Why cannot Pakistan create Einsteins and Hawkings? An addendum to Hoodbhoy’s argument.
Pervez Hoodbhoy is a renowned physicist of our country. He has been relentlessly arguing for the fact that Iqbal got into a wrong argument against science, that he never understood science thus he should never have discussed anything related to it, that he did not know what happens on the quantum level, that he became orthodox as the years passed by, that he did not have any education in the field of science even at the Inter level. And then further on Hoodbhoy extrapolates this misunderstanding on Iqbal’s part to his political vision of Pakistan, criticizing the lack of scientific endeavors in our country due to our strict adherence to Iqbal-like thinking, where the heart reins and the intellect is subjugated to it.
When I heard his lectures on YouTube at first he convinced me that our ignorant state of affairs regarding science on the national level is due to Iqbal-like thinking. Since Iqbal was an orthodox believer who held traditional Islamic, especially Sufi, values very close to his heart, it follows that his condemnation of scientific project translated into his political vision. Every Pakistani has Iqbal’s name on his lips, even though most of us have never read his works seriously, it seems natural that Iqbal’s seemingly orthodox ideology is ingrained in our thoughts. Our nation is certainly built upon the orthodox belief system as presented by Hoodbhoy, and because he thinks that Iqbal advocated it so he is right to blame Iqbal, which also extends the obligation to every serious thinker to blame Iqbal for our current national intellectual void.
Hoodbhoy also motivated me to pick up an important book by Iqbal, which he refers to as a priest does to the bible, “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam” and reread it. He particularly focuses on the second lecture in these series of lectures published in a book form, because it focuses primarily on Iqbal’s criticism of scientism. This incited me to read it closely and get the context of the statements that Hoodbhoy has memorized and repeatedly quotes in his lectures. I read them to clarify to myself Iqbal’s position on science, not to criticize him or Hoodbhoy.
So much for the self-disclosure, let’s get to the crux of the matter. Hoodbhoy quotes Iqbal as saying: “Thus physics, finding it necessary to criticize its own foundations, has eventually found reason to break its own idol, and the empirical attitude which appeared to necessitate scientific materialism has finally ended in a revolt against matter… the concept of matter has received the greatest blow from the hand of Einstein.” What Hoodbhoy forgets to do is contextualize this statement. This statement in the lecture comes in between the statements by the two of the greatest mathematicians of his times: Alfred-North Whitehead and Bertrand Russel; and Iqbal forms his position in their light. The catch is in the word “thus” at the beginning of the quotation. Let me first quote what precedes this “thus”:
“In our own times Professor Whitehead – an eminent mathematician and scientist – has conclusively shown that the traditional theory of materialism is wholly untenable. It is obvious that, on the theory, colours, sounds, etc., are subjective states only, and form no part of Nature… In the words of Professor Whitehead, the theory reduces one-half of Nature to a ‘dream’ and the other half to a ‘conjecture’. Thus physics…”
And then the previous quote follows. Before delving into what actually Iqbal was getting at let me complete the picture by quoting what follows Hoodbhoy’s quotation. Iqbal quotes Russel word to word:
“The theory of relativity by merging time into spacetime, says Mr. Russel, has damaged the traditional notion of substance more than all the arguments of the philosopher.”
An assumption Iqbal makes here is that matter=substance, so according to him and other quantum physicists there can never be non-substantial matter, which is common-sensical. It would be wrong to assume that Iqbal was fighting against science, he was fighting against the idea of scientific materialism. He was reading the leading minds of his times and making judgments on their conjectures. If Iqbal is to blame for our sorry state then Whitehead and Russel are equally to be blamed. Why does all this seem wrong now? Because Iqbal’s target was not science but the philosophy of science. A scientist not learned in philosophy would always misunderstand Iqbal’s position.
It is a very grand statement to say that scientists know everything about matter, as Hoodbhoy maintains. The whole scientific project is to look for exceptions, and it was precisely these exceptions that gave rise to Hoodbhoy’s much beloved field of quantum physics. At the speed of light the laws of classical mechanics break down, and a new set of logical precepts, that are usually counter-intuitive, are required to understand the quantum phenomena. This vast domain of the Unknown disturbed Schrodinger so much that he shunned quantum physics for biology. Yes, the scientific project is necessary in so far as the quest to understand the nature of matter continues, if the physicists today knew every bit of detail about matter no one would have funded 5 billion euros to build CERN in Geneva.
Now another bit of clarification is in order, because Hoodbhoy claimed that he did not understand it and even termed it as “gibberish”. Iqbal discusses Zeno after Russel and focusing on Zeno’s paradox and extending Cantor’s theorem of continuity he concludes that:
“The mathematical concept of continuity as infinite series applies not to movement regarded as an act, but rather to the picture of movement as viewed from the outside.”
Hoodbhoy quotes this and says that a mathematician or a scientist would never understand this because it is “gibberish”. Again I would repeat a scientist would not understand this, a student of the philosophy of science would easily understand this. Here Iqbal is subtly pointing towards the thought experiment that led Einstein to substantiate his relativity theory. Einstein imagined that someone traveling in a lift would not experience the movement of the lift, but any observer outside the lift would experience the movement of the lift. Assume that both the observer and the person in the lift has the same age. Now imagine that the lift travels at the speed of light and comes back to the same place where the observer outside the life is situated, according to physics the person in the lift would have passed fewer years than the observer outside the super-quick lift, because time slows down at the speed of light, thus for the observer the person coming out of the lift should look younger than himself though it seems to him that both of them have spent the same amount of time on earth. This could be a simplified explanation of Iqbal’s quote above.
There can be many reasons why Hoodbhoy got Iqbal wrong. Perhaps Hoodbhoy is reading his Iqbal with the very mindset that Iqbal is attacking, that of scientism: the pompous belief that science has the supreme explanatory power to describe every phenomenon in reality. I do not think that Iqbal was against science, he was merely taking his spiritual stance by pointing out the gaps in modern physics of his times. As Iqbal says:
“Personally, I believe that the ultimate character of Reality is spiritual: it is necessary to point out that Einstein’s theory, which, as a scientific theory, deals only with the structure of things, throws no light on the ultimate nature of things which possess that structure.”
In other words: Science can only tell how things function in the world not why they function the way they do. When Newton approaches the question of the fundamental causes of physics in his Principia he throws his hands up. He says that he has merely unearthed the laws of nature, but if anyone wants to know why is it that the laws of nature work as they do, then he should inquire the Grand Designer of the Universe. One could ask why is it that the acceleration of gravity is 9.8m/s/s on earth and not 5.6m/s/s? There is no sensible answer to that, except for the fact that that’s how nature wants it to be.
This pride in science is what disturbed Iqbal, and not only him throughout history many great figures had had trouble with this haughtiness. Perhaps the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein broke off with Russel because of the latter’s insistent belief in mathematics and science. So does this mean that we should not study science? Of course not. Hoodbhoy should promote science but not at the expense of Iqbal’s defamation. We should study science, we should study art, literature, philosophy, history everything. No field of study is complete, and would never be complete in unearthing the mysteries of man and the universe and that is what distinguishes a dead field from alive, and that is what makes education so beautiful. The sea of knowledge is so vast to drink up all our curiosity and our ignorance remains untouched.
