Close Encounters of the Metaphysical Kind

As Science Daily reports, the Large Hadron Collider is going to be switched on in two days. The LHC is the “largest experiment in the world.” It’s purpose is to smash things together. Tiny things. As in subatomic particles.

In a word, the LHC is freaking amazing.

But its implications for the unification of knowledge may be more amazing still. The SciDaily article begins with these questions: “How did the universe come to be? What is it made of? What is mass? Can science prove that there are other dimensions?”

These are cosmological questions, scientific ones. But some of them are also philosophical questions, in a sense. They’re basic. Fundamental. On the boundary between physics and metaphysics.

For the past several hundreds of years, knowledge has become more and more specialized. Science and Philosophy more often have been distant cousins or separated brothers than best friends or even lovers. And  though physics has continued to inform chemistry, and chemistry biology, and so on (with analogues in the philosophical world), these fields have become disparate in many ways.

This is a far cry from the ancient world. Aristotle, one of the great ancesters of Western civilization, is deemed a “philosopher” — yet if many of his works were first published today, Dewey would number them among treatises of science. Aristotle lived in a world where knowledge was much more closely interconnected than today, where it was perfectly natural for him to write both the Physica and the Metaphysica. But as humanity progressed, specialization increased.

Yet now, we have come full circle. Quantum mechanics and string theory have been developed to the point that they touch on metaphysical questions, on fundamental issues of ontology and existence.

Once again, science and philosphy are becoming one.