Nature in Modern Science
Nature in Modern Science
Francis Bacon was apparently influenced by Machiavelli in arguing that knowledge should avoid building up hypotheses based upon anything which could not be directly observed in the light of day. (Both authors wrote extensively about history and politics.) He was clearly also influenced by the debates in Europe caused by recent speculation about astronomy - for example that of Gallileo and Copernicus, which in turn seems to have looked back to classical atomists such as Democritus and Lucretius. What is new in modern times is the will to argue the case for such science in a political and public debate.
In his Novum Organum Bacon argued that the only forms or natures we should hypothesize are the “simple” (as opposed to compound) ones such as the ways in which heat, movement, etc. work. For example in aphorism 51 he writes:
51. The human understanding is, by its own nature, prone to abstraction, and supposes that which is fluctuating to be fixed. But it is better to dissect than abstract nature; such was the method employed by the school of Democritus, which made greater progress in penetrating nature than the rest. It is best to consider matter, its conformation, and the changes of that conformation, its own action, and the law of this action or motion, for forms are a mere fiction of the human mind, unless you will call the laws of action by that name.
Following Bacon’s advice, forms are now replaced by “laws of nature” or “laws of physics” in all scientific thinking. To use Aristotle’s well-known terminology concerning types of cause, these laws are descriptions of efficient cause, and not formal cause or final cause. It means modern science limits its hypothesizing about non-physical things to the assumption that there are regularities to the ways of things which do not change. Modern scientists often even argue that they have in this way avoided any sort of metaphysics. Some find this claim debatable, because by definition modern science can never prove this assumption to be true.
The result is that modern Baconian science normally sees nature, even human beings, as “matter in motion”, obeying certain “laws of nature” which science seeks to understand. For this reason the most fundamental science is generally understood to be “physics” - the name for which is still recognizable as meaning that it is the study of nature.
Matter is itself commonly defined as the substance of which physical objects are composed. It constitutes the observable Universe. According to the theory of relativity there is no distinction between matter and energy, because matter can be converted to energy (see annihilation), and vice versa (see matter creation). Philosophically, matter constitutes the formless substratum of all things, which exists only potentially and from which reality is produced. In the sense of content, matter is also used in contrast to form.
Idealism and the survival of Metaphysics
Modern science has also not ended Idealism, or more generally it has not ended speculation about metaphysics beyond just “laws of nature”. Apart from the position of the world’s main religions, philosophers such as Immanuel Kant have continued to argue the case for positions in conflict with that of modern science.
Beauty in nature
The writer Stephen Fry has commented that if we look around us, anything ugly that we see will have been created by human hands; this exemplifies a widely held view that nature is intrinsically beautiful. That the beauty of nature has been celebrated by so large a proportion of our art is further proof of the strength of this association between nature and beauty. Many scientists also share the conviction that nature is beautiful; the French mathematician, Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) said:
“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.
If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of quality and appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.”
A common classical idea of beautiful art involves the word mimesis, which can be defined as the perfection and imitation of nature. It is in nature that the perfect is implied through symmetry, equal division, and other perfect mathematical forms and notions. Plato wrote about Socrates and his ideas about how the perfect forms of things exist, and in nature we see the copy of this eternally existing form.
June 16 2008 10:46 pm | What