Despite itself, Hollywood manages on rare occasions to get it right. Such was the case with Ron Howard’s movie Apollo 13 (1995), starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Ed Harris. It retells the nail-biting story of Apollo 13’s aborted mission to the moon when an oxygen tank explosion crippled the spacecraft two days after its launch in 1970. Apollo 13 dramatized the frantic efforts to get the astronauts back alive from thousands of miles in space.
There’s a great scene in which the fllight director (played by Ed Harris) stands before a group of fellow workers. Behind him is a chalkboard drawing of the earth, the moon, and the spacecraft between them. He says very simply that they are going to have the damaged ship circle behind the moon, then use the moon’s gravitational pull to slingshot the ship back to earth.
That’s exactly what they did. And guess what? It worked!
What’s fascinating is that they were using physics that Isaac Newton developed in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687. In fact, if NASA could have transported Newton to 1970 and given him a couple of variables, in a few minutes Newton could have told them exactly what they had to do.
Now, does not the success of Newton’s physics here help prove that science is the key to finding truth? While that might sound reasonable, it’s not so simple. And Newton’s law of gravity is a perfect example of why not.
For starters, Isaac Newton didn’t have any idea of what gravity was. Concerning gravity itself, he famously said, “Hypothese non fingo” (“I feign no hypotheses”). In other words, Newton didn’t have a clue as to why every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. He only knew that they did, no matter how ridiculous the idea. He called the concept of gravity acting at a distance across empty space “so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” This is Newton talking about his own theory!
Second, Newton developed his theory on two false assumptions: absolute space and absolute time. The two premises upon which he worked out his law of gravitational attraction are now believed to be wrong.
Third, Newton’s law of gravity works only with slow-moving objects; with objects moving close to the speed of light it just doesn’t apply. In fact, Einstein’s theory of general relativity has superseded Newtonian physics. Newton’s law of gravity has been shown, at its deepest level, to be flawed.
For hundreds of years Newton’s accomplishment has been hailed as the classical account of a great scientific theory, and as powerful proof that science is the best way to learn truth.
Yet Newton had no clue as to what gravity was or how it worked. He built his theory on two premises later believed to be wrong. The theory applies only in limited circumstances. And the foundation of Newtonian gravity has been superseded by something else.
This is finding truth? All the theory did was make predictions. If that’s all you think science is for, as some do, then fine. Newton’s law of gravity was a smashing success (at least within certain speed limits). But if you believe, as others do, that science reveals truth and teaches us about the real world, then Newton’s theory failed.
And it’s not just Newtonian physics. By its nature, science can give us only glimpses, models, of reality—or, as some argue, only models (or glimpses) of how reality appears to us. But these models always change or are, at least theoretically, always changeable. For all its benefits, including its many wonderful practical and technological fruits, science comes with inherent limits about what it can teach us. Though the context is completely different, science parallels the idea about those who are “always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7),especially truth about the deepest and most important questions.
