Sky in a Bottle
by Peter Pesic
MIT Press 2005

It starts with the simplest question—one every parent has heard, and few have answered satisfactorily: why is the sky blue? For Santa Fe tutor Peter Pesic, the question is the first step in a scientific journey that starts with Plato and Aristotle and ends, if it does in fact end, with Pesic. Sky in a Bottle, the latest in Pesic’s remarkable list of scientific and philosophic books, chronicles the search for an answer to a question confronted by scientists and philosophers for centuries. Plato, Leonardo, and Newton all wrestled with the problem, as did the ancient Chinese and Middle Eastern scientists. The color of the sky is intimately connected with one’s view of the structure of the heavens, the properties of light, the functioning of the eye, the composition of elements, the nature of air, and man’s relationship to the cosmos. As late as 1862, Sir John Herschel claimed that the color and polarization of skylight was one of “the two great standing enigmas of meteorology.”

The book begins by dissecting the central question into three related questions. The first question is “Why does the sky have color?” The second is “If the sky does have color, why is it blue rather than some other color?” Once we think we understand the first two questions, the third question becomes “Can we recreate the color of the sky here on Earth? Can we, in effect, put the sky in a bottle?” Pesic traces the various attempts to answer the first two questions, taking the reader on a tour through the central ideas of chemistry, optics, and atomic physics.

In true seminar fashion, rather than show how each thinker improved upon previous work, the book attempts to evaluate each of the proposed solutions on its own merits, uncovering the scientific and cultural assumptions behind each thinker’s work. “One of the things that struck me was how long the question remained totally unresolved. Until almost 1900 people really didn’t know why the sky was blue. Many great physicists really barked up the wrong trees trying to answer the question,” said Pesic.

Pesic fist encountered the question in another scientist’s work. “I read a few years ago about a physicist named Smoluchowski who was working on the problem of trying to duplicate the color of the sky in a bottle. The more I learned of his work, the more I began to wonder if it was possible. Could it be done?”

Although the inspiration for the book started with Smoluchowski, Pesic says the question at the heart of the book has its roots in his experience at the college. “When I first came to St. John’s the first class I taught was freshman lab. We were studying the atomic theory and the question “Do atoms exist?” Here I was a physicist and I had never really asked myself this. How could you prove atoms exist? I had a Ph.D. in physics, but the question never came alive for me until freshman lab. It occurred to me that many of the things we take for granted, like the color of the sky, are, in fact, deep and interesting questions worthy of reconsidering,” he says.

Sky in a Bottle explores Rayleigh’s scattering law and the connections between the appearance of the sky and Avogodro’s number. Pesic also discusses the depictions of the sky in art, the secrets of matter and light, and even what the sky’s brightness might tell us about the size and density of the universe.

For those who prefer to take a more active role in tracing the conversation about the sky, the book contains an appendix of 11 important experiments related to light and color. “Some of the experiments in the book are simplified versions of the experiments we do in junior and senior lab. I included them to see if it was possible to demonstrate that light is a wave without using elaborate equipment,” says Pesic.

Leaving Us to Wonder: An Essay on the Questions Science Can’t Ask
by Linda Wiener and Ramsey Eric Ramsey
SUNY Press, 2005

It might seem strange for a St. John’s tutor to suggest in the title of her new book that there are some questions that can’t be asked. In Leaving Us to Wonder, Santa Fe tutor Linda Wiener and her collaborator propose that he who poses a question just might have already limited the answer. Consequently, many of today’s most important questions, when posed by scientists, are doomed from the start to limited or inadequate answers.

The book is an interesting collaboration between a biologist and a philosopher. Wiener is the biologist; Ramsey is a philosopher and associate dean of the Barrett Honors College at Arizona University West. The two met at a conference 10 years ago and struck up a conversation on some of the issues that had bothered Wiener in graduate school. Their work explores the meaning of the scientific worldview and how it plays out in our everyday lives. Their book investigates alternatives to what they call “scientism,” the view that science is the proper and exclusive realm for thinking about and answering every question.

One might expect that the impetus for such a book would come from the biologist’s critique of the philosopher’s methods and the philosopher’s objections to those of the scientist. For Wiener, the book really began when she was in graduate school as a scientist and began to question her own methods. She says, “I wanted to be a biologist because I wanted to be out with plants and animals and living things. But in graduate school, we treated animals and plants as if they were purely mechanical and mathematical. To the extent that science can study them they are, but I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to question that view. My colleagues thought that science was the way to understand everything. It seemed to me to be too narrow.”

Although the book warns us about the dangers of a scientific worldview in general, Wiener uses a specific example—the conclusions of evolutionary biologists—to help illustrate the case. Wiener shows how researchers working in evolutionary biology have stretched their conclusions to cover answers to questions about dating and divorce, relationships, childrearing, and the complex relations between the sexes—questions that cannot be answered from a scientific view alone. But the blame for this worldview is not limited to the scientists. At stake is the commonly held idea that a question is not properly answered until it has been answered by scientists. Our modern popular worldview includes the erroneous assumption that the only real and true knowledge is the knowledge gained using the scientific method. The book challenges this worldview by asking probing questions about modern inquiry. Do the facts procured by technoscientific systems render inconsequential our lived experiences, the wisdom of ancient and contemporary philosophic insight, and the promise offered by time-honored religious beliefs?

Drawing on authors from the Program, including Socrates, Darwin, Nietzsche, Kant, Heidegger, and others, Wiener and Ramsey demonstrate how many of the claims and conclusions of technoscience can and should be challenged. They offer ways of thinking about science in a larger context that respect scientific practice, while taking seriously alternative philosophies whose aims are freedom, the good life, or living well. For Wiener, many of these ways of thinking were first suggested by her experience at the college. “Being a tutor here allowed me to see how others have thought about the facts of biology in different ways. In the Program we see how Aristotle and Goethe and Nietzsche are looking at some of the same things as scientists, but with a different approach. Those approaches allow you to see new things that the modern scientific paradigm doesn’t reveal,” she says.

As one might expect from a collaboration between a philosopher and a biologist, the book is respectful of the power of scientific thinking. Wiener is not proposing that purely meditative thinking, to borrow a term from Heidegger, should supplant and replace the calculative thinking of the scientific method. Instead, she carefully presents the idea that both kinds of thinking have a role to play in getting at the truth—neither has a monopoly on metaphysical reality or objective truth. Calculative thinking might propose that humans are fundamentally collections of DNA and should be viewed as such. Meditative thinking might propose that humans are fundamentally rational creatures who exercise their will. Neither answer has a monopoly on the truth, but each ignores the conclusions of the other at its peril. The book concentrates on the limits of scientific thinking only because of its prevalence in the modern world. Wiener points out, “If you seek solutions in a strictly scientific way you don’t tend to get good solutions. First you have to figure out what the problem really is. Once you find a solution is needed, then you bring in more technical knowledge at the end. You don’t start with science. You end with it.”

By John Hartnett, SF83

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