Newton's "Absurdity"

A look at the history of scientific progress through an often unused perspective: the people that actually lived it.

At the turn of the 15th century, Copernicus created his model of the solar system, placing the sun at the center, putting an end to the increasing complexity of Ptolmaic epicycles, and is said to have kickstarted the scientific revolution. Though, to think that the moment of the “scientific revolution” first appearing in history, meant that this was the point in time when science first started getting utilised, is to misunderstand the term. The Ptolmaic enterprise that preceded Copernicus, that placed the earth at the center, motionless, while the other planets moved around it, was an immense scientific enterprise. It captured the work of hundreds of people, and the resources of kings and emperors; and from a methodological point of view, was not much different from modern day cosmology: The model was tested against observations, and when it was contradicted by them, modified to accommodate new observations, usually by the addition of new epicycles (it should be noted though, that this has been exaggerated, and not many, if any, additional epicycles were added beyond Ptolemy himself.). At its end, it was an extremely accurate explanation of the “universe”; and the introduction of the Copernican model, that placed the Sun at the center, at least initially, provided no increases in predictive accuracy. So the science historian Thomas Kuhn points out, and is also further detailed in the above link.

What really defined the scientific revolution, then, was not the introduction of the scientific method, which had existed for hundreds if not thousands of years (anthropologists like David Graeber identify it going back millenia), but was the introduction of the shared reductionist base, known as the mechanical philosophy. This was what Thomas Kuhn would call the first paradigm of physics, or natural philosophy.

The mechanical philosophy was the idea that all the observations of the world (except those identified with the mind), could be reduced down to various kinds of motions and collisions of matter. Essentially, the idea that we could reduce down understanding of the universe, to experience of the world that our brains evolved with; at the level of our conscious experience, everything we observe from the outside word appears to be various instances of cause and effect, facilitated by the motions and collisions of observable matter. As I outlined in the last post, and as Hume devised, this instinct is so strong, that even 10 month old infants assume such a causal mechanism to exist even in the absence of observing one.

The mechanical philosophy thus, was an extremely high goal for science: the aspiration that the universe could be understood in terms of concepts that form the foundation of our entire experiential reality. If the universe could be reduced down to our mechanical intuitions, in the same way that a combustion engine can, then we would truly be its masters; being able to sculpt new universes as a hobby, as we do combustion engines, as long as we understood enough about it. These were the aspirations of the scientific revolution, with the caveat that the human mind was beyond this understanding, and found its origin in a godly creator (mind-body duality was defined in these terms). Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we are not gods, as proven by the failure of the mechanical philosophy, which we will go into now.

Newton’s theory of gravity is what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift, or scientific revolution (distinct from the scientific revolution just mentioned); in the sense that the framework that came before it, that was considered the valid way to test and give value to scientific knowledge, was undone by it (though as we will see, not quickly). Newton called the implications of his theory,

so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matter a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.

“Absurdity” precisely because he could not reduce it down to the motions and collisions of matter: instead, it appeared to propose an “occult” notion of “action-at-at-distance”; something that could not be reduced down to the mechanical philosophy, no matter how hard Newton tried, and he spent his life doing so. All of a sudden, the occult forces that the likes of Leibnitz, Copernicus, Gallileo, etc had tried to banish, found there way back in, and movement of your arm could indeed shift the moon in its place (technically, a slight change in the distribution of the mass of earth, affecting the moons orbit). Along these lines, Newton outlined this new paradigm of physical understanding that his theory required, stating:

To tell us that every species of things is endowed with an occult specific quality by which it acts and produces manifest effects is to tell us nothing. But, to derive two or three general principles of motion from phenomena, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and actions of all corporeal things follow from those manifest principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy, though the causes of those principles were not yet discovered.

Here, Newton is both defending himself from his peers that accused him of returning to the occult; but also acknowledging that his mathematical approach did indeed fail to live up to the goals of the scientific revolution. This is what he means by the causes not having been discovered, meaning no reduction to the mechanical philosophy; the the use of “yet” betrays the intuition he had that they would eventually be reduced. The task has now been completely given up on in the mainstream sciences.

After the dust had settled, without being quite aware of its origins, physicists gave up the goal of trying to reduce the universe down to our foundational sensory experience, declaring that the universe was fundamentally “unintelligible” to us in this sense, and any search for intelligibility was a non-scientific one. We see this all the time when modern physicists dismiss common sense questions, like what came before the big bang (seeking that mechanical cause and effect), as unscientific questions. Though I doubt these scientists realise, that in making such statements, they are by implication stating that the scientific revolution was unscientific.

It however took science quite a long time to get to this modern point; the implications of Newton’s Absurdity were slow to be internalised. Many of the great physicists like Hertz, Maxwell, Faraday, still clung to the mechanical philosophy even well after action-at-a-distance had been generally accepted; as Helmholtz Notes in his Preface to to Hertz’s “The principles of mechanics in a new Form”:

In explaining electrical phenomena Faraday was bent upon excluding all preconceived notions involving assumptions as to the existence of phenomena or substances which could not be directly perceived. Especially did he reject, as did Newton at the beginning of his career, the hypothesis of existence of action-at-a-distance… So he first sought for indications of changes in media lying between electrified bodies or between magnetic bodies. He succeeded in detecting magnetism or diamagnetism in nearly all the bodies which up to that time had been regarded as non-magnetic. He also showed that good insulators undergo a change when exposed to the action of electric force; this he denoted as the dielectric polarisation of insulators… men were bound to recognise that part of the magnetic and electric action was produced by the polarisation of the intervening medium; another part might still remain, and this might be due to action at a distance.

