There are various striking intuitions about human existence. For example, in his brilliant memoirs, Speak, Memory, Nabokov begins with the deep reflection where human existence is compared to a baby in a cradle, rocking, completely vulnerable and uncertain. All of this is bracketed by two episodes of infinite darkness. The first episode took place before you were born and the second takes place after you’re gone. Your existence is a temporary flame, like that of a lit match.
In 2025, this would mean that the Kierkegaard sense of things would tell you that neuroscience can never really explain how existence is sensed by a living person.
Kierkegaard writes, “in my view the misfortune of the age was precisely that it had too much knowledge, had forgotten what existence means, and what inwardness signifies.” He continues, “for a knowledge-seeker, when he has finished studying China he can take up Persia; when he has studied French he can begin Italian; and then go on to astronomy, the veterinary sciences, and so forth, and always be sure of a reputation as a tremendous fellow.”
By way of contrast, “inwardness in love does not consist in consummating seven marriages with Danish maidens, then cutting loose on the French, the Italian, and so forth, but consists in loving one and the same woman, and yet being constantly renewed in the same love, making it always new in the luxuriant flowering of the mood.” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, page 232.)
A neural network that teaches itself the laws of physics could help to solve some of physics’ deepest questions. But first it has to start with the basics, just like the rest of us. The algorithm has worked out that it should place the Sun at the centre of the Solar System, based on how movements of the Sun and Mars appear from Earth.
The machine-learning system differs from others because it’s not a black that spits out a result based on reasoning that’s almost impossible to unpick. Instead, researchers designed a kind of ‘lobotomized’ neural network that is split into two halves and joined by just a handful of connections. That forces the learning half to simplify its findings before handing them over to the half that makes and tests new predictions.
A long-awaited experimental result has found the proton to be about 5% smaller than the previously accepted value. The finding seems to spell the end of the ‘protonradius puzzle’: the measurements disagreed if you probed the proton with ordinary hydrogen, or with exotichydrogen built out of muons instead of electrons. But solving the mystery will be bittersweet: some scientists had hoped the difference might have indicated exciting new physics behind how electrons and muons behave.
This week is a special one for all of us at Nature: it’s 150 years since our first issue, published in November 1869. We’ve been working for well over a year on the delights of our anniversary issue, which you can explore in full online.
A century and a half has seen momentous changes in science, and Nature has changed along with it in many ways, says an Editorial in the anniversary edition. But in other respects, Nature now is just the same as it was at the start: it will continue in its mission to stand up for research, serve the global research community and communicate the results of science around the world.
Nature creative director Kelly Krause takes you on a tour of the archive to enjoy some of the journal’s most iconic covers, each of which speaks to how science itself has evolved. Plus, she touches on those that didn’t quite hit the mark, such as an occasion of “Photoshop malfeasance” that led to Dolly the sheep sporting the wrong leg.
Scientific glassblower Terri Adams uses fire and heavy machinery to hand-craft delicate scientific glass apparatus. “My workbench hosts an array of tools for working with glass, many of which were custom-made for specific jobs,” says Adams. “Each tool reminds me of what I first used it for and makes me consider how I might use it again.” (Leonora Saunders for Nature)
(If you have recommended people before and you want them to count, please ask them to email me with your details and I will make it happen!) Your feedback, as always, is very welcome at briefing@nature.com.
Scientism is the view that science is truth and the rest is false, idiotic, or childish.
There’s a wonderful scene in the 2014 movie, The Theory of Everything (Eddie Redmayne plays Hawking) where the young Hawking is courting his wife to be at an evening party and he represents the quest for the theory of everything, hence the name of the movie.
Yeats says in his works, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”
Our desire to “re-enchant” education might cause us to modify this Yeatsaphorism slightly, “Education is not merely the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”
We started this book with a quote from Wittgenstein “Light dawns gradually over the whole” and argued that the meaning of the “whole” is and will be elusive forever.
That is as it should be:
Think of the final pages of John Dewey’s classic book, The Quest for Certainty. You’ll sense how Dewey oscillates between the “pin-down-ability” of the “whole” and its eternal slipperiness:
“Diversification of discoveries and the opening up of new points of view and new methods are inherent in the progress of knowledge. This fact defeats the idea of any complete synthesis of knowledge upon an intellectual basis. The sheer increase of specialized knowledge will never work the miracle of producing an intellectual whole. The astronomer, biologist, chemist, may attain systematic wholes, at least for a time, within his whole field.
“Man has never had such a varied body of knowledge in his possession before, and probably never before has he been so uncertain and so perplexed as to what his knowledge means, what it points to in action and in consequences.”
Wholeness, Dewey senses, like the white whale in Moby-Dick, “won’t sit for a portrait.” That is why the student should take an eternally “non-rigid” answer to these questions which are “arguments without end” and that’s fine.
