History as first science

The word history comes from the Greek word ἱστορία. If we look it up in the Liddell and Scott Greek-English lexicon of classical Greek we see that the word originally had a much more general meaning than what it has today. It seems that the concept of history in classical Greece is the closest equivalent of what we today call science. 

There exists a hierarchy of sciences where mathematics and physics are placed very high. The idea that everything is reducible to physics is still present in debates. The physicist Max Tegmark, in his book "Our Mathematical Universe", has even suggested that in the end everything is just mathematics.

In analogy with Aristotle calling metaphysics the first philosophy, I suggest here that it makes sense to call history the first science. 

The motivation for this is the simple fact that all sciences are dependent on observation and an observation is something that has to happen in time, that is, in history. In other words, we can only ever make observations of things in the present. Every observation ever made by a human is therefore a historical event. We don’t have access to the future because we can’t make observations of the future.

What I think sometimes confuses this basic fact is our concept of laws of nature. The idea of laws of nature seem to imply that we have knowledge of the world that transcends history and stretches into the future. But if we are to believe Karl Popper we don’t have such knowledge, because all theories are unprovable. All we can do is show them to be false. However we don’t really need the authority of Popper to draw this conclusion. As long as we haven’t learned to travel in time we simply can’t observe the future.

This doesn’t mean that it is meaningless to talk about the future. It’s obviously necessary to have a concept of the future and also to make predictions of the future. All life forms rely on regularities in nature. Humans are probably the life form that is best of all to adapt to changes in the regularities of nature. What gives us this power is probably our exceptional ability to create new technology. This adaptation always comes with an update of our predictions of the future.

But even if we admit that physics is a science of time passed, and therefore basically part of the science of history, what about mathematics? ”1 + 1 = 2” is true today and no imaginable event can change that so that tomorrow this would no longer be true. Therefore mathematics must definitely transcend time.

Is that really so certain?

What if we would instead consider mathematics as a historical artifact? What if we think of it as a sort of statue that we started building several thousand years ago, and we are still building on it, creating new extensions, connecting parts that were once separated. It is of course a very special form of historical artifact. One in constant development, but also with parts that have barely changed during all of its existence. This artifact is also an exceptionally useful tool for interpreting reality.

Mathematics as we know it consists of a finite number of proofs. These proofs are strings of symbols. Whatever language they are expressed in can be translated to 0’s and 1’s. So all of mathematics can be represented as a string of 0’s and 1’s.

In this sense mathematics is just a form of archive or memory. Memory of what? Useful models?

If this is true, then history subsumes all other sciences. This however doesn’t mean that you reduce all other sciences to history. History as the first science leaves all other sciences just as they are. All it does is in a sense to reveal the fundamental incompleteness of them and in this way also opens them up to the future.

Does this mean that mathematics becomes subsumed under the history of ideas, and thus part of the humanities? To say that all sciences are subsumed under historical science – wouldn’t that be to say that all science is part of the humanities, as history is generally understood to be part of the humanities? Not really, under this new understanding history cannot be categorized simply as part of the humanities; rather history precedes the distinction between natural science and the humanities. The history of humanity is very short compared to the time spans when there were no humans. The majority of history is not about humans at all. 

What is the present?

What is the present? The present is a measure of time. This can be a second or it can be a day or a decade. So it is a unit of time that we are in at the moment. Therefore the present can not be arbitrarily short or arbitrarily long. It must be measurable. Any designation of the present gives a partitioning of time; it gives rise to a past and a future.

We live in many present moments at the same time. We live this day. We live this year. We live this century. We also live in a geological time. There is a debate among geologists whether we are still in the Holocene, which started 11700 years ago after the last ice age, or whether we have actually entered a new geological epoch which is the Anthropocene. These geological epochs are a relevant measure for discussing the history of our planet. Our planet is estimated to be around 4,5 billion years. The planet Earth hasn’t always existed. Would it make any sense to use 4,5 billion years as a measure of the present? To say that we live in the time of the existence of Earth? It doesn’t leave much place for anything called history, but why not. If the present is 4,5 billion years, that leaves around 9 billion years to history. 

Of course we don’t know for sure when the beginning of time was. For example, if the cosmos is cyclical then the age of our universe could be a blink of an eye compared to the age of the cosmos. In that case it could even make sense to talk of 13 billion years as the present.

