Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
22. The Role of Contradiction in Discovery: Heraclitus, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein and Theology
Class of 2005-03-31
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7a-wisdom-2005/022-the-role-of-contradiction-in-discovery-heraclitus-planck/

[0:00] Prayer, name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. God, our enlightenment, guardian angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, hoard and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. Saint Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor, pray for us and help us to understand all truth. Amen. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen. I think I mentioned last time, you know, a little bit how some others have seen something of what Aristotle talks about in the first reading, and you could summarize it under the title I've given to these little readings: the role of contradiction in coming to know.

[0:46] Now, what I have on the first page, as you can see here, are some texts from a couple of philosophers: Heraclitus, perhaps the first philosopher to, in some way, see a little bit of this, and the text of Aristotle that we we read last time. Then on page two, I start with some selections from the great physicists of the 20th century, starting with the father of modern physics, as he's called, Max Planck.

[1:17] That occupies quite a few pages here. Ends up with the text from Einstein, of course, who's the authority, and then on page five and six from theology, right? So the purpose of this was to illustrate a little bit how, despite all the differences there are in the ways that philosophy and science and theology proceed, right? Some of the greatest minds in all three see something of the role of contradiction in discovery.

[2:04] Now I won't go over the text of Aristotle again, although we'll refer back to it a little bit today. But you could say, in a way, that the great Heraclitus anticipates this a bit.

[2:18] Now the statements that Heraclitus first gives there: "War is the father of all things, the king of all things." That may be a bit of an exaggeration, and we're not concerned with the total universality. But if war is the father of all things, also in particular, it's the father of what? New knowledge, right? Okay.

[2:44] And the second fragment is hitting upon that same thing. Now the third fragment from Heraclitus: the hidden harmony is better than the apparent harmony. That's well and beautifully said. Now you could apply that to a lot of things. But if you apply it to knowledge, right? Harmony is the opposite of what? Contradiction. And Socrates points out in the dialogues. If you read the dialogues, most people are what?

[3:21] Not in harmony. Their thoughts one with another, or with things, for that matter. But they're not aware of the contradiction. And Socrates will say, "What do you think? " And it's dangerous to admit three things you think, because sometimes from two things you think something else follows that might contradict that third thing you think. And usually, Socrates finds somebody to be in a what? Contradiction, right? Like the courts we're talking about earlier, right?

[3:56] They contradict each other, right? So if I kick a pregnant woman and kill her baby, that's homicide, at least, right? But abortion is not. So it is and is not. That's a contradiction. So most people are in a state of apparent harmony. And take the simplest example of all in the dialogues, in the Meno, right? Socrates asked the little slave boy, "How do you square? How do you double a square?

[4:26] How do you get the side of a square twice as big? " You double the side, he says. Okay. Now he's in a state of apparent harmony, right? But now, if you take an example, let's say you have a square that's two by two, right? Well, you say that if you double that side and make it four by four, you have a square twice as big. But even the slave boy can eventually see that two by two is going to give you four, right?

[4:56] And four by four is going to give you sixteen, and sixteen is not double of what? Of four, yeah. So he can't hold that four is double of two. And the square whose side is twice as long is twice as big. And sixteen is what? Not double four, right? Okay, so you've got to reject one of these things, right? And the thing to eject is what? That the square whose side is twice as long is twice as big.

[5:29] What that moment Socrates stops and he turns to the slave boy's master and he says, "We've done this guy a good turn, right? " Before he would have gone out and told the whole world the way to double a square is to double the side, they asked him, right? But now he knows he doesn't know, right? So he's been what? Freed from a mistake or an error, right?

[5:52] That's good. Secondly, he knows he doesn't know now. That's good to know you don't know. And third, he'll want to know. And then Socrates has a second conversation. Where he shows the slave boy that the diagonal of the square will be the side of a square twice as big. Okay. You know how Socrates does that, huh? He just says, "If this is the original square, and you put another square exactly equal to it here, another one exactly equal to it here, and fill up the fourth spot, you'd have a square which is what four times as big, right?

[6:38] " And then you take the diagonals of these, and after you see that the diagonal is dividing it into equal parts, you end up with a square that's exactly what half of four, which would be twice as big, right? Okay. Now you know that's the Pythagorean theorem, but that's not too advanced for this for the slave boy, huh? So that's the hidden harmony, right? See. But the hidden harmony is the true harmony, right?

[7:08] It's really free of contradiction. So what Socrates found is that most men are in a state of apparent harmony, and then along comes somebody like Socrates and points out the contradiction in your thinking, but then hidden under that contradiction is a true harmony. Okay, that's beautifully said, right?

[7:37] Now, when he says nature loves to hide, it's a very famous statement of Heraclitus, and I think I mentioned how it's down in the bookshop there, and I see in the science section the book entitled "Nature Loves to Hide," but no acknowledgement that the phrase comes from Heraclitus, huh? But notice the connection between that and the hidden harmony. That this is especially true about nature, right? He doesn't say the triangle or the square loves to hide, right?

