Twenty years after Erichsen’s pronouncement, Albert Michelsen, one of the scientists who measured the speed of light, declared the end of physics. “It seems probable,” he said, “that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established.” He then went on to quote Lord Kelvin, who apparently once mentioned that “the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” In other words, if you’re a young aspiring scientist, don’t bother getting a physics degree—there’s nothing left to discover. Less than two decades after Michelsen’s premature pronouncement, X-rays, radioactivity and relativity were discovered.
And still eminent scientists predicted that certain possibilities were forever closed. In 1932 Albert Einstein said, “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.” Ten years later, underneath the squash courts at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi fired up the world’s first nuclear reactor. (But Einstein gets the last laugh, at least in terms of bogus predictions. His high school teacher once told Einstein’s father, “It doesn’t matter what he does, he will never amount to anything.”)
Contemporary scientists would never make the mistake of saying they know all there is to know. On the contrary, they are fond of repeating Ralph W. Sockman’s adage, “The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” Like the Victorians, they believe in the ultimate power of science, but they appreciate that science is far from finished. It seems to have a limitless ability to reveal new worlds and create wonders. Of course, they continue to make predictions, even as they realize that the likelihood of being right is far from certain.
Stanley Kubrick based his film 2001: A Space Odyssey on Arthur C. Clarke’s premise that the moon would be colonized and civilian space liners would have regular service between the earth and the moon by 2001. In 1969 lunar exploration was in its infancy. Thirty-two years no doubt seemed like a conservative estimate. But the future isn’t what it used to be. Clarke later pushed forward his 2001 date by ten years, and he also prophesied that astronauts would land on Mars by 2021, nine years sooner than NASA’s best guess.
A future project that might surpass the achievement of moon bases and Mars landings, at least on an engineering scale, is the construction of a space elevator. Consisting of a rigid tube assembled in stationary orbit (built downwards at the same time as it is built outwards, in order to compensate for gravity and centrifugal force), such a structure is, apparently, quite possible. When complete, passengers would simply ride it up into space. In 2004 Bradley C. Edwards, head of the Institute for Scientific Research, envisaged the existence of a space elevator by 2020. Authur C. Clarke was a bit more ironic about the idea. He said that a space elevator “will be built about ten years after everybody stops laughing.”
The advent of robots is yet another magnet for futurist prognostications. In 2003 Marshall Brain, creator of the How Stuff Works website, forecast that robots would perform at a human level of skill in most manual jobs by 2030, though Helen Greiner, the chairman of the corporation iRobot, put it a little later, at 2034. In 1997 the computer scientists who organize the yearly RoboCup soccer games were confident enough to claim that by 2050 a team of robots would beat the human world champions in soccer.
Of course, as robots become more complex, their intelligence will begin to approach our own. Many computer scientists and science fiction authors believe that artificial intelligence—the attainment of human-level consciousness—is inevitable. In another of his predictions made in the year 2001, Arthur C. Clarke forecast that artificial intelligence (AI) would be attained by 2020. Ray Kurzweil came in a year earlier at 2019, while Hans Moravec, the visionary computer scientist and mathematician who’s in a position to know just how complicated human consciousness is, has his money on 2050.
Nanotechnology, one of the fastest-rising fields of research and development, is a wholly new frontier in science and, reminiscent of X-rays and radioactivity, something that wasn’t even imagined a few decades ago. The grail of nanotechnology—the building of a cell-sized programmable robot that can build replicas of itself—garners a wide range of predictions regarding its advent. In 2001 Arthur C. Clarke put the date at 2040, though the U.S. Army’s Future Force Warrior Project recently estimated that by 2020 nano-machines embedded in body armour would be able to transform the properties of the armour from flexible to bulletproof, filter out biological weapons and even treat wounds. And for the record, Clarke also predicted the successful cloning of dinosaurs by 2023.
Who knows exactly when, or even if, any of these wonders will come about? I remember watching newsreels in the 1960s that showed men flying in jet packs, which the commentator said would be as common as cars within a decade or so. The future is slippery, especially when it comes to the adoption of technology. Virtual reality smacked of the future, but who could have predicted cyber-sickness? It is the inventions we didn’t expect at all that have turned out to be the biggest. A decade before the Internet, very few would have guessed just how pervasive it would become. And technology keeps throwing new devices at us at an ever-increasing, sometimes overwhelming, rate. It seems that you either adapt to the future or you become its victim. Even science cannot tell us what’s in store, though not for lack of trying.
Pierre-Simon de Laplace, one of the great mathematicians of the scientific renaissance that spanned the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conjectured that science and mathematics would eventually be able to predict the future perfectly. In his treatise Théorie analytique des probabilités, written in the early decades of the nineteenth century, he explained how:
Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.
