Analog SFF, April 2010 (17 page)

"A . . . a judge?"

"Yes.” Fwem looked far from happy.

Oh, dear.
Duncan blew out a breath. He'd never really believed in the usefulness of cultural liaisons. They always seemed to cause more problems than they solved.
Especially this cultural liaison.
And now it was his problem. Duncan realized he had no idea how the Chuff justice system worked. Could this chief music judge do bad things to Roger? Maybe he'd just confiscate Roger's bassoon and have it chopped up for firewood.
That wouldn't be too bad—not too bad at all.
He looked hard at Fwem. “Why did the judge take Roger away?"

"Why?” said Fwem. “Because the music was wicked . . . awesome wicked."

Wicked.
Duncan worried. Roger might have gotten himself into serious trouble and it might take the ambassador himself to get him out of it.
The ambassador will not be happy.
Duncan turned to ask Fwem more questions but just then the second half of the concert started. He'd have to wait.

Throughout the second half, Duncan's trepidation steadily grew.
What a civilization considers wicked can be very strange—and beyond logic.
Duncan kept his eyes on the door.
Roger might be in very serious trouble indeed.

Then, when the music finally ended, Duncan saw the door open. And through it came Roger and the Chuff who'd abducted him. Arm in arm, they walked up to Duncan.

"This,” said Roger, “is Churbek."

"And,” said Churbek, “this Roger kid here is my new best friend."

"Best friend?” said Duncan weakly, struggling with the revelation that Roger was
not
in trouble.

"Churbek is a music producer,” said Roger. He turned to Fwem. “Churbek tells me you are one, too."

"Churbek got to you before I did,” said Fwem.

Duncan's worry had turned to relief—and now to annoyance. “What's this about?” he demanded.

"Churbek has offered me a recording contract,” said Roger.

"What?"

"The Chuff have a taste for the exotic,” said Roger. “We can sell them novelty—as long as they can use it and comprehend it. Anyway, they say that my music should be very appealing to children."

Duncan felt the situation slipping away from him. “I'm not sure that's appropriate for an Anglo-Terran government employee."

"If he couldn't do it,” said Churbek, “that would be awful."

"It's a great opportunity,” said Roger.

"Still,” said Duncan with a smile covering his irritation, “the Agency frowns on moonlighting."

"I really think I should do it,” said Roger. “For the sake of the Agency, of course."

"That's just it,” said Duncan, his irritation turning to anger. “You
are
a government employee. You can't—"

"They've offered to pay me in lutetium—lots of it."

"Oh.” Then, because he felt he had to, Duncan added, “Good work.” Inwardly, he winced as he saw Roger, Fwem, and Churbek looking at him as if he were an idiot—as if he were a poopyhead.

Copyright © 2010 Carl Frederick

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Roger had different problems in “Misunderstanding Twelve” [April 2004] and “A Higher Level of Misunderstanding” [May 2007].)

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I bought this book a few years ago:
What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty
. It is edited by John Brockman and available from Harper Perennial (ISBN-10: 0-06-084181-8, copyright 2006). I don't recall exactly why I bought it, although I am fairly certain that I thought I might discuss it in an Alternate View. Otherwise, any subtitle that tells me the book contains the musings of “today's leading thinkers” puts up a big red flag. Our leading thinkers? Who selected these people and why are they considered “leading thinkers"? There being no formal, recognized operational definition of the breed, it is simply a matter of opinion as to which people qualify. And you all know how fond I am of other people's opinions.

That having been said, I do recognize the need for rhetorical flourish in subtitles. The book contains musings from 109 contributors, one of whom also wrote the introduction, and the editor. I was pretty confident I'd find something inside that I'd have an alternate view about, or that one of the writers would have an alternate view of his own that I could present.

Just flipping through the pages, of which there are about 260, one finds that the typical contributor took about a page and a half to tell us what he believed but could not prove. Some took a few more, and several took much less. Personally, I have a bit of a problem with accepting someone as a “leading thinker” when he can't conjure up even one page on the subject at hand.