[8:06] But he says nature loves to hide, huh? So when we try to reach harmony in our thinking about nature, it's probably hidden in the beginning, right?

[8:25] Now the next fragment. It almost seems like a contradiction, right? If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it. You'll never discover it, right? For it is hard to be found, he says, and difficult. Now you might say that sounds like a contradiction. How can you expect the unexpected, right?

[8:53] But when your thoughts contradict each other, right? Then you realize there's something hidden to you, right? And now you're expecting something. What? Which you don't want to ask me to. Yeah. Yeah. And in a way, you've got to move in the direction of untying that what contradiction or apparent contradiction, and so at the end, it gives us a bit of advice. Dispute, right? Now, if you go to Navarre, right, look at Thomas's works.

[9:32] How many of his works are called what? Quaestiones disputatae, yeah, and even the great Summa Theologiae, huh, is kind of an abbreviation of the quaestio disputata method. Because you have a disputatio, you have what people or reasons, right, to think it's this, reasons to think it's the opposite, right? And they say in the Middle Ages, you know, they would have Say maybe one Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we'd have a lecture on the material, right?

[10:06] And there's certain things in there that are difficult, and other things, right? Certain things that historically and for other reasons, men have disagreed about, huh? And maybe in Tuesday, Thursday, we'll pull those out, right? And you guys are going to all say try to prove the affirmative side, and you guys are all going to prove the negative side, right? And then me, the great magister here, huh?

[10:31] I'm going to explain the thing, right? And if I thought that you guys had the truth, I'll answer all your arguments, right? And vice versa, right? If I thought these guys had the truth, I'll answer all your arguments. If I thought you both missed the boat, that the truth is somewhere in between you two, then I answer all your arguments and answer all your arguments, right? Well, the summa does that same thing, right?

[10:57] Except in abbreviated form. So the following advice of what? Yeah, he's the father of the progress of the human mind. That's one of the titles I give Heraclitus, huh? Okay. He's also the central thinker of human thought. Now, between Heraclitus and Aristotle, I could take, you know, play the life I was doing a little bit earlier, right? In the dialogue, right? Yeah. Um.

[11:31] But I go down to the text of Heraclitus that we saw last time, but I'm not going to expound this text again now here. But we'll look back at it when we look at the later ones. Okay.

[11:46] Now, let's look at the scientists here a bit here. Now, Max Planck is sometimes given the title by the physicists themselves of being the father of modern physics, right? Of course, modern and classical is you know relative thing. But the physicists of the 20th century, they call the physics of the 20th century sometimes modern physics, and the physics of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, the physics of the 17th century and the 18th and 19th century, classical physics.

[12:22] So classical there doesn't mean Greek, but means the physics of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Now, Planck is, as I say, sometimes called the father of modern physics because in December of 1900 he proposed the quantum hypothesis, which is the beginning of the physics of the 20th century. It makes it different. And Heisenberg, in his history there of quantum theory, said when Planck discovered this,

[12:56] he was he knew he had discovered something very important. He went for a walk in the park there in Berlin, I guess, with his son, and he said, "I think I discovered something as great as Newton." And he was studying what they call black body radiation, and he was running into contradictions because, according to the then existing theories, there should be infinite amounts of energy being generated here, and that's absurd.

[13:24] And so Planck came up with the idea that energy cannot be given or received in just any amount, but in just discrete amounts called the quantum. And five years later, right, Albert Einstein used the quantum to explain the photoelectric effect, and so it became clear five years later, or started to become clear, that all these light phenomena, electromagnetic phenomena, involve the quantum of Max Planck. In 1913, right, Niels Bohr showed that the atom involved the quantum, and he resolved some of the contradictions there.

[14:10] So there's Louis de Broglie says, the French physicist, nothing was made in the material world, the physical world, without the what quantum, right? Now, what's interesting though about Max Planck, also in terms of discovery, is that when he went to the university in the latter part of the 19th century, he was told that physics is now complete. The principles are all there. There's details to fill in, but the principles are all there.

[14:39] So here's a man who's told there's nothing really fundamental to be discovered, right? If you want to make some fundamental discoveries, go into biology or something that's still developing, but physics is now complete. So here's a man who was told there's nothing new to be discovered, right? He makes a discovery that's the beginning of modern physics, right? And which led eventually, as Heisenberg was to show, to the greatest change ever been in modern science.

[15:08] And he must know something about how discoveries are made, right? So what does he say about this? The first impulse towards a revision and reconstruction of a physical theory is nearly always given by the discovery of one or more facts which cannot be fitted into existing theory. Facts always form a central point about which the most important theories hinge. Nothing, he says, is more interesting to the true theorist than a fact which directly contradicts a theory generally accepted at that time, for this is his particular work.

