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Flame » in reply to limits: Sunday morning meditation

At the Asymptote
Fox — (archived)

First, let me say that your post is just plain gorgeous. I've read books that take hundreds of pages to say what you've done in five paragraphs. [Of course, they had footnotes ;-) ] And the irony of your closing line is, in the mathematical sense as well as the rhetorical, elegant.

I just wanted to add another perspective, from a different seat in the theatre-in-the-round.

The extension of our range of perception toward the extremes of the spectrum - more importantly, toward the extremes of the distance scale - has had the interesting effect of engaging empiricists in discussions bordering on the mystical. "Cosmology" once meant any explanation of the origin of the universe; the first two chapters of Genesis are a cosmology. Now it is a branch of physics (in fact, my favorite), yet it includes the Anthropic Principle, which proposes that this Universe's basic physical constants have the precise values they do because we are living in it. That is tantalizingly close to proposing that things are as they are in order for us to be here.

And then there is String Theory, and its successors and offshoots. The chains of inference are clear from theory and experiment in quantum physics, yet, by their very definition, neither the identities described nor the dimensions in which they vibrate can ever be directly perceived because they are beyond the ultimate limit of the Planck Length. While superstrings and branes may eventually allow us to incorporate all of our theories into one elegant package, we must, in essence, take them "on faith".

There is much in the infinite and the infinitesimal to inspire any of us to awe, and some of us to reverence. Yet, the most awe should be reserved for two ideas: that we can, with reason and without fear of delusion, discover our ultimate limits but extend our understanding beyond them; that we are capable of awe and, sometimes, reverence.

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