Faraday and Maxwell inclined towards the simpler view that there was no action at a distance…

Interestingly enough, Helmholtz further notes that Hertz attempt to measure electromagnetic radiation was motivated by attempting to prove Maxwell and Faraday correct, that electromagnetism was not action at a distance, and claims that Hertz did succeed in that goal. This may at first seem like a very strange thing for Helmholtz to declare; but it makes sense once you realise that these great scientists simply assumed something like an Ether to exist, and did not even conceive of the possibility of it not. The Ether being an all pervading medium capable of creating direct causal contact between two or more apparently separate objects, much like the waves on the surface of a lake, produced by a speed boat, affecting another floating at a distance. Thus “action-at-a-distance” is gone. Helmholtz finally notes that

Gravity still remains an unsolved puzzle; as yet a satisfactory explanation of it has not been forthcoming and we are still compelled to treat it as a pure action-at-a-distance.

So we see here, that even 150 years later, prominent scientists were holding out for that “yet”; action at a distance was not a satisfactory explanation; the emergence of gravity from matter perhaps as mysterious as the emergence of minds from matter, so some like Newton speculated.

Inside “The principles of mechanics in a new Form”, Hertz attempts to give a theory of gravity that avoids action-at-a-distance; in particular, Hertz makes explicit that he wants to remove any notion of “fields”, which he finds unsatisfying, and rely on explaining mechanics only in terms of space, time and masses. But he did ultimately fail, as this work has fallen into complete obscurity. No-one outside of extremely niche circles has heard of Hertz’s theory of gravity.

This fascination with this mysterious quality of matter lasted all the way to the early 20th century, with the Michelson–Morley experiment finally putting the nail in the coffin for the idea of an ether, and any notion of mechanical contact. Thus, in a very real sense, the Newtonian revolution took a full 200 years to be properly internalised into the scientific paradigm; the greatest minds, even after 200 years, eventually failed to reduce any of the most simple observable phenomena down to the mechanical philosophy; the death of the ether, a lingering but barely recognisable implementation of it, being the final nail in the coffin. Action-at-a-distance, with its mathematical formalism of “field”, was simply taken for granted, and the idea of questioning it, the new “absurdity”.

There is a huge amount of interesting history here, including later formations in the 1960s to conceive of gravity as a kind of electromagnetism that is realised by the index of refraction of vacuum, that I will leave here for now and return to the point.

Similar examples pop up throughout the history of science. Next we saw the more complex phenomena of chemistry, and people’s attempts to reduce it down to the foundational frameworks left by Maxwell and Newton; again, failure. Though we again see a similar hope that the achievement will eventually come, this time coming from Bertrand Russel, who in 1927 stated

[chemical laws] cannot at present be reduced to physical laws

Again, no such reduction was ever achieved, as these physical laws, as they existed then, were again another ill-conceived reduction base. Instead, quantum mechanics was invented to unify chemistry and classical physics (to a degree), again, showing the new more abstract reduction base was itself also ill-conceived; the Newtonian paradigm overturned even before its implications could be fully internalised. It would be foolish, I think, given this long history, to not think that the same things will happen to attempts to reduce general relativity down to quantum mechanics. But, often, science can only progress by foolish endeavours.

Reality, seems to defy at every step, our attempts to reduce it down to some base considered fundamental; this may come as a surprise to many, including professional scientists, that often consider science to be a success in the logical application of reduction. A view of science as such seems to only be able to be fostered within a general historical ignorance; but then, excellent physicists do not need knowledge of history to advance their field, so this comes as no surprise. Instead, a historically grounded view of science makes it appear to be an effort in continually unifying understanding, not by reduction, but by inventing increasingly abstract frameworks of understanding, and throwing away the old ones, with reduction only appearing successful when these things are viewed on the much shorter time scale of what Kuhn called an individual paradigm of normal science.

The cognitive Scientist Noam Chomsky identified this trend, and considered it to be evidence of the cognitive limitations of our species. Capturing it in the compelling statement

Contrary to the ghost being banished from the machine, Newton banished the machine, from the ghost.

His claim being that physics has effectively, without being quite conscious of it, internalised our cognitive limits by way of accepting that reality is unintelligible to us, and lowering the goal of scientific inquiry instead to make intelligible mathematical theories of the world, free from the requirements of determining the “causes” of their principles, that motivated the scientific revolution. Donald Hoffman is another figure who has come to a very similar conclusion as Noam Chomsky here; though as far as I know, without any reference to history of science. Though Hoffman seems to believe that we are able to step beyond these cognitive limitations (a conclusion I do not follow and see no basis for).

It may be the case that science can only progress, in a sense, by this continuing internalisation of our cognitive limits; a continuing lowering of the goals to more achievable ones. The reduction bases of today, like Neural Networks, Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are likely to go the same way as the mechanical philosophy and classical physics. In fact, intelligible mathematical theories of the world may themselves become too high a goal, as we are already starting to see a possible replacement of them by black box type correlative models in the form of deep learning.

In the next post, I intend to follow up on the implications of this trend the attempts to reduce Minds to Neural Networks.