It's all Greek to Me
If you keep these ideas in mind,
You will easily see Nature is free:
Liberated from her superb masters,
She can do all things by herself
Without any need of Gods.
– Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Reading 20th century physicists can be a a particularly enjoyable enterprise. Most, for example Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger, write the most clearly about their contributions to physics. An exception is Bohr, but that's directly connected to his writing style which is similar to thick, thick, thick 18th century German writers a la Kant, that’s not to say Bohr as Kant before, didn't have some beautiful and profound thinking to convey.
I started reading the physicists when Ronald Reagan began waving nukes as part of a degenerate America uber alles, neo-patriotism. I dug into the science of the bomb. The best of those who helped unlock the quantum world had misgivings on the technologies being loosed by this knowledge. Another characteristic these physicists shared, they all had a great appreciation of the Ancient Greeks. It seemed ironic to find those who intellectually bequeathed the most powerful technologies of modernity appreciated the Greeks, especially at a time American universities found no use for the same thought of the ancient white boy slavers. “Ostracize the lot!” The cry echoed across the hallowed (or is it hollow) halls of academia.
I discovered a recent book by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander and the Birth of Science. I hadn't previously been aware of Rovelli, who does quantum gravity research, but I never closely followed the last decades attempt of physics to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. It all seemed a bit fantastical and beyond any ability to be experimentally verified. Certainly, relativity and quantum mechanics are in themselves fantastical in regards to accepted common sense, not just in how we traditional think, but literally nonsensical in regards to the information we receive from our senses, nonetheless, to a certain extent both these theories have been experimentally and technologically proven.
Rovelli makes the case this scientific overturning of Homo sapiens' sensible understanding of the world began with the Greeks, particularly with Anaximander. It was Anaximander who first correctly conceived of the earth as suspended in space, resting on nothing. If you give it enough thought, this first scientific unmooring of daily experience remains as radical as any that followed.
Rovelli explains Anaximander, his teacher Thales, and the Greeks that followed were the initial developers of what's become known as the scientific method. “Someone proposes an idea, an explanation. The process doesn't end there. The idea is seriously considered and criticized. Someone proposes a different idea, and comparisons are made. The extraordinary thing is that this process can converge toward agreement. In this way, a group of people can forge a common conviction, or a majority view, or in any event a shared decision.”
Rovelli notes this method was specifically developed by the Greeks. He contrasts the Chinese, who for two thousand years had an imperial observatory tied to devising the calendar, but never developed an accurate measure of the earth. It wasn't provided until the Jesuits arrived in Beijing in the 17th century. Phew, how rich is the irony there? The Jesuits, Europe's, great, imperial church defilers of the Republican Renaissance, used the Greeks to help unravel Dynastic China.
From its beginnings, science continually upended previously established and variously codified understandings of the world. Its technological offspring entirely revolutionized human life. In his Nature and the Greeks, one of the developers of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrodinger, reveals initial Greek thought still remains fundamental to many of today's scientific constructs. Most intriguingly, Schrodinger writes of Democritus' conception of the universe's fundamental structure of atoms and void (space). Yet, Schrodinger himself partook in the still not completely understood undermining of this basic dichotomy. Having not read Rovelli's work, but with an understanding of the general field, I'm sure he's written plenty about this intellectual predicament. The important point is many of the initial constructs and processes of Greek science remain very much part of today's science.
It is not just the scientific forms of the Greeks still defining much present thinking, but also Greek political forms. The most enjoyable part of the book is Rovelli's tying the development of science to the rise of Greek democracy. He notes the end of the Bronze Age collapse of the dominant centralized and hierarchical palace civilizations across the eastern Mediterranean created the open environment for the rise of the new, distributed Greek city states. “The old absolute power of kings and priestly castes collapsed, and a new space opened up in which a new culture was born. Men learned to distrust a sovereign's absolute power and the priests' traditional wisdom. Something profoundly new was born in both the structure of society and humanity's quest for knowledge.”
