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Description
The Trouble with Physics, by Lee Smolin; Penguin, 2007, $59.95.
LORD KELVIN, in the late nineteenth century, proclaimed that Physics was nearly finished. He believed that all the fundamental Laws of Nature were known and the rest was only a matter of seeing to the fine detail. Wow, was he wrong! Came the twentieth century and the revolutions of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics which disposed of the comfortable certainties of Kelvin for ever. But now Physics and the scientific enterprise may indeed be over except for some wriggling. Not because we know everything, but because of deep flaws in human nature.
The early Christians were idealists. Motivated by a vision of faith, hope and charity, they formed into groups and grew in numbers. At some point they needed to be organised; bishops became necessary. And the bishops became leaders and got to wear pointy hats and long dresses, which meant that a certain sort of person joined up who wouldn't have been attracted in earlier days. But the lure of pointy hats, long dresses and telling other people what to do is irresistible to a certain sort of mind, not a particularly idealistic sort, and the Catholic Church came into existence. The Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for declaring that the stars were suns like ours and might have planets like Earth. It is hard to see Jesus Christ thinking this a good idea. The church had some connection with the ideals that motivated the early Christians, but it also had autonomous objectives instantly recognisable to the Sanhedrin that Christ himself castigated.
We have seen this happen many times. A university was originally a collection of scholars who ran things for their own benefit: they pursued knowledge and taught students in order to fund that pursuit. A man at the back of each lecture class carried a hat around... |
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