ambivalence

Wired, Issue 16.02

Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life — science doesn’t handle those issues well at all. But that’s cool. We have art and religion for that stuff. Science also assumes predictable cause and effect in a world that’s a chaotic, bubbling stew of randomness. But that’s OK, too. Our approximations are usually good enough. No, the real reason science sucks is that it makes us look bad. It makes us bit players in the Big Story of the universe, and it exposes some key limitations of the human brain.
Look at it this way: Before science, we humans had dominion over Earth, the center of the universe. Now we’re just a bunch of hairless apes on a wet rock orbiting a minor star in a marginal galaxy.
Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can’t really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave us brains that crave certainty, with irrational fears of crashing in an airplane and a built-in weakness for just-so stories about intelligent design. Meanwhile, the true wonders revealed by the scientific method — species that change into new species over time, continents that float around the planet, a quantum-mechanical world where nothing is for sure — are worse than counterintuitive. To a depressingly large number of us, they’re downright threatening.
In other words, thanks to evolution, half of all Americans don’t believe in evolution. That’s the universe for you: impersonal, uncaring, and ironic.

I came across an article on Wired magazine (16.01) titled The Software That Will Take Digital F/X to the Next Level of Awesome, relaying how Jos Stam, a computer scientist specializing in 3-D graphics who loves complex problems, view “reality [as] a binary riddle to be cracked, a series of fleeting images best appreciated after they’ve been rendered into 1s and 0s”. He has already devised an algorithm that models digital smoke with astounding realism (used in Lord of the Rings and War of the Worlds) and is currently working on daunting problems involving the interactions of objects and forces, which if successful would be “the holy grail of computer animation”. He wants “software that can play God with pixels”.

The article certainly affirms my belief that nature is innately governed by mathematics, as there seems to be mathematics and numbers in every aspects of the world, think golden ratio which is embedded in arts and nature. I am ceaselessly fascinated by the fact that nature can be accurately modeled by the complex dynamics of mathematics, attempting for example to mimic how elements interact in the real world at a fundamental level such as smoke with wind or solid objects with fabrics.

Paul Dirac, a Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1933, said that “one could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better”.

We may wonder, for example, why all the phenomena encompassed by electromagnetism, from the behavior of electrons to the nature of light, can be explained by a set of four differential equations known as Maxwell’s equations. Equally puzzling is the fact that some geometrical curves like the ellipse, invented/discovered by the Greek mathematician Menaechmus around 350 BC, were found 2,000 years later to describe the orbits of planets around the Sun. Similarly, group theory proved to be essential in the understanding of both the organization of elementary (subatomic) particles, and the structure of solids. What is it that makes mathematics fit the observable universe like a glove?

- Mario Livio, author of The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi