Free Knocking on Heaven's Door by Lisa Randall Page A

particular pieces of music occasionally achieved the epitome of simultaneous terror and beauty with which others had defined it. Sublime music for Clement was at a pinnacle beyond his usual powers of comprehension—resisting ready interpretation or explanation.

    The sublime proffers scales and poses questions that just might lie beyond our intellectual reach. It is for these reasons both terrifying and compelling. The range of the sublime changes over time as the scales we are comfortable with cover an increasingly large domain. But at any given moment, we still want to gain insights about behavior or events at scales far too small or far too large for us to readily comprehend.
    Our universe is in many respects sublime. It prompts wonder but can be daunting—even frightening—in its complexity. Nonetheless, the components fit together in marvelous ways. Art, science, and religion all aim to channel people’s curiosity and enlighten us by pushing the frontiers of our understanding. They promise, in their different ways, to help transcend the narrow confines of individual experience and allow us to enter into—and comprehend—the realm of the sublime. (See Figure 11.)

    Art allows us to explore the universe through a filter of human perceptions and emotions. It examines how our senses access the world and what we can learn from this interaction—highlighting how people participate in and observe the universe around us. Art is very much a function of human beings, giving us a clearer view of our intuitions and how we as people perceive the world. Unlike science, it is not seeking objective truths that transcend human interactions. Art has to do with our physical and emotional responses to the external world, bearing directly on internal experiences, needs, and capacities that science might never reach.

    [ FIGURE 11 ] Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), an iconic painting of the sublime—a recurring theme in art and music.
    Science, on the other hand, seeks objective and verifiable truth about the world. It is interested in the elements of which the universe is composed and how those elements interact. Although referring to his trade of forensic investigation, Sherlock Holmes admirably described science’s methodology in his inimitable style when he advised Dr. Watson: “Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid… The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it.” 11
    No doubt Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have had Holmes express similar methodology for unraveling the secrets of the universe. Practitioners of science attempt to keep human limitations or prejudices from clouding the picture so that they can trust themselves to obtain an unbiased understanding of reality. They do so with logic and collective observations. Scientists try to objectively figure out how things happen and what underlying physical framework could account for what they observe.

    As a sidebar, however, someone should let Sherlock know that he’s using inductive, not deductive logic, as do most detectives and scientists when they are trying to piece together the evidence. Scientists and detectives inductively work from observations to try to establish a consistent framework that matches all the measured phenomena. Once the theory is in place, scientists and detectives make deductions, too, in order to predict other phenomena and relationships in the world. But by then—for detectives at least—the work is done.
    Religion is yet another approach that many use to respond to the challenge that Gregerson described of relating to the hard-to-access aspects of the universe. The