The music of the Spheres
Quick, read the essay before the NYTimes puts it in their pay for view archives...
In his struggles with extremely complicated mathematics that led to the general theory of relativity of 1915, Einstein often turned for inspiration to the simple beauty of Mozart's music.
"Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music," recalled his older son, Hans Albert. "That would usually resolve all his difficulties."
In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field he had, like Mozart, succeeded in unraveling the complexity of the universe.
Scientists often describe general relativity as the most beautiful theory ever formulated. Einstein himself always emphasized the theory's beauty. "Hardly anyone who has truly understood it will be able to escape the charm of this theory," he once said.
The theory is essentially one man's view of how the universe ought to be.
In the wars of evolution, we see the duds of both sides discussing science vs God...duh...
It doesn't work that way, as even a philosophy impaired doc like myself knows.
You see, Scientism says that there are observable facts, period, and only such observable facts are TRUTH and the rest is falsehood...
Ah, but that's not how Science works...
In reality, science is a form of creativity....
Yes, the scientist dryly observes facts, and then makes a guess on what they mean, and does an experiment to confirm it, and voila, truth...Right?
Nope...
Scientist observe something, think about it, and then CREATIVELY think of a pattern to explain it, and then, perhaps many years later, there is an experiment to confirm that their creative explanation was right...
So when Watson and Crick "discovered" the structure of the molecule of DNA, they saw it was both simple and beautiful, and like a puzzle that clicks into place, all of a sudden, the explanation of genes popped into place..."It was too pretty not to be true", commented Watson...
And scientific Theory is like a painting or a photograph: it is Truth, but it is also an incomplete...and the best scientists, like the best photographers, show us the essense with their limited tools...
So we have quantum mechanics, and light that is both a photon and a wave...and gravity and the space time continuum with many dimensions that none can comprehend, but Eistein tried to describe...
Scientism denies this artistic and creative aspect of science...it forgets that the true is beautiful...
And both JP2's Faith and Reason and the B16 insisting that Love is the force behind the universe add dimension and richness to Darwin's ideas of rich evolution where the fecundity of nature and the interaction between living and the environment bring for new variations...
the Pope would say these patterns reflect the loving hand of a creator who placed into the universe both beauty and variation...so life should be cherished in it's variations...
Pseudoscientist preach using Darwin's ideas: That there is no god, the universe is meaningless, and the strong not only survive but deserve to survive --rigid theories of scientism that ignore the terrible implications of these ideas...(so big business has the right to destroy the environment, since we are the stronger ones...and let us destroy untermensch since we are the Aryan race...)
And even scientists sympathetic to religion see a philosophical apartheid between the two:LINK
Perhaps someday we will recognize not that the flat photograph of scientism is the only way to see truth, but see the Glory of the photographer's art as one way of explaining an ultimate truth of reality that does not deny that other ways--art, and music, and poetry-- also are a way to explain the same thing....
In his struggles with extremely complicated mathematics that led to the general theory of relativity of 1915, Einstein often turned for inspiration to the simple beauty of Mozart's music.
"Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music," recalled his older son, Hans Albert. "That would usually resolve all his difficulties."
In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field he had, like Mozart, succeeded in unraveling the complexity of the universe.
Scientists often describe general relativity as the most beautiful theory ever formulated. Einstein himself always emphasized the theory's beauty. "Hardly anyone who has truly understood it will be able to escape the charm of this theory," he once said.
The theory is essentially one man's view of how the universe ought to be.
In the wars of evolution, we see the duds of both sides discussing science vs God...duh...
It doesn't work that way, as even a philosophy impaired doc like myself knows.
You see, Scientism says that there are observable facts, period, and only such observable facts are TRUTH and the rest is falsehood...
Ah, but that's not how Science works...
In reality, science is a form of creativity....
Yes, the scientist dryly observes facts, and then makes a guess on what they mean, and does an experiment to confirm it, and voila, truth...Right?
Nope...
Scientist observe something, think about it, and then CREATIVELY think of a pattern to explain it, and then, perhaps many years later, there is an experiment to confirm that their creative explanation was right...
So when Watson and Crick "discovered" the structure of the molecule of DNA, they saw it was both simple and beautiful, and like a puzzle that clicks into place, all of a sudden, the explanation of genes popped into place..."It was too pretty not to be true", commented Watson...
And scientific Theory is like a painting or a photograph: it is Truth, but it is also an incomplete...and the best scientists, like the best photographers, show us the essense with their limited tools...
So we have quantum mechanics, and light that is both a photon and a wave...and gravity and the space time continuum with many dimensions that none can comprehend, but Eistein tried to describe...
Scientism denies this artistic and creative aspect of science...it forgets that the true is beautiful...
And both JP2's Faith and Reason and the B16 insisting that Love is the force behind the universe add dimension and richness to Darwin's ideas of rich evolution where the fecundity of nature and the interaction between living and the environment bring for new variations...
the Pope would say these patterns reflect the loving hand of a creator who placed into the universe both beauty and variation...so life should be cherished in it's variations...
Pseudoscientist preach using Darwin's ideas: That there is no god, the universe is meaningless, and the strong not only survive but deserve to survive --rigid theories of scientism that ignore the terrible implications of these ideas...(so big business has the right to destroy the environment, since we are the stronger ones...and let us destroy untermensch since we are the Aryan race...)
And even scientists sympathetic to religion see a philosophical apartheid between the two:LINK
Perhaps someday we will recognize not that the flat photograph of scientism is the only way to see truth, but see the Glory of the photographer's art as one way of explaining an ultimate truth of reality that does not deny that other ways--art, and music, and poetry-- also are a way to explain the same thing....
posted by Nancy Reyes at
7:44 AM
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