechanism, acting according to eternal innate laws, which they were curious to find out. This is, of course, the fundamental attitude of science up to this day.”

„Curiosity is the stimulus. The first requirement of a scientist is to be curious.”

„A new discovery is usually overstated and very often formulated into a hypothesis with too much detail that wears off later.”

„Yes, and if the oxen or horses or lions had hands and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.”

„this world can be so constructed as to be in com- mon to all of us, or rather to all waking, sane persons”

„The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”

„one man of genius weighs more than ten thousand of the crowd.”

„Where the senses give us conclusive evidence, we must follow it. Where they do not we are allowed to make any reasonable hypo- thesis to explain what we see.”

„A piece of matter is resolved in our thought into an innumerably great, yet finite number of constituents. We can imagine our counting them, while we are unable to tell the number of points on a straight line of 1 cm. length.”

„(D. fr. 6) A man must learn on this principle that he is far removed from the truth. (D. fr. 7) We know nothing truly about anything, but for each of us his opinion is an influx (i.e. is conveyed to him by an influx of 'idols'1 from without). (D. fr. 8) To learn truly what each thing is, is a matter of uncertainty. (D. fr. 9) In truth we know nothing unerringly, but only as it changes according to the disposition of our body, and of the things that enter into it and impinge on it. (D. fr. 117) We know nothing truly, for the truth lies hidden in the depth.”

„(D. fr. 125) (Intellect:) Sweet is by convention and bitter by convention, hot by convention, cold by convention, colour by convention ; in truth there are but atoms and the void. (The Senses:) Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall.”

„Though the positivist view ostensibly contradicts the 'under- standability of Nature % it is certainly not a return to the superstitious and magical outlook of yore; quite the contrary, from physics it expels the notion of force, the most dangerous relic of animism in this science. It is a salutary antidote against the rashness with which scientists are prone to believe that they have under- stood a phenomenon, when they have really only grasped the facts by describing them. Yet even from the positivists' point of view one ought not, so I believe, to declare that science conveys no understanding. For even if it be true (as they maintain) that in principle we only observe and register facts and put them into a convenient mnemotechnical arrangement, there are factual relations between our findings in the various, widely distant domains of knowledge, and again between them and the most fundamental general notions (as the natural integers 1, 2, 3, 4, ...), relations so striking and interesting, that for our eventual grasping and registering them the term * understanding ' seems very appropriate.”

„The scientist subconsciously, almost inadvertently, simplifies his problem of under- standing Nature by disregarding or cutting out of the picture to be constructed, himself, his own personality, the subject of cognizance.”

„To get from the mind- aspect to the matter-aspect or vice versa, we have, as it were, to take the elements asunder and to put them together again in an entirely different order.”

„Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. So, in brief, we do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it, we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them. “ “It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said : the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis something toward answering the demand Ttveç 8è f)|ieïç; ('who are we?’)”

„He is a person who, of all the things that a truly educated person ought to know of, is familiar only with one particular science, nay even of this science only that small portion is known to him in which he himself is engaged in research. He reaches the point where he proclaims it a virtue not to take any notice of all that remains outside the narrow domain he himself cultivates, and denounces as dilettantist the curiosity that aims at the synthesis of all knowledge. It comes to pass that he, secluded in the narrowness of his field of vision, actually succeeds in discovering new facts and in promoting his science (which he hardly knows) and pro- moting along with it the integrated human thought— which he with full determination ignores. How has anything like this been possible, and how does it continue to be possible? For we must strongly underline the inordinateness of this undeniable fact: experimental science has been advanced to a considerable extent by the work of fabulously mediocre and even less than mediocre persons.”

„specialization is not a virtue but an unavoidable evil is gaining ground, the awareness that all specialized research has real value only in the context of the integrated totality of knowledge.”

„Each lecturer in a technical university should possess the following abilities: (a) To see the limits of his subject matter. In his teaching to make the students aware of these limits, and to show them that beyond these limits forces come into play which are no longer entirely rational, but arise out of life and human society itself. (b) To show in every subject the way that leads beyond its own narrow confines to broader horizons of its own. Etc. “ — Robert Birley, Headmaster of Eton, quoted some lines from the report of the Commission for University Reform in Germany “Never lose sight of the role your particular subject has within the great performance of the tragi- comedy of human life; keep in touch with life— not so much with practical life as with the ideal back- ground of life, which is ever so much more important; and, Keep life in touch with you. If you cannot —in the long run—tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless. “ “The majority of educated persons are not interested in science, and are not aware that scientific knowledge forms part of the idealistic background of human life.”

„This habit of thought we must dismiss. We must not admit the possibility of continuous observation. Observations are to be regarded as discrete, discon- nected events. Between them there are gaps which we cannot fill in. There are cases where we should upset everything if we admitted the possibility of continuous observation. That is why I said it is better to regard a particle not as a permanent entity but as an instantaneous event. Sometimes these events form chains that give the illusion of permanent beings—but only in particular circumstances and only for an extremely short period of time in every single case.”

„what happens anywhere at a given moment depends only and unambiguously on what has been going on in the immediate neighbourhood 'just a moment earlier'. Classical physics rested entirely on this principle.”

„We cannot make any factual statement about a given natural object (or physical system) without 'getting in touch' with it. This 'touch' is a real physical interaction. Even if it consists only in 'looking at the object', the latter must be hit by light-rays and reflect them into the eye, or into some instrument of observation. This means that the object is interfered with by observing it. You cannot obtain any knowledge about an object while leaving it strictly isolated. The theory goes on to assert that this disturbance is neither irrelevant nor completely surveyable. Thus after any number of painstaking observations the object is left in a state of which some features (the last observed ones) are known, but others (those interfered with by the last observation) are not known, or not accurately known. This state of affairs is offered as the explanation why no complete, gapless description of a physical object is possible.”

