Overbye on Laws of Nature: A pet peeve

Dennis Overbye, long time Einstein correspondent¹ for The New York Times, published this essay today on the question of what the existence — or trust in the existence — of fundamental laws of nature actually means.

I have some issues with the piece as a whole – in particular it seems on quick reading to conflate ignorance of a given law or set of laws with the absence of some fundamental law, and there are other questions I’d ask of it if my own deadlines weren’t pinching so hard.

But there was one moment when I threw my pen at the screen, and I want to call Dennis out on one word in this passage:

Plato and the whole idea of an independent reality, moreover, took a shot to the mouth in the 1920s with the advent of quantum mechanics. According to that weird theory …

Quantum mechanics is not weird. It is difficult to understand. It makes some seemingly un-commonsensical predictions. It has been popularized in all kinds of spooky language (but then so has Einstein’s impeccably classical work). It was weird once — in 1927, and for some years thereafter, maybe until some time after World War II — in the sense that it seemed foreign as a way of thinking to at least some of the generation of physicists active as it was being invented.

But now? It is part of the commonplace fabric of not just physics but chemistry and, increasingly, the molecular and chemical end of biology. It’s just part of the toolkit, no more strange to a working researcher than a mitre box would be to a journeyman carpenter. And it’s not just scientists who have grown comfortable with quantum theory. The probabilistic nature of the microcosm doesn’t seem to bother us very much, especially when the technology it enables works so well.

So Dennis indulges himself in a little hype here. What’s wrong with that?

At least, by implication, a lot. The word points to an old and bad cliche that scientists are not like the rest of us, that the work they do is somehow irreducibly beyond the ken of mere mortals. Macbeth’s witches were weird sisters…now physicists stand over an intellectual cauldron and utter oracles that the hearer must struggle to interpret.

That’s exactly the wrong impression to leave, IMHO.

To be fair to Dennis — I harp on just one word out of a couple of thousand.

But the trope of mystery is there throughout too much science writing. It’s a convenient hook. a It makes science sound cool while absolving all parties of the need to understand what’s actually being said. From my perspective as a teacher of science writing, it is one of the most common, frequent and avoidable of errors of the craft.

By the way: Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance recently complained of a similar ill — a story at the Hubble Site that calls dark energy “a force.” Carroll points out that this is simply inaccurate, a confusion of concepts. But the underlying problem is the same: the writer was insufficiently precise in his/her use of language.

1: I should be careful about stones and glass houses re Einstein, of course, with my next article on big Al coming up soon in Discover. But still, it does seem sometimes as if Dennis and I and some others I could think of are all following the path of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager. Asked after the King died what he planned to do, the Colonel answered that he’d go on managing Elvis.

Image: William Blake,  Ancient of Days. 1794.  British Museum, London. Source:  Wikipedia Commons.

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