[15:45] So here's a man who was told there's no no discoveries to be made that are fundamental anyway, and he makes this extremely fundamental discovery, right? But he attributes it to what? Contradiction. Now Gamow is the the Russian physicist who came and studied under Bohr and so on, and got the Nobel Prize for contributions to quantum theory.

[16:11] And this is a little history he gives of the thirty years it took quantum theory to develop, right, from 1900 to about 1930. And that's what he says, reflecting upon this, he says staggering contradictions between theoretical expectations on the one side and observational facts, even common sense, on the other, are the main factors in the development of what science. That's a very strong statement, right?

[16:43] Now Niels Bohr here. Now Bohr is, in some ways, the most influential of modern physicists, because after he got the Nobel Prize and so on, he set up a institute for theoretical physics in Copenhagen, and men came from all over the world to study under him. Like Oppenheimer came to the United States, Heisenberg came from Germany, Gamow came from Russia. They all came and studied under him.

[17:10] While Einstein was more a loner, you know. And so Bohr himself, of course, got the Nobel Prize for applying the quantum to the explanation of the atom, and he he realized that if you concede the atom as a miniature solar system, you would have no stability. That's always coming into conflict with our atoms. And he realized that the radiation being emitted by the atom was not continuous, as those theories would indicate it should be when it goes from one orbit to another.

[17:46] So he introduced the idea of the quantum, this jump-like thing in the in the atom. Now, so I say Bohr is is a man who got the Nobel Prize himself, but many men who studied under him, like Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg, and so on, went on to get the Nobel Prize. So he's a very central thinker. Now this is a collection of things by scientists who worked with Bohr and has some quotes from him.

[18:13] He's describing the early stages of Bohr's thinking here. Bohr's hypotheses were only of a provisional character, inasmuch as they presented a mixture of Planck's ideas with the old mechanics. Nobody was aware of the situation more than Bohr himself. Thus, in a lecture on the new theory which he gave to the Danish Physical Society in December 1913, in which he himself rightly considered one of his best and clearest lectures, he emphasized this aspect of the problem in the following fine conclusion.

[18:46] This is Bohr's words now. Before closing, I only wish to say that I hope I have expressed myself sufficiently clearly. So that you have appreciated the extent to which these considerations conflict. There is the war that Heraclitus spoke about, right? With the admirably coherent group of conceptions which have been rightly termed the classical theory of electrodynamics. On the other hand, I have tried to convey to you the impression that just by emphasizing this conflict, it may be also possible, in the course of time, to discover a certain certain coherence in the new ideas.

[19:27] So it's by emphasizing this conflict, by emphasizing this contradiction, right, that we may be able to what discover a hidden coherence, right, which is another word for what Harmony is saying. So it's by emphasizing the conflict, the contradiction, and trying to resolve it that you might be able to make a what discovery.

[19:53] Another passage on Bohr. Bohr's turn of mind was essentially dialectical rather than reflective. Of course, dialectical with the Greeks means what reasoning from probable opinions to contradictory conclusions, as Aristotle says. It's like in the third part of the great dialogue, Meno, where Meno wants to know whether virtue can be taught, and Socrates says, "Well, we don't even know what virtue is yet, but can it be taught? Well, if you insist, I say something about it.

[20:25] Let's look. see if it can be said yes and and no, right? And so Socrates gives an argument that virtue can be taught, and he gives an argument that virtue cannot be taught, right?

[20:37] He says, "Bohr's turn of mind was essentially dialectical rather than reflective. Although he did, of course, spend long hours in solitary thought, often during sleepless nights, he needed the stimulus of some form of dialogue to start off his thinking. If the proposer of the doubt was at hand, the dialogue could be lively enough. For as soon as Bohr saw his way to the elucidation of the matter, he would make his point with unbounded eagerness and tenacity, not at all to get the better of his opponent, but rather to get him to share his own exhilaration at solving the difficulty.

[21:14] So intensely did he want everyone around him to share them with them. Even after many years, he would remember every detail of the argument's progress, and he would repeatedly tell the story with the same freshness and animation. It was characteristic now for these unforgettable conversations, so clearly revealing the essentially dialectical form of his thinking, that he would never try to outline any finished picture. Now these are the key words here, but would patiently go through all phases of the development of a problem, starting from some apparent paradox, which means a contradiction, right, and gradually leading to its what elucidation, the untying of that.

[21:57] Now those who were partaking in these conversations with Bohr, they said they were reminded of Socrates, right? They thought they were talking to Socrates, you know, but there's a certain likeness there, huh? Okay, they always start with an apparent paradox, something of a contradiction, and then gradually unravel that, break down that contradiction. Now this next passage is maybe even more precise about this. Logical analysis was not for him, Bohr, a mere verification of consistency.

[22:29] He wasn't just looking to see if what you said was free of contradiction. That's important, but that's not all he was interested, right? But rather, it was a powerful constructive tool, orienting the groping mind in the right direction.

