Professor Hawking’s lecture began with an account of the great god Bumba and his digestive problems, which I hadn’t heard about before. According to the myths of the Boshongo people, Bumba had a belly-ache and vomited up the sun, the moon, the stars and various animals including the first human beings. This ingenious piece of gastro-theology provides a very good account of why we’re here and where we came from, with only the slight disadvantage of being untrue. Or at least unlikely. As I understand the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman’s sum over histories, the great god Bumba may be busily at work somewhere, but probably not in this suburb of the universe.
As the lecture progressed, I was struck by how much more interesting Professor Hawking’s account was than that of the Boshongo people. I don’t only mean more likely, more persuasive, better argued, though it was all of those; I mean more interesting. It was better storytelling; I always wanted to hear what was going to happen next, and why. It was full of more interesting characters and settings. The Steady State, for example, which I couldn’t help picturing as a sort of 1950s advertisement, with a pipe-smoking father sitting comfortably in his living room, next to the radiogram, with a wife knitting submissively in the background and a small boy playing with Meccano on the carpet. The father would remove his pipe and twinkle knowledgeably as he said, “Of course, I’m with Steady State Insurance,” and a caption underneath would say “You Know Where You Are with a STEADY STATE Policy.”
Then there were other fascinating characters, such as the General Theory of Relativity, and the microwave radiation from the very early universe that turns up on your television screen, and the spontaneous quantum creation of little bubbles that grow, or don’t grow, into universes.
Another reason that the story we heard from Professor Hawking was different from that of the Boshongo people has to do with the relationship we have with the story itself. It’s to do with the way we—the audience at an academic lecture, the congregation in a church, the jury in a courtroom, the listeners around the cooking fire in the darkness of the savanna—the way we regard the stories we’re hearing. Different kinds of stories expect different kinds of audience and certain kinds of attitude from that audience. I don’t mean an attitude of liking or respect, though every storyteller would like those; what I mean is there’s something in the circumstances of the telling that says “This story is to be taken literally,” or “This is a metaphor. One thing stands for another.”
Because in the normal course of life, we depend on knowing which attitude it’s appropriate to take to the stories we hear. A witness in court might be telling the truth, or telling a lie, and the jury might believe him or not; but they don’t think that he’s talking in metaphor. If the prosecuting counsel says, “Tell the court what you saw the accused do,” and the witness says, “He stuck a knife in the victim’s heart,” the jury isn’t expected to understand this as meaning, “I saw him write a savage review of the victim’s latest book.” The jury is there to decide whether or not the statement is true, but not what kind of statement it is. It’s supposed to be a literal one.
Now we don’t know whether the first people who listened to the Bumba story thought it was literally true. Maybe they did. But I think that if people have evolved to the point where they can tell stories at all, they’ve already got a fairly sophisticated mental world in place, in which they know the difference between what’s literal and what’s figurative. After all, every one of the Boshongo people must at some point have eaten a piece of dead wildebeest or something that didn’t agree with them, and the consequences of that would have looked nothing like the sun, the moon, the stars and the animals and so on. So they were capable of thinking that Bumba’s belly-ache and its results were like theirs in some ways but unlike them in others: they were capable of thinking in analogy or metaphor.
As long as that mental capacity persists, human beings are able to think about their world and describe it in more ways than one, and a very great gift that is. At the high point of what we might call the Bumba tendency, we find the sublime poetry of Milton’s account of the Creation in Paradise Lost. Milton pictures the angel Raphael talking to Adam and Eve and telling them what happened before they themselves were created, and does it in words that celebrate the sensuous physical beauty of the world so vividly that it’s impossible, for this atheist at least, to withhold a rush of imaginative empathy. I know it isn’t literally true, and yet I can enjoy it to the full. Most of us are capable of that sort of mental double vision, and that capacity can’t only have evolved last week. I think it’s as ancient as language and as humanity itself.
The trouble comes when the fundamentalists insist that there is no such thing as analogy or metaphor, or else that they are wicked or Satanic, and that there must only be a literal understanding of stories. The Bible is literally true. The world was created in six days. The Kansas Board of Education says so. The worshippers of Bumba, as far as we know, haven’t developed this modern perversion, this modern limitation on the meaning of narrative; it’s only the worshippers of Yahweh and Allah who are as silly as that.
The delight for me in the account Professor Hawking has given us in his lecture and in his marvellous book A Brief History of Time, is that we can both listen to it with wonder and take it literally. It’s a tale of heroic endeavour, of intellectual daring and imaginative brilliance without parallel, and those people like me who are in the business of playing variations on the Bumba story, and trying to get as close to the Milton end of the spectrum as our talent will let us, can only take off our hats and salute the storytelling of those like Professor Hawking—those who not only tell the story, but who themselves played a part in the events: who uncovered a corner of the mystery, who shone a light into the darkness and revealed something that no one had ever seen before.
