Science holds a deep, extraordinary potential for us as individuals and as a society – a
potential that we might not immediately expect it has. This was recognized in Ancient Greece where science was an integral part of what it meant to be a true philosopher – a lover of wisdom. The lives of many of the early scientists, such as Copernicus and Galileo, clearly reflect the extraordinary potential of science. It is these and other famous scientists that show us the true potential of science - its ability to lead us into a deep relationship with the natural world, and to find our own place in it. Yet today, we have the wrong idea about science. As a society we have created a certain impression of what science is, how it works and what it means. Since science is authoritative, this impression of science is also our collective impression of what truth is. We live immersed in this world view, almost as though it is part of the air we breath. The majority of scientists themselves take on this impression as an unconscious and unquestioned assumption about their work and the world we live in. However, I contend that our view of science (and reality) leaves out a vital ingredient. If each of us took all of the science we experienced in school, and all of the stories we hear about it today through the media and popular science programs, and all the scientists themselves tell us, and threw these ingredients into a pot, then the dish would be a failure. Like a recipe for bread that accidently left out the yeast, it would be missing the active ingredient most needed for the whole recipe. At best we would create only a kind of stale and indigestible flat bread. The worst aspect of leaving something crucial out of our perception of science is that the perception has become a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. Scientists themselves have, without knowing it, a limited view of science. Science has grown to reflect this view, and the crucial missing ingredient – the topic of this essay - has increasingly been left out, suppressed, or glossed over. This is so true that, in modern science, we would have to look very hard to find the ingredient I’m referring to. In professional science itself we do not see it, practice it, or teach it, and yet in many hidden ways, if we are lucky, it is there. One tell-tale sign of our ingredient-deficient view of science is found in the common experience of doing science. It’s fair to say that many (or most) people’s experience of the practice of science, usually comprising a remembrance of being compelled to sit and learn it in school, is not exactly positive. The results of science can be portrayed as exciting in television programs like Nova, but the process of doing science as portrayed and experienced in school laboratories throughout the world is dry, tedious and devoid of creativity or imagination. Instead of a warm, fresh, mouth-watering bread, we are spoon fed the indigestion-giving, stale, flat bread that is the dominant view of what science is. Because modern science, under the influence of our ideas about it, has been very successfully obscured the key life-giving ingredient, the easiest place to begin to be able see it is in history – before it was completely obscured. But even there one has to look past many of our ideas about how science happened, and how it advanced. One has to get a kind of fake mythology of science out of the way before one can get a real taste of what actually occurred – a taste of the missing ingredient. The key to this approach to history is to include what a so-called “objective” history leaves out – the inner lives, motivations and experiences of the famous scientists themselves. Many of the prominent names in the history of science (such as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Darwin) were really explorers, driven to open out a new frontier. They gave their lives to this exploration with such a great passion that one might almost call it a religious fervor. What was it that inspired and motivated these early scientists? It certainly couldn’t have been the lifeless view of science given to us in our modern classrooms. It’s good to remember that the beginnings of modern science occurred at times in history when conditions were much different than today. To get a sense of the motivation and experience of the early scientists we have to try to place ourselves in the culture and conditions of the time – in the consciousness of the time. And, in doing so, I suggest that we might have to open ourselves to the possibility that they were motivated by a deeper and much more holistic vision of scientific inquiry, its place, and purpose in life than we have today. To explore this, there is probably no better place to go in history than that period that is typically cited as marking the beginning of modern science – the Renaissance. In this period there occurs a monumental episode that seems to hold archetypal significance for modern science. It is the “mythic beginning” of everything we now experience as science and we call it the Copernican Revolution. It is here, so the story goes, that science emerged as distinct from religion and began to become the accepted mode of inquiry into the real and the true. Hence we call it the birth of modern science. Appropriately enough, this mythic episode concerned differences between the Catholic church and certain scientists over the structure of the heavens. The question arose as to whether the Earth was the center of the universe, or the Sun. The Catholic church, along with most of the astronomers from the prior 2000 years, held that the Earth must be motionless at the center of the universe. Copernicus followed by Galileo said that the Sun must be at the center and the Earth in motion around it. Copernicus was the first to create a predictive mathematical model to demonstrate this idea. The ensuing split between science and religion is something that continued to deepen with time, and basically continues to this day. The reason for this can be found in our view of history – our developing view of how science progresses and advances. This view suggests that the arrival of a new scientific theory is data driven. This means that as new data are accumulated, old theories no longer fit or explain the data and new ones are required. For example, in this view we assume that Copernicus advanced his theory because of new data on the motion of the planets that no longer supported the old Earth-centered view. This data-driven process is an objective one with theories only emerging when required by the data. No need for religion – in fact religion is seen as getting in the way of this process. The only problem with this data-driven, historical perspective on how science advances is that, as we’ll see below, it’s not what actually happened There is something puzzling that comes to light if we do actually consider the inner lives, motivations and experiences of the early scientists (or any scientist for that matter) rather than just the “facts.” If we include what we can find out about their internal motivations, the actual writings of Copernicus and Galileo, for example, reveal that, far from being opposed to religion, they would have regarded their scientific ideas as being inspired by their religious faith, and that the result of their inquiries was a deepening of it. It was not as though science and religion were unrelated for these explorers. In fact they were closely tied. If science were a purely objective process, then it’s hard to imagine how this could be so. Clearly something else was