Peter Pesic - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Peter Pesic

The bell & the buzzer:
on the meaning of science

To seek the meaning of science is to

seek its human signi½cance. At ½rst
glance, that seems problematic because
modern science characteristically calls
into question many of our all-too-
human preconceptions in its effort to
discover the truth. Still, to those who
care for it, science can have a com-
pelling, human quality. It is a quest,
and as such has common elements with
other heroic journeys.

Jason and the Argonauts knew they
were seeking the Golden Fleece. But sci-
entists seek something that is unknown
and hidden–the ultimate laws of na-
ture. The elusiveness of this goal condi-
tions the search and the searchers. Even
setting aside the complex effects of sci-
ence on the world, to seek the meaning
of science, like the scienti½c quest itself,
is to seek something unknown, to gather
seemingly disconnected stories and per-
spectives fully aware of their discontinu-

Peter Pesic is a tutor and musician-in-residence at
St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Before
joining the faculty of St. John’s College, he was a
research assistant and associate at the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center. A concert pianist, he is
also the author of three books on the history and
philosophy of mathematics and science: “Abel’s
Proof” (2003), “Seeing Double” (2002), and
“Labyrinth” (2000).

ity. As with science itself, our story
emerges as much in the gaps as in what
we can connect.

Modern science is a newcomer, barely

four hundred years old. Though indebt-
ed in deep ways to Plato, Aristotle, and
Greek natural philosophy, the pioneers
of the ‘new philosophy’ called for a deci-
sive break with ancient authority. In
1536, Pierre de La Ramée defended the
provocative thesis that “everything Aris-
totle said is wrong.” Francis Bacon and
René Descartes criticized scholarship
that remained in thrall to the ancients.
This adversarial stance implied a prob-
lematic relation to the established order.
In spite of Bacon’s efforts to persuade
his king to support his fledgling scien-
ti½c research efforts, King James mock-
ingly compared Bacon’s words with the
peace of God that “passeth all under-
standing.” Though later rulers came to
value the powers that science gave them,
they recurrently turned against its ever
more expensive projects of ‘pure’ re-
search.

To render the new philosophy more
comprehensible to an audience steeped
in classical learning, Bacon often resort-
ed to reinterpretations of ancient myths.
He compared science to the Sphinx
because each, “being the wonder of the
ignorant and unskillful, may be not ab-

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Peter Pesic
on
science

surdly called a monster.” His irony im-
plies that this super½cial view has its
own truth, though it also must be con-
sidered within a larger, deeper perspec-
tive. Here the concept of depth is crucial,
for the essential innovation of modern
science has been to disclose the secrets
and depths of nature. Though this has
become a familiar image, it represents a
radical departure from Aristotle’s view
that nature is fundamentally open to
human understanding, not hidden. In-
stead, Bacon turned to alternative in-
sights, to Heraclitus’s enigmatic teach-
ing that “nature loves to hide” and to
Isaiah’s recognition that “thou art a
God that hidest thyself.”

We have only begun to estimate the
effect on human understanding of this
quest for the depths. Bacon envisaged
that the new philosopher, as a “skillful
Servant of Nature,” would wrestle with
Proteus, “the messenger and interpreter
of all antiquity and all secrets,” whom he
identi½ed as “Matter–the most ancient
of things, next to God.” Bacon empha-
sized that this ordeal of experiment was
to be heroic testing, not the torture of a
slavish and submissive victim. Bacon
also anticipated that the evidence that
emerged would be enigmatic, even enci-
phered. He judged that “the universe to
the eye of the human understanding is
framed like a labyrinth,” requiring a new
kind of interpretation akin to the then
emergent art of codebreaking. Bacon did
not anticipate the form this decipher-
ment would take–symbolic mathemat-
ics–though he mused on the unexplored
possibilities that lay beyond the mathe-
matics he knew, convinced that the fu-
ture would far outstrip any anticipation.
He guessed that this extraordinary quest
would have deep effects on the seekers,
penetrating the nature and wellsprings
of their passions as they scourged and
tested their own intensely felt theories,

no less than they vexed nature with
experiments.1

Bacon anticipated that the votaries of
his ‘new philosophy’ would prick their
desire to know with the spur of self-
questioning. Fired with visionary ex-
citement, they should nevertheless try
to undermine their own dearest theories,
lest they fall victim to self-delusion. He
compared this dilemma to struggling
with the Sphinx’s menacing claws:
“distraction and laceration of mind, if
you fail to solve them; if you succeed, a
kingdom.” If they solve her riddle, the
seekers will discover the secret sources
of power over the political and natural
worlds, thereby facing the deepest pos-
sibilities of corruption. In such works
as his un½nished New Atlantis, Bacon
framed the hope that these “sons of sci-
ence” (as he called them) would emerge
triumphant from this ordeal whose trag-
ic possibilities he also sensed.

