In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

255 What About the Next Twenty Years? Or “It’s Turtles All the Way Down” Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time, tells a delightful story about a well-known scientist who once gave a public lecture on astronomy. In the lecture, the scientist described the universe, with the Earth orbiting around the sun, and the sun, in turn, orbiting within a vast collection of stars called a galaxy. When he concluded his lecture, a little old lady in the back of the room got up and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant turtle.” The scientist, with a somewhat arrogant smirk, responded to the woman ’s outburst by asking, “But what is the tortoise standing on?” The woman replied, “You’re very clever, young man, very clever, but it’s turtles all the way down.”1 I suspect that one of the reasons this story amuses is that it portrays a double truth. On the one hand, we recognize the scientist’s truth. We know from accepted rules of evidence—observation, experience, and replicated experiments—that the Earth is indeed round and revolves around the sun. But, on the other hand, the woman also represents a different kind of truth. She stirs in us the awareness that reality is never as precisely and omnisciently knowable as the scientist implies. We have, of course, always known the woman’s truth, but since the dawn of the modern era we have ignored it. We have instead adopted René Descartes’ naively optimistic assertion that humans are capable of knowing everything with certitude and that they can solve all the problems that could ever confront the human mind. More recently, science has adopted a much more constrained posture. With the emergence of quantum physics Talk given at the twentieth anniversary celebration for the Center for Rural Affairs, Walthill, Nebraska, 1993. 256 Cultivating an Ecological Conscience in the twentieth century, we now realize that many of the basic assumptions that led to Descartes’ optimism are not verifiable at the subatomic level. Consequently, our view of the world has forever changed. In his quantum physics primer, The Cosmic Code, Heinz Pagels graphically describes our post-Newtonian world with a new metaphor. He contends that the proper metaphor for the universe is no longer the Newtonian clock—fully knowable, completely predictable, precisely quantifiable, and rigidly deterministic. Rather, it is the pinball machine, full of probabilities and uncertainties.2 The stock in trade of the quantum world are the concepts “lack of objectivity,” “indeterminacy,” and “observer-created reality .”3 These properties of the atomic world, especially the awareness that the observer influences the outcome of measurements, Pagels calls “quantum weirdness.”4 Even science now recognizes that “it’s turtles all the way down.” As we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Center for Rural Affairs and look to its future, it is important to keep this “quantum weirdness” in mind. Recognizing that we live in a pinball-machine-like world—a world full of indeterminacy, lacking objectivity, and allowing observers to co-create reality—can help us to put the center’s work into proper perspective. It was largely conventional wisdom’s failure to recognize this pinballmachine -like nature of our world that led traditional intellectuals to mistrust the center’s work. From the beginning, much of the center’s work was questioned because it didn’t fit the assumptions and frames of reference of classical intellectual thought. And because the classical way of viewing the world was assumed to be “objective,” it was considered the only legitimate view. Consequently, when the center started promoting energy self-sufficiency for small farms, critics presumed the center had adopted a neo-Luddite position bent on turning the technology clock backward. When the center challenged conventional wisdom’s views on center-pivot irrigation systems, critics accused them of being opposed to progress and of failing to see the obvious benefits of such great inventions for farmers in the drought-plagued plains. When the center proposed that viable rural communities were an indispensable part of a healthy farm economy, critics inferred that nostalgia prevented the center from realizing that rural communities had outlived their usefulness. When the center focused on the farmer as the critical ingredient to any effective and efficient agriculture, critics supposed romantic nonsense had blinded them from seeing that technology had already [3.136.26.20] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 16...

Share