Searching for Dichotomies Where None Exist
Male or female. Positive or negative. Innocent or guilty. Waves or particles. Right or wrong.
The human mind loves to divide things into black and white. But if there’s one sure thing science has taught us, it’s that even the most sharply defined categories can turn out to be slippery as shadows. Often, apparent opposites turn out to be different aspects of the same thing--viewed in another way.
Is light made of waves or particles? Is time an arrow or a cycle? Is gravity a real force or simply apparent motion, like the “wind” on your face as you ride down the freeway on your Harley?
The answers you get depend on the questions you ask.
“Any scholar immersed in the details of an intricate problem will tell you that its richness cannot be extracted as a dichotomy,” writes Harvard biologist Stephan Jay Gould in his book “Time’s Arrow,” which explores various perspectives on time. “Yet, for reasons I do not begin to understand, the human mind loves to dichotomize.”
Three years ago, a revolution in physics grew out of the discovery that five unrelated theories were really the same. So-called string theory, which views everything in the cosmos as the harmonics of 11-dimensional vibrating strings, seemed to split into five mutually exclusive categories.
But the discovery of surprising “dualities” saved the day. As the name implies, a duality brings together two, sometimes mutually exclusive, ideas--showing they are both part of a larger truth.
Depending on how one defines “distance” in string theory, for example, the universe is both large and expanding, and tiny and contracting. “There is no contradiction here,” writes Columbia University string theorist Brian Greene. “Instead, what we have are two distinct but equally sensible definitions of distance.”
Through a series of such discoveries, the physicists learned that they had been like the proverbial blind men describing the elephant. The ears and tail and trunk they had discovered separately turned out to be linked in completely unexpected ways.
Finding the truth in opposites is how science progresses. Electricity and magnetism, for example, seem to be opposites. Yet when you put them together, you get light.
Nonetheless, the tendency toward bipolar thinking seems built into our brains. “Being able to distinguish between opposites is a basic requirement for ordering the world around us,” writes Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser in “The Dancing Universe.” “The problem is we pay a price for our survival. Questions that transcend the distinction between opposites remain unanswered.”
One such question Gleiser discusses is the division between science and the spirit. We like to think of science as completely objective, he says, with no room for passion, even though many nonreligious scientists see their work as a “spiritual quest.”
Gleiser reminds us of the wisdom of Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who invented the idea that waves and particles are complementary--not mutually exclusive--descriptions of light and matter. When Bohr was awarded the Danish Order of the Elephant in 1947, he chose the Chinese yin and yang symbol for his coat of arms. The inscription was: “Contraria sunt complementa.”
In English, that’s “Opposites complement each other.”
Not only waves and particles, but even such notions as flat and curved space can be used interchangeably, depending on what kinds of insights a scientist is seeking.
“What is the real, genuine truth?” asks Caltech physicist Kip Thorne in his book “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy.” “Is spacetime really flat . . . or is it really curved? To a physicist like me this is an uninteresting question.”
The reason: Both viewpoints give the same physical answers. Therefore, Thorne concludes, the question of which is the “real truth” is irrelevant. “It is a matter for philosophers to debate, not physicists.”
In what Thorne calls a “mind flip,” physicists learn to move back and forth from one picture to its seeming opposite--like admirers of M.C. Escher’s drawings.
Society would work more smoothly if laypeople could learn the physicists’ trick, argues University of Georgetown linguist Deborah Tannen in “The Argument Culture,” a work that explores how this almost universal bipolar disorder keeps critical problems from getting solved.
“At the heart of the argument culture is our habit of seeing issues and ideas as absolute and irreconcilable principles continually at war,” she writes. “What’s wrong is that it obscures the complexity of research.”
It also obscures the richness of truth.