Four centuries later, we continue to
wonder at this unfolding drama, trying
to gauge whether Bacon’s hopes were
vain or whether they might yet be sus-
tained. Kepler, Newton, Darwin, and
Einstein bore out many of Bacon’s an-
ticipations, both in the heroic tenor of
what they attempted and achieved but
also in the peculiar dif½culties their
quests raised for their desires. Einstein
speaks for all of them: “I want to know
God’s thoughts. The rest is trash.” Those
who seek such knowledge must wrestle
with something beyond the human.

Consider the paradoxical demands

that Bacon anticipated. On one hand,

1 My book Labyrinth (Cambridge, Mass.: mit
Press, 2000), drawing on the important work of
John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of
Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1989), treats these Baconian themes and
their relation to the work of Kepler, Newton,
and Einstein.

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The bell &
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the seekers must be cold, impersonal,
testing each theory mercilessly. On the
other, they must be ½lled with ardor, on
½re to imagine radically new insights
into the depths. Their imaginations
must be feverish enough to conjure up
ever more daring flights of fancy, but
then cold enough to try to annihilate
their own creations. This paradox
threatens to unravel the seekers’ selves
and to paralyze their desires. As a result,
their humanity may be hostage to their
integrity as ‘scientists’ or ‘physicists.’

These names, only coined in the 1830s,
replaced the older term ‘natural philoso-
pher,’ which Isaac Newton and Michael
Faraday had applied to themselves. Our
literary representations of this new
breed are similarly recent. Consider the
‘mad’ scientists inspired by Mary Shel-
ley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prome-
theus (1818). The original Victor Franken-
stein is sensitive and intelligent, deeply
affected by the early death of his mother.
“The world was to me a secret I desired
to divine,” he recalls. “Curiosity, earnest
research to learn the hidden laws of na-
ture, gladness akin to rapture” are his
earliest recollections, blending intellec-
tual with passionate response. After a
youthful infatuation with alchemy and
magic, he encounters the wonders of
modern chemistry and is seized by the
desire to “explore unknown powers,
and unfold to the world the deepest
mysteries of creation.” His obsessive
quest eclipses ordinary human love and
even makes him forget his own family.
His only offspring is his creature, a mon-
strous man-child who disappears into
inhuman isolation and whose delicate
sensibility turns to cruelty as his suffer-
ings transpose Rousseau’s noble savage
into a dark key.

The mad scientist is also akin to Goe-
the’s Faust (Part I, 1808), who wants to
know the inmost secrets of the world but

sickens from the emotional aridity of his
erudition and develops an inordinate de-
sire to control the world as a surrogate or
perhaps cure. Goethe’s Mephistopheles,
a hedonistic grand seigneur, deplores the
conflicted desires of his protégé: “You
can’t get the Doctor out of your system
[Dir steckt der Doktor noch im Leib].” The
mad scientist cuts a tragicomic ½gure
because of his obsessions and his dislo-
cation from the ordinary human world.
Hair disheveled, erotically unful½lled,
he sells his soul for delusive dreams of
power.

Thus far, the mad scientist is a kind of
parody of Bacon’s forebodings. Never-
theless, the parodic exaggerations point
back to the emotional dilemma that
Bacon more subtly discerned when he
pointed to wounded seekers such as
Oedipus as archetypes of the new phi-
losophers. In Bacon’s account, Oedipus
solves the Sphinx’s riddle not despite
but because of his wounded, limping
feet. And Bacon did not allude to the
tragic sequel–incest and parricide–as
if his Oedipus has emerged triumphant,
blessed by his wound and thereby be-
stowing blessings. Perhaps Bacon imag-
ined a more positive and heroic version
of the ancient story, whose foreboding
power he must have known. He went on
to depict benign scientist-priests as the
hidden rulers of his scienti½c utopia,
the New Atlantis, who conceal even from
their wise king scienti½c discoveries they
deem too dangerous.

