I Peered Into the Mysteries of the Universe and Found Only More Mysteries

When I was a kid, I dreamed of transcendence even if I didn’t know to call it by that name. I walked through the world with my head in the stars, trading the industrial wastelands of New Jersey for pictures of distant galaxies, my leaky roof for books about the solar system. I spent hours in my room dreaming of space-suited astronauts bounding over alien landscapes.

Whenever things were bad, I retreated into space and science. When I was 9 years old, a drunk driver careened over the centerline and killed my 15-year-old brother. The shock of his sudden, irrevocable disappearance propelled me deeper into my astronomy books. I devoured telescopic images of interstellar clouds and star fields. They showed me a cosmos in which my story, my pain, was just one narrative in an infinite book of stories.

I yearned to follow my heroes, such as Newton and Einstein, into the rarefied realms of mathematical physics, a desire that only deepened as I learned more about physics through old texts I found on solo trips to Greenwich Village. In the mathematical proofs underpinning Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s relativity, I saw an invisible skeleton on which the flawed flesh of the world had been hung. I also learned that once you discover the precise mathematical laws governing atoms and their subatomic particles, everything in the universe can be predicted and explained. To me, this reductionism, along with the supposedly timeless reality of mathematics, meant that human experience could be overcome through a higher, more complete perspective. I left for college wanting to join in the effort to climb those heights, to pierce the veil of this messy world and find a view of the universe free of human bias and tragedy.

In some ways, I did exactly what I set out to: I graduated with a degree in math and physics, plus enough credits for a philosophy triple major. I got my Ph.D. and became a professor at the University of Rochester. I formed a research group that used supercomputers to study wonderful things, such as the birth of stars and the evolution of the filigreed interstellar clouds that soothed my heart after my brother’s death. My life was filled with science, and it made me happy.

But as my scientific practice deepened, my faith in the perfection of a human-free perspective on the world began to waver. The older I grew, the less satisfied I became with the notion that the beauty I saw in a sunset was just an illusion manufactured by my nerves, which, in turn, were nothing but atoms; the more difficulty I had believing that atoms alone, bouncing around in a void, could describe everything that was real.

My first doubts arose, ironically, when I was introduced to physics’ highest achievement. Quantum mechanics—the study of atoms and their constituents—is the most accurate scientific theory ever developed. But it also reveals a world that is inherently fuzzy. In quantum mechanics, one cannot know every property of an object with perfect accuracy. Even more important, the act of measurement, which plays no role in classical physics, lives at the core of quantum mechanics: The act of observing a particle changes the rules it follows. The centrality of measurement-making seemed to imply a centrality of measurement-makers, that is, us.

This intrusion of the human into my vision of a perfect, human-free scientific perspective—a God’s-eye view of the world—was disconcerting to say the least. As the great physicist Neils Bohr said, “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” And yet, the mathematics of quantum mechanics was more beautiful and powerful than anything I’d ever seen. Like so many physicists before me, I fell in love with the field. But it left me with deep unresolved questions about my wish for a transcendent perspective. If access to that perfect world without us was impossible, where did that leave me and my passion for science?

[Read: Scientists found ripples in space and time. And you have to buy groceries.]

Another crack in my worldview appeared in philosophy class. At first, all of my courses were aligned with the analytic school of philosophy, which aims to determine the “truth content” of statements about the world. Then I hit phenomenology and my head split open. Phenomenology eschews dry logic for blood-warm, embodied human experience. It takes our ongoing, moment-to-moment presence as an irreducible, inescapable fact. Suddenly I couldn’t ignore how direct experience was so intimately tied to all my attempts to describe reality and yet slipped, like a ghost, past attempts to pin it down with either science or philosophy.

As the decades passed, I began to live a double scientific life. My career in astrophysics didn’t require the kind of philosophical engagement needed for asking basic questions about quantum mechanics. But I continued my own studies in the various interpretations of that deep yet perplexing field. I also kept reading philosophy beyond the analytic tradition.

In this way, I circled the question of experience and its primacy, struggling to wrap my mind around the exact problem with that human-free, reductionist take on science. I never lost my passion for science or the excitement of its expansive vision of the cosmos. But I could never go back to the story I’d learned as a kid, in which science offered an escape from the human perspective into what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called the “view from nowhere.”

I was in my 50s by the time I was ready to attack the question head-on. It was early spring 2016, and I was visiting my friend Marcelo Gleiser in New Hampshire. Marcelo is a gifted theoretical physicist who, like me, had been writing books for a decade that were skeptical of the God’s-eye view. Evan Thompson, a philosopher well known for his work on cognition and living systems, came to visit the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth, which Marcelo directed. As the snow melted and the trees began to bud, the three of us caught fire.

For a month, we spent endless hours talking in Marcelo’s office, at cafés, and over dinner. We each knew that the orthodox story of science was a mistake. Although it had once made sense, now it was leading to paradoxes and dead ends in fields as varied as physics, biology, and consciousness. We also saw its profound and mostly negative effects on society at large.

[Read: Has physics made philosophy and religion obsolete?]

Then, on a rainy walk across campus, we lit upon the central theme. The human eye has a blind spot—an invisible hole in our vision—where the optic nerve connects to the retina. It lies at the heart of our visual field and also makes seeing possible. In the same way, something unseen lies at the heart of science that also makes it work: direct experience.

Unpacking that blind spot took Marcelo, Evan, and me into long jam sessions of big ideas and sharp detail. If we’d met as teenagers, I think we’d have spent energy like that arguing over our favorite bands—or, better yet, formed our own. In the end, that’s kind of what happened. After many years, our work together has led to a new book, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience.

We wrote with a sense of urgency. Science is the most powerful tool humans have ever devised, and yet, its rise is also linked with the rise of industrial societies (be they capitalist, socialist, or communist) that have proved remarkably efficient at pulling resources from the planet. It has given us fossil fuels, air travel, nuclear weapons, and iPhones—all transformative technologies that have shaped the world as we know it, and also imperiled us. Without the capacities that science gave nation states and their economies, we would not today be weathering an extreme, human-changed climate or assessing the risk of an AI apocalypse. Perhaps, by developing a new philosophy of science, we’ll be better poised to address those threats.

In our view, that new philosophy should position science not as a god collecting pebbles of absolute truth, but as a self-correcting narrative that humans co-create with the world around us. Science shouldn’t sweep direct experience under the rug, but explicitly and correctly build from it. Western science and philosophy have long advanced a view that only objective, quantifiable things are real, and therefore important. Experience was just an unimportant sideshow of brain activity. But, in fact, an experiencing subject is the necessary precondition for having a scientific practice at all.

[Read: The new philosophy of cosmology]

Direct experience comes first. It’s just a given, a raw fact that can’t be reduced. The bodily feelings of hot and cold, for example, are concrete and real; degrees Fahrenheit and the theories of thermodynamics that underlie them are abstractions, albeit immensely powerful and useful abstractions. The point is that no one’s ever had a view from nowhere. No one ever can.

Working out the details of the blind spot allowed me to resolve the decades-long dilemma at the center of my scientific life. That’s because the blind spot is not really a problem with science. It's a problem with a philosophy about science. Seeing that dichotomy has opened my eyes to new and exciting terrain. I’d been called to science to find the world without us. Now I see how impossible that is, and that the real challenge is to understand the world and us, together as an inseparable whole.

It seems fitting that, in order to gain this new perspective on the universe, I had to return to the teenage sense of possibility that had first brought me to astrophysics. My childhood dream might still be unfulfilled, but a lifetime later, I’ve found something better than transcendence: the knowledge that the universe is even richer with questions and deeper in beauty with us in it.