Celebrating the Beauty of Science
What shall man be doing after 10,000 years from now? Scientists tell us that we shall always have tasks ahead and will not be bored.
Science, in Kant’s famous words, is organized knowledge. Kant defined wisdom as organized life. Science is man’s great effort to know himself and the world better at many levels with or without concomitant increase in power or solving this or that problem. It has been part of comprehensive education from the earliest times. Modern science did succumb to certain Promethean and Faustian ambitions and thanks to its wedding with power or technology it has been a mixed blessing and a danger against which most of great thinkers, artists and poets have warned. In its wake many treasured traditional sciences have been a casualty and its myopia and hubris have been factors in the crisis of modern civilization. What we are concerned with today is not this scientism but science in the more general and universal sense that has been part of treasured intellectual adventure that borders on the aesthetic and the mystical. We celebrate today science in service of beauty, scientist as “a mystic in the act of prayer” and science as observation of the behavior of God as Iqbal would have it.
Let us first take note of the ecstasy that is doing science when it becomes our wazeefa of a sort. Lavoisier, the father of chemistry, is said to have found hardly any time for taking food and enjoying mostly milk to spare time for pursuing science. Rutherford forgot his marriage function and kept guests waiting as he got lost in his work in his laboratory. Hawking was able to live and fight debilitating disease thanks partly to his zeal for science that dissolves ordinary woes. It was appreciation for irresistible beauty of certain mathematical order (that, as Plato noted, partakes of the divine) that led Dirac to his path breaking work: “A theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data. God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.” Pursuing beauty is its own reward. Fortunate are those who find doing science a beautiful adventure and thus a joy and move closer to the station of ihsan that constitutes man’s spiritual perfection. It is in such Masters as Leibnitz, Newton, Einstein, Whitehead and Salam, for instance, that we find how science can be spiritually and intellectually enriching pursuit.
It was semblance of eternity in mathematical equations through which Russell found food for man’s primordial hunger for perfection or eternity. Mathematics was allied to the Sacred for the Greeks and Plato found in our knowledge of mathematics proof for our immortality. One needs to pray to be granted such an exalted station that science becomes our sustenance, our vocation, our song. Zealous scientists are a new breed of karma yogis who are close to jnana yogic station. Zahae naseeb to be a scientist. The Prophet of Islam (S.A.W) prayed to be shown things as they are, an aspiration that goads phenomenology and science.
What shall man be doing after, say, ten thousand years from now? Scientists tell us that we shall always have tasks ahead and will not be bored. The Mystery and the need to pursue infinite perfections would always persist. As Sir J.J. Thomson noted in his Presidential Address to the British Association: “As we conquer peak after peak we see in front of us regions full of interest and beauty, but we do not see our goal, we do not see the horizon; in the distance tower still higher peaks, which will yield to those who ascend them still wider prospects, and deepen the feeling, the truth of which is emphasized by every advance in science, that “Great are the Works of the Lord.”
What is the justification for continuing to teach physics, chemistry and botany in schools and colleges if vast majority of pass outs will not be employed in any industry or sector that applies or requires such knowledge? I have mostly failed to elicit good answers in my interactions with teachers and students on this question. I think the following considerations better justify salary of teachers and huge investment of time by students. Chemistry of life is beautiful as Feynman noted. Michio Kaku noted “Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings.” “Chemistry, as an independent science, offers one of the most powerful means towards the attainment of a higher mental cultivation… it furnishes us with insight into those wonders of creation which immediately surround us, and with which our existence, life, and development, are most closely connected. (Justus von Liebig in Familiar Letters on Chemistry) Sir Joseph Paxton made a point about botany that has not been generally taught to the students of botany: “Botany is, above every other, the science of beauty.” Physics is the food for the mind and the first step in our quest to know for the pure joy of knowing. Aristotle’s great opening sentence on Metaphysics “All men naturally desire to know” implies we are born scientists (in the wider classical sense of the term) and if we fail to maintain interest in science we deny part of ourselves. We all need to reclaim our lost right – and deliver pleasant duty – to childhood adventure of wonder driven career of a scientist as Sagan rightly noted: “Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.”
A scientist is only closed to the idea of closure of mind and appreciates that “truth is a pathless land” and that implies readiness to eschew dogmatic answers and that is what constitutes faith’s essential movement of embracing uncertainty and openness to experience. A scientist can only be a submitter to truth and as truth has infinite faces and ever escapes/transcends our attempt to pin it down or encompass it fully, he/she is, by default, in an important if not comprehensive sense, a Muslim who affirms the transcendence of Truth. The Quran states that only knowledgeable people fear/take serious note of God/Truth/the Real.