Here again popular imagination fol-
lows with its own version of the scientist
as magus. Einstein’s wild hair is not the
mad scientist’s coiffure but a secular au-
reole, bespeaking his superhuman intel-
ligence and wisdom. A Jew fleeing race
hatred, he de½es its threats. He is even
(if wrongly) credited with the atomic
bomb, but he is saddened and wounded
by the use of that bomb. He is an advo-

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Peter Pesic
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cate of peace, a rebel against the estab-
lishment that reveres him, offering a
new vision of human potentiality. His
casual dress and dislike of wearing socks
reflects his liberation from convention,
an anti-style adopted by students since
the 1960s. Like all true myths, the
scientist-magus lives on, as does the
wounded hero: Stephen Hawking’s pop-
ular appeal reflects the fascination with
a powerful intellect struggling to over-
come a crippling physical disability.

Besides these exceptional stories, stud-

ies show that scientists suffer from ill-
ness and disability during childhood far
in excess of the general population.2 Sci-
entists bear the mark of their struggle,
but they also may attain compensatory
powers. Between the extremes of magus
and mad scientist, consider the nerd.
About 1957, mit undergraduates began
referring to ‘gnurds,’ studious grinds,
especially in science and engineering.
The nerd is emotionally immature, so-
cially isolated, unfashionably dressed,
and erotically unattractive. He is the sci-
entist as Unmensch and scapegoat, the lo-
cus of feelings of confusion, inadequacy,
and mistrust that modern science can
excite. Though he tends to be the butt of
comedy, there is a certain pathos about
his human incapacity.

The nerd is a ½gure in contemporary
mythology, but he is not without ante-
cedents. What is known of Descartes’s
persona ½ts the category. His mother
died when he was very young; he was a
sickly child, emotionally remote from
his father. At age eight he became a
boarding student at a Jesuit collège, where
he excelled. Such institutions fostered a
new kind of self-discipline that bred

2 See Anne Roe, The Making of a Scientist (New
York: Dodd, Mead, 1953), and Gerald Holton,
The Scienti½c Imagination: Case Studies (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1978),
229–252.

overzealous students who read by moon-
light, spent all their money on books,
and neglected their health–proto-nerds,
if you will.3 Descartes added the crucial
element by turning this intensi½ed and
interiorized studiousness not toward
humane letters and classical scholarship
but toward a new mathematics and nat-
ural science, and he did so in phases of
his life in which he notably shut himself
off from other people for long periods
of time. His intense aloneness deeply
marks important passages in his philo-
sophical works. He shut himself up in a
stove-heated room to make his fateful
experiment on himself, to get rid of all
his opinions “all in one go, in order to
replace them afterwards with better
ones, or with the same ones once I had
squared them with the standards of rea-
son.”

Of course, calling Descartes the ½rst
nerd grossly ignores his personal re½ne-
ment, elegant prose style, sly wit, even
his surprising career as a soldier of for-
tune. I only want to point to a certain
constellation of qualities that link him
with continuing elements in the modern
mythology of science. Consider, for
instance, the 1701 frontispiece to Des-
cartes’s posthumous works, depicting
him as Faust, seated in his study, sur-
rounded by mathematical instruments,
illuminated by the ostentatious rays
of the light of nature shining into his
chamber. Though Descartes was melan-
cholic, the ½gure in the frontispiece has a
debonair smile of self-satisfaction. This
Faust is not tormented or agonizingly
conflicted, but quietly triumphant even
in his isolation. Descartes chose as his
motto bene vixit bene qui latuit–“he lived
well who hid well”–and gazed at the
world through the mask of a scholar

3 See Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellec-
tual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),
15–37.

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The bell &
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who outwits the world in the hidden
fortress of his mind. On the other hand,
he hid in a kind of inner exile from the
outer world, and placed just this separa-
tion between mind and body.

