I’ll take the Edge Question and make a pseudoinvariant transformation that makes it more apt. When Niels Bohr was asked what the complementary variable of truth (i.e., Wirklichkeit, or ‘reality’) was, he replied, with no hesitation, ‘Klarheit’ (clarity). With apologies to Bohr – and since neither truth nor clarity are quantum mechanical variables – real truth and comprehensive clarity should be simultaneously achievable, given rigorous experimental evidence.
So I will use ‘clarity’ (as in ‘clear reality’) in place of ‘truth’. I will also invent equivalents for ‘proof’ and ‘belief’. Proof will be interchangeable with ‘experimental scientific evidence’. ‘Belief’ is trickier, given that it has to do with complex carbon-based life. It can be interchangeable with ‘theoretical assessment’ or ‘commonsense assessment’, depending on the scale and the available technology. In this process (no doubt a path fill of pitfalls), I have cannibalized the original Edge Question to produce the following:
What do you either commonsensically or theoretically assess to be clearly real, even though you have no experimental scientific evidence for it?
Now, this is a difficult question. There are many theoretical assessments made of the explanation of natural phenomena at the extreme energy scales, from the subnuclear to the supercosmic, that possess a degree of clarity. But all of them are buttressed by the vast collection of conciliatory data that, scale by scale, express nature’s works. This is the case even for string theory. So the answer is still ‘Nothing’.
With regard to Bohr’s complementarity, I would suggest that belief and proof are in some way complementary: If you believe something, then you don’t need proof of it, and if you have proof, you don’t need to believe. (I would assign the hard-core string theorists who do not really care about experimental scientific evidence to the first category.)
antwoord van Maria Spiropulu [fragment]
uit: What we believe but cannot prove : today’s leading thinkers on science in the age of certainty - John Brockman (ed.)
extra: website Maria Spiropulu
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