Science requires maturity on our part to part with certain notions that literalist/fundamentalist approach anxiously upholds. In fact in this task higher religion and mysticism converge with science. Iqbal found in Freud an ally for religion in so far it psychoanalysis helps to distinguish the demonic from the divine in religious experience. Freud pleaded for abandoning God as father figure, a notion that higher religion has identified as a work of idolatrous imagination. Darwin’s essential insight was, as Stephen J Gould notes, that “hope and morality cannot, and should not, be passively read in the construction of nature. Aesthetic and moral truths, as human concepts, must be shaped in human terms, not ‘discovered’ in nature.” An education in science is empowering and liberating. Einstein meant this when he remarked “One ought to be ashamed to make use of the wonders of science embodied in a radio set, while appreciating them as little as a cow appreciates the botanical marvels in the plant she munches.” Jamaluddin Afghani made a similar point about Madrasa teachers using light of oil lamp to read religious texts and not bothering to inquire mechanism of chimney. James Watson has noted the real point about science’s attempt to bypass the supernatural in explaining nature: “With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.” In fact the real home of what is called the supernatural in popular religion is beauty without and wonder within. Robinson Jeffers rightly noted: “The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigating nature, or the artist admiring it; the person who is interested in things that are not human.”
Let us not be duped by popular idolatry of modern science (one finds in Freud’s Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis and some famous new atheists) as the exclusive or royal road to truth that seeks to discredit philosophy and religion. Wittgenstein noted in his little known classic Culture and Value about dominant reductionist demystifying attitude many scientists naively take pride in: “Man has to awaken to wonder…Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.” He read Tagore’s poetry in a session of positivists who sought to dethrone metaphysics. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” he noted. That explains his dismissal of Frazer and others who explain away myth and religion. Science ultimately explains nothing as reflection on what constitutes scientific explanation would reveal. Science only deepens mystery and appreciation of what is. It pushes our ignorance to another level and never touches the rock bottom of things/truth/certainty. Things remain impenetrable or dense to reason, full of mystery and magic implying union with the reality of things – “the beloved” – ever remains an ideal or limit that is approximated but not fully consummated. At the quantum level the language of objects we are accustomed to fails. Familiar modes of explanation and such notions as mechanism, force and causality are not much helpful. As we move deeper in the world of psyche and spirit, we become part of the problem and thus encounter a Mystery that we are as Marcel would say. The poet, the mystic and the scientist join hands in celebrating the gift of being with eloquent silence. The task is, as Jeffers or Abhinavagupta would put it, celebration of existence or “the discovery, understanding, and expression of the Beauty of things.” Rumi would say that the task of we the non-prophets is not preaching but celebrating the joy of being or dancing the dance of the soul. The aspiration of science is to partakes in the dance of the soul and provide inputs that wisdom makes proper use of.
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/celebrating-the-beauty-of-science/282422.html
Science, in Kant’s famous words, is organized knowledge. Kant defined wisdom as organized life. Science is man’s great effort to know himself and the world better at many levels with or without concomitant increase in power or solving this or that problem. It has been part of comprehensive education from the earliest times. Modern science did succumb to certain Promethean and Faustian ambitions and thanks to its wedding with power or technology it has been a mixed blessing and a danger against which most of great thinkers, artists and poets have warned. In its wake many treasured traditional sciences have been a casualty and its myopia and hubris have been factors in the crisis of modern civilization. What we are concerned with today is not this scientism but science in the more general and universal sense that has been part of treasured intellectual adventure that borders on the aesthetic and the mystical. We celebrate today science in service of beauty, scientist as “a mystic in the act of prayer” and science as observation of the behavior of God as Iqbal would have it. Let us first take note of the ecstasy that is doing science when it becomes our wazeefa of a sort. Lavoisier, the father of chemistry, is said to have found hardly any time for taking food and enjoying mostly milk to spare time for pursuing science. Rutherford forgot his marriage function and kept guests waiting as he got lost in his work in his laboratory. Hawking was able to live and fight debilitating disease thanks partly to his zeal for science that dissolves ordinary woes. It was appreciation for irresistible beauty of certain mathematical order (that, as Plato noted, partakes of the divine) that led Dirac to his path breaking work: “A theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data. God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.” Pursuing beauty is its own reward. Fortunate are those who find doing science a beautiful adventure and thus a joy and move closer to the station of ihsan that constitutes man’s spiritual perfection. It is in such Masters as Leibnitz, Newton, Einstein, Whitehead and Salam, for instance, that we find how science can be spiritually and intellectually enriching pursuit.
It was semblance of eternity in mathematical equations through which Russell found food for man’s primordial hunger for perfection or eternity. Mathematics was allied to the Sacred for the Greeks and Plato found in our knowledge of mathematics proof for our immortality. One needs to pray to be granted such an exalted station that science becomes our sustenance, our vocation, our song. Zealous scientists are a new breed of karma yogis who are close to jnana yogic station. Zahae naseeb to be a scientist. The Prophet of Islam (S.A.W) prayed to be shown things as they are, an aspiration that goads phenomenology and science.