The nerd, the magus, and the mad sci-

entist are modern mythic ½gures, some-
what disheveled descendants of Bacon’s
attempts to reenvision ancient myth.
In different ways, they live out the impli-
cations of the project to ½nd out what
is hidden behind nature. Yet this pre-
sumes a basic split between manifest
and underlying realities, which Bacon
had already discerned but whose full
dimensions only emerged much later.
Nature is more protean than Bacon
dreamed: Proteus merely assumes dif-
ferent shapes; nature shifts between
whole realities.

Indeed, no one could have anticipated

the way quantum mechanics trans-
formed our sense of reality. Consider a
particle observed at point A and time ta,
then at point B and time tb. The laws
of quantum mechanics assign to each
possible path connecting A and B an
‘amplitude,’ a complex number that
depends on the ‘action,’ the difference
between kinetic and potential energy
summed along that path. Where New-
tonian mechanics had allowed only
one possible path (that of least action),
quantum mechanics allows all possible
paths, each weighted by its action. The
net amplitude is the sum of the separate
amplitudes for all the paths. But this is a
complex number, not directly observ-
able. If you take the absolute square of
the net amplitude, the result is a positive
real number that tells the total probabili-
ty of that particle appearing at point A
and time ta, then at point B and time tb.4

Einstein satirized quantum theory’s
reliance on probability in his aphorism
“God does not play dice.” He insisted
on the necessity of distinguishing the
constituents of the world and following
their individual careers. But ironically
Einstein was a great practitioner of the
statistical method, a pioneer in applying
statistical concepts to fundamental
physics, as when he used the observed
jittering of microscopic particles
(Brownian motion) to deduce the size
of the atom. Einstein also pioneered the
new statistics of quanta in advance of
the full flowering of quantum theory in
1926. But in these cases, he always sought
a nonstatistical underlying theory.

The essentially probabilistic character
of quantum theory emerges as we com-
pel subatomic matter to respond to ex-
periments built to human size. In so
doing, we exert an unavoidable and un-
controllable (though limited) influence
on what we observe, an influence that
always bears the mark of our observa-
tion. As Werner Heisenberg put it, “the
object of research is no longer nature in
itself but rather nature exposed to man’s
questioning, and to this extent man here
also meets himself.” We are no longer
grappling only with the protean forms
of matter in the labyrinth. Commenting
on Heisenberg’s insight, Gerald Holton
evoked the possibility that we traverse
“the labyrinth with the empty center,
where the investigator meets only his
own shadow and his blackboard with his
own chalk marks on it, his own solutions
to his own puzzles.”5 Here even the dice-
playing God has disappeared, or never

to be |z|2 = (a + bi)(a – bi) = a2 + b2, a positive
real number.

4 Any complex number z can be written as
z = a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i
is √-1. Then the absolute square of z is de½ned

5 See Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scien-
ti½c Thought, 1st ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1973), 34–36.

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Peter Pesic
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come, leaving only a mocking echo to
taunt us.

Well before these issues emerged in
physics, Darwin’s account of natural
selection pointed to the randomness at
the heart of biology. Under the urbane,
cheerful civility of The Origin of Species
lies an abyss. Contrary to common opin-
ion, identifying us as ambitious apes was
not Darwin’s greatest scandal; after all,
the doctrine of original sin also under-
mines human pretension, holding that
nature fell with our fall. No, our relation
to the primates merely reveals us to be
nouveaux riches trying to live down our
humble origins. Far more disturbing is
Darwin’s veiled but unmistakable dis-
proof of divine providence, though he
himself remained faithful to the older
tradition of natural theology and did not
draw this more radical conclusion.6
Nevertheless, in flat contradiction of any
“special providence in the fall of a spar-
row,” Darwin’s nature is utterly heed-
less. No purpose or direction guides nat-
ural selection; there is only the battle to
survive and (far more important) to pre-
vail in reproduction.

As a result, the process of the origina-
tion of species constantly hides and even
annihilates those origins, not purposive-
ly but through random carnage and mere
oblivion. If so, what is hidden about that
process is not some divine secret or in-
telligible law, but a blind, implacable
play of random variations in mindless
competition. Indeed, in Darwin’s ac-
count, mind itself emerges randomly in
the course of that struggle.

Darwin did not merely present an al-
ternative account to Genesis; he under-
mined any account not based on chance.

6 See John F. Cornell, “God’s Magni½cent
Law: The Bad Influence of Theistic Meta-
physics on Darwin’s Estimation of Natural
Selection,” Journal of the History of Biology 20
(1987): 381–412.

