INVENTING REALITY
Physics as Language
Bruce Gregory
New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1988
256 pp., $18.95
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! For the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, not love, nor light, Nor certitude…
When Mathew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" was published in 1867, the world that science described seemed very solid, very real, and as predictable as clockwork. The redoubtable Lord Kelvin told physicists to have anything much to do; just about everything was discovered, known measured. All that remained was to clean up a few details.
Yet the poet was more correct in his view than the physicist. By the time the year 1900 came around, physics was being rocked to its foundations. Radioactivity, X-rays, the quantum theory, and Einstein's relativity theory would open up a whole new universe for physicists to probe and study. Fundamental limits were discovered; not merely limits on what we know, but limits on what we can know. Certitude disappeared form the physicists' world view.
In Inventing Reality: Physics as Language, Bruce Gregory presents an intriguing problem to the reader. Is there a real, absolute universe that we can discover and understand? Or does our comprehension of the world around us depend on our point of view, the language we use, the ideas we carry around in our heads?
Sculptors such as Michelangelo have said that the beautiful statues they make were inside the rough stone even while it was being quarried. The sculptor, they say, merely removes the outer layers of stone to reveal the statue in all its finished splendor. It that what physicists do? Chip away the obscuring layers of ignorance to reveal the universe as it really is?
Or is the sculptor's statue a product of his own mind, his own inner conceptions? Does his hand stop when the stone has been worked to the point where the statue he saw in his imagination appears before his eyes? Is this the way physicists probe the nature of the universe? Do they start with preconceived ideas and work until their measurements match their assumptions?
Is there an absolutely universe, a universe that "really is," awaiting discovery by physicists? Or is the universe what we imagine it to be, a universe that is shaped by our mental conceptions and the language we use to describe it? Is there a God behind it all, a master principle, an absolute reality that we mortals strive to uncover and understand? Or is the universe simply what we make of it? These are the questions that Gregory grapples with: ultimate questions--with no ultimate answers.
Gregory draws a parallel with umpires at a baseball game. One ump says, "I calls 'em the way I sees 'em." In other words, empirical measurements are the guide to understanding the way the real world works. The second umpire says, "I calls 'em the way they are." That represents a faith that measurements actually describe the real
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