In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, cosmologist Stephen Hawking told of his quest to find the ultimate explanation for the universe.
If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God.
Thanks in part to Hawking, religious-sounding titles were a thing in science book publishing for a time. James Trefil offered Reading the Mind of God: In Search of a Principle of Universality in 1989. Oxford mathematician Paul Davies followed his 1984 work God and the New Physics with 1993’s The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World. Not to be outdone, also in 1993, Leon Lederman, director of Fermilab in Illinois, cranked out The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?
Back then an ultimate explanation for life, the universe, and everything seemed to be on the near horizon. Lederman said he hoped to one day see a simple list of equations explaining the universe that would "fit on a t-shirt.”
The intellectual optimism of the Bush-Clinton years has been tempered by a succession of theoretical and experimental disappointments. String theory has mostly unraveled. And since the single biggest discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (the predicted Higgs particle), the “standard model” that gives order to the physicist’s zoo of subatomic particles has hit some recent experimental snags, bringing the theory into question.
There are some big TOES out there (Theories of Everything) that have yet to be falsified - and it’s too early to say of the standard model that it’s ‘another beautiful theory slayed by an ugly fact’ - but it’s safe to say the cosmic optimism of the late Hawking and some of his colleagues has gone the way of the VCR and big hair.
Even the huge and breathtaking successes of the Hubble and James Webb telescopes have had a flip side: the further we look back in space and time, the more difficult it becomes to make the history of the universe (or metaverse) run backwards smoothly on the blackboard or the supercomputer without introducing ad hoc mechanisms.
“Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness,” insisted the writer Aldous Huxley.
Science has explained plenty of course, but it seems the pessimists are ascendant among physicists. Will nature curmudgeonly conceal the final truth to the very end? Perhaps the scientific quest into the immensely large and insanely small will go on forever, with The Answer perversely and recursively retreating inward, like a nesting of Russian dolls.
Or not.
In any case, history give us reason to be humble in our expectation of final truths. Consider the case of Ernst Haeckel.
Haeckel’s vision
Born in 1834, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He was also an adventurer and specimen-collecter in the tradition of Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt. Haeckel discovered and named thousands of species, and was the first to draw up a genealogical tree of the various orders of animals. We mostly remember him today for his word “ecology.”
His influence on the popular imagination of the time was, apparently, enormous: in various editions his works were best sellers across Europe. (The Central European writer Arthur Koestler remembered it as “the Bible of my youth.”) He was something of the Carl Sagan of the 19th century, a Renaissance man of vast learning with a knack for explaining science to a popular audience.
Like other naturalists of the era, he was also a superb draftsman. His hallucinatory illustrations of marine and botanical organisms are still reproduced today, not so much as biological specimens but as artistic masterpieces.
We’re talking about a mostly forgotten genius who once as famous as the man whose ideas he popularized for millions, Charles Darwin. The film Proteus described his monumental influence in the 20th century:
Lenin would extoll his work as a ‘great weapon in the class struggle, Sigmund Freud would base his theories of development and the unconscious on Ernst’s Haeckel’s ‘biogenetic law.’ Haeckel’s nature mysticism would have a profound effect on the literature of D.H. Lawrence, and his images of undersea creatures would shape the sinuous forms of Art Nouveau. As the years went by, many of his theories would be rejected, while his vision of endless progress would be shattered on the battlefields of World War I. The Nazis would ban his books, while using his ideas to support the madness of racial purification.
The singular event that marked the biologist for life was the death of his young wife Anna from pleurisy on February 16, 1864. On the same day the young naturalist turned 30. “Haeckel became made with grief, falling unconscious and remaining bed for some eight days in partial delirium,” writes Robert J. Richards, author of The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Thought.
Haeckel’s family feared he might take his own life out of grief, and came to care for him. An anecdote from Richards book captures the character of the mourning naturalist, and how memories of his lost love had fused with his love of nature.
