The nature of the physical world

Arthur Eddington

The Nature of the Physical World is the title of a landmark work in the history of popular science. Published in 1928, it compiles the Gifford lectures given in Edinburgh by its author, Arthur Eddington, in 1927. Eddington was then famous, having been the scientist who, in 1919, on the occasion of a solar eclipse, organized the expedition that proved one of the predictions from Einstein's theory of General Relativity: the deflection of light when passing near a star. It was said of him that he was one of only three people in the entire world who understood General Relativity. In addition to this, Eddington was a pioneer researching on the origin of the energy of stars, for he was the first to propose that it came from the fusion of hydrogen to form helium.

The unreasonable effectiveness of science

Paul Davies

Paul Davies is an British physicist, expert in cosmology and quantum mechanics, well known for his activity in scientific popularization. In one of his articles [1], with the same title as this post, he wrote the following:

The fact that this rich and complex variety emerges from the featureless inferno of the Big Bang… as a consequence of laws of stunning simplicity and generality… has a distinct teleological flavor.

And in his most famous book, The Mind of God (1992), written in response to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Davies wrote the following words:

The success of the scientific method at unlocking the secrets of nature is so dazzling it can blind us to the greatest scientific miracle of all: science works.

What Davies poses here has much to do with one of the most pressing problems of our time, the debate between realism and anti-realism, if we use the terms of analytical philosophy. This debate can be summarized in the following words: