Christopher Potter - How to Make a Human Being - A Body of Evidence

3 | Philosophy is adversity’s sweet milk, says Friar Laurence. Hang up philosophy! says Romeo in reply. Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, Displant a town, reverse a prince’s doom, It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more.

Philosophy is dead.

Stephen Hawking, on the first page of his book The Grand Design

Philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex.

Steve Jones, biologist

Philosophers keep out. Work in progress.

A notice pinned to the laboratory door of the physicist Niels Bohr (1885–1962)

If you ask in how many cases in the past has a philosopher successfully solved a problem, as far as we can say there are no cases.

Francis Crick (1916–2004), biologist

4 | In refutation of Zeno’s paradox, 1Diogenes got up and walked across the room.

To study Metaphysics as they have always been studied appears to me to be like puzzling at astronomy without mechanics.

Charles Darwin (1809–82), in his notebook

Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, ‘Why?’ and sometimes he thought, ‘Wherefore?’ and sometimes he thought, ‘Inasmuch as which?’ – and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.

Eeyore the philosopher in A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh

Philosophers have been profoundly wrong in almost every question under the sun over the last 2,000 years. You should never listen to the answers of philosophers, but you should listen to their questions.

Christof Koch, neuroscientist

Philosophers will tell you the whole idea of science is just a subset of philosophy.

David Rothenberg, philosopher

5 | Philosophy used to matter more. Of Plato’s five kinds of imagined regimes, the greatest – named Kallipolis – was ruled by philosopher kings. 2Socrates had to die because philosophy was seen as a threat to society. These days philosophy matters only to philosophers.

Philosophy is the highest, the worthiest, of human endeavours.

Slavoj Žižek, philosopher

6 | Scientists have a habit of dismissing the questions they don’t want to answer. They call them philosophical. For many scientists, philosophy is a step too close to theology. Scientists eschew philosophy for logic or even for just plain common sense.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

It is generally thought that common sense is practical. It is practical only in a short-term view. Common sense declares that it is foolish to bite the hand that feeds you. But it is foolish only up to the moment when you realize that you might be fed very much better.

John Berger, writer and art critic

7 | If, as philosophers have concluded, there is nothing that the universe can be made out of, scientists have wondered what that nothing might be.

8 | Science, philosophy and religion have this in common: that they all must account for how nothing became something. Philosophers have worried for centuries about the nature of substance and of nothingness. Religions have their various creation myths. Science too tells its own creation story. The triumph of particle physics is that it so nearly explains how nothing became everything.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), philosopher and mathematician

All things are born of nothing and are borne onwards to infinity.

Blaise Pascal (1623–62), philosopher and mathematician

9 | If only we knew exactly how the story began. If only we could say, ‘Once upon a time’ and know what follows.

10 | An ancient Greek cosmology has the world created out of a pre-existing condition called chaos. Kaos is not emptiness but formlessness. It was the world before there were things in it. The word nothing, like some fossil of ancient thought, still retains that original concept of no thing. The universe emerged when Logos , meaning variously form, knowledge and word, came into contact with Kaos . Out of their union comes Cosmos (beauty or order, as in cosmetics, which bring order to the face). The opening words of St John’s gospel repeat this ancient prescription: In the beginning was the Word. In the original Greek the word translated as ‘word’ is Logos . And in Genesis we find God creating nature by separating out from chaos what then become things with names. Naming is a process of separating out, and the first step in any scientific investigation of the world. Before explanation must come the naming of parts. The idea of nothing as emptiness came later. That the universe was created out of emptiness, ex nihilo , is a radical departure from how creation was envisaged by certain ancient Greek philosophers, and was an interpretation imposed on the Biblical story by medieval scholars.

11 | Our current best modern-day creation stories are variants of the Big Bang theory, a mathematical description of the universe coaxed out of the equations of general relativity. Even though they were his equations, Einstein at first denied the Big Bang. Later he changed his mind.

The most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.

Einstein, of an exposition of the Big Bang given by its inventor (discoverer?) Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), priest and physicist

12 | All matter can ultimately be reduced to constituent particles – bosons and fermions – that are the excitations of various types of energetic field. At the Big Bang there may have been a single kind of energetic field which, in an expanding universe, evolved into other kinds of energetic field.

Within a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe is a cascade of particles decaying into other particles. Whole eras of the universe passed before it was even a second old.

13 | We know what happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, but what happened in the beginning?

14 | In the beginning everything was in the same place at the same time. In the beginning the physical world is pure energy, whatever that is. In the beginning the universe is some condition of form, number and energy held in perfect symmetry. It cannot last. The symmetry breaks and becomes a world of asymmetries, imperfections and accidents. The world falls into existence.

The positive energy within matter can be counterbalanced by the negative sink of the all-pervading gravitational field such that the total energy of the universe is potentially nothing; when combined with quantum 3uncertainty, 4this allows the possibility that everything is … some quantum fluctuation living on borrowed time. Everything may thus be a quantum fluctuation of nothing.

Frank Close, particle physicist

Zero exists now, it has always existed, and it will always exist. It is the native state of existence. It is what the physicist David Bohm called implicate order. It is the timeless quantum superposition of all universes and all life in an infinite universe. As the most brilliant physicists have long held, a perfect zero is the most ordered state of all, it just isn’t found in the past where time begins. It exists in the future where time ends.

Gevin Giorbran, science writer

15 | Energy leaks out of the vacuum for no reason at all except randomness and the pressure exerted by a sink of infinite negative energy. Overall the universe is nothing at all.

16 | Take matter out of the universe and reality becomes unstable, liable to give birth randomly to new universes. The vacuum is the birthing ground of universes; like the silence of the mystics, a roiling place of visions and madness, of annihilating forces.