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The Statue Beneath the Stone
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14869 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1988 |
2,839 Words |
| Author
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Ben Bova
Ben Bova has authored nearly eighty realistic books about the
future. His two latest novels are The Trikon Deception
(coauthored with astronaut Bill Pogue) and Mars. He is
president emeritus of the National Space Society and
president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He
resides in Naples, Florida. |
INVENTING REALITY
Physics as Language
Bruce Gregory
New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1988
256 pp., $18.95
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! For the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, not love, nor light, Nor certitude…
When Mathew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" was published in 1867, the world that science described seemed very solid, very real, and as predictable as clockwork. The redoubtable Lord Kelvin told physicists to have anything much to do; just about everything was discovered, known measured. All that remained was to clean up a few details.
Yet the poet was more correct in his view than the physicist. By the time the year 1900 came around, physics was being rocked to its foundations. Radioactivity, X-rays, the quantum theory, and Einstein's relativity theory would open up a whole new universe for physicists to probe and study. Fundamental limits were discovered; not merely limits on what we know, but limits on what we can know. Certitude disappeared form the physicists' world view.
In Inventing Reality: Physics as Language, Bruce Gregory presents an intriguing problem to the reader. Is there a real, absolute universe that we can discover and understand? Or does our comprehension of the world around us depend on our point of view, the language we use, the ideas we carry around in our heads?
Sculptors such as Michelangelo have said that the beautiful statues they make were inside the rough stone even while it was being quarried. The sculptor, they say, merely removes the outer layers of stone to reveal the statue in all its finished splendor. It that what physicists do? Chip away the obscuring layers of ignorance to reveal the universe as it really is?
Or is the sculptor's statue a product of his own mind, his own inner conceptions? Does his hand stop when the stone has been worked to the point where the statue he saw in his imagination appears before his eyes? Is this the way physicists probe the nature of the universe? Do they start with preconceived ideas and work until their measurements match their
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