cane areas of study, they usually do not register on the public’s radar
screen. However, predictions regarding the limitations of knowledge and
achievement in the physical world are much more likely to come under
scrutiny—and when one predicts that we will never know the chemical
composition of the stars, it takes an extremely long time to be proved cor-
rect. Making such predictions would seem to be a losing intellectual
proposition—like taking the wrong side of Pascal’s Wager. You can al-
ways be proven wrong, and you are extremely unlikely to be proven
right.It’s Tough to Be a Physicist
One cannot help but be impressed by the extraordinary success of phys-
ics, a success to which mathematics makes a substantial contribution. I
remember being amazed as a child when the New York Times published
details of a partial solar eclipse that was to occur that day. The article in-
cluded the time of onset, the time of maximum coverage, the time of
conclusion, and a graphic of the path of the eclipse—in which portions of
the country one would be able to view this phenomenon. To think that a
few laws propounded by Isaac Newton, coupled with some mathematical
calculations, enable one to predict such phenomena with almost pinpoint
accuracy is still a source of substantial wonder, and unquestionably repre-
sents one of the great triumphs of the human intellect.
Most of the great theories of physics represent the scientific method in
full f lower. Experiments are conducted, data is gathered, and a mathe-
matical framework explaining the data is constructed. Predictions are
made—if those predictions involve as-yet-unobserved phenomena whose
existence is later validated, the theory attains greater validity. The discov-
ery of the planet Neptune gave added weight to Newton’s theory of gravi-
tation, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury helped substantiate
Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Physics is sometimes thought of as being simply a branch of applied
mathematics. I feel this does a severe injustice to physics. The difference
between physics and mathematics is somewhat akin to the difference
between the art of painting portraits and abstract expressionism. If you
are hired to paint a portrait, it has to end up looking like the person whose
portrait is being painted. Insofar as my limited understanding of abstract
expressionism goes, anything you feel like putting on canvas qualifies as
abstract expressionism—at least if it’s so abstract that nobody can recog-
nize what it is. This is a bit unfair to mathematics, some of which is
highly practical—but some of it is so esoteric as to be incomprehensible
Reality Checks 31