Laplace was voicing the hubris of scientific rationalism at one of its most exciting periods. In this passage, he envisaged how a God-like intelligence would be able to calculate the future, given a thorough enough knowledge of the past and present. It speaks much of Newtonian and Cartesian idealism, where elegant formulae paralleled the perfect harmonies of the golden proportions. But the universe has become a much stranger and more turbulent place in the intervening decades. Here, at the beginning of the third millennium, scientists make highly reasonable speculations rather than bald declarations. Kurt Gödel’s unprovability theorem took the wind out of the sails of absolute knowledge in the mid-twentieth century. A few decades later came the mathematicians of chaos theory—among them Edward Lorenz, who discovered the “butterfly effect,” which is more or less the ability of a very small event to have catastrophic consequences. It turns out that accurately and absolutely predicting the behaviour of large numbers of anything, be they atoms or stars, is pretty much impossible, at least on the specific level.
If an omniscient scientist were able to have complete access to a universe in which he could stop time, and if that same scientist, like Laplace’s hypothetical intelligence, had a colossal supercomputer that could register the position of every particle in his universe and then calculate the future trajectory of every atom, electron and quark, what would happen when the universe was restarted? According to chaos theory, the universe would obey his calculations for about one, maybe two seconds before unforeseen turbulence set in. No matter how complete our knowledge or how perfectly predictive our calculations, we can never, ultimately, forecast for more than a second or two what will happen in such a large region. Time is equivalent to turbulence in such deterministic systems; it introduces randomness. We can know the general picture of the universe, we can even predict its ultimate fate with utter certainty, but we cannot know what will happen along the way.
TWILIGHT OF
THE DAWN
My palm tree was picked up yesterday afternoon. Two men carried it through my garage and out to a white truck parked in the lane. I accompanied them, helping to keep the leaves from tearing on the doorways. In the lane I could see that the truck was already partially filled with other potted tropical plants: mandevilla vines, hibiscus shrubs and a spreading bougainvillea. They were crowded in like refugees being evacuated before an invasion. Just in time, as it turned out. The attack, in the form of a killing frost, came last night. Early in the evening, as ice crystals began to sparkle on my lawn, I put a makeshift greenhouse—clear plastic stapled over a slender wooden frame—over my basil plants. But this morning, despite my precautions, I noticed that some of the leaves had wilted. The banana tree looked disastrous. Its collapsing leaves were mottled with large brown patches.
Although it was sunny this afternoon, it was also cool, the late October sun too low to warm my skin. Most of the trees in the neighbourhood have lost their leaves, though the towering willow in the backyard across the street is still green, as if it were sheltering the last remnants of summer in its leafy depths. I put on my jacket and walked over to the park. The air was dusted with the scent of dry leaves, and there was a faint, intoxicating background of leaf smoke. High piles of bronzed oak leaves were on the street in front of several homes. I riffled a hand through one of the piles and noticed that, like snowflakes, no two oak leaves were the same. At one house, a man was decorating his front porch for Halloween, stringing thick artificial cobwebs over the banisters and pillars. His next-door neighbour had placed a diminishing set of bright orange pumpkins on his steps, starting at the bottom with a pumpkin the size of basketball and finishing at the top with one as small as a tennis ball. The pumpkins worked like an optical illusion, making his steps appear deeper and longer than they actually were.
In the park, dogs chased balls and sticks thrown by their owners and children screamed in the little playground. Each of the trees had a wide circle of brown leaves beneath it. Even though it was only five o’clock in the afternoon, the light was already starting to fade. Tonight we set the clocks back. Over the next few days, people will have stationary jet lag—a direct, physical consequence of our chronometric abstraction. Monday morning rush hour will witness a few more fender-benders than usual. But it’s not just the end of daylight saving. The gloom closes in more quickly this time of year because the encroachment of darkness accelerates in mid-autumn, as the shape of our orbit around the sun conspires with the tilt of the planet to speed up the shortening of the days.
On the way home I bought a pumpkin at the little grocery store around the corner and carried it home on my shoulder. I like Halloween. It’s one of the few purely secular and nocturnal celebrations in North American culture. But as the children are out trick-or-treating, employees in retail stores will be burning the midnight oil to make sure that Christmas displays are in the windows when the doors open next morning. The retail economy has always been locked into a cyclical calendar, except now it’s looking further and further ahead. Fashion designers bring out their seasonal lines six months in advance. Magazines arrive in stores and mailboxes at least a month ahead, and by the time the month printed on their covers has rolled around, they are off the shelves. But the future will not be harnessed. It has its own agenda.
The future opens up into possibility. Anything can happen. A meteor could streak from the sky and land in the middle of the street next to the park. A poor labourer in South Africa could unearth a giant diamond on a dirt road and have his life changed forever. The field of potential that is the future is also fallow ground for fantasy. We live in its thrall. “The future enters into us,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
Just as there is a deep past, there is also a deep future, one that in terms of human destiny is beyond individual comprehension. As a species we are just getting started. H. G. Wells had an inkling of our destiny when he wrote in The Discovery of the Future, “The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.” It’s really a question of how much time we have, and according to cosmologists there are billions and billions of years ahead for this universe. All the time in the world.
