The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[RD] I was once asked at a public meeting "Don't you think that the mysteriousness of Quantum Theory is just the same as the mysteriousness of the Trinity or the Transubstantiation?" And the answer, of course, can be answered in two quotes from Richard Feynman. One, Richard Feynman said "if you think you understand Quantum Theory, you don't understand Quantum Theory". He was admitting that it's highly mysterious. But the other thing is that the predictions of Quantum Theory experimentally are verified to the equivalent of predicting the width of North America to the width of one human hair. And so, Quantum Theory is massively supported by accurate predictions. Even if you don't understand the mystery of the Copenhagen Interpretation, or whatever it is. Whereas the mystery of the Trinity doesn't even try to make a prediction, let alone an accurate one.

[DD] You know, I don't like …

[CH] It it isn't a mystery, either.

[DD] I don't like the use of the word "mystery" here. I think, I think there's been a lot of consciousness-raising in philosophy about this term, where we have so-called mysterians, the new mysterians. These are people who like the term "mystery". Noam Chomsky is famously quoted to say "There's two kinds of questions, there's puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles are soluble, mysteries aren't". And first of all, I just don't buy that. I buy that but I buy the distinction and say 'there's nothing about mystery in science. There's puzzles, there's deep puzzles, there's things we don't know, there's things we'll never know, but they aren't systematically incomprehensible to human beings. The glorification of the idea that these things are systematically incomprehensible, I think, has no place in science.

[CH] Which is why I think we should be quite happy to revive traditional terms in our discourse, such as obscurantism and obfuscation. Which is what they really are. And to point out that these things can make intelligent people act stupidly. John Cornwell, who's just written another attack on yourself, Richard, and who is an old friend of mine, a very brilliant guy, wrote one of the best studies of the Catholic Church and fascism that there's been published. In his review of you, he says "Mr Dawkins … Professor Dawkins should just look at the shelves of books there are on the Trinity." "The libraries full of attempts to solve this problem before he …" But none of the books in those religious libraries solve it either! The whole point is that it remains insoluble and it's used to keep people feeling baffled and inferior.

[RD] But I want to come back to the thing about mystery in physics, because isn't it possible that our evolved brains … because we evolved in what I call middle world, where we never had to cope with either the very small or the cosmologically very large, we may never actually have an intuitive feel for what's going on in quantum mechanics but we can still test its predictions, we can still actually do the mathematics and do the physics to actually test the predictions, 'cause anybody can read the dials on a …

[DD] Right, I think what we can see is that what scientists have constructed over the centuries is a series of tools, mind-tools, thinking tools, mathematical tools, and so forth which enable us to some degree to overcome the limitations of our evolved brains, our stone age, if you like, brains, and overcoming those limitations is not always direct. Sometimes you have to give up something. Yes, you'll just never be able to think intuitively about this but you can know that, even though you can't think intuitively about it.

[RD] Yeah, that's right.

[DD] There's this laborious process by which you can make progress and you do have to cede a certain authority to the process but you can test that and it can carry you from A to B in the same way. If you're a quadriplegic, an artificial device can carry you from A to B. It doesn't mean you can walk from A to B but you can get from A to B.

[RD] And the bolder physicists will say "well, who cares about intuition? I mean, just look at the math!"

[DD] Yeah, yeah, that's right, they are comfortable with their … living with their prostheses.

[SH] Well, the perfect example of that is dimensions beyond three, because we can't visualise a fourth dimension or a fifth but it's trivial to represent it mathematically, and so we can move in that dimension.

[DD] And now we teach our undergraduates how to manipulate n-dimensional spaces, and to think about vectors in n-dimensional spaces, and they get used to the fact. They can't quite imagine … what you do is you imagine three of them and, say, you wave your hand a little bit, and say more of the same, but you you check your intuition by running the maths, and it works.