AI ‘Deep Nostalgia’ brings old photos to life with animation

From a Western perspective, it all started in ancient Greece, around 600 BCE. It was during the Axial Era, a somewhat controversial term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers to refer to the remarkable intellectual and spiritual awakening that occurred in various places across the world in the span of one century approximately. Apart from the explosion of Greek thought, this is the time of Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha) in India, of Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, of Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) in ancient Persia – religious leaders and thinkers which would reframe its sense of faith and morality. In Greece, Thales of Miletus and Pythagoras of Samos pioneered pre-Socratic philosophy, (sort of) shifting the focus of investigation and explanation from the divine to the natural.

True, the divine never quite left early Greek thought, but with the onset of philosophy, trying to understand the workings of nature through logical reasoning – as opposed to supernatural reasoning – would become an option that cannot be overlooked. exist before. The history of science, from its beginnings to the present day, could be told as an increasingly successful split between belief in a supernatural component of reality and a strictly materialistic cosmos. The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, the age of reason, literally means “to see the light”, the light here being clearly the superiority of human logic over any sort of supernatural or unscientific methodology to arrive at “truth” things.

Einstein, for his part, was a believer, preaching the fundamental reasonableness of nature; no weird inexplicable stuff, like a god playing dice – his tongue-in-cheek critique of the belief that the unpredictability of the quantum world was truly fundamental to nature and not just a gap in our current understanding.

How far we can understand how nature works through logic alone, science cannot answer. This is where the complication begins. Can the human mind, through the diligent application of scientific methodology and the use of ever more powerful instruments, achieve a full understanding of the natural world? Is there an “end to science”? This is the sensitive issue. If the split that began in pre-Socratic Greece were to be completed, nature in its entirety lends itself to a logical description, the full set of behaviors that science studies, identifies, classifies and describes by means of perpetual natural laws. . All that remained for scientists and engineers would be practical applications of this knowledge, inventions and technologies that would meet our needs in different ways.

This type of vision – or hope, in fact – has been going since at least Plato who, in turn, owes much of this expectation to Pythagoras and Parmenides, the philosopher of being. The dispute between the primacy of what is timeless or unchanging (being), and what is changeable and fluid (becoming), is at least as old. Plato proposed that the truth is to be found in the rational and immutable world of Perfect Forms which preceded the delicate and deceptive reality of the senses. For example, the abstract form Flesh embodies all chairs, objects that can take many forms in our sensory reality while serving their functionality (an object to sit on) and basic design (with a seating surface and legs) underneath). According to Plato, forms hold the key to the essence of all things.

This kind of tension is palpable today when we see groups of scientists arguing passionately for or against the existence of the multiverse, an idea which declares that our universe is part of a very large number of other universes; or for or against the final unification of the laws of physics.

Nature, of course, is always the final arbiter of any scientific dispute. Data decides, one way or another. It is beauty and power at the heart of science. The challenge, however, is knowing when to give up on an idea. How long do you have to wait for an idea, however attractive, to be deemed unrealistic? This is where the debate gets interesting. The data to support more ideas “out there” such as the multiverse or the extra symmetries of nature needed for unification models have refused to appear for decades, despite extensive research with different instruments and techniques. On the other hand, we can only find if we look. So, should we continue to defend these ideas? Who’s deciding? Is it a community decision or should each person adopt their own way of thinking?

In 2019, I participated in an interesting live debate at the World Science Festival with physicists Michael Dine and Andrew Strominger and moderated by physicist Brian Greene. The theme was string theory, our best candidate for a final theory of the interaction of particles of matter. When I finished my doctorate in 1986, string theory was the way. The only way. But, by 2019, things had changed, and quite dramatically, due to the lack of supporting data. To my surprise, Mike and Andy were quite open to the fact that this certainty of the past no longer existed. String theory has taught physicists a lot of things and maybe this was its usefulness. The Platonic perspective was in peril.

The dispute remains alive, although with each experience that fails to show evidence to support string theory, the dream becomes harder to justify. Will it be a question of generation, as the famous physicist Max Planck once said: “Ideas don’t die, physicists do”? (I’m paraphrasing.) I hope not. But it’s a conversation that should be more open, as was the case with the World Science Festival. Dreams die hard. But they can die a little easier when we accept the fact that our understanding of reality is limited and doesn’t always match our expectations of what should or shouldn’t be real.