The humility I
have described here is not the humility we see (not always in sincere form) in
various Eastern religious leaders and the like, although it is related. I am speaking of intellectual humility: the ability to accept that anything one has
come to believe, whether it be from schooling or a church, from books, parents
or other authorities, or even as the product of one’s own observations and
thoughts, could genuinely be mistaken; mistaken no matter how much observation
and thought or the weight of authority or time lend to it. Or how many people hold the belief, for how
many centuries. It is the recognition of
human limitations and fallibility, even among the most brilliant, well-educated
minds. My personal favorite example of
this is Einstein adding the so-called Cosmological Constant to his equations
for General Relativity to prevent, for what were mainly esthetic reasons of
his, an expanding (or contracting) universe, something which his raw equations
implied. When Edwin Hubble was within
barely a decade to demonstrate by his observations of the red shifts of distant
galaxies that the universe is in fact expanding, Einstein pronounced this ad-hoc addition of the Cosmological
Constant the greatest blunder of his career.
What makes this example my favorite is how a more recent discovery in
cosmology, that the universe is not only expanding but that, contrary to all
expectations the expansion rate is accelerating (the mutual gravitational pull
of the galaxies ought to be slowing it down, yet it is speeding up), has
resurrected Einstein’s self-disavowed constant, albeit in somewhat different
form. Einstein’s confession of his
greatest blunder may thus prove itself an even greater error, an irony I have
to expect he would have enjoyed.
Another, important
aspect to humility is the overwhelming feeling, shared by most of us I suspect,
at looking upon a universe not only greater than our ability to fully
understand, but, as the biologist J.B.S. Haldane observed (though he used the
word queerer rather than greater), greater than we can understand. One of the
most wondrous and compelling things about science, which is such a large part
of the reasons I have spent a lifetime immersed in it, is how strange and
wonderful it can make the most “ordinary” of things, simply by the act of
explaining them.