What shall man be doing after, say, ten thousand years from now? Scientists tell us that we shall always have tasks ahead and will not be bored. The Mystery and the need to pursue infinite perfections would always persist. As Sir J.J. Thomson noted in his Presidential Address to the British Association: “As we conquer peak after peak we see in front of us regions full of interest and beauty, but we do not see our goal, we do not see the horizon; in the distance tower still higher peaks, which will yield to those who ascend them still wider prospects, and deepen the feeling, the truth of which is emphasized by every advance in science, that “Great are the Works of the Lord.”
What is the justification for continuing to teach physics, chemistry and botany in schools and colleges if vast majority of pass outs will not be employed in any industry or sector that applies or requires such knowledge? I have mostly failed to elicit good answers in my interactions with teachers and students on this question. I think the following considerations better justify salary of teachers and huge investment of time by students. Chemistry of life is beautiful as Feynman noted. Michio Kaku noted “Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings.” “Chemistry, as an independent science, offers one of the most powerful means towards the attainment of a higher mental cultivation… it furnishes us with insight into those wonders of creation which immediately surround us, and with which our existence, life, and development, are most closely connected. (Justus von Liebig in Familiar Letters on Chemistry) Sir Joseph Paxton made a point about botany that has not been generally taught to the students of botany: “Botany is, above every other, the science of beauty.” Physics is the food for the mind and the first step in our quest to know for the pure joy of knowing. Aristotle’s great opening sentence on Metaphysics “All men naturally desire to know” implies we are born scientists (in the wider classical sense of the term) and if we fail to maintain interest in science we deny part of ourselves. We all need to reclaim our lost right – and deliver pleasant duty – to childhood adventure of wonder driven career of a scientist as Sagan rightly noted: “Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.”
A scientist is only closed to the idea of closure of mind and appreciates that “truth is a pathless land” and that implies readiness to eschew dogmatic answers and that is what constitutes faith’s essential movement of embracing uncertainty and openness to experience. A scientist can only be a submitter to truth and as truth has infinite faces and ever escapes/transcends our attempt to pin it down or encompass it fully, he/she is, by default, in an important if not comprehensive sense, a Muslim who affirms the transcendence of Truth. The Quran states that only knowledgeable people fear/take serious note of God/Truth/the Real.
Science requires maturity on our part to part with certain notions that literalist/fundamentalist approach anxiously upholds. In fact in this task higher religion and mysticism converge with science. Iqbal found in Freud an ally for religion in so far it psychoanalysis helps to distinguish the demonic from the divine in religious experience. Freud pleaded for abandoning God as father figure, a notion that higher religion has identified as a work of idolatrous imagination. Darwin’s essential insight was, as Stephen J Gould notes, that “hope and morality cannot, and should not, be passively read in the construction of nature. Aesthetic and moral truths, as human concepts, must be shaped in human terms, not ‘discovered’ in nature.” An education in science is empowering and liberating. Einstein meant this when he remarked “One ought to be ashamed to make use of the wonders of science embodied in a radio set, while appreciating them as little as a cow appreciates the botanical marvels in the plant she munches.” Jamaluddin Afghani made a similar point about Madrasa teachers using light of oil lamp to read religious texts and not bothering to inquire mechanism of chimney. James Watson has noted the real point about science’s attempt to bypass the supernatural in explaining nature: “With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.” In fact the real home of what is called the supernatural in popular religion is beauty without and wonder within. Robinson Jeffers rightly noted: “The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigating nature, or the artist admiring it; the person who is interested in things that are not human.”
Let us not be duped by popular idolatry of modern science (one finds in Freud’s Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis and some famous new atheists) as the exclusive or royal road to truth that seeks to discredit philosophy and religion. Wittgenstein noted in his little known classic Culture and Value about dominant reductionist demystifying attitude many scientists naively take pride in: “Man has to awaken to wonder…Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.” He read Tagore’s poetry in a session of positivists who sought to dethrone metaphysics. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” he noted. That explains his dismissal of Frazer and others who explain away myth and religion. Science ultimately explains nothing as reflection on what constitutes scientific explanation would reveal. Science only deepens mystery and appreciation of what is. It pushes our ignorance to another level and never touches the rock bottom of things/truth/certainty. Things remain impenetrable or dense to reason, full of mystery and magic implying union with the reality of things – “the beloved” – ever remains an ideal or limit that is approximated but not fully consummated. At the quantum level the language of objects we are accustomed to fails. Familiar modes of explanation and such notions as mechanism, force and causality are not much helpful. As we move deeper in the world of psyche and spirit, we become part of the problem and thus encounter a Mystery that we are as Marcel would say. The poet, the mystic and the scientist join hands in celebrating the gift of being with eloquent silence. The task is, as Jeffers or Abhinavagupta would put it, celebration of existence or “the discovery, understanding, and expression of the Beauty of things.” Rumi would say that the task of we the non-prophets is not preaching but celebrating the joy of being or dancing the dance of the soul. The aspiration of science is to partakes in the dance of the soul and provide inputs that wisdom makes proper use of.
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/celebrating-the-beauty-of-science/282422.html
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