MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIE TY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC
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Believing without seeing
gives science more power
If believing really requires seeing, then
physicists who study black holes must
be delusional.
By their very nature, black holes can’t
be seen — they swallow light rather than
reflecting it. Yet nearly all physicists
believe that black holes exist.
Fortunately, the idea that some-
thing is real only if you can see it died (for the most part)
in 1916 with the last of the 19th century’s deniers of the
reality of atoms, Ernst Mach. Mach, the Austrian physicist-philosopher whose writings had a profound influence on
Einstein, contended uncompromisingly that the notion of
atoms was only a useful idea, not an insight into something
real about nature.
Mach insisted that science should concern itself only
with phenomena that presented themselves to the senses.
He therefore insisted that atoms were merely “mental
artifices,” convenient mathematical fictions conceptually
valuable for explaining chemistry and physics — but only
in a metaphorical way. Just because the cause-and-effect
universe (of classical physics) could be understood as operating like a mechanical clock, that didn’t mean the universe
actually was a clock, after all.
“Atoms and molecules ... can never be made the objects of
sensuous contemplation,” Mach declared. “Have you ever
seen one?”
It turned out that Mach, while a very deep thinker, had a
rather limited view of science and its powers. He was wrong
about atoms, of course, and he was also wrong to insist on
artificial limits to what science should be allowed to con-
sider. Scientists succeed not by observing philosophical
prescriptions but by using their wits to figure out whatever
will work in the quest to understand, explain and predict
nature’s machinations.
And so it’s entirely appropriate that scientists who
believe in black holes have not been deterred by their supposed invisibility. In fact, as Charles Petit recounts in this
issue (Page 22), some physicists have decided to take a black
hole’s picture, anyway. It’s true that the picture they envision might best be described as a silhouette, but if the quest
succeeds, it will nevertheless demonstrate once again that
science can infer aspects of reality before they are available
to “sensuous contemplation.”
—Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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