Monday, 26 December 2022 | Vir Singh
—–GUEST COLUMN——
Vir Singh
The universe has no edge, no end, and so is our curiosity to understand the universe in its entirety. We are looking deeper into our universe through increasingly sophisticated telescopes and lenses. We are flying our rockets to travel to the most distant galaxies. Astronomers have recently released the most detailed images ever of the Orion nebula, 1,300 light-years away. Earlier in the summer, they discovered white dwarf stars and the most distant galaxy ever observed.
The Orion nebula is one of the brightest nebulae in the night sky. Four interstellar clouds of ionised hydrogen of this magnitude contain a young open cluster of four primary stars known as trapezium. The Orion nebula, with more than 2,000 times greater mass than our sun, is the most studied celestial object in the Milky Way outside the solar system, which continues to excite our curiosities. Close study of nebulae has told us much about how stars and planetary systems form from the collapse of clouds of gas and dust. We have gained amazing knowledge by exploring every aspect of our earth and everything ranging from the biosphere to the biomolecules, but the natural processes that create life on this living planet have also been fragmented. Mankind has realised that the earth can no longer bear us. Constantly registering an increasing trend in temperatures, the planet Earth is likely to turn into a fireball in less than 1,000 years. There is an infinite curiosity to know that there can be a refuge like Earth in the universe other than Earth, but the reason is not that much. This curiosity, this eagerness, this zeal, this thirst is a humble gift to mankind of its natural evolution. Natural evolution has gifted us with a mind that has an infinite lure to know, discover, explore, invent, and understand everything and every phenomenon whether of the Earth or in the cosmos.
To satisfy our natural curiosity, we had to dive into the depths of the universe. We had to travel to the galaxies. We had to search for life-sustaining planets, fulfilling the purpose of the evolution of mankind—and we are doing the same, will continue to do the same, till we achieve our goals. What we have to learn is endless—as vast as the universe in which our planet revolves. It’s exciting and sometimes uncomfortable to learn how much we don’t know yet. The amount we know and the amount of knowledge we have acquired is not even a fraction of the amount we do not know and the amount of knowledge we have to acquire.
In ‘When We Cease to Understand the World’, Benjamin Labatut describes how the advent of quantum mechanics upended the linear path that, up to that point, had accelerated our scientific success in reducing the world into smaller, and smaller pieces. It is also inherent in the principle of science that to understand an object, go on reducing it to such an extent that it is easy to understand it. In this way, science fragmented the matter down to the atom and the biosphere down to the cell and tried to understand more and more of the universe. In 1927, at a conference of the world’s greatest scientists, Labatut reported that Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr had presented their astonishing vision of quantum mechanics. An electron is not in a certain place until it is measured; it appears only at that moment. Before measuring, it has no characteristics; it cannot even be imagined before observation. Through this discovery, scientific thinkers faced the limits of our ability to fully understand the building blocks of life. Heisenberg also proposed the famous “uncertainty principle”, which states that both the position and momentum of a particle cannot be measured with precision. The more accurately you know one value, the less accurately you know the other. Quantum mechanics changed the trajectory of science. Quantum mechanics describes nature in a way that is different from how we usually think of science. Instead of telling us that things will happen, quantum mechanics tells us how likely certain things are to happen. Although its advent changed the reductionist nature of some scientific approaches, its inherent uncertainty did not make it any less valuable. Quantum mechanics is the foundation of chemistry and cosmology.
Astrophysicist Adam Frank and his colleagues say that scientific change has changed the historical observer position assigned to the scientist. According to him, “We can no longer expect to know the world in itself, outside of our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is as fundamental to scientific knowledge as what is revealed by physical reality.” Physics concerns itself with reality but often does not have the temptation to delve into the very depths of reality. Physics can sometimes represent only a rough representation of what we say about reality. The real stories in our lives arise from our interactions with the world around us.
Although we find ourselves between two poles of uncertainty—the infinitely small and the infinitely great – our understanding of quantum mechanics can help us gain an accurate perspective.
We can humbly accept the realisation that we are far from a complete understanding of nature and reality, and will likely never be able to fully understand nature and reality. Science is not perfect, but we can learn to grow within this lack of certainty. It can help us approach the world with more curiosity and wonder. As author Marilyn Robinson puts it, we should “look for a science whose rules and methods merely assert the truth value of its assumptions rather than overturn the assumptions of the questioners”. We can act according to and in tune with what we know, such as our ever-growing appreciation of the deep interactions that make life possible—from underground to the elaborate mycelial networks to the global carbon cycle, from quantum to the cosmos. We constantly observe, analyse and philosophise our world and share it, revising our understanding over time. Our experiences will always be part of our “reality”. The two cannot be separated. We always face uncertainty as well. But in the absence of certainty, there is also often an infinite number of probabilities encamped among the countless range of possible outcomes. Collectively we can change the world by doing the best we can, through our relationships with nature and each other.
The most brilliant of the cosmic dimensions of human knowledge is the search for the possibilities of life outside the Earth or the creation of life possibilities through knowledge-based systems. It has become an imperative of the destiny of our contemporary world to see the emergence of life on other planets and/or moons.
(The author is professor emeritus of environmental science, GB Pant University of Agriculture and Technology. Views expressed are personal)