In so doing, he tacitly questioned the
presumption that physical science ex-
cludes randomness and natural selec-
tion. To be sure, he himself raised no
such question, but gradually physicists
raised it themselves.

James Clerk Maxwell, a religious man,

would not allow Darwin’s theories to
be discussed in his presence. In 1872,
Maxwell took pains to deny that atoms
evolved, since they show no evidence of
variation or selection, no “missing links”
or signs of evolution or change, “as
though they had all been cast in the same
mould, like bullets, not merely selected
and grouped according to their size, like
small shot.” Likewise, Maxwell noted
the perfect likeness of atomic spectra
on Earth and distant stars, “like tuning-
forks all tuned to concert pitch,” all cut
to a universal measure, “the double royal
cubit of the Temple of Karnak.” For him,
this was powerful testimony to the per-
fect workmanship of the divine Manu-
facturer. Implicitly, Maxwell wished to
exorcise the ghastly specter of Darwin-
ian randomness from any intercourse
with the universality of physical law.
Yet his reaction indicated that the Dar-
winian possibility was present in his
mind. Maxwell took the observed equal-
ity of atomic properties and spectra as
positive evidence for the unity of the
universe and the sameness of its con-
stituents. So far, no evidence has
emerged to contradict either of those
propositions.

But now consider Andrei Linde’s sug-
gestion that, rather than there being on-
ly one universally valid set of physical
laws, there are many different universes,
each with its own laws of nature, each
randomly different from the other.
Linde’s “chaotic inflationary universe”
calls into question the presumption that
there is a unique set of God’s thoughts,
the physical laws of a unique universe.

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His proposal that multiple universes
have randomly different physical laws
still lacks any observation that might
con½rm or deny it. Yet his hypothesis is
not merely a perverse possibility but fol-
lows the probabilistic direction of quan-
tum mechanics. Uncomfortably, we
remember that once we presumed the
Earth was unique, central. Is the as-
sumption that there is any unique uni-
versal physical law another childish
dream from which we must awaken?

Here the crux may be the randomness
of the physical laws differentiating these
universes. Such ‘laws’ appear unground-
ed on any principle or necessity. If ran-
dom, they cannot be God’s thoughts,
because they are not the product of any
thought, much less that of God. In the
‘many worlds’ interpretation of quan-
tum theory put forward by Hugh Everitt
in 1957, each possible path is a world un-
to itself. At every instant, an in½nite ar-
ray of branching paths leads into the fu-
ture, though at any time we only experi-
ence one of these possibilities, the fork
we happen to have taken. Linde’s sug-
gestion takes this idea a step further:
alternative universes may not be abso-
lutely separated (as in the many worlds
view), but extremely distant. To be sure,
Everitt’s many worlds may be simply al-
ternative versions of the same universe,
while Linde’s universes may have no re-
lation to each other, since their physical
laws are fundamentally (if randomly)
different.

The bizarre quality of these sugges-
tions shows why Einstein would have
wanted to exclude them from God’s
thoughts. (In contrast, Niels Bohr
thought we have no right to tell God
what to do; surely the Old One may
gamble without our consent.) Yet I think
that this problem has a deeper resolu-
tion stemming from the interpretation
of amplitudes and probabilities ½rst

articulated by Max Born in 1926. So far,
we have treated ‘reality’ as a single level,
whether encompassing one universe or
many. But quantum mechanics operates
on two levels, even in the simplest exam-
ples. First is the inner level of the ampli-
tudes. Since these are complex numbers,
they are not observable. Nevertheless,
they follow strictly deterministic mathe-
matical equations (like those of Erwin
Schrödinger or Paul Dirac) as they un-
fold in time. Second is the outer level of
probabilities. These are positive real
numbers predicting the results of actual
observation and experiment. However,
these probabilities do not, like their con-
stituent amplitudes, follow determinis-
tic mathematical equations; this is the
very meaning of probability as opposed
to certainty. Despite randomness on the
level of observation, the inner level of
quantum mechanics is deterministic,
not random.

