sarah and Larry Floersch
Many years ago, when I was coming of age, I found myself living in the “Jim Crow” South. Over the decades since, I have come to see just how much that society was based on fear, arrogance, and certainty, an outlook that made people blind to the suffering of others. That fear was a dark echo of pre-emancipation days, where the slaveholders feared for their lives should they lose control of those they had enslaved. The slaves rightly hated their “owners,” but were controlled through fear for their lives at the hands of their enslavers.
Things might seem better now, but I sense we are sliding backward toward such a society in which “us” and “others” become prominent, where truth and knowledge are no longer respected, where arrogance, ignorance, and alternative facts rule.
It makes me think back to 1975 and a program that aired on PBS entitled “The Ascent of Man.” To me it is still relevant to the situation of today.
The 13-part series was written and hosted by the late mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski, and it detailed the intellectual history of civilization through the lens of the history of science, a history that in many ways has been a struggle over the centuries between dogma and the empirical and rational investigation of nature.
Take Galileo, for example. In one episode Bronowski was allowed to view Galileo’s original manuscripts in the Vatican library in which he argued that the Earth revolved around the sun. For this, in 1633, Galileo was put under house arrest by Pope Urban VIII for the remainder of his life. From Galileo’s perspective, that beat the alternative, which was to be burned at the stake for heresy. His arrest and the threat of torture and death showed that scientific investigation could be dangerous. I’m sure people today at the Centers for Disease Control have a sense of how he felt.
It was in episode 11 that Bronowski laid out what he considered the heart of the dilemma. In the 1920s, the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg at the University of GÖttingen in Germany was studying the nature of electrons in the atom. What he discovered was the limits of scientific knowledge. Heisenberg called it the Principle of Uncertainty, and it essentially states that there is a limit to how accurately we can know the position and momentum of a subatomic particle at the same time. That’s pretty esoteric, but the ramifications beyond atomic theory were vast.
Bronowski preferred to call it the Principle of Tolerance, that we can never know things precisely, we can only know things within certain tolerances. Bronowski argues that it is one of the greatest ideas in the history of science. What’s more, it is a fundamental property of nature. It forms what Bronowski called the paradox of knowledge, that is, the more we know, the more we discover what we do not know. All knowledge is limited.
Bronowski also tells the story of his friend, physicist Leo Szilard. It was Szilard who formulated the theory of a nuclear chain reaction. Szilard even patented the formula for it and then tried to keep it secret lest it be misused. He tried to work with other physicists of his time, for example, Joliot Curie and Enrico Fermi, to keep the theory under wraps, but as science was marching on, so too were the forces of intolerance and the armies of the world. At last, in 1939 Szilard wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, which was signed by Albert Einstein, offering the help of scientists in the inevitable war. The Manhattan Project was born. But even then Szilard did not stop. He lobbied hard to have the bomb tested openly before the Japanese and international observers so that all parties could see the result before it was used in anger.
Szilard failed, and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki he turned away from physics and took up the study of human biology — of life — and the social sciences, ending up at the Salk Institute.
According to Bronowski, there is always a struggle between knowledge and certainty in the minds of humans. To have knowledge implies you are aware of the limits of knowledge, that you do not know all, can never know with certainty. Certainty, he says, means to assume you have absolute knowledge. Certainty is the way of authoritarians.
At the end of the episode, which Bronowski labeled “Knowledge or Certainty,” we find him standing on the bank of a pond. He is at Auschwitz and behind him is a crematorium. He rejects the notion that science will turn people into numbers. “This is where people were turned into numbers,” he says. “Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”
He went on, “I owe it to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.”
And then, in an unscripted, spontaneous move, Bronowski waded into the pond, reached down, scooped up a handful of mud from the bottom, and said, “We have to touch people.”