While walking along the shore, lost in his grief, he gazed idly upon a medusa, of a species unknown to him, floating near the surface of a tidal pool. The creature seems to have been transformed before his eyes into something quite different. Later in 1879, in his giant two-volume System der Medusen, he recounted the experience in the fine print of his systematic description of the organism, a creature he named Mitrocoma Annae - Anna's headband. Any reader who chanced to fall upon this passage, buried as it is amongst technical descriptions of the over six hundred species of medusae cataloged, would certainly have been startled by its very personal character:
“Mitrocoma Annae belongs to the most charming and delicate of all the medusae. It was first observed by me in April 1864, in the Bay of Villafranca near Nice. The movement of this wonderful Eucopide offered a magical view, and I enjoyed several happy hours watching the play of her tentacles, which hang like blond hair-ornaments from the rim of the delicate umbrella-cap and which with the softest movement would roll up into thick short spirals. . .. I name this species, the princess of the Eucopiden, as memorial to my unforgettable true wife, Anna Sethe. If I have succeeded, during my earthly pilgrimage in accomplishing something for natural science and humanity, I owe the greatest part to the ennobling influence of this gifted wife, who was torn from me through sudden death in 1864.”
The Riddle of the Universe
In his senior years the biologist summed up the knowledge of his time and pronounced it final, in his book Die Welträthsel. Some years back I spotted an 1905 American translation - The Riddle of the Universe - at a Vancouver antiquarian bookstore. It was a steal at two bucks.
All the riddles of the universe were pretty much solved, Haeckel determined, and he devoted a chapter to each: Consciousness, The Immortality of the Soul, The Unity of Nature, and God and the World. Just one riddle of the universe was left to explain: “substance.” By substance the biologist meant the ultimate constituents of matter and energy.
“We do not know the ‘thing in itself' that lies behind these knowable phenomena,” he wrote. "But why trouble about this enigmatic ‘thing in itself’ when we have no means of investigating it, when we do not even clearly know whether it exists or not? Let us, then, leave the fruitless brooding over this ideal phantom to the 'pure metaphysician’...”
The biologist was “fully convinced” that the then-current body of knowledge “would not receive substantial modification during the brief spell of life that remains to me.” A year later, the German physicist Max Plank had alerted the world to the first bit of dry rot in the classical world edifice.
By the time the American translation of Haeckel’s book had come out, a Swiss patent clerk by the name of Albert Einstein was onto the blueprint for replacing the aging building of classical physics with a bizarre new structure in four dimensions, in which matter and energy were interchangeable. Classical physics remained useful for ballistics and other applications, but as an ultimate explanation it was built on the shifting sands of quantum physics, which Einstein also had a hand in inventing.
Thanks to sledgehammer-wielding contractors like Neils Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger, classical physics was reduced to rubble, and “substance” evaporated into a cloud of probabilities. Haeckel died in 1919; by the 1920s, a number of his certainties had gone poof.
In his career, the gentleman explorer and artist had made tremendous contributions to biology, but toward the end of his life he was way off in assessing 19th century certainties. Yet this kind of expectation - that of pending revelation, of final enlightenment - runs throughout the history of science.
This attitude often produces reactionary academic conservatism and intellectual laziness, but that’s hardly the worst of it. Human beings can shapeshift into monsters when they’re in the grip of certainties handed down from “experts” that are later rejected as risky, dangerous or even repellent - but only the damage has been done.
And here’s where we get into the most problematic chapter of The Riddle of the Universe, “The History of The Species.”
In one passage, the author states that the interval in consciousness between animals and the “lower races of men” is less than that between such races and “the highest specimens of thoughtful humanity (Spinoza, Goethe, Lamark, Darwin, etc.)” In other words, dark-skinned people were closer to animals than they were to the best examples of people Haeckel could think of, who by happy coincidence were much like him.
In one of Haeckel’s other books illustrating evolution, there’s a drawing outlining the family resemblance of apes to Africans.
However, I won’t go the fashionable woke route by retrospectively condemning Haekel as some monstrous representative of a hateful ideology. In the end, the powerful brain of this sincere and sensitive man was as much the product of its time as steam engines and cotton mills. (In other ways the world’s first ecologist was well ahead of his time: his vision of nature’s fundamental interconnection persists to this day.)
But yes, the racial notions of Haeckel and other “experts” - like the British eugenicist Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Darwin - would supply some of the intellectual tinder for the ovens of Auschwitz.
If there’s a lesson in Haeckel’s culture-bound blunders, it’s to not use standards of the present to hatefully judge figures from the past (a past which we can do nothing to alter), but rather learn from them so we don’t repeat their mistakes in the present (a present we can alter for the sake of a better future).
What scientific certainties do we live by which will be found to be dangerous nonsense a century from now?
Haeckel on God
The spiritually-inclined Haeckel found it impossible to reconcile the scientific understanding of his adulthood with the Christian upbringing of his childhood. What he found more agreeable was the philosophical principle of “monism,” inflected with the nature spirituality of the German writer Goethe.
“The monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our present knowledge of nature, recognises the divine spirit in all things. It can never recognise in God a "personal being," or, in other words, an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form. God is everywhere. As Giordano Bruno has it, ‘there is one spirit in all things, and no body is so small that it does not contain a part of the divine substance whereby it is animated,’” he wrote in The Riddle of the Universe.
This is one area where Haeckel doesn’t diverge greatly from a number of scientists who succeeded him. Both he and Einstein followed the pantheistic philosopher Spinoza, who insisted that God did not create the world, but that the world is part of God. Many of the architects of quantum theory, like Erwin Schrodinger and Wolfgang Pauli, also shared Haeckel’s mystical bent.
Of course, the idea of a disembodied supreme being, separate from the universe he created, has fared less well with scientists over time. Stephen Hawking himself famously said he had no use for the concept. With the cosmos having no beginning or end of time, “what place then for a Creator?”
From Prime Mover to cosmic deadwood: scientists have been extraordinarily successful in demoting the Supreme Being. The 19th century scientists Lyell and Hutton took geology out of His jurisdiction, and Darwin followed suit with biology. Pushed back to the sphere of fixed stars by Galileo, and sent hoofing it across the intergalactic void by Edwin Hubble and his telescope on Mount Palomar, God now finds himself demoted to an obscure role in “quantum cosmology.” The job description apparently involves fiddling in the narrow gaps of space-time, though no one has produced any work sheets. A senior executive with little to do since the Big Bang, He must be concerned that further discoveries will result in Him being escorted off the premises for good, after being made to hand over His keys.
So when scientists and science writers past and present talk about God, it seems mostly a literary affectation with the promise of book sales. But who knows, perhaps there’s a peculiar element of over-compensation in there, too. So used to doing without God for so long, scientists may feel He may soon be explained away completely, and they’re feeling some preemptory loss. What does it mean to have an Ultimate Text without an Ultimate Author?
There’s another possibility, as unlikely it may seem to the secular-minded: that the science publishing world’s brief flirtation with theology was more accurate than anyone knew at the time. Perhaps a Creator will figure prominently in the Ultimate Explanation in some fashion, even if it’s just a 12 year-old superintelligence who’s built a digitally-based cosmic prison for his/her own perverse amusement.
The other possibility is the mystical gambit of a Haeckelian flavour: All That Is cannot be reduced to a set of equations that will fit on a t-shirt, and The Indefinable Whatever is more effectively grasped with the heart than the head.
Queerer than we can suppose
In any case, modern science has granted us a picture of the life, the universe and everything that’s far more awe-inspiring than anything found in a book cobbled together by Emperor Constantine in 330 AD from texts composed by tribes wandering around in the desert more than a millennia earlier. And we’re certainly in a better position to ask big questions than the poor sod who supposedly asked St. Augustine what God was doing before he created Heaven. "Creating Hell for those who ask such questions,” was the nightclub-worthy response.
Yet that doesn’t mean we should turn science into a religion of its own, presuming it to be a body of unassailable fact and unquestioned truth. Science can and does progress, but there have been many time in history where knowledge and understanding has retreated after advancing. It’s the sociologists of science who understand best that our conception of the world at any given time is only an approximation -- mostly useful, occasionally crankish -- of a certain culture-bound cross-section of reality. It’s not the territory, its the map.
It's entirely conceivable that a final cosmic answer will continue forever to elude us. The words of the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane come to mind: "My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
The ultimate explanation may come tomorrow. Or never. And a God or Goddess may or may not be a part of it. But it might be wise to avoid betting on horses in either directions.
(All pictures from Wiki Commons and the author)
Superb documentary on Haeckel and his time below. Also this small, old-school BBC masterpiece, still relevant on the matter of knowledge versus certainty.
I've been watching someone on the internet who elucidates real nice the often dense cosmology of Rudolph Steiner, and I've been thinking to myself, "Now there's a dude who understands the whole shebang." Even if, though, he's only one essential ingredient of the big picture, it's thinkers like him who really illustrate the truism of it all being far stranger and beyond anything that we can even know.
“…The job description apparently involves fiddling in the narrow gaps of space-time”…. I like that, not only because it would appear to be an essential job just on its own, but it because it preempts the inevitable announcement of soon-to-be-known equations -and is also a task too complex to be elucidated by mere mortals or some equally vulnerable A.I.working only within the left hemisphere of consciousness.