I confess that most of the names were completely unfamiliar to me. No offense Terrence Sejnowski, but I've never heard of you. I can see in the little bio that precedes each contribution that you're a computational neuroscientist and the coauthor of a book called
The Computational Brain
, but I must have missed that one. Christine Finn, archaeologist and journalist, author of two books, same deal.

However, there are plenty of names that I did recognize, among them genuinely famous scientists (leading thinkers or not) that I'm sure most of the
Analog
audience has heard of, and several science fiction writers as well, some of whom have appeared in these very pages. There are names like Ray Kurzweil, Richard Dawkins, P. C. W. Davies, Michael Shermer, Bruce Stirling, Freeman Dyson (a leading thinker in anyone's book!), Daniel C. Dennett, Lawrence M. Krauss (
The Physics of Star Trek
author), Lee Smolin (I wrote about his book a few columns ago), Gregory Benford, Rudy Rucker, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Okay, I admit it, I had never heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, but I liked his contribution and thought it made for a fitting concluding essay.)

I've selected a few of the essays to discuss below. This should give you a good feel for what you'll find in the book, but I'll tell you right now that I think it is worth a read. I've certainly wasted more money than this book will set you back on thicker, highly-touted tomes by leading authorities that were crap from preface to index. If you run into crap in this book, the next essay may very well be a gem.

In the preface, editor John Brockman explains the specific motivations that lay behind asking eminent minds what they believed but cannot prove. I found them naive, but explaining why would require more than an Alternate View column. Suffice to say that if I had only read the preface prior to buying the book, I would not have bought it. But if I had also read the introduction written by Ian McEwan, a non-scientist but a well-respected British author, in addition to the preface, I would have changed my mind and purchased it.

McEwan's intro is marvelous. He echoes several themes that are near and dear to my heart, and is clearly aware that, path to truth or not, science is performed by scientists, who are people first. In my experience, progress in a field is often not made until someone comes along who can rub the noses of the accepted experts in the dog waste of their dogma. Or, as happens more often, when those authorities with a vested interest in the status quo—financial, intellectual, or both—die. McEwan understands this.

First up is the contribution by Michael Shermer, publisher of
Skeptic
magazine, someone who would never make it on my list of leading thinkers. He is skeptical about things almost everyone is already skeptical about, and famous for it. That qualifies him? But he is a competent writer and states clearly what it is he believes but can't prove. It's actually a bunch of things, and not succinctly put. But he starts with this one: “I believe, but cannot prove, that reality exists independent of its human and social constructions.” (p. 37)

Even I believe
that
, but Shermer's reality has no room for the supernatural or paranormal, especially God, and mine does. He says: “After thousands of years of attempts by the world's greatest minds to prove or disprove the divine existence or nonexistence, with little agreement among scholars (as to whether He is or isn't) one's belief, disbelief, or skepticism finally rests on a nonrational basis.” (p. 38) True, you can't prove God exists from His creation, but you also can't prove the existence of Henry Ford from a Model T. Bringing up those greatest minds seems a bit beside the point, but since he did, he should have noticed that most of those greatest minds believed in God anyway, lack of proof notwithstanding. Maybe they knew something Shermer doesn't.

At least Shermer gave the readers three pages of his well-presented thoughts. Next we turn to the contribution from Bruce Sterling, novelist, journalist, and futurist. Here is his bit: “I can sum up my intuition in five words: We're in for climatic mayhem.” (p. 75) He goes on to say . . . well, nothing. That's it. That's his entire contribution. Seems to be a leading thinker who keeps his thoughts to himself. Perhaps that's just as well since believing we are in for climatic mayhem hardly counts as an intuition when headlines routinely claim exactly the same thing.

