“The central framework of current physics is that of entailing laws.”
“The central image is the billiard table as boundary conditions and the set of all possible initial conditions of position and momenta of the balls on the table.”
“Then, given Isaac Newton’s laws in differential form, we deduce the deterministic trajectories of the balls.”
“Our model of how to do science is to deduce new consequences, test them, accept or reject the results by diverse criteria, then retain or modify our theories. Science proceeds as Aristotle might have wished, in part as deduction.”
“My aim is to begin to demolish this hegemony of reductive materialism and its grip on our scientific minds, and a far wider elicitation of a grossly misplaced scientism in modernity.”
“Science is sciencia, knowledge.”
“Being and becoming are more fundamental to all life and our humanity.”
“We are, first of all, alive, and alive in a becoming biosphere. Despite bursts of extinction events and the fact that 99.9 per cent of all species that ever lived are gone, the biosphere flowers on. This flowering of the biosphere, more than a metaphor for human history, begins to suggest a mythic structure beyond that by which we currently live.”
“At the centre of my argument is a vexing question: since the Big Bang, why has the Universe become complex? I claim that at least part of the answer is that, as more complex things and linked processes are created, and can combine with one another to make yet more complex amalgams of things and processes, the space of possible things and linked processes becomes vastly larger, and the Universe has not had time to make all the possibilities.”
“History enters when the space of what is possible is vastly larger than what can actually happen.”
“We have no way to study this exploration deterministically. Here in the heart of classical physics, reductive materialism can fail. Sciencia fails, reason fails, and doors open to how we live forward. We start to be set free as humans in a creative universe. We co-create with one another and with nature, but by the very creativity of the Universe and us in it, we cannot know what we will co-create.”
“Then what can guide us? Our guide can be a new founding mythic structure that reflects our full enlivenment: humanity in a creative universe, biosphere and human individual, and social lives that are fully lived and that keep becoming. The dream is diversity, more ways of being human as our 30 or so civilisations across the globe weave together gently enough to honour their roots and allow change to unfold gracefully. Our global woven civilisation is ours to create, ever-unknowing, facing, as Immanuel Kant said, the crooked timber of our humanity.”