Originally published 31 December 2002
The great 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell said, “It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in.”
Law and mystery: The two pillars of scientific creativity.
It is a common complaint that science robs the world of mystery and leaves us stranded in a world of law. Indeed, science is often taught to nonscientists as law only, with no hint of how law is energized by mystery. No wonder so many students find science boring, and go looking for mystery in pseudoscience and superstition.
To counter this complaint, I have often evoked the metaphor of scientific knowledge as an island in a sea of infinite mystery.
As the island grows larger, some of what was formerly mysterious becomes lawful. But, in an infinite universe, the mystery is hardly depleted by our discoveries.
Rather, as the island of knowledge grows larger, so does the shoreline along which we encounter mystery. It is at the shoreline — Maxwell’s interface of law and mystery — that all great science takes place.
Albert Einstein agreed. He wrote: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
Einstein believed that experience is the only reliable source of knowledge, but he recognized behind every experience something subtle, intangible, and ultimately inexplicable. “Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion,” he wrote.
Standing with Maxwell and Einstein on the shoreline of knowledge we glimpse the Infinite through a glass darkly, and recognize a power greater than ourselves by ecstatic intuition.
A reader of past columns has pointed out that I was not the first to use the metaphor of the shoreline. The 18th-century English scientist Joseph Priestley said something similar.
In the preface of the second volume of his Experiments and Observations Relating to Various Branches of Natural Philosophy, Priestley wrote: “The greater is the circle of light, the greater is the boundary of the darkness by which it is confined. But, notwithstanding this, the more light we get, the more thankful we ought to be, for by this means we have the greater range for satisfactory contemplation. In time, the bounds of light will be still further extended; and from the infinity of the divine nature, and the divine works, we may promise ourselves an endless progress in our investigation of them: a prospect truly sublime and glorious.”
Joseph Priestley was a man of the Enlightenment, a champion of reason, a foe of superstition. He was also deeply religious, and divided his life between scientific investigations and religion. In science, he is best known as the discoverer of oxygen, and for his stubborn belief in phlogiston, a now-discredited hypothetical substance supposedly mixed with all combustible matter that was released as flame in burning.
In religion, Priestley was a Dissenter, a Unitarian who took issue with the doctrines of the established Church of England. As a Dissenter, he was precluded from attending either Oxford or Cambridge universities, which at that time required for graduation assent to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Established Church, a catalog of official orthodoxy.
As Robert Schofield noted in his biography of Priestley, it was just as well that Priestley could not attend the ancient universities. Intellectual life at those institutions was hobbled by curricular requirements imposed by the Church of England. Mired in religious and political orthodoxy, Oxford and Cambridge had become pretty much irrelevant to the explosion of rational knowledge we call the Enlightenment.
Most of the important science, philosophy, history, and literature of late-18th-century England was accomplished by people who had no connection to the traditional universities. Priestley took his education at a Dissenting academy, and soon found colleagues who shared his own scientific interests and liberal political and religious views, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. He was a friend of American democracy, and ended his days in Pennsylvania.
Dogma of every kind — scientific, political or religious — is foreign to a person such as Priestley, who lives on the shoreline between knowledge and mystery. The shore is not necessarily a comfortable place to reside — many people prefer the firm ground of orthodoxy, or the murky waters of mystery — but the shoreline is where all great science is done, and, as Maxwell suggested, it is a place of keen intellectual enjoyment.
