11-07-2024, 12:00 PM
Nautilus has an interesting essay today by Dale Markowitz:
This touches on a subject that I enjoy thinking about: Science is an emanation of magic. Or something greater. It does not exist in a vacuum, build by empirical observation alone. It is rather inspired, an apparently standalone system of reason, that is breathed through the human imagination and finds its own life in the mechanistic and secular world.
This can be seen in the papers of the great scientists. The original ones, where they break new ground. Not the summaries or restatements that are written later and put in textbooks, but the words where they first put pen to paper and create something new. There's almost always a hermetic undertone to it. A parallel complexity. They write about the large, which cannot be said, in terms of the material, of which we can speak. Schrodinger on colour theory. Newton on celestial motion. They were magicians, science was merely the new element with which they worked.
Although science today has become largely flat, commercialize, devoid of consideration of anything other than itself, this vitality remains. It can still be seen, and in fact can never be eliminated. The universe doesn't work that way. And it's heartening to see this being acknowledged, even if only at the academic fringes.
Quote:How the Occult Gave Birth to Science
In 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes purchased a trove of Isaac Newton’s unpublished notes. These included more than 100,000 words on the great physicist’s secret alchemical experiments. Keynes, shocked and awed, dubbed them “wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value.” This unexpected discovery, paired with things like Newton’s obsession with searching for encrypted messages in the Bible’s Book of David, showed that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason,” Keynes concluded. “He was the last of the magicians.”
When it came to fascination with the occult, Newton was hardly alone. Many contemporary scientists may cast aspersions on spells, mythical tales, and powers of divination. Not so for many of the early modern thinkers who laid the foundations of modern science. To them, the world teemed with the uncanny: witches, unicorns, mermaids, stars that foretold the future, base metals that could be coaxed into gold or distilled into elixirs of eternal life.
These fantastical beliefs were shared by the illiterate and educated elite alike—including many of the forebears of contemporary science, including chemist Robert Boyle, who gave us modern chemistry and Boyle’s law, and biologist Carl Linnaeus, who developed the taxonomic system by which scientists classify species today. Rather than stifling discovery, their now-arcane beliefs may have helped drive them and other scientists to endure hot smoky days in the bowels of alchemical laboratories or long frigid nights on the balconies of astronomical towers.
[...]
This touches on a subject that I enjoy thinking about: Science is an emanation of magic. Or something greater. It does not exist in a vacuum, build by empirical observation alone. It is rather inspired, an apparently standalone system of reason, that is breathed through the human imagination and finds its own life in the mechanistic and secular world.
This can be seen in the papers of the great scientists. The original ones, where they break new ground. Not the summaries or restatements that are written later and put in textbooks, but the words where they first put pen to paper and create something new. There's almost always a hermetic undertone to it. A parallel complexity. They write about the large, which cannot be said, in terms of the material, of which we can speak. Schrodinger on colour theory. Newton on celestial motion. They were magicians, science was merely the new element with which they worked.
Although science today has become largely flat, commercialize, devoid of consideration of anything other than itself, this vitality remains. It can still be seen, and in fact can never be eliminated. The universe doesn't work that way. And it's heartening to see this being acknowledged, even if only at the academic fringes.