going on for these explorers – something that we don’t find in our modern school laboratories. This sense is further reinforced when we realize that the Copernican (heliocentric) model of the solar system did not provide an improved fit to the data available at the time. It required just as many tweaks and added complexities as the older Earth-centered theory. This is inconsistent with our idea that data is the thing that drives scientific change. To drive this home it is interesting to note that, in terms of an actual proof of the heliocentric model, it would take another 200 years or more after Copernicus for that to arrive. Nevertheless, the Copernican model gained traction and after Galileo and then Kepler began to become the accepted one. Why? The clues to this go back even further in time. The real beginnings of modern science can be traced to the first times that mathematics was applied to the physical world. A time when observations (or experiments) were first described and “explained” mathematically. This did not really begin with Galileo, often described as the father of modern science, but with the ancient Greeks and probably Pythagoras. He and others at the time apparently realized the mathematical nature of music and harmony. When they looked to the heavens they perceived that the planets (there were five known at the time) moved according to the same kind of mathematics, forming a harmony called they called “musica universalis” - the music of the spheres. For the Pythagoreans there was clearly a kind of order or harmony that underlay the universe, and this order could be revealed through mathematics. It pointed to a kind of unity in creation and, hence, it was the reflection of a higher law. Mathematics and science were the required beginning of an esoteric spiritual path for the Pythagoreans and the study of these disciplines opened a window on a deep mystery. So at this time in history science was a kind of doorway to an experience that one might easily call religious (in the esoteric sense). There was an intimate connection between science and spiritual experience. If we roll the clock forward to Copernicus and Galileo, they were obviously experiencing something similar – science deepened their religious faith and experience, and was a part of it. In fact, the Renaissance was a time when the ideas and teachings of ancient Greece were being revisited in a big way. Copernicus was very influenced by the ideas of Pythagoras (and others) and the idea of the music of the spheres. The existing and complicated Earth-centered theory clearly offended his sense of harmony. He saw a way to make better music – a way that created in Copernicus a deeper sense of the unity of creation. Expressed in the language of the time, this new harmony provided a “greater revelation of God’s glory.” There were openly metaphysical and aesthetic aspects to his work. Contemplation of the heavens was virtually a spiritual practice for Copernicus. Like the Pythagoreans, his perception of the harmony in nature led him to a deeper connection with its mystery. His vision of a sun centered universe was first and foremost an aesthetic vision – one informed by his scientific training. Though he had to make his model fit the data it was clearly not data-driven – the time for the idea of a sun-centered universe had arrived. Looking at this first of the major paradigm shifts in scientific understanding, and at subsequent major shifts, it becomes apparent that something else is clearly involved in driving scientific progress. Rather than being data-driven, when looking at the subjective experience of the great scientists, it appears that the “truth” arrives first as a kind of aesthetic experience. The deeper workings of the universe are actually perceived. This seeing touches some deep chord in the perceiver. This chord is something that could motivate a person to devote their lives to furthering that truth and even risk their lives for it. The scientists are almost possessed by the visions they have, and they are completely convinced – issues with the data do not matter. There seems to be a kind of dual nature to these insight experiences – on the one hand something important about the world’s workings is perceived, and on the other hand there is gained a sense of how deep this world goes. In other words, as a new horizon opened there was simultaneously a foreknowledge of infinite horizons. And those horizons draw the scientist onward to discover more. There is also a sense of unity, wonder and awe that characterized these experiences - a deep sense of beauty and appreciation for the workings of life and the universe. Einstein said that the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.... The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle…, and I’m sure this quote is often misunderstood. Far from feeling that he knew everything about the universe – that he had explained it – his seeing the harmony (the comprehensibility) deepened his sense of the unknown mystery of it all – the infinite depths. This clearly captivated him. In fact he was taking the first steps of a Pythagorean path. The sense of harmony, beauty and wholeness can be traced from the beginnings of science, through to our own experience, and all the way into modern science. In modern science theories are assessed by their “elegance,” and equations are often called “beautiful.” Einstein said that Maxwell’s equations were so beautiful that they had to be true. One has to ask whether there’s a connection between this sensibility, the Copernican Revolution, and the Pythagorean spiritual path. In fact every revolution in science bears the hallmarks of this. The fact is that all the major paradigm shifts of science have happened before the data actually supported them. There was very often a religious or spiritual feeling instilled in the scientists themselves. Today, the physicists at the frontiers of fundamental science are busy searching for a unified theory. They are convinced that there is one truth at the heart of our universe. This isn’t very logical or rational. Why should we think that is so – why could there not be many truths underlying our universe? Physicists are captured by a vision of one fundamental truth. It is an aesthetic vision. Copernicus would have understood. The ground breaking scientists were all possessed by a vision that had an aesthetic power. They saw the possibility of a better music and a better harmony. But for most of these scientists there was a dual effect of their new theories. There always seems to be something of the mystic in the great scientists. In seeing more deeply the harmony of the universe, they gained an experience of its mystery. Like Copernicus, their investigations provided for the greater revelation of God’s glory. And this is what is exciting about science. This is the yeast that makes it rise – it is the missing ingredient. In science we play around with the intelligibility of the universe so that we can have a greater experience of its true nature, and our own true nature. On the one hand comprehensible and on the other irretrievably mysterious. Learning about the universe should awaken wonder and awe – it should reveal that we know but really do not know. And that should be exciting - it should spur us on to look further and more deeply. In our view of science we could put back the missing ingredient that is so needed. Then it would become apparent that a science class could be the first step on a spiritual path, and that it could lead us to a deep sense of connection and place in this universe.