I am finishing a lovely autobiographical novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by the young Vietnamese poet Ocean Vuong. Vuong is extraordinarily original and imaginative in his use of language and metaphor. At one point in the book, the narrator Little Dog (standing for Vuong) says that he wishes he were the Sun, because it is the only thing that does not cast a shadow.
In my life, science has been the one thing that does not cast a shadow. Even at the age of twelve or thirteen, I was impressed by the primacy of science, the solidity and truthfulness of the material world. I built my own laboratory and stocked it with test tubes and petri dishes, bunsen burners, resistors and capacitors, coils of electrical wire. Among other projects, I began making pendulums by tying a fishing weight to the end of a string. I’d read in Popular Science or some similar magazine that the time for a pendulum to make a complete swing was proportional to the square root of the length of the string. With the help of a stop watch and ruler, I verified this wonderful law. Logic and pattern. Cause and effect. As far as I could tell, everything was subject to quantitative analysis and material test. I saw no reason to believe in any unprovable hypotheses.
Science, and its analytical way of thinking, was the Sun for me, the discipline that illuminated other disciplines, the one thing that did not cast a shadow. Everything else was to be understood in terms of science.
Now, many years after my childhood experience with pendulums, I still begin my explorations of the world with science. But I have come to realize that science, as powerful as it is, has a limited domain.
For many years my wife and I have spent our summers on an island in Maine. It’s a small island, only about 30 acres in size, and there are no bridges or ferries connecting it to the mainland. Consequently, each of the six families who live on the island has their own boat. One summer night, after midnight, I found myself returning to the island in my boat. No one was out on the water but me. It was a moonless night, and quiet. The only sound I could hear was the soft churning of the engine of my boat. Far from the distracting lights of the mainland, the sky bristled with stars. Taking a chance, I turned off my running lights, and it got even darker. Then I turned off my engine. I lay down in the boat and looked up. A very dark night sky, seen from the ocean, is a mystical experience. After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I’d rarely experienced before. I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them. And the vast expanse of time – extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I would die – seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity.
If you had connected every one of my 100 billion neurons to a super computer and recorded every electrical and chemical datum, you would not have been able to understand my experience.
I know that many of us have had similar experiences. But each is unique. And each, I believe, is ultimately un-analyzable by the methods of science. So, there are some things not illuminated by science.
In a similar manner, there are interesting questions that have no definite answers. In graduate school, scientists are filled with the idea of the “well posed problem:” a problem that can be stated with such clarity and precision that it is guaranteed to have a definite answer. Scientists usually work by finding interesting problems and then breaking up those problems into pieces that can each be stated in terms of a definite question with a definite answer. For example, a typical scientific problem might be: How does a living organism pass the instructions for creating a new organism on to its descendants? It might take a year, or even 10 years or more to find the answer to a scientific problem, but we scientists are taught from an early point of our apprenticeship not to waste time on questions that do not have clear and definite answers. I would argue, in fact, that at each moment, every scientist is working on a problem that he or she believes has a definite answer.
By contrast, questions in the arts and humanities often do not have definite answers. In fact, sometimes definite answers destroy the power of the exploration. Ideas in a novel or in a painting are complicated with the intrinsic ambiguity of human nature. Indeed, the exquisite contradictions and uncertainties of the human heart make life interesting. They are why the actions of characters in a good novel can be debated endlessly, why God held the apple in front of Eve and then forbid her to eat it. For humanists, there are many interesting questions without answers, such as: “What is love?” or “Why did Raskolnikov murder the elderly pawn broker in Dostoevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment” or “What caused World War II?” Such questions stimulate and provoke our imaginations, our thought, our creativity, even challenge us to consider what it means to be human – but they do not have definite answers. For many humanists and artists, the question is more important than the answer. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a century ago, “We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”
I’ve come to learn that we need questions with answers and questions without answers. Both kinds of questions are part of being human.