The sort of story that these great heroes (and I’m using the word carefully and accurately)—that these great heroes of modern science tell does have one thing in common, and I mean in a technical, structural sense, with stories of the Bumba sort. And that has to do with how they end. Most stories that we read in novels or fairy tales, or see in films and plays, are shaped with a conclusion in mind. The events are all arranged to lead up to “And they lived happily ever after.” Or “Reader, I married him.”
Or the last sentence of George Orwell’s Animal Farm:
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Stories of that kind take us on a journey through harmonies and tensions and releases and discords and finally we come to a resolution. The story’s done; all the ends are tied up; there’s no more to be said.
But the stories that both religion and science tell us about our origins don’t do that. There isn’t that sense of cadence and finality that we have at the end of a play or novel, or the aesthetic and moral closure we feel at the end of one of the classic fairy tales. Stories about origins don’t have that sort of determined ending. The religious kind of origin-story might tell us that we were brought forth by a great father in the sky, or in the case of Bumba by a great gurgitator, and they usually go on to put us in some kind of relationship with our creator. We are his children. We owe him gratitude and worship and obedience. The other kind of origin-story, the scientific kind, tells us about the development of matter from the first moments of the universe, the formation of atoms, the way atoms join with other atoms to form more complex structures that eventually give rise to life, and how life itself evolves by means of natural selection.
We are the children of the sky-god, or we are made of the same material as the stars.
Either way, stories like this tell us how we got here: but then they say, in effect, “The story continues, and the rest is up to you.”
And whether or not we know this, whether or not we like it, that puts us in a moral relationship with the thing we came from
too, whether that’s God or whether it’s nature. The God stories go on to make this quite explicit: do this, believe that. The stories of science have moral consequences too, but they convey them more subtly, by implication; we might say more democratically. They depend on our contribution, on our making the effort to understand and concur.
The implication is that true stories are worth telling, and worth getting right, and we have to behave honestly towards them and to the process of doing science in the first place. It’s only through honesty and courage that science can work at all. The Ptolemaic understanding of the solar system was undermined and corrected by the constant pressure of more and more honest reporting: “Yes, we know the planets are supposed to go round the earth in perfect circles, but really, if you look, you don’t see that. You see this instead. Now why do you think that could be? What’s actually going on up there?”
So we have the courage of such as Galileo and the other victims of persecution and fearful closed-mindedness. I was very glad to hear that Professor Hawking escaped the clutches of the Inquisition during his visit to the Vatican; four hundred years ago, he would not have done, and in the context of the time scales we’ve been hearing about tonight, four hundred years is the merest flicker of an instant. We sometimes forget how lucky we are to live in this little bubble of time which is still warmed, you could say, by the background radiation from the Enlightenment. We’re privileged to be able to hear the words of Professor Hawking without having to meet in secret, without having to depend on passwords and disguises, without the danger of betrayal and arrest and torture; and that is not only because of the intellectual brilliance of the great heroes of science, both past and present, but because of their valour too.
Professor Hawking ended his lecture with a survey of the current state of cosmology, and the prediction that we are getting close to answering the age-old questions, “Why are we here? Where did we come from?” Some people are rather afraid of thinking that there might be a final answer to those questions; they think it will take all the mystery and delight out of the universe. I think they could hardly be more wrong. The more we discover, the more wondrous the universe seems to be, and if we are here to observe it and wonder at it, then we are very much part of what it is. And there is no shortage of important questions. Once we know where we come from, we might find that our attention turns to questions like, “Where are we going? What shall we do?”
The story continues, and the rest is up to us. I’m immensely grateful to science, and to Stephen Hawking in particular, for illuminating our path to the present day with such brilliant clarity, such intellectual daring and such wit.
THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN EXON, THE EXETER COLLEGE MAGAZINE, AUTUMN 2006, WRITTEN IN RESPONSE TO THE DENNIS SCIAMA MEMORIAL LECTURE DELIVERED BY STEPHEN HAWKING, MARCH 2006.
The Path Through the Wood
HOW STORIES WORK
On the “phase space” of the story world and the path a writer makes through it, with comments on “Cinderella” and an account of how I came to imagine the wheeled mulefa in The Amber Spyglass
Thank you very much for inviting me here. This is the second time my body has been in Finland, but my imagination has come here often. I’m honoured by your wish to hear me speak, and I hope I can find something interesting to say.
But I can only talk about what I know. When I was adding up what I know before coming here, I discovered that to tell you all I know would take me about forty-five minutes, which is a useful coincidence, because that’s about the amount of time I’ve got. You’re welcome to ask me questions at the end, but if you ask me something I don’t know I shall have to make up the answer on the spot.
