Physics & Language

venerdì, 31 gennaio 2025

I have been participating in the events at the Pari Center for several years now, even helping with the planning and organization of their in-person Gentle Action conferences over the past two years. As much as I enjoy volunteering and helping out behind the scenes with the online and in-person events, I had long-hoped that someday I would be able to contribute to one of their journal issues. This January (2025) my dream became reality.

I was invited to contribute an article to the January 2025 issue of Pari Perspectives by my friend, Jonathan, who was one of two guest editors for the issue. I found the theme of "Life Beyond Mechanism" especially intriguing, especially given my interest in the history of science in the Western world.

I chose to focus upon the gradual shift away from the exploration of the Natural World and the movement towards a more arithmetic, mechanistic view of the world. Few people realize that Descartes, along with his French cohort of Mersenne and Gassendi, was focused upon creating a scientific model of the world that would allow for the possibilities of God-given miracles. As far as Descartes, Mersenne, and Gassendi were concerned, the Catholic Church was beset upon on all sides, both from without (in the form of the Protestants) and within (from people such as the Dominican monk Giordano Bruno).

These constraints gave rise to the mechanistic model of the world that has become so prevalent today. The article that I wrote takes a distinctly different approach than anything I have seen up until the point when I wrote it. Rather than delving into the historical motivations and machinations, I chose to address the "mathematization" of the world, and subsequent mechanization, by Descartes, directly questioning whether the arithmetic methods proposed by Descartes accurately model the Natural World that we both participate and live in.

Click here to visit the Pari Center website, browse its programs, and purchase a copy of the journal.

Yours in inspiration,
Michael Weaver