More big questions

There is something rather odd about the current state of science. The funding for its prestigious institutions and mega projects now routinely runs to hundreds of millions, even billions, of pounds. And it is certainly productive, generating a tidal wave of papers every year published in its 25,000 academic journals. But ask what it all adds up to and those much heralded breakthroughs in understanding seem remarkably elusive.

This could be due, at least in part, to the law of diminishing returns, where science’s striking success necessarily imposes barriers to further advance. By the time it has (apparently) resolved the big questions of the origin of the universe, how the galaxies and our earth were formed, identified the earliest forms of life and cracked the genetic code, then what comes after could be an anticlimax.

For Rupert Sheldrake, science’s problems go much deeper than this. It is, he claims, facing a ‘credibility crunch’ on many fronts where the physical and natural world, as currently understood, can no longer be accounted for within its own narrow, materialist terms. He presents this challenging, if intriguing, argument by identifying ‘ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted’: we live in a causally closed universe, governed by known physical laws; life can be explained in terms of its constituent parts; the human mind in terms of the electro-chemistry of the brain; and so on. He then interrogates each in turn by reformulating it, in the spirit of radical scepticism, as a question. Are the laws of nature fixed? Is biological inheritance material? Are minds confined to brains? This Socratic method of inquiry proves surprisingly illuminating.

The law of the conservation of matter and energy, for example, is a foundational principal of physics. There is only so much of each, they can be converted from one form into another (kinetic, potential, mechanical, electromagnetic) or into each other — but can neither be created nor destroyed.