The Science of Discworld IV

Einstein’s curved spacetime. Fundamental particles such as the electron changed from tiny hard spheres to probability waves, and are now considered to be localised excitations in a quantum field. The field is a sea of particles and the particles are isolated waves in that sea. The Higgs field is an example: here the corresponding particles are Higgs bosons. You can’t have one without the other: if you want to be a particle physicist, you have to understand the physics of quantum fields as well. So the word ‘particle’ necessarily acquires a different meaning.
    Scientific revolutions don’t change the universe. They change how humans interpret it. Many scientific controversies are mainly about interpretations, not ‘the facts’. For example, many creationists don’t dispute the
results
of DNA sequencing; fn3 instead, they dispute the interpretation of those results as evidence for evolution.
    Humans are hot on interpretation. It lets them wriggle out of awkward positions. In 2012, in a televised debate about sexism in religion and the vexed issue of female bishops in the Church of England, some months before the General Synod voted against the proposal, one participant quoted 1 Timothy 2:12-14: ‘But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.’ Itseems hard to interpret this as anything other than a statement that women are inferior to men, that they should be subservient and
shut up
, and that moreover, original sin is entirely the fault of women, not men, because Eve fell for the serpent’s temptation. Despite this apparently unequivocal reading, another participant stoutly maintained that the verses meant nothing of the kind. It was just a matter of interpretation.
    Interpretations matter, because ‘the facts’ seldom explain how the universe relates to
us
. ‘The facts’ tell us that the Sun’s heat comes from nuclear reactions, mainly hydrogen fusing to helium. But we want more. We want to know
why
. Did the Sun come into existence
in order to
provide us with heat? Or is it the other way round: are we on this planet because the Sun’s heat provided an environment in which creatures like us could evolve? The facts are the same either way, but their implications depend on how we interpret them.
    Our default interpretation is to view the world in human terms. This is no great surprise. If a cat has a point of view, it surely views the world in feline terms. But humanity’s natural mode of operation has had a profound effect on how we think about our world, and on what kinds of explanation we find convincing. It also has a profound effect on
what world we think about
. Our brains perceive the world on a human scale, and interpret those perceptions in terms of what is – or sometimes was – important
to us
.
    Our focus on the human scale may seem entirely reasonable. How else would we view our world? But rhetorical questions deserve rhetorical answers, and for us, unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, there are alternatives. The human brain can consciously modify its own thought-patterns. We can teach ourselves to think on other scales, both smaller and larger. We can train ourselves to avoid psychological traps, such as believing what we want to
because
we want to. We can think in even more alien ways: mathematicians routinely contemplate spaces with more than three dimensions, shapes so complicated thatthey have no meaningful volume, surfaces with only one side, and different sizes of infinity.
    Humans
can
think inhuman thoughts.
    That kind of thinking is said to be analytic. It may not come naturally, and its outcomes may not always be terribly comforting, but it’s
possible
. It has been the main path to today’s world, in which analytic thinking has become increasingly necessary for our survival. If you spend your time comfortably telling yourself that the world is what you want it to be, you will get some nasty surprises, and it may be too late to do anything about them. Unfortunately, the need to think analytically places a huge barrier between science and many human desires and beliefs that re-emerge in every generation. Battles scientists fondly imagined were won in the nineteenth century must continually be re-fought; rationality and evidence alone may not be enough to prevail.
    There is a reason for our natural