[22:51] I noticed that, right? To know where you're going, right? Orienting the mind in the right direction. That he saw the heuristic power of logic. In its dialectical character. Now, what does the word heuristic mean? Yeah, it comes from the Greek word "heurein with the "heurein," which means to find or discover, right? So he says that he Bohr, saw the heuristic power, the power of what discovery, right?

[23:21] The power of finding something you don't know in its dialectical character, in its ability to bring out what contradictions. Well, no. Okay. That in its dialectical character, that in so far as logic teaches us to bring out these contradictions, right? Yeah. It has a heuristic power, a power of discovery, right? He's illustrating by the striking comment he made on more than one occasion, on his own early experience of scientific discovery.

[23:55] The decisive point. This is quoting Bohr now. The decisive point about Rutherford's atom model. Rutherford was a British physicist there, and Bohr went over to England to study under him, right? Cambridge, right. The decisive point about Rutherford's atom model was that it made quite clear that atomic stability could in no way be accounted for by the classical, meaning the Newtonian, physical laws. Okay. And thereby, what pointed the quantum postulate, right?

[24:30] See, orienting the groping mind in the right direction as the only possible escape from the acute dilemma, the acute contradiction. Just the sharpest the contradiction that was there, right, between the classical laws and and the atom there, made me Bohr absolutely confident of the truth of the quantum postulate. So it not only oriented his mind towards the quantum postulate, it pointed to it as the only way, right?

[25:00] But it also convinced him, right, of the truth of it, right. Which is the two things that Aristotle has there in the second paragraph. It shows you where you're going, and helps you to know that you've arrived. You're going the direction of resolving this contradiction, and when the contradiction disappears, that's a sign you've made some progress, right? You've arrived in some sense. Bohr was still remembering this lesson when, in one of his last conversations, he observed that the reason why no progress was being made in the theory of the transmutations of matter occurring at very high energy is that we have not so far found among these processes any one exhibiting a sufficiently violent contradiction.

[25:45] With what could be expected now? notice the words expect the unexpected, right? With what could be expected from current ideas to give us a clear and unambiguous indication of how we have to modify these ideas? So until you find a strong enough contradiction, you're not going to what make any progress, right? That's why I call Heraclitus the father of the progress of the human mind, because he first saw something of this, right?

[26:12] And the last reading here from from Bohr, or about Bohr, difficulties which are these contradictions, were for him Bohr merely the external appearance of new knowledge, like the outer thing of an orange or some food like that, right? And in an apparently hopeless contradiction, these staggering contradictions that Gamow talked about, right? He conceived the germ, right, the seed of wider and more comprehensive order and harmony. That's the better harmony, right?

[26:47] That Heraclitus spoke about. So it's beautiful, right? To see in different words, right, the same thought coming out again. Now Heisenberg is probably the most illustrious of the pupils of what, of Bohr? If you read Heisenberg's books, he always comes back to his his first encounter with Bohr and his conversations with him. You know, Bohr, you know at that time was regarded as a man who in the 1920s knew more about the atom than anybody in the world.

[27:23] And he came from Copenhagen to Germany to give a series of lectures on the atom, and the German physicists called the Bohr Festival. It's the great thing. Well, anyway, and one of the lectures there, Heisenberg was present. He was still a student at the time, right? In the question period, Heisenberg posed an objection to something, right? And Bohr gave some kind of an answer to the objection, right?

[27:48] But kept on kind of looking back at the guy, you know, as he went on. And so at the end of the period, he came over. Bohr came over to Heisenberg. He says, "Let's go for a walk." And they went for a walk, and they talked about atomic theory for I don't know a couple hours. And Heisenberg said it influenced all his subsequent what thinking, huh? Now Heisenberg, you know, is responsible for a lot of things.

[28:10] I mean, he was the first guy to propose that the the nucleus of the atom was composed of protons and neutrons. They knew there were protons; they didn't know about neutrons, but he was the first guy to propose that. But he's the man who formulated the what principle of indeterminism in quantum theory, which was the greatest change in physics since what Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.

[28:37] But in the Gifford lectures he gave there in Scotland, there, which they put out the title Physics and Philosophy, but it's the Gifford lectures, he's talking about the history of quantum theory here. He says Bohr's theory had opened up a new line of research. The great amount of experimental material collected by spectroscopy. Through several decades, was now available for information about the strange quantum laws governing the motions of electrons in the atom.

[29:06] The many experiments of chemistry could be used for the same purpose. And now he makes a very interesting observation. It was from this time on that the physicists learned to ask the right questions. And then he makes a very interesting observation. And asking the right question is frequently more than halfway to the solution of the problem. I told you that I had drawn my line on the board there, but it's good to think about this, right?

[29:36] You represent by a straight line the time and the what difficulty, right? It takes to go from ignorance to knowledge. The average Joe would think that asking the question comes somewhere at the beginning, right? And all the rest of that time and effort in answering it. But if we Put this here as a midpoint, let's say, huh? Heisenberg says asking the right question is often to go more than halfway, right?