This may give the key to our problem:
wherever there is randomness, consider
another level of reality that weights the
manifold of possibilities. In the case of
Linde’s universes, let each universe and
its space-time be represented by a single
point in a superspace and by a corre-
sponding amplitude for its formation.
Seek then the equation (now in super-
space, not ordinary space) that describes
the evolution of each sort of universe.
God only appears to be gambling if we
look only at one level of reality. To make
sense of this, we must give up a simple,
unequivocal sense of ‘reality.’

Einstein was not willing to pay this
price; he thought that physics should
deal with observation and be deter-
mined unequivocally on that level. He
hoped by some arti½ce of ½elds and ge-
ometry to account for quantum phe-
nomena. His efforts met with no suc-
cess, and quantum theory remains un-
contradicted by any experiment so far.

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Peter Pesic
on
science

This is a warrant to embrace the multi-
plicity of realities–not to resist them.

The idea of such multiple realities is

not new. Mathematics has considered
alternatives to Euclidean space since the
early nineteenth century. In the early
twentieth century, John von Neumann
showed that quantum theory is most
naturally formulated in Hilbert space, an
in½nite-dimensional manifold of ‘state
vectors.’ Economic models routinely
rely on ‘spaces’ of high dimensionality,
each dimension a different economic
index. Yet we speak of the Dow Jones In-
dex going ‘up,’ as if it were an object in
ordinary space.

But these are only representations,

whose relation to reality was Immanuel
Kant’s deep concern. His Critique of Pure
Reason (1781) separated phenomena (the
world as it appears to us) from noumena
(the ultimate nature of things in them-
selves). By dividing reality in this way,
Kant sought to protect Newtonian phys-
ics from David Hume’s skeptical ques-
tion: What guarantees that physical law
and causality are valid, beyond our ex-
pectations based on past experience?
To this, Kant conceded that we cannot
know by pure reason anything about
things in themselves. Physical law ap-
plies to phenomena alone. In his vivid
image, we live on an isolated island (the
phenomena) surrounded by vast, un-
fathomable depths (the noumena). The
coherence of our science depends on the
built-in categories of the human mind,
rather than the unknowable depths of
nature.

Kant’s two levels of reality are compa-

rable to those of quantum theory. Ob-
servable appearances are like probabili-
ties; noumena are like amplitudes. How-
ever, Kant denies that pure reason can
acquire any knowledge of noumena, but
the inner, unobservable quantum ampli-

Dædalus Fall 2003

tudes are perfectly intelligible, totally
determined by fundamental equations.
Ironically, it is the outer level of observa-
tion that is probabilistic, not completely
knowable. In this way, quantum theory
shares Kant’s divided view of reality but
takes it in a very different direction. This
dialogue between physics and philoso-
phy has only just begun.

Every reality has its price and its value,

which we need to gauge. The possibility
of illusion is ever-present, for the multi-
plication of ‘realities’ lends each one of
them a certain quality of unreality, of
deceptiveness through being an alterna-
tive or a part, not a whole. The differ-
ence between levels of reality cannot be
dismissed; probabilities are not the same
as amplitudes, though we must pay heed
to both. Here, Bacon reminds us that we
must not merely gaze aimlessly at the
varying shapes of Proteus.

First and foremost, we have to wrestle

with the premise that reality could be
multiple. Is not the concept of ‘reality’
singular, unique by its very de½nition?
Out of several ‘realities,’ must not one of
them be the most fundamental, the real
reality? So at least Einstein seemed to
assume. Yet the two levels of quantum
theory both seem necessary because nei-
ther can be reduced to the other. If we
consider amplitudes more fundamental,
we dismiss the observable world and its
inescapable probabilities. Since each of
us is composed of roughly a hundred
trillion trillion (1026) atoms, we take for
granted prejudices based on our sheer
size. Because of this, we tend to identify
‘reality’ with the familiar world of dis-
tinguishable, macroscopic individuals.
But on the atomic scale, there are no
such individuals.7 This subverts our
‘common-sense’ assumptions about

7 I have discussed this at length in Seeing Dou-
ble (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2002).

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The bell &
the buzzer

reality and is at the heart of quantum
theory.

However, our argument does show the
problem of insisting on wholly incoher-
ent, separate ‘realities,’ for probabilities
and amplitudes are deeply connected
because the one is the absolute square of
the other. Perhaps then the better term
for them is ‘levels of reality.’ Bacon held
that the “hidden God” of scripture de-
lights in our search into his divine abyss.
Perhaps it may be naive or outmoded to
speak thus about the hidden levels of
reality. Yet what more secret mark could
sign a book of secrets?

