FROM CERTAINTY TO UNCERTAINTY

This book puts the development of science and ideas in the 20th century into a challenging perspective. In 1900 Lord Kelvin proclaimed that science had discovered all the laws of nature. Just a few years later the clear mechanical certainties of the Newtonian world view had been overthrown. Einstein's Relativity had shown the flexibility of our measurements of space and time, and quantum physics had replaced causal precision with statistical probability and uncertainty at the heart of things. Above all, Bohr stated that the state of affairs within the atom before the collapse of the wave equation was essentially unknowable to the human mind. David Peat points out that this move in science from certainty to uncertainty is paralleled by a large number of other cultural changes in the 20th century. He concentrates on philosophy and painting. Wittgenstein persuaded Anglo-Saxon philosophy to abandon traditional metaphysics and concentrate on the limits of language. Painting has moved from the precise representation of the objective world in Renaissance perspective through Impressionism to the abstract representation of the painter's feelings and the random assembly of objects. Peat's theme can, indeed, be extended. High classical music has moved from the tonal and harmonic precision of Bach's equi - tempered piano to atonal dissonance. Literary criticism has moved from the reverent appreciation of the great works of the past to deconstruction and cultural relativism with a politically correct bias. Publicly accepted personal morality has shifted from puritanical restraint to sexual anarchy. No explanation is offered for this movement from certainty to uncertainty. There is no evidence whatsoever that any of the cultural leaders were aware of the changing world picture of science. Perhaps there was a shift in group consciousness of which neither artists nor scientists were aware. Perhaps it must just be put down to what Jung called "synchronicity". Significantly it was the painters who were the prophets of the new age. Impressionist painting started off in Paris 40 years before the advent of quantum physics. Interestingly, Peat omits the greatest "synchronicity" of all. Mach (the first instrumentalist scientist), Wittgenstein, Kandinsky (founder of abstract painting ), Schönberg, (atonal music ), Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler and Leon Trotsky ( co-organiser with Lenin of the Bolshevik revolution) all lived in pre First World War Vienna. Together they shattered the comfortable security of 19th century imperial Europe. Most were Jewish intellectuals thoroughly assimilated into middle class German culture, and the man who was about to destroy the Jewry of Central Europe was living in the slums round the corner. Peat does not view the movement into uncertainty without some reservations. He notes with a little concern that modern art has reached the point where neither the critic nor the general public can any longer distinguish between the joke, the fraud, and the genuine work of art. He makes great play with chaos theory and argues that all our certainties, our measurements and our apparently proven scientific laws are, all of them, averages imposed by a rational grid upon reality. Reality itself may well contain tiny perturbations which may feed back into disastrous unforeseen change. Who could have foreseen that 17 men armed only with DIY knives could change the course of 21st century history, as in the Twin Towers? In Peat's view, rational structures of rigid order have lost their legitimacy in science, in the arts, and even in mathematics where Gödel's theorem has shown that maths itself must contain axioms it can never itself prove. His answer is that chaos itself has the capacity to produce self-ordering systems. The ecological challenge of possible climate change is more likely to be met by groups of individuals acting responsibly, than by any authoritarian fiats by a hypothetical world government. Impressive as the argument is, there are caveats. The cultural influence of modern science may be less in the way of quantum uncertainty, and rather more in the opposite direction of the dominance of precise and accurate material knowledge. The mathematics of quantum theory in the 20th century have given us unprecedented power over the energies of the atom, and profound insights into the origin of the universe. The motto here is not uncertainty. Peat indicates that there is a reverse direction from uncertainty and chaos to structure and order. His examples of how this happens are less clear than the exposition of the descent into disorder. Yet our understanding of the external world and the existence of civilised life all depend upon this reverse direction. This book raises more questions than it answers. For that very reason it can be recommended as a good read.