The (Un)certainty of Science

I saw this cup in a small gift shop a couple years ago and was immediately struck by it. It made me laugh, but then I thought about how profound it was. There are many ways this sentiment could be construed, but my first thought was actually of a particular person — one Isaac Newton.

Anyone who knows me well knows about my fan girl crush on Isaac Newton. Of all the people from the past that this historian would love to meet, Newton is in like the top three. Though he had a bit of an ego (all geniuses do, for good reason), for my money he’s still one of those key individuals in human history who couldn’t possibly have fathomed how much his life and work would change the world, for good or for ill.

The late science historian Richard S. Westfall, who wrote several books on Newton including his biography Never at Rest, summed him up like this:

The end result of my study of Newton has served to convince me that with him there is no measure.  He has become for me wholly other, one of the tiny handful of supreme geniuses who have shaped the categories of the human intellect, a man not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow beings.

Heady stuff and a hell of a sentiment to try to live up to. But why did the cup make me think of Newton? Well, he was an English scientist, er, “natural philosopher” for all you 17th century geeks out there, who made it possible for the phrase on the cup to even be a thing. Let me explain.

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

Newton was born into a tumultuous world. England was engaged in a civil war that would end up with its king being executed for the only time in the country’s history. On the Continent, particularly in northern Europe, the Protestants and Catholics were busy throttling each other in a bloody war that would last 30 years and have such disastrous, widespread consequences that some historians call it the first “modern” war.

However, there were good things too. The Italian Renaissance had unleashed a spirit of innovation (see my earlier post about that) based on a humanistic tradition that sparked all kinds of things from advances in art and architecture, to a globally-expanded economy, and an increased curiosity about the inner workings of the world that would come to foster a “Scientific Revolution,” in which Newton would play a critical role.

It’s not hard to imagine that people in Newton’s time probably felt like they were on the cusp of something. A shedding of one skin and growth of a new one.

People before him such as Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Brahe, and Kepler had pushed the envelope and created the foundation on which Newton would build the future. He stood on the shoulders of giants, indeed. But Newton knocked the ball out of the park. And he started young.

First up, he invented Calculus in his early 20s. Another man, a German scientist named Leibniz also worked on inventing Calculus at the same time, but research into the men’s notebooks to trace who came up with it first ended in a favorable outcome for Newton after Leibniz’s death in 1716. Today both men are credited, but in Newton’s day he emerged the victor.

Next up, also in his 20s, Newton invented rainbows. Well, not really, but kind of. He began to work in optics and refracting light. At first he did it by poking his eyeball with a metal object and moving it around and noticed seeing colors. But then he decided to use a prism instead. He viewed sunlight through the prism and found that it separated the white light into the seven colors of the rainbow, and voila! He created our modern understanding of the composition of white light, which no one had ever accomplished before (Aristotle had tried but failed).

Still not yet 30 years old, Newton tinkered with an early telescope which led to him inventing the reflecting telescope, the type which we still use today. Others had been using telescopes that refracted light through a lens (like Newton did above with the prism) which created a color distortion in whatever they were viewing. But Newton figured out that if the light was bounced off a mirror rather than through a lens, that the color distortion would be eliminated. Our views into the deepest parts of space thanks to the Hubble and Webb telescopes are actually thanks to Newton and his tiny invention.

Newton’s telescope invention he presented to the Royal Society in 1672. The Science Museum UK - [1], CC BY 4.0.

And he was just getting started . . .

In 1687, when he was in his mid-40s Newton published the first volume of his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica which we would read now as the “Mathematical Principles of Science.” It is widely believed to be one of the most, if not the most, important science books ever written. In it, Newton outlined his theories — many of which he had been working on for 20 years — including theories on motion, which became the foundation for modern physics:

1. Inertia – everything stays in motion or rest until acted upon by outside forces

2. Force – change in motion of a body is proportional to force acting on it and happens in a straight line

3. Action/Reaction – for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction

In that same book, Newton also outlined his Theory on Universal Gravitation which he had been working on since his early 20s. Some of you have probably heard the famous story about the apple falling from the tree, and that when Newton witnessed it he was inspired to think about why which led him to discover gravity. This story may be just a legend, but the outcome is the same nonetheless as it marks the watershed moment in our modern understanding of how gravity works. 

While most others believed motion was inherent in objects – like earth/down, air/up – Newton believed motion was the result of the interaction between objects. It was a novel explanation for the rise and fall of the tides as well as the orbits of the planets. Newton never knew or was able to articulate exactly what gravity was (i.e., as a substance or other tangible object), but he argued the interaction between objects could confidently be mapped mathematically, which he did in a simple equation.

He also argued that the effects of gravity were felt everywhere in the known universe, which was a massive assumption that has turned out to be true even though Newton had no way to prove it in his day. This meant that Aristotle’s theories of the universe which had held sway for almost 2,000 years by Newton’s time — that there were two realms, one between earth and the moon, and the other from the moon and above where things operated differently and were made of different stuff — simply couldn’t hold anymore. Newton had changed our understanding of the world forever.

But what did all this mean? How did it result in the phrase on the cup that science doesn’t care what we believe?

Well, because Newton’s theories gave us a universe that was now a giant, regulated, uniform thing that operated according to natural laws in absolute time, space, and motion. This mechanistic or “world machine” view became Newton’s gift to Enlightenment thinkers who took it and ran with it. For them it meant that, regardless of what people believed about God’s creation of it and role in it, the universe was actually a disinterested, orderly, and comprehensible thing, and human reason could be used to unlock the secrets of it. Further, importantly, we could bend it to our will. In the 18th century mind, the upside potential must have seemed endless. Progress! Our secular modern worldview would be born from this new sense of control over the material world — all based on science, not faith/belief or tradition.

BUT, Newton’s science clearly showed that human understanding of the world was one thing but that control or “dominion” over the world is actually an illusion.

The irony for those later Enlightenment thinkers was that Newton had been a pretty religious man. He was a Protestant Christian who studied and wrote as much or more about faith than he did about science. He believed, as did virtually all the early scientists of his day, that scientific investigation was not a secular pursuit but rather simply a religious act in that it was a means to understanding God’s handiwork. It was those later Enlightenment thinkers who would be responsible for separating and compartmentalizing science from faith, something Newton would not have understood or condoned.

THE OTHER GREAT IRONY is that the quest for certainty about the universe which the early scientists were so excited to undertake ended up creating a more uncertain world in many ways.

For medieval European Christians, the Church — as a unifying institution with almost universal reach — had created a world with a strong sense of stability. Medieval people were certain about this because they believed:

• God created the universe for them and had given the earth the central position in his creation

• The earth was fixed beneath their feet

• They were here because God put them here

• That heaven was the final resting place for the faithful

There was probably a pretty profound sense of comfort and security in all that. You didn’t have to think too hard, just have faith in God’s plan and live in accordance with it and the traditions you’d always known. Now that’s some certainty.

But then the scientists came along and rather than instilling confidence with their newfound knowledge of the world, the “certainty” they brought to the table ended up yanking the rug out from underneath the Old Ways, ushering in a period of great anguish and searching.

The questions it produced are profound. If the world operates — as the phrase on the cup says — in a mechanistic way according to universal scientific principles such as physics and gravity and is indifferent to what humans do or believe, then does it even matter that we are here? Why are we here? Is there anybody out there who cares about us? Is there a God? Do we have a future?

To be fair, Newton’s science gave us some of the most amazing discoveries ever and showed us what grand leaps the human intellect is capable of. That’s not nothing. And it’s not his fault that after his death the Enlightenment took his work in another direction. It was they who gave us the illusion that there is a hierarchy at play where science reigns supreme as our way of understanding and manipulating the world, whereas religion or older ways of believing about the world are simply “stories” and reflect a superstitious ignorance that is subordinate.

It’s important to remember that Newton unlocked a world he wouldn’t have agreed with. For him, the old stories and ways of understanding our place in the world were inextricably intertwined with his Christian faith; he did not separate belief from science. The sentiment on the cup was made possible by his science from our modern point of view, but it would be paradoxical to him.

And I believe he was right. I think the state of our world now in so many ways as the “beneficiary” of both Newton and the later thinkers is showing that we are out over our skis. We cannot forget our old stories and ways of being in the world and simply think we’ll use science to solve our way out of all our problems. We and our world are more complex than that.

To be clear, this is also not a call for us to return to the medieval Christian world. What I mean is the march onward looking only toward a future without ever reflecting on our past shared human experience — whatever your particular stories and traditions entail — is a mistake. Science can and has been a helpful tool at times, but as a historian I deeply believe that if we turn our backs on our traditions then we cast ourselves adrift. In many ways I think we already are.

“Science doesn’t give a fuck what you believe,” but maybe it should.