REFLECTIONS ON SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES
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The Secret
Emily Dickenson (1)
Some things that fly there be, —
Bird, hours, the bumble-bee :
Of these no elegy.
Some things that stay there be, —
Grief, hill, eternity :
Nor this behooveth me.
There are, that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies ?
How still the riddle lies !
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I call myself a structural biologist, and as such, I take a special interest in the connections between chemistry and life—in particular, how the structures of molecules give rise to specific biological activities like immunity or digestion or thought. In this search, as in all things, I also take a special interest in distinguishing ignorance, both personal and communal, from mystery.
As an example of this distinction, imagine that you are looking at an object, say, a dark loon, silhouetted beyond breakers on the bright winter ocean. When you live in Maine and have taken winter walks on the beach, with waves on one side of you and snowy woods on the other, such images come to mind easily.
Reflecting on this scene, I can tell you a detailed story, based on current scientific findings, about how I become aware of the loon, a tale that begins with photons, in essence, particles of light, diffracting off the loon, and a very small number of them being focused on my retina by a proteinaceous lens. In the retina, some photons are absorbed by visual pigments, and each such photon energizes a small organic molecule (a retinoid, which came into my body, by the way, in the form of vitamin A, perhaps from a bite of carrot). This molecule starts a cascade of events, many of them little more than changes in molecular shapes, that results in an electrical impulse that travels by way of extended nerve cells to my brain. Along the way, branching impulses are formed, and other impulses converge and mingle, and so this signal reaches the brain in a complex form, many nerve cells speaking at once, in varied rhythms. But in their mixed voices, my mind finds a sort of harmony: I say to myself that I see a loon, and due to resulting signals that reach into emotional centers of my brain, I have to catch my breath.
Scientific analysis has revealed many of the molecular mechanisms that underlie perception. With each passing year, I could include additional specific technical details in my scientific story of seeing a loon. Hearing this story and its technical revisions, some might say that science is gradually removing the mystery from it.
The narrator in Poe’s “Sonnet—To Science” (see Discussion, Class 4, which will soon become a reading under Poetry and Science) appears to be in this camp. The poem contains a litany of mysteries driven from their woodland cover into the harsh daylight of science: Diana, goddess of the animals; Hamadryad, the wood nymph, Naiad, the water nymph, and elves. It appears that, for Poe’s narrator, there must be pure mystery, or none at all. He prefers to be “left alone in his wandering” instead of asking analytical questions about whether these creatures really exist, or what natural forces are personified by them.
In contrast to Poe’s narrator, I see science as a means of distinguishing ignorance from mystery, of separating them, as in a distillation. Some aspects of perception are still shrouded in ignorance, and will one day be revealed. So for now, those aspects are simply our communal ignorance, which appears surmountable. But I wonder if any amount of science will remove the essential mysteries from all parts of the commonplace act of perceiving.
For instance, at one end of my seaside observation is the photon, the smallest bit of pure mystery. We know the laws of photon behavior in great detail, but there is no adequate theory of the photon, by which I mean that there is no satisfying and useful explanation of its action. There are the laws that we call quantum mechanics, which predict photon behavior with phenomenal accuracy, but there is no quantum theory to explain why it acts that way. There are attempts with such enigmatic names as string theory and many-universes theories, but neither are testable in the way we wish for in scientific theories.
A deep mystery at the other end of the story is the I, the one who sees the loon and feels the excitement of kinship with an animal whose identical ancestors foraged off such shores long before my own ancestors, who were hardly recognizable as such, came down from trees. Where, in all this molecular machinery, is the I, the breathless observer?
Confidently and relentlessly, scientists move to work out the full picture of what goes on in the brain when I take in a state of affairs like my surroundings on a winter walk, and when I attend first to one thing, perhaps the sting of snow on my face, and then to another, the unexpected loon on the water. Can we fully and satisfactorily explain the subjective, first-person (conceptually, in-here) experience of perception by appealing to objective, third-person (out-there) molecules, cells, and signaling networks?
In the photon and in the self who sees the loon lie mystery that perhaps takes us beyond what science can fathom.
How still the riddle lies !
For me, science does not eliminate mystery; science helps us to distinguish mystery from simple ignorance. I believe that this view of science makes its findings more accessible, less fearsome, less authoritarian. In this light, we see that science cannot overpower the inherently mysterious, but can distill away personal and communal ignorance to reveal—not dispel—mystery.
(1) XIV. The Secret, Favorite Poems of Emily Dickenson, Mabel Lewis Todd and T. W. Higgenson, eds, New York: Avenel Books, 1978, p. 33.