„I say this interpretation suggests itself: that there is a fully determined physical object in existence, but I can never know all about it. However, this would be a complete misunderstanding of what Bohr and Heisenberg and those who follow them actually mean. They mean that the object has no existence independent of the observing subject. They mean that recent discoveries in physics have pushed for- ward to the mysterious boundary between the subject and the object, which thereby has turned out not to be a sharp boundary at all. We are to understand that we never observe an object without its being modified or tinged by our own activity in observing it. We are to understand that under the impact of our refined methods of observation, and of thinking about the results of our experiments, that mysterious boundary between the subject and the object has broken down.”

„I cannot believe that the deep philosophical enquiry into the relation between sub- ject and object and into the true meaning of the distinction between them depends on the quantita- tive results of physical and chemical measurements with weighing scales, spectroscopes, microscopes, telescopes, with GeigerMüller-counters, Wilson- chambers, photographic plates, arrangements for measuring the radioactive decay, and whatnot. It is not very easy to say why I do not believe it.”

„in perception and observation subject and object are inextricably interwoven is hardly new.”

„I think it is true that in previous centuries, when discussing this question, one mostly had in mind two things, viz. (a) a direct physical impression caused by the object in the subject, and (b) the state of the subject that receives the impression. As against this, in the present order of ideas the direct physical, causal, influence between the two is re- garded as mutual. It is said that there is also an unavoidable and uncontrollable impression from the side of the subject onto the object. This aspect is new, and, I should say, more adequate anyhow. For physical action always is inter-action, it always is mutual. What remains doubtful to me is only just this : whether it is adequate to term one of the two physically interacting systems the 'subject'. For the observing mind is not a physical system, it cannot interact with any physical system. And it might be better to reserve the term 'subject' for the observing mind.”

„This does strike us as a true aporia, which occurred for the first time to Democritus, who realised it fully —but left it alone ; very wisely, I think. He fully realised it. While he adhered to his catoms and the void' as the only reasonable wray of understanding objective nature, we have some definite utterances of his preserved, to the effect that he also realised that this whole picture of the atoms and the void was formed by the human mind on the evidence of sense perceptions, and nothing else $ and other utter- ances where he states, almost in the words of Kant, that we know nothing about what any thing really is in itself, the ultimate truth remaining deeply in the dark.”

„Free will in man includes as its most relevant part man's ethical behaviour.”

„But that was it—you never could think what things would be like if they weren't just what and where they were. You never knew what was coming, either; and yet, when it came, it seemed as if nothing else ever could have come. That was queer—you could do anything you liked until you'd done it, but when you had done it then you knew, of course, that you must always have had to . . . “ — John Gals - The Dark Flower “A much more serious and interesting attempt to explain the difficulty away was founded by Bohr and Heisenberg on the idea, mentioned above, that there is an un- avoidable and uncontrollable mutual interaction between the observer and the observed physical object. Their ratiocination is briefly as follows. The alleged paradox consists in this, that according to the mechanistic view, by procuring an exact know- ledge of the configuration and velocities of all the elementary particles in a man's body, including his brain, one could predict his voluntary actions— which thereby cease to be. wThat he believes them to be, namely voluntary. The fact that we cannot actually procure this detailed knowledge is no great help. Even the theoretical predictability shocks us. To this Bohr answers that the knowledge cannot even be procured in principle, not even in theory, because such accurate observation would involve so strong an interference with 'the object' (the man's body) as to dissociate it into single particles—in fact kill him so efficiently that not even a corpse would be left for burial. At any rate, no prediction of be- haviour would result, before the 'object' is far beyond the state of exhibiting any voluntary behaviour. The emphasis is of course on the phrase 'in prin- ciple'. That the said knowledge cannot actually be procured, not even for the simplest living organism, let alone a higher animal like man, is clear also without quantum theory and uncertainty relation.”

„I think I must accuse Bohr—though in actual fact he is one of the kindliest persons I ever came to know— of an unnecessary cruelty for his proposing to kill his victim by observation. I cannot see what purpose it should serve. It will never, according to quantum mechanics, yield us the full set of configuration and velocities of all the particles, because according to our present views this is impossible. The equivalent of this complete knowledge in classical physics is in quantum physics a so-called maximum observation, which yields the maximum knowledge that can be obtained, nay, that has any meaning. Nothing in the views accepted at present precludes that we should obtain this maximum knowledge of a living body. We must admit the possibility in principle, even though we know perfectly wrell that practically it cannot be achieved. This state of affairs is exactly the same as with complete knowledge in classical physics. Fur- thermore, precisely as in classical physics, you can from a maximum observation, yielding maximum knowledge now, deduce, in principle, maximum knowledge at any later time. (You must, of course, procure maximum knowledge also about all agents that act on your object in the meantime 5 but that is, in principle, possible and is again absolutely analogous to the case of classical mechanistic physics.) The fundamental difference is only this, that the said maximum knowledge at that later time may leave you in doubt about very conspicuous features of the actual observable behaviour of your object at that later time—the more so, the longer the time that has elapsed. It would thus appear that Bohr's considerations adduce a physical unpredictability of the behaviour of a living body again precisely from the lack of strict causation, maintained by quantum theory. Whether or no this physical indeterminacy plays any relevant role in organic life, we must, I think, sternly refuse to make it the physical counterpart of voluntary actions of living beings, for the reasons outlined before. The net result is that quantum physics has nothing to do with the free-will problem. If there is such a problem, it is not furthered a whit by the latest development in physics. To quote Ernst Cassirer again : 'Thus it is clear . . . that a possible change in the physical concept of causality can have no immediate bearing on ethics'.”