[30:12] In other words, you spend more time, maybe in more effort, before you ask the right question, than after you ask the right question getting the answer. Now I found that myself to be true in philosophy that I spend more time and effort in trying to get from ignorance to knowledge before I ask the right question, but once I ask the right question, boom, you know. And I always tell that example always sticks in my mind when I was, I think I mentioned it last time.

[30:44] I was doing my doctoral thesis, you know, and I had a problem that I'd been thinking about on and off, not only but for ten years, right? I had an undergraduate and so on. My years of teaching St. Mary's in California and so on, and then all of a sudden I put together something Thomas said and something Dion said. Dang, I had the answer like that. you know and I asked the right question, and so I went down to check it out with Monsignor Dionne there, the best mind I've ever known.

[31:11] and I came in and I asked the question. she said, "No, where are you going anyway? You see, but they ask the right question, you know. " And I, I said, "damn, it, can I go there? You know? " But, but now,

[31:29] you can see that also illustrated in a way in the Great Dialogue the Meno right, because Socrates merely asked the slave boy's questions, right? And out of the slave boy's answers, the slave boy recognizes his mistake first, and then later on he recognizes the true way of doubling a square. And Socrates says, "Well, I didn't teach him, you know. " Well, he did, right? But what Socrates was doing is asking all the right questions, and then the slave boy seemed to what teach himself or to draw it out of himself, right?

[32:06] But shows you the greatest work is maybe what asking the right question. Now Heisenberg goes on. What were these questions? Huh? They were the right questions. Practically all of them had to do with the strange apparent contradiction between the results of different experiments, huh?

[32:28] So it's not until they saw those strange apparent contradictions that they asked the right questions, and once they asked the right questions, they were more than what? Yeah, I think I mentioned last time how one of Heisenberg's other books there on his conversations that he said he had with scientists in his lifetime, right? And he tells this conversation he had with Einstein, and Einstein pointed something out about the way he had come to the relativity and so on, and.

[32:59] Then later on, when Heisenberg and Niels Bohr are trying to figure out quantum theory, and they're giving each other's nerves and so on, and finally Bohr says, I'm going skiing," and Heisenberg stays in Copenhagen there, and he asked the right question one night, and all of a sudden, bang, he's there like that, right? And he's so excited and nervous, he goes back and he's he's calculating, making all kinds of stupid mistakes.

[33:24] Finally, he calms down and starts calculating correctly, and everything comes out perfectly, all the numbers, you know. But once he asked the right question, right? He was there in no time. But notice it's these contradictions enable you to ask the right question, right? We had an example of that in discussing the great fragment of Anaxagoras on the mind, right? On one hand, we saw that what the mind is self-ruling, and we point to logic as a sign that the mind can rule itself, right?

[34:04] And then on the other hand, Anaxagoras says the ruler must be separated from the ruled, but the mind is not separated from itself. So you've got a contradiction here, right? But that led us to ask the right questions. How is it that the mind can direct itself, right? When the ruler must be separated from the ruled?

[34:32] It's not that we have two minds. It's not that the mind has two parts, one of which rules the other part, right? But that there are some things known to the mind and some things not known to the mind, and so the mind is ruled in what it doesn't know, by what it does know, and ruled in what is less known to it by what is more known to it.

[34:56] But until we see that contradiction, we didn't really understand how the mind what goes forward, how the mind does in fact direct itself. And then we see how Socrates at the beginning of this, when he was trying to get people to separate what they know from what they don't know, right? And most people have mixed those up. Now Einstein is perhaps the most famous of all the physicists, scientists of the 20th century.

[35:29] You know, Time Magazine made him Man of the What Century, right? Okay. Okay. As I tell the students, I'm always quoting this proverb. They don't seem to know it. You know, get it from the horse's mouth. You heard that? Yeah, I don't know They don't seem to know these things. Stitching nine, says nine. They don't seem to know these things. that my grandmother told me. But the meaning of the get from the horse's mouth is you're going to win the race, right?

[35:56] Oh. The horses down there, they're they're close enough. They know who's got to who's got to win, right? And so somebody says to you, "How was the theory of relativity discovered? " Right, this theory that made Einstein world famous. We get it from the horse's mouth, you know. Don't take somebody else's word for it, right? Now, the evolution of physics is probably the nearest thing to a kind of a history of the main ideas of physics and the development of physics.

[36:26] And this is what Einstein says in that book. He says the relativity theory arose from necessity. Now, why does he say necessity? Is it determinism? No.

[36:42] Yeah, because the mind can't accept a contradiction, right? Okay. From serious and deep contradictions, right? These staggering contradictions, apparently hopeless contradictions. Yeah. From serious and deep contradictions in the old theory, from which there seemed no escape, right?

