Introduction

Abstract

There are some questions that physics since the days of Newton simply cannot answer. Perhaps the most important of these can be categorized as ‘questions of ethics’, and ‘questions of ultimate meaning’. The question of humanity’s place in the cosmos and in nature is pre-eminently a philosophical and religious one, and physics seems to have little to contribute to answering it. Although physics claims to have made very fundamental discoveries about the cosmos and nature, its concern is with the coherence and order of material phenomena rather than with questions of meaning. Now and then thinkers such as Stephen Hawking or Fritjof Capra emerge, who appear to claim that a total world-view can be derived from physics. Generally, however, such authors do not actually make any great effort to make good on their claim to completeness: their answers to questions of meaning often pale in comparison with their answers to conventional questions in physics.² Moreover, to the extent that they do attempt to answer questions of meaning, it is easy to show that they draw on assumptions from outside physics.³ However, it seems that the fact that physics, ethics and religion are sometimes mixed, should not be attributed to anything inherent in these fields, but to incorrect understandings of these fields and their interrelationships. Goethe said that Newtonian science puts “nature on the rack,” using a metaphor that he borrowed from Bacon.’ We can give it a new twist and say that physics only makes ethical and religious statements under the compulsion of an inquisitor. Physics, ethics and religion appear to be separated from each other by ‘natural’ limits.

The Age of Reason is left the Dark Ages of the history of mechanics.

Clifford A. Truesdell¹