A Final Story
NASSER ZAKARIYA
In the middle of the 1990s, many scientists were willing to declare with increasing con- fidence that science was at last in a position to answer age-old questions. What were
the origins of human life? What were the major
events that created the earth, the galaxies, the
fundamental features of the universe as it exists today? Among these scientists numbered
several prominent popularizers whose confidence, along with the possibility of discovering traces of life elsewhere in the universe,
helped inspire origin-based research programs
like those at NASA, which took as their task
composing the full cosmic and human evolutionary story. At the same time, influential
physicists believed that fundamental physics
was perhaps itself approaching finality: a final
theory could very well be in our grasp.
A hundred years earlier, in the middle of the
1890s, similar hopes for science were expressed
but later reconsidered. And as historians of science have shown, statements based on the suc-cesses of more modern physics were made at
several points across the century, all without a
final theory ever materializing. It would seem
to serve us well, then, to take the reservations
as seriously as the hopes in approaching similar sentiments today.
But if we allow ourselves to have a little confidence, and explore what it might mean to live
in a time when answers to fundamental questions are at hand, we must first confront what
that finality might mean. For scientists, that often
means the refinement and unification of fields.
In the early 1990s, physicist Steven Weinberg approached the question more thoroughly in his
book Dreams of A Final Theory. Picturing the
progression to ever more fundamental explanations as “arrows of explanation,” the final theory meant for him the convergence of all such
arrows at the set of deepest truths about nature.
Weinberg emphasized the beauty, the feeling of
inevitability, and the rigidity such a final theory
would likely have. Weinberg had set his hopes
on string theory and though since the time of his
writing, confidence in that theory has faded, he
explained what it would and would not mean to
have such a final theory in our grasp. It would
not mean just endless refinement, since many
scientific questions would in practice be too difficult ever to compute from fundamental princi-
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ples, and their actual solutions would themselves be beautiful. There would always be new
science, if no new fundamentals.
In his book, Weinberg likened the entire enterprise to the exploration of the earth. So even
if the world were fully charted, there would still
be more to explore within it. Still, he did think
that something might be lost, a sense of wonder perhaps. He argued moreover that the more
we learned of the fundamental principles of the
universe, the more we found that the world was
indifferent to us — that the universe suggested
no purpose for us at all. In this sense, finality
argues against many traditional religious beliefs. But Weinberg also found redemptive value
in the scientific exploration itself. He argued
that it added to the dignity of human life in
forcing us to confront unflinchingly the truths
of our existence.
While the waning confidence in string theory has made talk of a final theory more distant, a greater confidence has emerged in our
ability to relate a comprehensive story about
the universe and its history. This attitude points
to a significant change from a century earlier.
Then, the finality was only in the principles,
and the questions of our ultimate physical origins were often judged to be non-scientific, not
respectable science.
Scientists have different views concerning
the consequences of such a comprehensive history, the co-evolutionary story of the emergence
of the material universe and the emergence of
life and its diversity: that the work has no implications for the value of human life; that it
undercuts or adds to its value by making questions of meaning immanent rather than transcendent; that it has no implications for
religion; that it’s completely at odds with any
literalist or conservative conception of scripture
and perhaps even with spirituality. And the
question of what it means for an account to be
comprehensive is itself open to endless discussion. But these origin sciences, at least in their
popular face, emphasize a particular role for
humanity as the only known consciousness
able to relate the history of the world that
formed it. The stories emphasize beauty as
well, and suggest that the world is as meaningful as its history is aesthetic — so that meaning is also in the eye of the beholder.
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Nasser Zakariya is a doctoral
candidate in Harvard
University’s History of Science
department, completing his
dissertation on narratives of
quest and the scientific story
of origins.