[37:03] So Einstein is saying the same thing that Bohr said, right? That it arose from a contradiction. Now, the strength of the new theory lies in the what consistency, right? The freedom from contradiction and simplicity, with which it solves all these difficulties, right? So it arose from a contradiction, and that you've arrived at something, right? Is shown by the contradictions disappearing. Okay, those two things are what Aristotle is talking about, right?

[37:41] In the second paragraph, where he said that seeing these difficulties, these contradictions beforehand, tells you where to go, points you in the right direction, as Bohr says. It orients your mind in the right direction, but also tells you when you've arrived, because that the contradictions disappear is a sign that you what made some progress, right?

[38:08] Now, the second paragraph of Einstein is talking about quantum theory. I think I mentioned before Einstein didn't want to go along with the indeterminism, right? That Bohr and Heisenberg, right? And of course, the the great showdown was what the Soviet Congress, you know, physicists in 1930 or 27 or earlier. there were several of them, but the last one, Einstein was posing objections to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory that Bohr was defending and Heisenberg and so on.

[38:42] And Bohr would stay up the night and come back the next day and refute Einstein, and then Einstein would think of another objection, right? And

[38:54] the Einstein's final objection was sounded pretty good, you know, and. And Bohr was pretty worried. And in one of the books I have, is a picture. There's a picture of Einstein and Bohr coming out of that session where Einstein proposed his last objection. and Einstein's looking pretty, you know, kind of cocky a little bit, you know, I mean, not overdone, but a little bit, you know, like I put the the nail in that thing, and and Bohr's coming afterwards you know, wants to talk about more, you know.

[39:25] Well, he was up again the other night again, and he discovered a flaw in Einstein's objection, a flaw which, of all things, was based upon Einstein not applying his own theory to the question. No. And and that shut Einstein up, right? Einstein never publicly again tried to. He wouldn't. He wouldn't accept it. You see, okay. But notice what Einstein says about this, though, nevertheless, one of the most fundamental questions raised by recent advances in science is how to reconcile the two contradictory views of matter and wave. Is one of those fundamental difficulties, right?

[40:06] Which once formulated must lead in the long run to scientific progress, right? Okay. Now the last reading from Einstein is general more general now, right? Okay. And he perhaps could express himself a little bit better in that first sentence. It's not science that forces us to create new ideas, new theories, but it's the contradictions, right? I think that's what he has in mind. But notice now his words.

[40:41] I think get kind of interesting. He says their aim is to break down the wall of contradictions, which frequently blocks the way of scientific what progress, right? Now notice Aristotle used the metaphor of your feet being tied together, right? By contradiction, the mind being tied together like the feet. Einstein used another metaphor, but the wall of contradictions. It's the same idea that these two guys have in mind, right?

[41:11] Whether you run into a wall that blocks your way going forward, whether your feet are tied by the contradiction. In both cases, you're expressing the idea that contradiction stops the mind at least temporarily, right? Okay. And Aristotle says if you consider that contradiction, it'll tell you where to go. And where where are you going? You're going in the direction of untying that contradiction. And Aristotle compares it to looking at the, you know, if your feet are tied by rope, you look for the loose end, right?

[41:40] And then you start to unravel it, right? Well notice Einstein's word here. Their aim, right, is to break down the wall of contradictions, which frequently blocks the scientific progress. So in a sense, you're taking aim, right, at the unknown there, right? The untying of that contradiction will be this discovery, huh? And now Einstein gives what in logic we'd call a universal affirmative statement. No exception, right? He says all of the essential ideas in science, all of them.

[42:15] It's a very strong statement. were born, right, in a dramatic conflict. War is the father of all. In a dramatic conflict between reality and our attempts at understanding, right? I like the choice of the word dramatic, too, right? Because as Aristotle pointed out in the book on drama, there, the poetics, a plot consists of what tying the knots and untying them, right? And that's why the philomythos, the lover of plots, is in a way a philosopher, right?

[42:52] And the plot, in a way, is like philosophy, huh? Because philosophy consists of seeing knots and then untying them, right? And the plot has those two things, right? And I was quoting, you know, the great Shakespeare there in

[43:11] Twelfth Night, where all the knots have been created there, and the character says, "O time, thou must untangle this. Not I. It is too hard a knot for me to untie." Right? Aristotle says time is a good helper for the philosopher in untying some of these knots. It takes time sometimes to, it does take time most of the time, for all the time, to to to take these down.

[43:40] Aristotle makes an interesting observation in the poetics. He says that the younger poets or the lesser poets are better at tying the knots than untying them. You can see it's a poor story about the philosopher, huh. Most philosophers can tie themselves and even others into knots, but they can't untie them. And you know, sometimes you see a movie or something, or you read a story, and you get kind of engrossed in the story.

[44:04] But then the way it turns out is, yeah, you know, And um but somebody like Aristotle or or Thomas, they can untie these knots, huh? Okay. But you do kind of you read the summa, you know, you read the objections and the contra, then you kind of, you know, let that knot settle into your mind. Then you try to untie it yourself, and and sometimes you can make a little progress.