Or would it? I suggested above that to call something the present we have to be able to measure it. At the moment we have great difficulties in measuring the complete history of our universe.

We can’t count time without regularities in nature. The most natural and oldest way to count time is based on the relative movements of the Earth and the Sun. One spin around Earth’s axis gives day and night and one turn around the Sun gives a year. These are, by the way, not perfect regularities. The Earth’s spin is slowing down 1.8 millisecond every 100 years. Of course this is a very negligible number. What that number means is basically that we have found a regularity in nature that is more regular than Earth’s spin that we can compare it too. 

This is what physics does: it finds these regularities in nature. But of course the only regularities we can examine or detect are historical regularities. In this sense we can understand physics as history on the biggest and smallest timescales.

However, what the cosmologist Thomas Hertog argues for in his book ”On the Origin of Time” is that we can’t find any regularities that have been true for all of the history of the universe. His book is an important inspiration for this essay. Hertog believes that the laws of physics themselves, which is just another name for regularities in nature, have a history. If I understand it correctly this is because the laws at the quantum level are laws of probability. And if the theory of the Big bang is correct, the beginning of the universe must have been governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. This immediately introduces uncertainty and unpredictability to the history of the universe. So all laws of physics except the laws of quantum mechanics must be contingent laws, which means that they are historical facts rather than laws of nature.

So in the end, the only laws that are valid for all of the history of the universe, are laws that describe the world as unpredictable. All the deterministic laws of the universe are in reality themselves contingent, and have not always been true, but emerged from the quantum world.

Time and the holographic principle

In the end Thomas Hertog reverts to a very Parmenidean perspective of the universe and, with the use of the holographic principle, posits a hypersphere at the limit of our the universe that contains a complete description of everything. In that way, history is reduced, and physics can remain the most general or primary science, which in the end holds the truth of everything we could ever know.

This also renders our present moment a sort of illusion and de facto already decided from the beginning of time, and therefore in a sense meaningless.

As the holographic principle is based on our theories of black holes, it is based on a dynamic phenomenon. A black hole is never static, it is always in a state of change. It is constantly attracting matter from its surroundings. It is at the same time constantly emitting matter. This is what’s called Hawking radiation. So even if we assume that the surroundings of the black hole were completely empty and that it therefore didn’t attract any matter, it is still in a constant state of change due to its radiation. Therefore a black hole can never be a static object. 

The holographic principle, derived from our understanding of black holes, says that any volume of space has a complete description at its boundary. So, for example, everything inside a room can be described on the surface of its walls, its floor and its ceiling. In this sense the holographic principle leads to static descriptions.

It has been observed that our universe contains enough matter for it to form, or already be, a black hole. Theories based on this observation have been put forward and are called black hole cosmology. At the face of it, black hole cosmology seems to rest on pretty firm grounds. It starts from the observation of how much matter is in our universe, and applies to this the theory of general relativity. This gives that we should be living inside a black hole. Black hole cosmology gives us a very dynamic view of our universe. It also posits very concrete limits to our knowledge of the cosmos or multiverse, because it would be impossible for us to observe anything beyond the event horizon of our black hole.

The holographic principle has been much talked about for the last couple of decades among physicists. It is definitely a fascinating principle. But it seems to me that it is also a sort of distilling out of a static model from a dynamic phenomenon (a black hole). At the same time our universe seems to have the basic properties of the dynamic phenomenon from which we have derived the principle. With that in mind it seems that black hole cosmology is really worth pursuing further.

A problem with Hertog’s theory is that a description located at the boundary of our universe seems difficult to investigate in a meaningful manner. The purpose it serves seems to be to defend physics as the most general science.

Hertog writes that his theory makes any theory of everything impossible. In that sense it weakens physics' claim to be a foundation, and this he sees as a positive. But I think that the very construction of the theory still places physics at the top of the hierarchy because of what it means for our understanding of time – namely that it is ultimately an illusion. It seems to be implicit in Hertog’s theory that what is ultimately real is the mathematical description of the universe, even though we will never get hold of this complete description. So in the end Hertog's position seems to be not that far from Max Tegmark's.

It all seems to come down to how we understand mathematics. Does it hold the final secret to our universe? Does it transcend time? Or is it, as I suggested above, a historical artifact created by man?

I think the latter alternative is closer to the truth and also a perspective that is more likely to inspire us to create new mathematics that can help us go beyond and improve our current models of the universe.