Freeman Dyson is the guy who thought up Dyson Spheres, worked on the Orion space drive, and showed that Schwinger's and Feynman's “competing” approaches to quantum electrodynamics were equivalent. (He's also a global warming skeptic, by the way.) His piece is a bit over a page long, not at all concerned with “weighty” matters, but very interesting and so deftly written I'm impressed with the style even apart from the content.

Here is his belief: “Given any number, such as 131,072 (which happens to be a power of two), the reverse of it is 270,131, with the same digits taken in the opposite order. Now, my statement is: It never happens that the reverse of a power of two is a power of five.” (p. 82) In Dyson's preceding paragraph he says, “Thanks to Kurt Godel, we know that there are true mathematical statements that cannot be proved.” He believes his statement is an example of such.

Haim Harari, theoretical physicist, begins his essay with an interesting question. He says we've known about the electron for over a century, and that it “is believed to be a pointlike, elementary, and indivisible particle. Is it?” (p. 181) He goes on to ask the same question about the assumed indivisibility of the neutrino and quarks, and he wants the reader to consider whether or not the accepted “fundamental” particles actually are, or if they may be made up of something smaller.

Haim admits that there “is absolutely no experimental evidence for a further substructure within all of these particles.” (p. 182) That isn't strictly true, since interpretation of observations is theory dependent. If substructure were to be found, many earlier observations would be reinterpreted as having actually pointed to it.

So Haim's unprovable belief is that the fundamental particles are not so fundamental after all. He feels they may be made up of smaller particles in the same way the atom was found to consist of subnuclear particles. Made of something smaller? I agree. But I think it's in the same way a tornado is made up of air molecules.

Perhaps my favorite essay is that of physicist Lee Smolin. (I discussed his book
The Problem With Physics
back in my September, ‘09 column.) He opens with these two sentences: “I am convinced that quantum mechanics is not a final theory. I believe this because I have never encountered an interpretation of the present formulation of quantum mechanics that makes sense to me.” (p. 220) Smolin knows much more about QM than I do, he being a theorist who has spent much of his professional life working on quantum gravity. So for me it is nice to read that his highly informed opinion is the same as my almost gut level “what the hell does
that
mean?” opinion.

Given his belief, it follows that QM is an approximate theory, and that there must be hidden variables. In his view, “the hidden variables represent relationships between the particles we do see—relationships that are hidden because they are nonlocal and connect widely separated particles.” (p. 221) You'll have to make of that what you will; his essay is pretty succinct and I'd just wind up quoting the whole thing if I explained further.

Smolin also mentions that he (and I agree) doesn't think the Big Bang represents the beginning of time. His last sentence is heartening for an experimentalist to read when it comes from a theorist: “Finally, I believe that in the near future we will be able to make predictions based on these ideas which will be tested in real experiments.” (p. 222)

The last essay I'll discuss is also the last essay in the book. It is by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and seems clearly to have been picked to be last. He is a professor at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, and has written several books. He gained my approval with his first sentence: “I can prove almost nothing I believe in.” (p. 251) Among such things are the roundness of the Earth, quarks, and the Big Bang. He notes that his beliefs “are based on faith in a community of knowledge whose proofs I am willing to accept . . .” (p. 251) This is a notion it is always wise to keep in mind, for faith in things we believe but cannot prove is as necessary to science as it is to religion, politics, and friendship.

If I had been asked to contribute to this book, I would have said that what I believe but cannot prove is that the Universe cannot be mathematically inconsistent with itself. I think it follows from this belief that mathematically inconsistent theories, like classical electromagnetism, need to be put on a mathematically rigorous basis. It works too well over too huge a scale for us to be complacent in leaving it unfinished. I believe the mathematically consistent theory will be in the form of a perfect fluid model of space-time (the aether) that will naturally eliminate the distinction between particle and field, revealing, finally, the Theory of Everything.

Excepting, of course, the origin of the aetheric fluid in the first place. God made that.

Copyright © 2010 Jeffery D. Kooistra

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