Having trouble wrapping your mind around the Higgs boson, whose possible discovery has caused such a stir in cosmological circles this week?
You’re not alone, Robert Wright reassures you: The problem, he suggests, is that the Higgs boson is not amenable to translation into the world of metaphor and narrative, which is the world most of us non-mathematical savants inhabit. (Even the word “particle,” as in “God particle,” is misleading, in this instance.) When presented with an abstract concept, evolution has trained us to break it down into a story that comports with how objects interact in the tangible world we inhabit. But modern physics is operating in a world that resists such logic, resists such translation. And so. despite valiant attempts, writes Wright, “I personally continue to have no idea what the Higgs boson is.”
And I think the physicists who ‘understand’ what it is can do so only because they don’t have the layperson’s compulsion to think about the world in ways that are ultimately metaphorical. Or, at least, these physicists have dropped the idea that to truly understand something is to have a crystal-clear metaphor in your mind, a metaphor that doesn’t break down at any point and doesn’t contain internal contradictions. For them, apprehending a purely mathematical description of something is tantamount to comprehending it.
Is there a lesson here? “We should all try to have some intellectual humility, especially when opining on grand philosophical matters, because the thing we’re using to try to understand the world–the human brain–is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty crude instrument.”