From Graham Relf
Newcastle upon Tyne
The analogies drawn by scientists who link cosmology with religion surely amount to nothing more than romantic fantasising which has no place in scientific method (“God of the quantum vacuum”, 4 October, p 28). The danger is that people begin to think this is OK, and the body of scientific knowledge which has been so painstakingly built up in recent centuries will then become suspect.
I do not mean that scientists cannot be romantics or fantasise (in their own time), but efforts to “bridge the gap” between science and theology are surely dangerous: these are entirely separate areas of human experience.
Yes, cosmology is a special case precisely because, by definition, there is only one Universe and it is therefore not possible to do experiments on controlled groups of universes. In that sense the traditional method which has proved so useful for science cannot be applied.
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But that does not mean that reasoned argument has to be abandoned: we will still continue to make useful deductions from observations and our knowledge of physical laws.
If Kepler wrote that he had “wanted to become a theologian” it was merely because of the culture surrounding educated people of the time. The “intriguing interpretations” discussed in the article threaten to take us back to the medieval cosmology which preceded him.
The accuracy of such few factual statements as appear in the article is also dubious. For example, in what sense is “1 to 2 metres almost exactly halfway between 1026 metres and 10-35 metres”? If this numerological trickery were relevant we should all be only 10-5 metres tall. Or should it be 5×1025 metres?
