
Modern
science could be said to mark its birth with the publication of Newton’s
PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA in 1687. Since then information on every conceivable
subject, on every scale from the sub-atomic to the cosmological, has
been gathered at an exponentially increasing rate. The result is that
today researchers are labouring under an information overload making
it impossible for them to read more than a tiny fraction of the thousands
of papers published weekly or occasionally even daily in their particular
discipline. One has only to spend an hour or two searching the Internet
to get an impression of the huge amount of data available. Now the question
is this: does all this information stem from isolated, unconnected phenomena
or is every bit a piece of a large, very large puzzle which will eventually
be assembled to reveal a single, coherent picture? Another way to put
this question might be to ask whether events in nature occur randomly,
in some totally arbitrary sequence, or must each event necessarily be
connected causally to a previously established state, in which case
we could, theoretically at least, regress ultimately to a prime cause,
the origin of the puzzle. The following pages are devoted to a study
of this question that concerns us all. What we are as human beings,
our relationship to nature, to the cosmos, are profoundly affected by
the answer. If nature is chaotic and composed of random accidents, of
which we would presumably be one, then most probably our existence is
meaningless. If on the other hand nature proceeds and progresses according
to logical rules, in a word evolves, then we are part of that process
and as such we may have a “role” to play, we can have significance.
It is essential for every one of us to have at least a general understanding
of the processes leading to the Big Picture, if indeed there is one.
Only by making this effort will we ever know what we are and how we
relate to the changing universe we inhabit.
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