Today, October 31, I cut back the dead stems of the peonies and ornamental grass, leaving the bare earth of my garden beds. Even the weeds have shrivelled away. The only green left in my yard is the deep emerald of the lawn, the viridian leaves of the bamboo, the mossy green of the rhododendron and the paler green of the big yuccas under the kitchen window.
After lunch I sat outside and carved the pumpkin with a thin-bladed knife. Every year I cut the same design—a wide, grinning demon’s head crowned in flames. The motif works well with the yellow-orange of the candlelit pumpkin’s interior, and I get compliments from some of the trick-or-treaters. “Your pumpkin’s cool,” one little girl said last year. I have a bowl of candy by the door ready for dusk, which is when the first toddlers will appear in their oversized costumes. As the evening wears on, the trick-or-treaters will get older, and by ten or eleven o’clock, teenagers in quickly improvised get-ups will clean up what’s left of my hoard. My pumpkin will glow malevolently into the night until, sometime past midnight, the light in its head will go out.
Chapter Thirteen
STEALING ETERNITY
Swiftly the years beyond recall
Solemn the stillness of this fair morning
I will clothe myself in spring clothing
And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.
By the mountain stream a mist hovers
Hovers a moment, then scatters
There comes a wind blowing from the south
That brushes the fields of new corn.
—T’ao Ch’ien
In 1986 two cosmologists from Oxford University—John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler—published an astonishing book called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Within its painstakingly researched 706 pages, they argue that, in a strange and wondrous way, the destiny of life on our planet is intrinsically linked to that of the universe. They write, “The realization that the possibility of biological evolution is strongly dependent on the global structure of the Universe is truly surprising and perhaps provokes us to consider that the existence of life may be no more, but no less, remarkable than the existence of the Universe itself.”
It seems that our presence here is no accident. If any of the basic elements of the universe were even slightly different, say Tipler and Barrow, human life would not have arisen. And they go further. They demonstrate that because of these razor-thin constraints—the precise relativities between basic forces such as light and gravity as well as the availability of certain elements—intelligent life, and specifically human life, was inevitable. They make this contention even though the statistics seem to argue against human life having occurred. According to the algebra, human life is inevitable, but only in one location (and possibly two) in the entire universe. Everything Barrow and Tipler looked at, from atomic bonds to the composition of stars, pointed in a single direction. Eerily, hair-raisingly, everything was precisely tailored to create on our planet one instance of carbon-based life—ourselves. The odds against our existence mean that the presence of life on our planet is almost supernatural. The universe, they suggest, exists for us.
Time, it seems, also has a hand in this remarkable convergence. Not only is this the only possible universe in which we could have existed, this is the only possible time. They write, “For there to be enough time to construct the constituents of living beings, the Universe must be at least ten billion years old and therefore, as a consequence of its expansion, at least ten billion light years in extent. We should not be surprised to observe that the universe is so large. No astronomer could exist in one that was significantly smaller.” These aren’t just speculations. They are based on the same kind of spit-and-polish mathematics that underlies nuclear reactors and
planetary motion.
Using the same reasoning, Tipler and Barrow then look billions of years into the future to see what the logical conclusion of their anthropic principle will be. They maintain that because the universe was “fixed” to create intelligent life like ourselves, it was also designed to nourish us at each stage of our evolution. So, as our technology and intelligence evolve, we will discover that every constituent of matter will become useful to us at every successive stage of our progress, as if it had been designed that way. And apparently it was. Eventually, life will expand to fill first our universe, and then “all universes that are logically possible.”
Barrow and Tipler don’t invoke God to explain their extraordinary form of manifest destiny, though their assertions seem to require precisely that kind of faith. (Such assertions are as close as science gets to the notion of divinity.) But they do foresee a problem with our eventual omniscience. No matter how like immortals we become, we will never be able to reverse the arrow of time. The universe will eventually end. What will happen to life then?
This past week has been cold, almost like winter. On the few nights when the sky is clear, the stars have an icy clarity—sparks struck from the black flint of space. The seasonal march of the constellations has taken Andromeda from just above the horizon, where I saw it in June, and parked it directly overhead. Nestled in the curve of the Andromeda constellation is the faint glow of the Andromeda galaxy. Aside from being the only galaxy visible to the naked eye, it is also almost the mirror image of our own, the Milky Way. Not only do both galaxies have a spiral shape, both have the same tilt relative to the other. Astronomers on a planet located in the Andromeda galaxy, looking at the Milky Way, would see something very similar to that which our astronomers see when we look at them. The sister galaxies are connected in another way as well. They are nebulaic ballroom dancers that are circling a common centre of gravity, drawing nearer to each other at the rate of fifty miles per second. In a few billion years the Andromeda galaxy will loom twice as large in our sky.
Soul of the World Page 20