[44:31] Sometimes it's not any progress at all. Then you go turn to Thomas. How does he untie this? What's kind of the way to do it, you know? I know sometimes I give students an article in the class, and I'd rather give them the whole article, I just give them the objections and the contra, and then the rest of it, the body of the article and the objection, they put on a separate piece of paper, which I'll pass out after they, you know, thought a bit about the thing, you know.

[44:58] So those are some wonderful things from some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, seeing the role of contradiction, right? Now the last selections here are from what theology, right? And like in the text from the

[45:18] decree on priestly training here, which starts with the scripture and then the history of the church, and then finally comes to Thomas. I do the same thing here, right? Now, chapter twenty-two. In the logical division there, the understandable division there, the Gospel of St. Matthew, chapter twenty-two, is one of three chapters, right? In the third part of Matthew, which are giving the reasons why they wanted to put him to death, the Pharisees and so on, right?

[45:56] And you know, one chapter is because he's correcting their faults, right? And so there is different reasons for it, but this chapter is where he's what refuting them, right? Okay. Now, while the Pharisees were gathered round, Jesus put to them this question: "What is your opinion about the Christ? Whose son is he? David's?" They told him. Then how is it? He said that David, moved by the Spirit, calls him Lord, where he says, and he quotes a psalm, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, and I will put your enemies under your feet."

[46:29] If David can call him Lord, then how can he be his son? So notice our Lord is doing. He's pointing out an apparent contradiction

[46:39] between two passages in Scripture, right? Okay. And the Pharisees, who claim to know the Scriptures, right? They can't answer that, right? So he's doing a little what Socrates does with the slave boy, right? He's showing the man to be what ignorant of what he claims to know, right? But now the hidden harmony is better than the apparent harmony, right? Hidden under this apparent contradiction is the truth, right?

[47:10] The unexpected truth that Christ, that Jesus, is both man and what God, right? And so, as man, he can be descended from David, right? But as God, he is the what Lord of David, right? Okay.

[47:30] Or sometimes they take one to the New Testament. They'll say, you know, Christ will say the Father is greater than I. One of the times they're talking about as being equal to the Father. Well, how can he be less than the Father and equal to the Father? That's contradiction, right? Well, he's both God and man. As God, he's equal to the Father. But as man, he's less than the Father.

[47:52] In fact, as man, he's less than himself as God. You see, so hidden under these apparent what contradictions, right, is a profound truth, right? And notice, you know, despite all the difference, say between let's say quantum theory and this, because quantum theory is proceeding from these experiments, right? This is proceeding. Christ is proceeding here from the books of the Old Testament, right? But the quantum physicist is seeing a strange apparent contradiction between different experiments, and the untying of that apparent contradiction will be the discovery of something.

[48:35] Christ is pointing out an apparent contradiction between this part of Scripture and that part, but hidden under that is a profound truth that Christ is both God and what man, right?

[48:50] So there you have our Lord in a sense, It's a little bit like Socrates, because the reason why they put Socrates to death was because he was going around doing this, right? He was showing men who claim to know something. That they didn't know what they claimed to know, He was showing men who had a reputation for knowing something that they didn't know this. This is only one of the reasons why they put Christ to death.

[49:13] But it's interesting, how that that Socrates and Christ share that particular reason, right? Now, after Scripture, there you have the Church Fathers. I take perhaps the greatest mind there among the Church Fathers, Saint Augustine, right? Augustine says, "The city of God, but even the heretics yielded an advantage to those who make proficiency, according to the Apostle's saying, meaning Saint Paul. There must also be heresies, right? That they which are approved may be made manifest among you.

[49:56] Now Augustine is starting to talk here about how heresy. During the Patristic period, was necessary for the development of what? A theology, yeah. Because a heretic contradicted some article of the faith, sometimes starting from misunderstood passages maybe of scripture, sometimes starting from philosophy or something like that, right? And the church fathers, like Augustine, were forced, right, by this attack upon the article to defend the article of the faith, right?

[50:29] And to untie that apparent contradiction, and that's how they came to a deeper understanding of that article of the faith, right? Whence too is elsewhere said, the son who receives instruction will be wise, and he uses the foolish as a servant. I was reading Sherlock Holmes story there, and Watson calls himself the whetstone of what of Holmes, right? Huh? And sometimes he speaks of the fool right So what's stolen of the wise.

[51:03] Shakespeare speaks that way too. For while the hot restlessness of heretics—that's a good description of them—they stirs up questions about many articles of the Catholic faith, right? The necessity, see of defending them forces us. Notice those words, necessity and forces, like we saw Einstein using those same words, right? The necessity of defending them forces us both to investigate them more accurately, to understand them more clearly, and to proclaim them more earnestly.

