FROM WONDER TO UNDERSTANDING

Beginning a Journey

Most of us know that heart-stopping feeling of awed wonder at the beauty and majesty of nature. I remember well a journey I made across Iran in the late 1970s. I was traveling on a night bus through the vast desert between Shiraz and Kerma¯n, when its ailing engine finally failed. It sputtered to a halt in the middle of nowhere. We all left the coach while its driver tried to fix it. I saw the stars that night as I had never seen them before — brilliant, solemn and still, in the midst of a dark and silent land. I simply cannot express in words the overwhelming feeling of awe I experienced that night — a sense of exaltation, amazement and wonder. I still feel a tingle, a shiver of pleasure, running down my spine when I recall that desert experience, all those years ago.

RAPTUROUS AMAZEMENT: A GATEWAY TO UNDERSTANDING

For some, that sense of wonder — what Albert Einstein called "rapturous amazement" — is an end in itself. Many of the Romantic poets took this view. Toward the end of his life, the great German novelist and poet Goethe declared that a sense of astonishment or wonder was an end in itself: we should not seek anything beyond or behind this experience of wonder, but simply enjoy it for what it is. But for many it is not a destination, however pleasurable, but is rather a starting point for exploration and discovery.

The great Greek philosopher Aristotle also knew that sense of wonder. For him it was an invitation to explore, to set out on a journey of discovery in which our horizons are expanded, our understanding deepened and our eyes opened. As the great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas once put it, this sense of wonder elicits a desiderium sciendi, a "longing to know," whose fulfillment leads to joy as much as to understanding.

This journey of discovery involves both reason and imagination, and leads not to a new place, but rather to a new way of looking at things. There are two main outcomes of this journey of exploration. One of them is science, one of humanity's most significant and most deeply satisfying achievements. When I was young, I wanted to study medicine. It made sense. After all, my father was a doctor and my mother a nurse. Knowing my career plans, my great-uncle — who was head of pathology at one of Ireland's leading teaching hospitals — gave me an old microscope. It turned out to be the gateway to a new world. As I happily explored the small plants and cells I found in pond water through its lens, I developed a love of nature which remains with me to this day. It also convinced me that I wanted to know and understand nature. I would be a scientist, not a doctor.

I never regretted that decision. From the age of fifteen, I focused on physics, chemistry and mathematics. I won a major scholarship to Oxford University to study chemistry, where I specialized in quantum theory. I then went on to do doctoral research at Oxford in the laboratories of Professor Sir George Radda, working on developing new techniques for studying complex biological systems. I still have that old brass microscope on my office desk, a reminder of its pivotal role in my life.

Yet though I loved science as a young man, I had a sense that it was not complete. It helped us to understand how things worked. But what did they mean? Science gave me a neat answer to the question of how I came to be in this world. Yet it seemed unable to answer a deeper question. Why was I here? What was the point of life?

Science is wonderful at raising questions. Some can be answered immediately; some will be answerable in the future through technological advance; and some will lie beyond its capacity to answer — what my scientific hero Sir Peter Medawar (1915–87) referred to as "questions that science cannot answer and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer." What Medawar has in mind are what the philosopher Karl Popper called "ultimate questions," such as the meaning of life. So does acknowledging and engaging such questions mean abandoning science? No. It simply means respecting its limits and not forcing it to become something other than science.

WHY WE CAN'T EVADE THE BIG QUESTIONS

The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883 — 1955) put his finger on the point at issue here. Scientists are human beings. If we, as human beings, are to lead fulfilled lives, we need more than the partial account of reality that science offers. We need a "big picture," an "integral idea of the universe." As a young man, I was aware of the need for a "bigger narrative," a richer vision of reality that would weave together understanding and meaning. I failed to find it. What I found to be elusive I then took to be merely illusory. Yet the idea never entirely died in either my mind or my imagination. While science had a wonderful capacity to explain, it nevertheless failed to satisfy the deeper longings and questions of humanity.

Any philosophy of life, any way of thinking about the questions that really matter, according to Ortega, will thus end up going beyond science — not because there is anything wrong with science, but precisely because its intellectual virtues are won at a price: science works so well because it is so focused and specific in its methods.

Scientific truth is characterized by its precision and the certainty of its predictions. But science achieves these admirable qualities at the cost of remaining on the level of secondary concerns, leaving ultimate and decisive questions untouched.

For Ortega, the great intellectual virtue of science is that it knows its limits. It only answers questions that it knows it can answer on the basis of the evidence. But human curiosity wants to go further. We feel we need answers to deeper questions that we cannot avoid asking. Who are we, really? What is the point of life? As Ortega rightly observed, human beings — whether scientists or not — cannot live without answering these questions, even in a provisional way. "We are given no escape from ultimate questions. In one way or another they are in us, whether we like it or not. Scientific truth is exact, but it is incomplete." We need a richer narrative, linking understanding and meaning. That is what the American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) was getting at when he declared that the "deepest problem of modern life" is that we have failed to integrate our "thoughts about the world" with our thoughts about "value and purpose."

So we come back to that haunting and electrifying sense of...