Consider the sentence “Two men got married to each other at city hall today.” Again, in 1900 in the United States, this sentence would have been unintelligible nonsense. In fact, I specifically remember similar sentences being used as examples of self-contradictory nonsense in graduate philosophy seminars in the mid-1960s. Then came the gay rights movement and court cases and changes in Americans’ attitudes toward homosexuality. Nowadays, therefore, the sentence is intelligible, and sentences like that are true in cities in the United States every day.
Galileo’s claim that Earth circled the sun along with Venus, Mars, and Jupiter seemed not false but unintelligible to most people in his time. Galileo’s claim implied that Earth is one of the heavenly bodies, like Venus and Jupiter, but that was unintelligible nonsense because Earth is clearly down here!
In other words, nonsense is not necessarily a permanent state. The apparent meaninglessness and unintelligibility of a sentence may be a function of changeable external circumstances, such as a lack of knowledge. The principle that nonsense comes in degrees helps us comprehend some cases of nonsense’s transmutation into truth.
Ancient alchemy was the forerunner of today’s science of chemistry. Alchemy arose in the Hellenistic period when Greek philosophy, with its rational principles, encountered traditional Egyptian technologies for making materials. Early alchemists took it for granted that strange-sounding, meaningless, unintelligible words could emanate magical powers. They were nonsensical magical words like we considered in the previous chapter. Alchemists were looking for just the right combinations of nonsensical magic words to set mysterious forces into motion. Supposedly those mystical forces would somehow interact with the physical materials used in an alchemical procedure. The purpose of uttering the nonsensical formulas over the physical materials was to transmute less desirable substances into more desirable ones.
Numerative nonsense—unintelligible, meaningless language modeled on numbers and mathematical terminology—also appears in some early alchemical writings. Strangely evocative formulas like “the five overcomes the three” occur in writings by alchemists, yet the writings contain no clue as to what the number words supposedly enumerate. The alchemists’ words do not convey coherent thoughts to the mind.
In alchemy, then, multiple types of nonsense ran in tandem with observable physical processes. Occasionally an alchemist would stumble onto a useful discovery, and gradually alchemists learned more and more about material substances and chemical reactions. Then, in the sixteenth century, Paracelsus said that alchemists should pursue the practical goal of making medicines rather than trying fruitlessly to make gold. In the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle wrote The Skeptical Chymist. Although it is somewhat ambiguous and vague by today’s standards, Boyle’s book is largely intelligible. In the eighteenth century, Lavoisier gave the science a mathematical language and a sound experimental basic in his Elements of Chemistry. When reading ancient alchemical writings, Paracelsus, Boyle, and Lavoisier in sequence, alchemical, magical, and numerative nonsense seems gradually to morph into intelligible scientific truth. Nonsense gradually transmuted into intelligible truth by degrees over the many years of chemistry’s history.
Nonsense May Be Implicated in Some Basic Concepts of Science
Science seems to tolerate nonsense better than theory would indicate. In science nonsense is a strongly negative quantity. After all, science signifies reason and truth, while nonsense is a hallmark of irrationality. Paradoxically, though, science has put up with a seemingly unintelligible concept of time for many centuries.
Some scientists have concluded that an essential aspect of the conventional concept of time is unintelligible nonsense. For example, reflective of early twenty-first-century scientific thinking, in New Scientist Marcus Chown has said,
At super-high energies, like those believed to have occurred in the earliest moments of the big bang, time loses all meaning.
Science writer Amanda Gefter has stated,
This, of course, raises the question of what came before the big bang and how long it lasted. Unfortunately, at this point basic ideas begin to fail us; the concept “before” becomes meaningless. In the words of Stephen Hawking, it’s like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole.
And they contrast sharply with Isaac Newton’s words in stating his theory of classical mechanics, that “absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.”
Newton’s physics was the crowning achievement of science and the epitome of reason from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, yet the notion of the flow of time enshrined in Newton’s classical mechanics is unintelligible nonsense from the standpoint of twenty-first-century physics. Here we see again how what is thought of as intelligible or unintelligible may shift dramatically as science acquires new knowledge.
The more things change, though, the more they stay the same. Some ancient Greek philosophers questioned whether time is intelligible, and the question has been debated intermittently ever since. “What came before the big bang?” has a previous incarnation in “What was God doing before he created the universe?”
St. Augustine replied that the question itself is meaningless nonsense, arguing that God brought time into being at the Creation, along with everything else. Accordingly, since time began at the Creation, to ask what happened before the Creation is unintelligible.
St. Augustine faced the same objection from rival philosophers in his era. They insisted that time is infinite, with no beginning and no end, hence that there obviously was a time before God created the world. Debates about the intelligibility of time seem to be an enduring theme of organized rational knowledge, including science.
Scientists generally acknowledge that there is a major problem concerning nonsense at the very center of twenty-first-century physics. Namely, physics’ two most successful theories generate nonsense when they are combined. Furthermore, the problem is widely known, and scientists put up with the astonishing paradox as a matter of course, as described in 2013 by Jacob Aron in New Scientist:
Our two best theories for describing reality are quantum mechanics and general relativity. So far, however, attempts to combine the equations in these disparate theories have produced nonsensical answers.
In sum, an element of nonsense seems to be tolerated in science as a practical matter. Ideological principles that would seemingly exclude nonsense entirely from science are suspended. Apparently, science has no choice but to abide some amount of nonsense, even in basic concepts such as time.
Nonsense Sometimes Serves as a Placeholder in the Search for Rational Knowledge
A singer who forgets some of the words of a song may fill in the gap with improvised nonsense syllables and rescue the performance. Similarly, scientists sometimes fill in gaps in scientific knowledge with nonsense, even knowing that it is nonsense, as a temporary stand-in for truth. For instance, unintelligible nonsense is produced by combining the equations of quantum mechanics with the equations of general relativity. However, the nonsense is tolerated for the sake of the enormous amounts of knowledge the two theories produce separately. I dub this kind of situation “placeholder nonsense.”