Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Physicists on God and Science

The following is based on my recollection, I am sure that details are wrong and the statements "quoted" are a paraphrase of my memory. 

In 2004, I and some UMD graduate students interested in studying particle physics theory attended a series of lectures by Prof. Gates. A group of interested undergraduates from Howard also attended.

One day, I and the other graduate students had spent some time talking about the Anthropic Principle. This continued as we went to the lecture. Gates had something come up and so it continued as the Howard students also arrived. 

Gates ended up very delayed and so the discussion developed into a more general God and Science discussion with ~3 sides: I and a Jewish graduate student taking a general theist perspective, the other graduate students taking a general atheist perspective and most of the Howard students taking a traditional Christian perspective.

The discussion had continued for over half an hour and had become very involved when Gates arrived. He listened for a few moments and then drew a Venn diagram with three circles and labeled them Technology, Mathematics and Nature. He pointed to the intersect of all three and said something like
“This is the part of the universe that we have the technology to make measurements of and the mathematics to describe. This is where we do science.”
He then pointed to the part of the circle that was exclusively Nature and said something like
“I believe that God is here”
and then pointed to the overlap of Nature and Mathematics
“and that String Theory is here, where we have mathematics to describe nature but do not yet have the technology to make measurements yet.”
He then went into his lecture.

This didn’t seem to have a very strong impact me at the time, but retrospectively has had a huge impact on me. I think about his diagram whenever I think about God and Science or Religion and Science and associated issues.