Which End Is Closer To God?
We have a way of discussing the world, when we talk
of it at various hierarchies, or levels. Now I do not mean to be very precise,
dividing the world into definite levels, but I will indicate, by describing
a set of ideas, what I mean by hierarchies of ideas.
For example, at one end we have the fundamental laws of physics. Then we invent
other terms for concepts which are approximate, which have, we believe, their
ultimate explanation in terms of the fundamental laws. For instance, "heat".
Heat is supposed to be jiggling, and the word for a hot thing is just the word
for a mass of atoms which are jiggling. But for a while, if we are talking about
heat, we sometimes forget about the atoms jiggling- just as when we talk about
the glacier we do not always think of the hexgonal ice and the snowflakes which
originally fell. Another example of the same thing is a salt crystal. Looked
at fundamentally it is a lot of protons, neutrons, and electrons; but we have
this concept of "salt crystal", which carries a whole pattern already
of fundamental interactions. An idea like pressure is the same.
Now if we go higher up from this, in another level we have properties of substances-
like "refractive index", how light is bent when it goes through something;
or "surface tension", the fact that water tends to pull itself together,
both of which are described by numbers. I remind you that we have to go through
several laws down to find out that it is the pull of the atoms, and so on. But
we still say "surface tension", and do not always worry, when discussing
surface tension, about the inner workings.
On, up in the hierarchy. With the water we have waves, and we have a thing like
a storm, the word "storm" which represents an enormous mass of phenomena,
or a "sun spot", or "star", which is an accumulation of
things. And it is not worthwhile always to think of it way back. In fact we
cannot, because the higher up we go the more steps we have in between, each
one of which is a little weak. We have not thought them all through yet.
As we go up in this hierarchy of complexity, we get to things like muscle twitch,
or nerve impulse, which is an enormously complicated thing in the physical world,
involving an organization of matter in a very elaborate complexity. Then come
things like "frog".
And then we go on, and we come to words and concepts like "man", and
"history", or "political expediency", and so forth, a series
of concepts which we use to understand things at an ever higher level.
And going on, we come to things like evil, and beauty, and hope...
Which end is nearer to God, if I may use a religious metaphor, beauty and hope,
or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way, of course, is to say that
what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing;
and that all the sciences, and not just the sciences but all the efforts of
intellectual kinds, are an endeavour to see the connections of the hierarchies,
to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology, man's
psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the
neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways. And today
we cannot, and it is no use making believe that we can, draw carefully a line
all the way from one end of this thing to the other, because we have only just
begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy.
And I do not think either end is nearer to God. To stand at either end, and
to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in that direction is
the complete understanding, is a mistake. And to stand with evil and beauty
and hope, or to stand with the fundamental laws, hoping that way to get a deep
understanding of the whole world, with that aspect alone, is a mistake. It is
not sensible for the ones who specialize at the other end, to have such disregard
for each other. (They don't actually, but people say they do.) The great mass
of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the
time our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and working
in the middle, and in that way we are gradually understanding this tremendous
world of interconnecting hierarchies.
-Richard Feynman