Welcome to the first issue of The Colossus! Thanks to the wonder of online publishing, we are able to leap headfirst into publication with a staff of only two people. Consider this edition a preview of larger, more diverse issues to come, as well as an invitation to contributors who would like to help us round out our expertise and release new material on a more regular basis than the after-work hours of graduate students afford.

What exactly does The Colossus purport to be? For those with a classical background, our name might evoke the image of the giant statue erected above the harbor at Rhodes: a symbol of man bestriding nature, the power of knowledge over physical reality and the human condition. Those more familiar with Sylvia Plath may prefer the image of this statue fallen into ruin, powerless. The editors, who are professional scientists, tend to take both views of their craft. On the one hand, we would hardly have committed ourselves to lives of low pay without some kind of idealism regarding the power and beauty of knowledge. But years spent doing menial tasks in the pursuit of answers to some remarkably esoteric problems has left us with a certain skepticism towards empiricism and a taste for more accessible topics. With The Colossus, we intend to grab science by the feet and shake it within an inch of its life. What are its presuppositions? Does it have anything to offer a world more or less disenchanted with the notion of absolute truth? Does science merely produce an endless series of toys, or can it substantively improve the world? Are these improvements technical, or are they social as well: can science guide political decisions?

If these questions seem broad, it is because we are, in fact, not entirely certain how to answer them. Popular science writing, though it commands our respect, tends to avoid or glamorize the process by which scientific knowledge comes into existence, and it often simplifies technical details by ignoring alternative interpretations of data. Philosophers of science, at the other extreme, try to explain the bigger issues surrounding science—meta-science, if you will—but with some notable exceptions they are first philosophers and then scientists, and their work usually involves too many uses of words like “ontological” and “epistemological” to command much attention from nonphilosophers. What we hope to do is to talk clearly about science without recourse to either of these well-travelled forms. We aim to be both whimsical and scholarly. Our articles may seem a little free-flowing and tangential as a result, and we hope you will find them enjoyable. What is more, we hope that you, regardless of whether your background is in science, philosophy, politics, or some other discipline, will be inspired to join us. We invite your comments, your contributions, and—for the bold—your assistance in editing and publishing.

Allow your correspondent to commence, then, with a cautionary tale. You see, science was not always as it is now, for the world once seemed a different place to people. Science took thousands of years to evolve into its present form; at the same time, it played no mean part in changing how humans look at the world. Whether you happen to think that science arrives at objective truth or merely tells a convincing story about the universe, you must admit that if science has changed it could continue to change, and the shape of the world will change with it.

Perhaps because we take our world of particles, forces, and mechanics so much for granted, it requires a certain amount of imagination to see the world as Aristotle and the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean did. Anyone who picks up The Physics will probably be shocked, not only at how wrong it is about some rather basic things (for instance, Aristotle thought that a spear continues to move in the direction it is thrown because the air rushes around the spear to fill in the space it just vacated, creating a vacuum in front of the spear that pulls it forward), but at how utterly unscientific the reasoning is. In order for modern science to determine the cause of some event (ignoring, for the moment, the objections of the empiricists to the very notion of cause), it looks for mechanical explanations. The weight falls to the ground because it follows the local curvature of spacetime; the eight ball goes into the corner pocket because the cue ball struck it at a certain angle and transmitted its momentum to it.

The ancients were, as far as we can tell, at least as careful in their observersations as us. But science is about understanding causes, not merely making observations, and the ancients had a rather different notion of causality. They accepted four kinds of causes to explain events: formal, efficient, material, and final. Formal causes arise because of categories. The whale is a mammal because it gives birth to live young, and we have defined the category mammal as those creatures that give birth to live young (ignore, again for the moment, the copious counterexamples). Efficient causes have to do with the actors ultimately responsible for the event. People, animals, and Fortune can all be efficient causes. Material causes are the intermediate events, such as the cue ball striking the eight ball. And final causes have to do with the purpose of the event. The final cause of this document appearing on your screen involves, alas, the relatively transparent ambition of its author.

The first thing to note is that ancient science permits a certain type of explanation that would be rejected by a modern scientist. Aristotle talks about an acorn wanting to become an oak tree, or the lighter elements as wanting to rise or fall. Hot air rises, for example, because it contains fire, and fire wants to rise more than ordinary cold air. As Chesterton points out, it’s difficult to say exactly how seriously anyone took this kind of language—whether anyone thought oak trees actually have some kind of vital spirit that spends as much time thinking about making acorns as young humans spend thinking about the equivalent sort of behavior. We can detect, for example, a certain amount of whimsy in the story of Apollo harnessing up his horses every morning to drag the sun across the sky that suggests such stories were meant as entertainment, and perhaps as entertaining ways in which to remember various observations—where the sun appears, when to plant and harvest certain crops, and so on. Thus it may have seemed only natural for philosophers like Aristotle to use the same language of desire to describe their observations in physics and biology. But language expresses how people think, and in order for science to acquire the predictive power it now has, it had to refuse to talk about the desires of elements, which don’t really explain anything because they are internal to the elements. Instead we talk about density, which can be measured, explained in terms of more fundamental phenomena, and used to predict with astonishing accuracy how a great many systems will behave.

This difference, between a science that could only provide explanations for already-observed events and one that can make predictions about systems that have never been observed, is the distinction that gives modern science power. Power over nature, power over other humans: it is almost impossible to overstate how vast it seemed to both the bulk of humanity and their leaders, who had lived since the dawn of time by the skin of their teeth, always in danger of famine, disease, and natural disaster, tied by the immense manual labor necessary to break land, build houses, and transport goods, to a single plot of land for their entire lives, living and dying by its fortunes. Such power was frightening to see, both to those in entrenched hierarchies who feared chaos, and to those who saw in modern science a devilish, Faustian bargain, power at the expense of one’s soul.

Knowledge is only powerful when it is accurate, and the desire for power created the other important distinction between ancient and modern science, which is the way in which knowledge is acquired. For the ancients, knowledge came through observation only; for us, the scientific method prescribes experimentation, the physical disturbance of a system. Where Aristotle would observe, speculate, and then write a book, we have to formulate a hypothesis—a prediction of how the system works—and then perform an experiment that tests the hypothesis. We are often wrong, we are usually frustrated (by what seems like Nature’s insistent and rather old-fashioned modesty), but there is also a certain satisfaction in knowing that we have not merely told a convenient story that happens to fit the facts, but actually touched reality.

It would be easy, perhaps, at this point to dismiss ancient science as naive, or the product of a chauvinistic, male-dominated society based on slave labor. But future generations may dismiss our Faustian dilemmas with equal prejudice, so it behooves us to try to understand why Aristotle and company explained things the way they did. What we must also consider is that the ancients viewed the four causes in a complex interplay, indeed, a sort of unity. In particular, the notion of formal cause, and thus form, was not merely a matter of categories. For both Plato and Aristotle, form was the organizing principle in an object. Mammal, for example, is not merely a word that describes a type of animal; rather, there really is some quality of mammalness that causes certain animals to behave in a certain way. Words are not just normative boxes in which to place things, but descriptive, capable of accessing a deep—unseen but inferred—reality that organizes the universe into a kosmos of order and purpose. Formal and final causes are seen in this light to be much the same, two sides of the same coin. And matter, which moderns tend to see as the be-all and end-all of reality, was for the ancients a sort of goo that was only meaningful when it was placed into the matrix of form. The thing that holds a hammer together is its form, its hammerness. The material which composes the hammer is there only by accident: if wood and iron were not available and humans still had need of hammers, they would make them out of something else.

This world of the ancients, which was alive with purpose, had to pass away in order for modern science to come into existence. Over the centuries, slowly and surely, the notion of form, which is external to objects, was replaced with purely material explanations. The desires of elements were better described by their densities; the desires of acorns faded away as the mechanisms of biology became clearer; the functions of an animal in an ecosystem are now explained in terms of evolution. Form, purpose, and function—the organizing principle—retreated further and further from view, becoming ever smaller. The noble hammer, one of Aristotle’s favorite examples for talking about forms and their virtues, is all accident now, its entire existence dependent upon which pieces of wood and iron the hammersmith picked, and the atoms of those materials mere wanderers in the vast universe, now part of a tree, now a hammer, now something else, held in place by the strange, strange rules of quantum mechanics.

Where human agency fits into this picture is unclear. Indeed, from the moment Newtonian physics took sway, the notion of free will has been, at some level, scientifically untenable. For all that we invoke chaos theory, quantum indeterminism, and emergent properties, the fact remains that in a world whose causes are only material, it is hard to find a place for the soul. This is the meaning of the Faust myth, and—if I may be allowed to conclude with a hypothesis—it is the tension between the world of meaning and the world of facts that drives almost every dispute over science and its uses. Power, as Gandhi said, is meaningless without compassion. But at the same time, power enables compassion to actually feed people.

We look forward to discussing these questions with you. If you are interested in contributing, please consult our prospectus or email one of the editors. In the meantime, please enjoy the rest of the issue.