2024-12-14

In response to Fernando on viewing his initial version of the last chapter in the documentary:

It looks good to me, and I have only one specific change in mind: to sharpen up the timing of each cut between imagery-clips during voice-over, so that the voiced words always pertain to the image on display at the moment. For example, Rich talks about quarks, but it takes a couple of seconds before a depiction of quarks shows up on the screen.

A general comment that I have is perhaps one that cannot have much effect and cannot be taken as any kind of direction. I offer it only in case it might somehow be useful to someone: I should like to avoid the appearance of advocating the reductionistic materialism that every physicist and engineer of secular inclination is inclined toward these days. I should like to avoid the view that everyone who is unaware of Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics naturally adopts when receiving a technical education these days. I’ll spend a few words here below, but I want reiterate that this is not a recommendation for any change to the documentary.

Yet what I want to avoid is the view according to which water-molecules actually exist in liquid water.

A water-molecule might actually exist, might be a substance itself, before joining a volume of liquid. After joining, however, it seems possible to me that the molecule might no longer actually exist, though it still really exists as a potency in the liquid substance. It transforms from a real actuality as a substance on its own into a real potency within another substance, the liquid. This seems possible on the quantum mechanical description if we suppose that there is a lot of entanglement among dissociated atoms and molecules in liquid water, so that the full property of the liquid is only properly described more or less by a single wavefunction spanning the liquid’s volume.

I make this point as a specific example of a more general idea. On the one hand, we have a hierarchy of theories spanning from preons at the bottom, to particles of the standard model, to atoms, to molecules, to inanimate macroscopic substances, to plants, to animals, to the bodies of rational animals, to celestial objects, to the evolution of spacetime itself. On the other hand, there seems to be a boundary that prevents the reduction of one theory merely to a theory in which more fundamental parts explain everything. Water seems not merely to be molecules. A human person especially seems not merely to be molecules.

Yet it seems necessary to develop a hierarchy of theories in order to make best sense of the world, even if we know that the theories of things that can never be seen are likely not right. Necessary because the human mind seems built to have at least some imperfect understanding of all that is, and because God in His mercy makes the universe comprehensible to us. Even if that comprehension is always flawed, it seems ill considered to reject the gift. Rather, we must accept it as did the good steward in the parable of the talents. By working hard to develop the gift of comprehension, we might hope to do great things in the world, to become worthy stewards of creation.