Theory questions will to make new discoveries

By Carl Heintze

In the 19th century the American writer Henry Adams, writing The Education of Henry Adams, proposed what he called a dynamic theory of history.

Adams suggested the pace of history, indeed, the pace of civilization in general, is speeding up with time, just as the pieces of the universe are moving away from one another with ever greater speed.

Adams suggested that as we discover more and more there is less and less that we don't know. According to this theory, as scientists make the great discoveries of physics, chemistry and biology there are fewer and fewer great discoveries to be made.

Having found gravity (Sir Isaac Newton), relativity (Albert Einstein) and DNA (James Watson and Francis Crick), only the minutiae of life remains to be uncovered. Indeed, physicists are now concerned less and less with the "big" questions of how the universe is organized than they are with really little ones: sub-atomic particles, for instance--things so small that we can only infer what they are like or how they work.

They're not even sure if such particles of matter, if they exist, are different states of the same particle, or many different particles with very short periods of existence.

In the same way, astronomers and astrophysicists are reaching the limits of what can be seen through telescopes, either those that depend on capturing light, or those that trap radio waves of the spectrum. The perceptive universe has become so large that, as with the microscopic, we can't visualize it or really examine it.

The stars and collections of stars such as the Milky Way seem to be moving faster and faster away from one another, so that at some indeterminate time in the future, each part of the universe will be so far from every other part they will be completely disassociated.

Even, as history, the universe is speeding faster and faster. And since time, so far as we know, runs only in one direction, that's where we are all going, toward complete anarchy or chaos.

Adams didn't go this far, in part, because he didn't know that much about modern astronomy, but others have suggested that, if this is true, discovery is constantly increasing in speed, eventually it will make us lose interest in discovery altogether.

With the big questions of physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy out of the way, there will be only little questions left. Scientists, with less and less to discover, become less interested in science. In fact, we may all become less and less interested in scientific discovery.

This, of course, is not to say that mankind is less interested in the applied parts of science--what we now call technology. The computer revolution with which Santa Clara Valley is most intimately concerned, is as much a technological revolution, as it is a new set of scientific discoveries.

Much of it is based on scientific discoveries made in the 19th and early 20th centuries, not new science. It's not so much that there is nothing new under the sun, as it is that we finally have been able to enjoy the fruits of discoveries made some time ago.

If all this is true, if Henry Adams is right, if science is slowing down as it speeds discovery, then presumably civilization will sometime soon reach a kind of scientific plateau--a place where, as Alexander the Great discovered, there will be no more worlds to be conquered.

Just what this will do to society and civilization isn't clear. There have been, however, times in man's past when such plateaus in history have evolved, when man has been less interested in finding the how and why of his world than in simply accepting it.

One was the Middle or Dark Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, when no unifying force held the Western world together.

For centuries, curiosity about the world was stuck. It was believed to be flat and the center of the universe. Those scientists who thought otherwise were considered heretics. They found themselves in a lot of trouble.

Few cared to try to extend life. Disease was rampant, wiping out about a quarter of the population of Europe. The Crusades, filled with religious fervor and bloodshed and cruelty, occupied the attention of the known world.

Fortunately for the optimists of the earth, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eventually dawned, and science at least reached an equal footing with religion.

While two world wars may make us wonder if true enlightenment has arrived, in general, humans find themselves living better lives than they did half a millennium ago. Is history moving ever more rapidly towards a stalemate? Is science slowing down, even as the rate of discovery increases?

Henry Adams probably would not be surprised to discover that we don't really know, that the uncertainty of human history and the iron rule of passing time make it unlikely that we are going to know.

But, because we're human, we're going to worry about it, in spite of science, history and the evolving cosmos.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Willow Glen Resident.

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