Knowledge, science, governance - and minds

Suppose one has learnt quite a bit of high-school/junior college physics, meaning he knows all about things like Newton’s laws and equations of motion, Archimedes’ principle and Pascal’s law and equations that govern the behaviour of mirrors and lenses, and the propagation of sound, and the basics of thermodynamics and electromagnetism and even the way atoms are supposed to be built and to behave – is that knowledge enough to understand all there is to chemistry? Any modern chemist would say no, while acknowledging that much of his domain overlaps with the physicist’s territory: still, you cannot pronounce on the way acids and bases interact to form an enormous variety of salts on the basis of the laws of physics alone, nor how organic compounds transmute from one category to another under the influence of specific chemicals, temperatures, pressures and catalysts, nor how very large compounds, such as amino acids and proteins, can be synthesized and modified. That is why a separate subject called chemistry still exists, and shows no imminent signs of dying out.

When you move on to the study of life – from the composition, structure and organization of individual cells to the specific study of the character and behaviour of tissues and organs and complex organ systems, meaning particular living species, and given that there are uncounted millions of incredibly different living species on earth from bacteria and diatoms to giant trees and whales and homo sapiens itself, it goes without saying that, though physics is still believed to be the most rigorous, determinate, fundamental Queen of the Sciences, and the study of modern biology is sought to be grounded in a good understanding of physics and chemistry, no biologist or medical researcher will dream of asserting that a good grasp of physics or even chemistry alone will equip you to understand life and its infinite variety and complexity: however unsatisfactorily descriptive, non-rigorous, non-mathematical the biological sciences are, they still exist in their own right, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A ‘Theory of Everything’, that elusive Holy Grail of physics, even if attained someday, will not take you very far in becoming a good student of evolution or a competent doctor. It is wise to keep this in mind, despite the fact that most physicists sneer at the ‘lesser sciences’.

Our doctors, though they are (for most of the time) dealing with only our bodies – the material part of ourselves, hence most accessible to science as we understand it – are most of the time acutely aware, moreover, that we have something called minds (many biologists would claim that so do many other animals, like elephants, dolphins, chimps, pigs and horses, though admittedly of a far less complex and less multitalented sort), and the mind, though centred in the brain but spread throughout the body via the senses and an unthinkably complicated network of neuro-chemical connections, is so inextricably intertwined with everything the body does and feels that it is almost impossible to treat any really serious malaise, from accident-related trauma to heart disease, without involving the mind in the process. And the mind (as Yudhishthir averred two millennia ago and Asimov concurred a few decades ago, the single most complex piece of organized matter in the universe), still for the most part defies comprehension and conscious, rational control, though the cleverest of men having been trying to understand it for thousands of years. Psychology studies it most directly (alongwith, lately, neuroscience, using fMRI brain scanners), but so have all religions (and their insights are not to be ignorantly scoffed at). From what I have read of history, sociology, economics and politics, they are all diverse ways of studying the same thing, and after millennia of effort, no expert in any one of these fields can claim to have anything more than a partial picture, each often having special techniques of distorting and caricaturing the reality in its effort ot make it manageable and comprehensible (economics, especially of the mathematical variety, would fall flat unless it assumes the pathetic hyper-simplification that Man is nothing but a machine coldly calculating pleasure, pain, profit and loss all the time). That should give us some idea of how complicated the subject matter is. Literature (including, very importantly, biographies) and cinema, moreover, are very powerful ways of not only trying to understand the human mind but to explore its seemingly limitless creative powers. As the Bard said, ‘What a piece of work is Man!’, he himself being a prime exemplar.

It is with this mind that we compose Thus Spake Zarathustra, and sculpt Madonnas, and write Hamlet, and work out e equals m times c squared, and love and hate and laugh and learn and dream. It is with this mind that I long for God (who is this ‘I’? Is it an illusion? Does it mean anything? Where is it located? Is it coterminous with the body and bodily life? Why are some few minds so immeasurably more powerful than the rest? Do collective minds exist?...). It is this I which is reflecting while writing this essay…

The long and short of it is, even a fairly good grasp of the fundamental sciences, physics and chemistry, gives you little or no understanding of what is, or should be, the most important thing of interest to all of us, that which, individually as well as collectively, shapes and guides our destiny.

If this is accepted to be true, isn’t it a frightening thing that of late those who are guiding the fates of nations, heads of governments and CEOs of giant corporations, have very little education outside of one or the other of the sciences?

Don’t we need much more broadly educated people at the helm of affairs than we have right now? And doesn’t that beg the question, what does being ‘educated’ mean?

Just thinking. Swarnava, it is budding physicists like you who give me the courage to wonder publicly like this, those who, despite loving their own subjects, already know that ‘this is not all there is’. Who know and respect and wonder over the fact that some of the greatest insights in science, too, come in dreams…