He continues,
“The birth of science and the birth of democracy, therefore, have a common foundation: the discovery of the usefulness of criticism and dialogue among equals. In criticizing his master Thales, Anaximander did nothing more than transport onto the plane of knowledge what was already common practice in the agora, the places of assembly, in Miletus: not accepting uncritically or reverently the divine or semi divine lord of the day, but instead criticizing the ideas of a citizen magistrate, not out of lack of respect, but on the shared conviction of that a better proposal can always be found. ...The birth of science and the birth of democracy, therefore, have a common foundation: the discovery of the usefulness of criticism and dialogue among equals.”
As modern democracy degenerates, it is now established science seeking to create a new palace culture, literally incorporated in the industrial corporation. Just as distressing, a cult of science rises, including increasing pronouncements made with the sole intention of ending discussion, ending debate, the very processes essential to the scientific method. Maybe most representative of this tragic mix is the atrocity of some technology specialist, who has made a quick, Croesus fortune via archaic and decrepit market structures, continually spouting out idiocies on whatever topic they desire. Almost as bad as the inane ramblings of a given fool rising to the top of a corrupt and dysfunctional American political system. The real failure is the established system's growing inability to healthily confront either. The decline of democracy is as detrimental for healthy science as it is for a healthy politics.
The fundamental connection of geometry between the Greeks, science, and politics has been forgotten. Physics is geometry sketched by calculus. Euclid's initial axioms remain valid, but Einstein needed 19th century Lorentzian innovations to curve space-time. Geometry is also essential for political understanding, all power is geometric. Democracy’s institutions and processes need to be horizontal and distributedly connected like the Greek city states as opposed to the vertical and centralized palace cultures that preceded them. With industrialization, political organization has become almost entirely centralized. Power is located overwhelmingly at the top of massive corporate pyramids. Essential to the decline of American republicanism has been the ever greater concentration of power in both the corporation and its DC handmaiden. Most recently, corporations use compute technology to further centralize power. The industry itself has become a palace culture, overwhelming controlled by a handful of corporations’ network structure of massively centralized stored data centers, processed by increasingly centralized compute technology. However, it seems the energy required for such structure is a serious impediment to large scale adaption of this this next generation of compute technology.
It is more than a bit ironic a relatively recent revolutionary idea of science, that order is gained from innumerable quantities distributedly connected across the “bottom” and not, using Lucretius word, by masters ordaining order from the top, has had zero impact on contemporary political thinking. Instead, democracy is crushed from above, coinciding with a complete trashing and forgetting of the Greek experience.
Any ability to revive democracy requires not only a reforming of politics and government, but just as imperatively, the processes of science need reform, a renaissance in Greek understanding that the processes and methods of both are existentially entwined. Rovelli writes,
“Conceiving a democratic political structure means accepting the notion that the best ideas emerge from the discussion of the many and not from the authority of a single power. It means acknowledging that the public criticism can determine the best ideas, and that is possible to debate and converge at reasonable conclusions. These are the very hypotheses that underlie science's search for knowledge.”
He essentially adds,
“Taking this path requires faith in human beings, their being reasonable, and their honesty in searching for truth. This kind of faith in human beings is that of the luminous humanism of the Greek cities in the sixth century BCE at the root of extraordinary intellectual and cultural flowering of the following centuries, which continues to bear fruit in the contemporary world.”
The world today is enmeshed in a centuries old scientific revolution. The resulting technologies ever more forcefully alter human life and the greater environment from where we were birthed. Science provides no blueprint for the future. It neither tells us what technologies to develop or the best way to utilize them. We have taken on the power of our old gods in the ability to manipulate nature, but the insight of the Greek educated Roman Lucretius that nature is liberated from any masters is true today as it was two thousand years ago. We are left, just as the Greeks, with democracy, as the best and at this point the only way to shape the future.
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