What unites these divergent realities

may be nothing other than the human
mind itself. The effort to connect the
disparate, to mediate between our inner
and outer worlds, is precisely the strug-
gle of consciousness. Here, it is crucial
that there is no formula that connects
them, that our experience is irreducibly
multiform. In the face of this, our efforts
of thought aim to bridge these gaps and
grasp a seamless whole. Certainly it is
the ambition of most philosophical sys-
tems to resolve the blooming confusion
of the world into consonance.

In contrast, Plato reminds us that
the basic notion of ‘system’ misses the
essential character of our experience,
which is closer to dialogue than mono-
logue. Science works by drastically over-
simplifying the world, cutting out every-
thing that cannot be mathematized. Our
quest for meaning must bracket this un-
sparing simpli½cation within a broader
perspective that struggles to grasp some
larger wholeness, if only by trying, and
failing, to connect the disparate pieces.
In the moment of failure, we feel most
clearly the leap between levels. That sur-
prising, sinking, excited feeling may be
the essence of thought as felt experience,
rather than as bare abstraction.

The felt character of this divided

world, which is the inner dilemma of the
scientist, reaches out to touch all who
partake in the insights of science. Unlike
the common stereotype of cold abstrac-
tion, the real problem is that the process
of scienti½c thought is so hot to grasp
something radically new, yet deliberately
chilled to temper and chasten merely
wishful thinking. The simultaneous feel-
ing of opposites, of hot and cold togeth-
er, results in a kind of shiver, exactly the
feeling Einstein remembered in old age
about his earliest memory–looking at
the compass in his father’s hand and
realizing that “something deeply hidden
had to be behind things.” Such a frisson
goes beyond pain and pleasure to indi-
cate the powerful experience of new
insight, and signal a drastic departure
from common humanity. It is, I suggest,
a deep element of the inner perils and
exaltations of the scienti½c experience.
There is a curious parallel in behav-
ioral psychology. Consider Ivan Pavlov’s
famous experiments conditioning dogs
to expect food after a bell is rung or an
electric shock after a buzzer sounds.
When both the bell and buzzer sound
simultaneously, most dogs exhibit
strong signs of anxiety, unsure whether
they are to be fed or shocked. However,
at that juncture a very few dogs suddenly
cease to be conditioned to either stimu-
lus. Under the paradoxical stress, it is as
if the scales fall from the dogs’ eyes to
reveal bell and buzzer as meaningless
constructs. Through their peculiar expe-
rience of cognitive dissonance, those
few dogs have entered a new relation to
‘reality,’ precisely because they fully ex-
perienced its doubleness, if not duplici-
ty. Perhaps they enter into complete ca-
nine cynicism and disillusionment about
their trainers’ deceitfulness. At least,
they are intractable to further condition-
ing.

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Peter Pesic
on
science

Like Pavlov’s dogs confronted with the
simultaneous sounding of bell and buzz-
er, scientists subjected to contrary yet
superimposed levels of reality may sud-
denly cease to regard any single level in
the way they had been conditioned.
They may feel:

like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Paci½c–and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise–

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.8

The crisis comes not from one level
but from the deeply felt dissonance be-
tween many. If they can withstand the
resultant emotional stress, they may
experience a sudden realization. What
then? Perhaps they will recognize the
one, true level of reality, of which all
other levels are merely distorted reflec-
tions. Perhaps they will turn away in dis-
illusionment, as if such discord mocks
all meaning. Or perhaps in the very mul-
tiplicity they will recognize a new, disso-
nant polyphony.

Einstein once remarked that “the real

nature of things, that we shall never
know, never.” Max Planck also believed
that “science cannot solve the ultimate
mystery of nature. And that is because,
in the last analysis, we ourselves are part
of nature and therefore part of the mys-
tery that we are trying to solve.” Even so,
Planck considered that the chief attrac-
tion of science is “the pursuit of the un-
knowable.” In the struggle to know what
may be unknowable, our mind and na-
ture wrestle on all levels. The bell and
buzzer are sounding ever louder. To
what will we awaken?

8 John Keats, “On First Looking into Chap-
man’s Homer” (1817).

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