Foreword

Sir Fred Hoyle

 Many challenging problems face humankind as we approach the dawn of the new century. This book explores some of these problems in the form of a dialogue that spans the fields of art, science, sociology and religion. The dialogue is between two distinguished scholars who think deeply but often from widely different viewpoints. Convergence of opinion unfolds partly through the force of logic and argument and partly because of the common cultural heritage of Buddhism that the two participants share.

What is amply clear is that the twentieth century has been dominated by science. Enormous strides have been made in many scientific disciplines, particularly in the first half of this century. Science and technology have indeed transformed our lives beyond what could have been imagined as recently as 50 years ago. Even today the pace of discovery has not slackened and vast amounts of exceedingly intricate factual detail continue to fill the pages of scientific journals. What is noticeable, however, is that fact-hunting in science is tending to become like stamp-collecting, with an ever-increasing reluctance on the part of scientists to philosophize, and an ever-increasing aversion to reassess and revise old ideas. At the beginning of the twentieth century science and philosophy were inextricably linked. Indeed, in the older universities in Britain science was known as natural philosophy. Now, at the close of the century, science and philosophy seem to have parted ways, much to the detriment of both. If science is to recover its lost vitality, new attitudes will be needed.

Whilst the science and technology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were deeply rooted in European culture, we are now beginning to see the growing influence of Oriental cultures, notably that of Japan, on the scientific and industrial scene. As this dialogue exemplifies, the older philosophies of Asia are set to play an important role in the emerging scientific culture of the twenty-first Century.

Of the many religious and philosophical systems that have developed over the last several thousand years Christianity has undoubtedly had the greatest influence on science. This influence can be attributed not to the views of the founder of this religion, but to later philosophical additions, which were made around AD 500, and which formed the foundation for assertions that nothing that happened here on Earth could have any conceivable relation to events occurring in the Universe beyond the Earth, excepting of course the beneficial activities and heating effect of the Sun. In medieval times the Universe was indeed supposed to be fixed and the sky unchanging, and any suggestion to the contrary was visited by dire punishments. It is quite remarkable that nobody in Europe dared to record the supernova of AD 1054, which, according to the Chinese, must have been brighter than the planet Venus for weeks on end. Similarly, the Sun was supposed to be so perfect that no mention of sunspots was ever permitted, despite the fact that large sunspots were readily visible under suitable conditions. So-called naked-eye sunspots must have been seen over the centuries by hundreds of millions of people, and yet there is not one extant record of their occurrence.

It may seem a little strange that such a regressive belief system should have been an encouragement to the development of science. But so it was. Many problems in science can be examined and resolved without consideration of the influence of the forces of the Universe. Such “closed-box” problems tend to be the simplest, and so focusing attention on them seemed only too natural. However, this meant that while the simpler problems were being solved, the more difficult dilemmas, in which external influences are involved, came to be excluded by virtue of cultural and religious considerations. It therefore came about that science was obliged by religious belief to concentrate on precisely those matters where the challenge of reaching a breakthrough in understanding was least difficult and so where early progress could best be made. Success came that way, though one can say that, from an intellectual point of view, it was scarcely deserved. It is this kind of success that, in the present book, is referred to as the achievements of reductionist science.

The evident disadvantage, however, is that the attitude of mind that produced early success will, if persisted in, lead to later failure. All those problems that require an acknowledgment of the connection between the Earth and the Universe at large will remain inaccessible to solution by the former methodology. It is just this situation in which we find ourselves today, with the supply of closed-box problems essentially exhausted and with the educational process still serving to forbid “open-box” thinking. The unmistakable slowing up of fundamental discoveries in science in recent years, just at a time when the pace of empirical investigation is so intense, can hardly be explained otherwise. Fundamental science has run out of steam because there are no more important closed-box problems to be solved. The hot pace has gobbled them all up and only the open-box problems, requiring a quite different mode of thinking, remain.

The situation is exemplified by the problem of the origin of life. Cultural constraints from the past demand that this issue only be discussed within a closed terrestrial box. Since neither the solution to the origin of life nor the solution to its evolution lies there, one may conclude that the present state of the biological sciences is likely to be intellectually vacuous, despite the availability of a veritable mountain of empirical detail. The same, I suspect, is also true of cosmology. It is as if a number of small children were attempting to put together a somewhat complicated jigsaw puzzle. Some of the pieces manifestly can be fitted exactly together. These are the acknowledged successes of science. In other cases, however, pieces have crudely matching shapes, but they do not exactly fit. What children are inclined to do, and what modern scientists in biology and cosmology and, indeed, in physics are seemingly doing, is to force the pieces to fit, leaving a multitude of little gaps, from which one can see that attempts at constructing a coherent picture will not be successful.

Predicting the future is a notoriously hazardous task. Yet I will risk the attempt by suggesting that science in the twenty-first century will at last free itself from closed-box thinking. The intimate relationships between events on the Earth and happenings in the wider Universe will be acknowledged fully, with consequences that I expect to be far-reaching for science and also highly profitable for philosophy.