[51:35] And the question mooted by an adversary becomes the occasion of instruction. God brings good out of what evil, yeah, yeah. Is it? What does "mooted" mean in this question? Mooted by an adversary. Well, really, just something raised by an adversary, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, it's not a real question in some sense, but see, in other words, you just go on believing, you know, but not penetrating too much what you believe until someone, you know, so that can't be true what you believe, you know, it doesn't make any sense.

[52:08] And here's reason why it doesn't make any sense. And now you're forced to what defend that, and in defending it, you come to understand it better, right? So here you see the role of contradiction in the development of theology during the what Patristic period, huh?

[52:28] Now, in this particular passage from the decree on priestly training, it says dogmatic theology should be so arranged that these biblical themes are proposed first of all. And so I began with the scriptural passage from our Lord in the Gospel of Matthew. Next, he says they should be opened up to the students what the fathers of the Eastern and Western Church have contributed to the faithful transmission, right, and development.

[53:00] But notice what it says: of the individual truths of revelation. There's a kind of ad hoc character to many of the works of Augustine that there isn't, for the most part, for Thomas's works. You know, Thomas has some ad hoc works too, but you know, contra so and so, contra contra contra. You see all these works, you know. So Augustine is always replying to some heretic who's denied this particular article of the faith, and he's defending that article of the faith against these objections, and so he's contributing to what the development of an understanding of that individual truth of revelation.

[53:40] Okay. Now the next thing is similar to that because let's read it first, and then I'll point out similar. The further history of dogma should also be presented, account being taken of its relation to the general history of the church. Which you go down to the various church councils, and I'm thinking, you know, especially the ecumenical councils, right? They're very often in response to what some heresy, right?

[54:08] Okay. And so in the early ones, somebody's denying the divinity of Christ or denying that Mary is the mother of God or something of that sort. In the council of Trent, you know, the problems with the heretics there in regard to the sacraments, right? So it's kind of development of sacramental theology there in the in the council Trent, right? So it's kind of an ad hoc character too, right?

[54:32] That the councils are not usually trying to to consider the whole of the faith, right? But they're having in mind some false notions and heresies of that particular period about some articles of faith, and they're responding to those, right? Okay. So it's a little bit like the patristic period, huh? Okay. Now finally at the end, it says, "Next, in order that they may illumine the mysteries of salvation as completely as possible."

[55:05] That's a very strong phrase, now, right? He wants to illumine the mysteries of salvation as completely as possible. What should the students do? The students should learn to penetrate them more deeply with the help of what speculation under the guidance of Thomas, right? Now, if you take you know the most famous work of Thomas, the Summa Theologiae, or you go back to the Questions Disputatae, right? Obviously, Thomas is what always starting from a contradiction, right?

[55:39] You could say, in a way, every article in the Summa. There's hundreds and hundreds of articles there. Every article begins from a what contradiction that's developed to the objections, huh? He's always arguing against himself, arguing against the truth, right? He's always objecting to the truth, right? Um, and so if you're going to take the guidance of Saint Thomas. The role of contradiction is going to be central to all you do, right?

[56:05] But what this is, that's how you illumine the mysteries of salvation as completely as what possible. That's a very strong statement, right? And notice what it adds there, and to perceive their interconnections, huh? Because Thomas is looking at, you might say, the whole of the faith, right? You contrast that with what it said in the second paragraph: development of the individual truths of revelation, right? And now you are seeing all of them in a kind of connected way in the Summa Theologiae, right?

[56:36] Okay. So we could bring other texts in, but that's enough to kind of see that Aristotle's got something on the ball there, right? And he talks about the role of contradiction in discovery, huh? But

[56:55] I think some light is thrown upon this by what Aristotle said in the second book, right? He talked about how why natural philosophy is more difficult than geometry, right? And why theology or wisdom is more difficult than geometry. And that's connected with discovery being made in theology or wisdom and in natural philosophy by seeing contradictions and untying them, right? I think that is not so much true about discovery in geometry, huh?

[57:37] Now it's pointing to the fact that before a theorem is proven in geometry, for the most part, there are some exceptions, right? Very interesting exceptions, but for the most part, men would not guess or think opposite things about them, right? A lot of times. What? Many, many times, yeah. They would not. They yeah. They would think what they would guess what was true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even something you know as hard to know as the Pythagorean theorem, right?

[58:10] You might not have a new opinion about that, right? But you wouldn't have opposite opinions about that, right? You see, and so one thing that's very important about discovery is the disposal of discovery is to have a good what imagination, right? And so Sherlock Holmes always, you know, talks about the imagination there. And of course, the modern physicists, you know, are talking about this imagination and almost putting it higher than reason, right?

[58:46] But geometry is more accessible to the imagination. I can imagine the things I am talking about in geometry, right? I can't imagine God or the angels or the soul, and I can't imagine, you know, the natures of things, right? Um. So this connection between discovery being made, maybe in geometry, without there being a contradiction first, right? And geometry being more accessible to imagination, which has got this great role to play in in discovery.

[59:22] Okay. So take a little break now before we logical place to make a break, huh?