Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction

Abstract

The morning after giving an invited lecture on the socially constructed nature of scientific knowledge, I had the privilege of watching as a STM (scanning tunneling microscope) operator zoomed in on a sample of graphite, and as we approached a scale of thousands of nanometers… hundreds of nanometers… tens of nanometers… down to fractions of a nanometer, individual carbon atoms were imaged before our very eyes. The experience was so sublime that it sent chills through my body — and I stood there, a theoretical physicist who, like most of my kind, rarely ventures into the basements of physics buildings experimental colleagues call “home”, conscious that this was one of those life moments when the amorphous jumble of history seems to crystallize in a single instant. How many times had I recounted for my students the evidence for the existence of atoms? And there they were — just the right size and grouped in a hexagonal structure with the interatomic spacings as predicted by theory! “If only Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, and especially Mach, could have seen this!” I found myself exclaiming.

Because truths we don’t suspect have a hard time making themselves felt, as when thirteen species of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females stay undiscovered due to bias against such things existing, we have to meet the universe halfway. Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade. The sky’s high solid is anything but, the sun going under hasn’t budged, and if death divests the self it’s the sole event in nature that’s exactly what it seems.

[From the poem “Cascade Experiment”, by Alice Fulton (Fulton, 1990)]