So I’m not going to say much about science fiction, because I don’t know much about it. Nor do I know much about fantasy. I know nothing at all about the interactive multimedia narrative experiences made possible by computer games and so on. The thing I know about is printed on paper, and was created in the first place by a single mind. It has a beginning, a middle and an end—though not necessarily, as somebody said, in that order; or, as Philip Larkin said, “a beginning, a muddle, and an end.” The interactive multilayered multimedia experience may well be superior, it may well be the future, it may be destined to brush the novel aside and populate the earth with its progeny; but I am talking about the novel.
And in doing so I’m going to bring in my own experience as a novelist, though I have to enter a warning here too. I have friends who write books, and it always surprises me how differently we work. One will make a detailed plan and submit that to a publisher for his comments and then alter the plan and make an even more detailed scenario and then finally write the finished thing. Another will begin to write with not the faintest idea what she’s going to finish up with. I have my own method which is like neither of those. The only thing we have in common is that we all end up with finished books, and that we are each convinced that our method is the only sensible one. So when I describe my own way of going about it, please remember that I’m not recommending it as the only way, or the best way, or an infallible way. It’s none of those things; it’s only my way.
Now here I want to come to the title of my talk, “The Path Through the Wood.” Some of you might know that Robert Frost poem. “The Road Not Taken,” which I think was used as the title of a book not long ago. He talks about coming to a fork in the road through a wood, and having to choose which way to go, and the poem ends:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
So here we have two ideas: the wood and the path. The wood, or the forest if you like, is a wild space. It’s an unstructured space. It’s a space full of possibilities. It’s a space where anything can happen (and it frequently does, in the words of the song from that great movie Hellzapoppin’). There are monsters in the wood. There are life forms unlike any others. There are quarks and neutrinos and virtual particles; it’s full of charm and strangeness. It’s non-linear. It just grew.
The path, on the other hand, is a structure. And it has a function: it leads from here to there, or from A to B. It’s extremely linear; even when it doubles back and crosses itself it does so with an air of purpose. It says: “I know where I’m going, even if you don’t.” It was made.
I expect you can see where this is going. Each novel or story is a path (because it’s linear, because it begins on page one and goes on steadily through all the pages in the usual order until it gets to the end) that goes through a wood. The wood is the world in which the characters live and have their being; it’s the realm of all the things that could possibly happen to them; it’s the notional space where their histories exist, and where their future lives are going to continue after the story reaches the last page.
(This is the point where practitioners of literary theory will throw up their hands in disgust. Characters don’t have histories, they would say; the only life they have is that in the words on the page; they are not real people, they are only literary constructions; to mistake the characters in a novel for characters in real life is to make a fundamental category error; it’s naïve to the point of stupidity—etc., etc. To these ladies and gentlemen of theory I say, Thank you very much; now go away until you can tell me something useful).
So the wood, or the forest, is the sum of all possibilities, and, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I found a nicely scientific-sounding term for it in a book about elementary physics. The term is phase space. I could sort of grasp the edge of it, and get a vague idea of the meaning of the whole, but I couldn’t understand the explanation, and when my seventeen-year-old son tried to explain the explanation to me, I got even more confused, so I won’t try to explain it to you; but no doubt some of you are already familiar with the idea. It’s something like the sum of all the consequences that could follow from a given origin.
And each story we can tell has its own phase space, its own forest, which is different from the forests of every other story. I can illustrate what I mean by the story which in English we call “Cinderella,” and which in French is “Cendrillon,” and which in the great collection by the Brothers Grimm is called “Aschputtel,” and which no doubt has a different name in every language in the world. It’s one of the most familiar stories of all, which is why I can use it here.
The Cinderella-world contains many, many things. It contains a young girl who’s bullied by her sisters. It contains a palace with a charming young prince. It contains rats and pumpkins and a fairy godmother. It contains an invitation to a ball…and so on. Those are the things we know about from the story.
But by extending what we know just a little, it’s possible to see some other things that the world contains—things that lie off to the side of the path which is the story we know. We know there was a ball—so there must have been musicians to play there. There must have been an orchestra. We know Cinderella did all the dirty work in the kitchen, and she got her name from the ashes—so they didn’t have a gas-fired boiler and central heating in that house; they must have had an old-fashioned stove with a chimney. Chimneys have to be swept. There must have been a chimney sweep who called regularly.
We can see the Cinderella-world, the Cinderella-forest, getting a bit deeper as we look at it. We can imagine more, even further from the path: what about the town they all lived in? Was there a mayor and a town council, was there a police force, was there a department for dealing with pests—for getting rid of rats, for example?
It would be possible to invent a million facts about Cinderella’s world, each consistent with every other, each something that Cinderella could have known about or experienced. The world or the wood can be as detailed and rich as we like.
Daemon Voices Page 9
