GOLDMAN’S BULLDOG PRESENTS
NOBODY KNOWS
(THE THING THAT REALLY MATTERS ABOUT)
ANYTHING!
A USERS’ GUIDE
FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
WRITTEN BY:
NOBODY!
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR GOLDMAN’S BULLDOG
“Let’s have Nobodies review the book before we publish it. That’ll give us a jump on the critics!” Nobody!
1. “Nobody! has written a book for Nobodies everywhere. Who knew there was a market?” Nobody on Madison Avenue
2. “Equivalent to Martin Luther’s ‘95 Theses’ only nailed to the door of science!” Nobody in Wittenberg
3. “Balanced skepticism!” Nobody at the Bureau of Weights and Measures
4. “Nobody! obviously knows nothing about science!” Nobody at Fermilab
5. “If you say it’s bad science, it’s humor. If you say it’s bad humor, it’s science. What an Interpretation!” Nobody in Copenhagen
6. “Nobody! is the black hole that everybody is afraid of!” Nobody at CERN
7. “It’s a deadly serious book with a science humor escape clause!” Nobody at The Claremont Colleges
8. “What escape clause? There’s no such thing as science humor!” Nobody at the Los Alamos Nuclear Testing Grounds
9. “Science in a nutshell!” Nobody on Maui
10. “What’ve you been smoking? A macadamia nutshell! Science for nuts!” Nobody at Planters Peanuts
11. “Ban this book!” Nobody in Boston
12. “Burn this book!” Nobody in Bradbury
13. “Steal this book!” Nobody at Sing Sing Prison
14. “Not in our schools!” Nobody at the Board of Education
15. “Nobody! is guaranteed to offend everybody!” Nobody at the Ministry of Truth
16. “Essays so clear they don’t contain a scintilla of truth!” Nobody at the Ministry of Clarity
17. “Nobody!’s genius was to realize that science was comedy!” Nobody at the University of Clown Science (“The Science of Clowns! The Clowns of Science!”)
18. “Nobody! is proof that you can fool ‘some of the people all of the time.’ Or was that ‘all of the people some of the time?’ Either way!” Nobody at the Lincoln Memorial
19. “It’s as if the ‘Extracts’ ate Moby Dick!” Nobody at Real Vanilla Extracts
20. “Out Nabakovs Nabakov. Pale Fire for Idiots!” Nobody at the Red Onion State Prison “Super-Prison Literary Society”
21. "In Cold Blood--without all the blood!" Nobody eating Breakfast at Tiffany's
22. “Science for mystics! Mysticism for scientists!” Nobody at Carnival Krewes Lines
23. “It’s one of the longest words in the English language. How do you spell SPRUNGFULLGROWNFROMTHEBROWOFZEUS?” Nobody at the National Spelling Bee
24. “Did Nobody! really say, ‘shivs for the scientific point of view?’” Nobody at San Quentin Prison [Editor's Note: Of course not, that was “shills for the scientific point of view,” but Nobody! said the light was often poor in prison.]
25. “You can read it as a book of Twainian essays or as an existential novel with Nobody! as the anti-hero!” Nobody in Algeria
26. “Or you can read it like the dime-store philosophy that it is!” Nobody at the Five and Dime
27. “Nobody! makes you think--then wish you hadn’t!” Nobody at Think Tanks Anonymous
28. “Don Nadie es el Borges de los escritores de ciencia!” Don Nadie en Buenos Aires, Argentina [Editor's Note: Apparently, “Don Nadie” is “Nobody!” in Spanish.]
29. “You get Borges, but you want Mickey Spillane!” Nobody at Mike Hammer Investigations
30. “Pienso que Don Nadie necesite cien anos de soledad!” Don Nadie en Macondo, Columbia [Editor's Note: “Don Nadie” thought the writer probably meant “solitary” not “solitude.” He said he couldn’t find Macondo on the map.]
31. “It’s about a man who went crazy because he believed the books he read about science. ‘Don Nadie’ es ‘El Quijote’ del siglo veinte-uno!” Don Nadie en El Instituto Cervantes
32. “‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ Our newest model is the ‘Nobody! Commerative Pen’--it writes with invisible ink!” Nobody at Parker Pens
33. “Our Nobody! pens are two for a buck and write with real ink. Put that in your ‘Commerative Pen’ and smoke it!” Nobody at BIC Pens
34. “Nobody! takes ‘abstract’ writing to a whole new level. Plus, he had the good sense to number things!” Nobody selling Jackson Pollock's Numbered Paintings (“They make people look at a picture for what it is--pure painting!”)
35. “Nobody! writes his own reviews. Saves us time and paper!” Nobody at The New York Times
36. “Bezos! We’ve got a problem. You know the novel is dead when it’s been reduced to a handful of jokes and a book of essays!” Nobody at Amazon Books
37. “Nobody! doesn’t just blur the line between art and science, he erases it!” Nobody at The Great American Eraser Company
38. “Everything you always wanted to know about science but were afraid to ask!” Nobody at the Reuben Sandwich Shop
39. “It’s not science humor. It’s that hot new genre fiction non-fiction!” Nobody at the School for Modern Fiction Writers
40. “When will Nobody! be apologizing on Oprah?” Nobody in Chicago
41. “Who would’ve thought to make Bohr, Godel, and Schrodinger the heroes of an existential novel? Nobody!” Nobody in Paris, Texas
42. “You know that a fad has ended when it’s been reduced to satire. Existentialism is dead!” Nobody in Tombstone
43. “Nobody! can say things that bodies can’t say!” Nobody on Boot Hill
44. “Reading Nobody! is like having sex with a pimp; you have to work and pay!” Nobody at The Paris Hilton
45. “I think Nobody! is channeling George Carlin!” Nobody at The Ritz-Carlin [Editor's Note: The Editor thought this should be “The Ritz-Carlton,” but Nobody! said that George had left a provision in his will to buy one of the hotels and fix the name.]
46. “People in prison have a lot of time to read. Nobody! calls us his ‘Captive Audience!’” Nobody at Lompoc Prison
47. “It's the way that you tell it!” Nobody on Rikers Island
48. “Everybody loves Nobody!” Nobody on Long Island
49. “Nobody! has finally written a water-cooler book about science!” Nobody at Sparkletts Water Coolers
50. “Sly, seductive, rye humor--makes me want to fake an orgasm!” Nobody in Seattle [Editor's Note: The Editor thought that this should be “wry” humor, but Nobody! insisted that it was correct. He said that he was only funny if you’ve been drinking.]
51. “Nobody! puts the fiction back on the science shelf where it belongs!” Nobody at Fiction Science Magazine
52. “Nobody! puts the scientist back into American science. Our question is: ‘Is that a good thing?’” Nobody at Scientific American Magazine
53. “I think that Nobody! made it all up and then called it non-fiction!” Nobody at The Skeptical Inquirer Magazine
54. “I think Nobody! put all the jokes up front just to get people to buy the book!” Nobody at Saturday Night Live
55. “We have met the enemy and he is Nobody!” Nobody at the National Powered Pogo Stick Convention
56. “Nobody! has arrived just in time to save the publishing industry singlehandedly!” Nobody at Publisher’s Weakly Magazine
57. “Nobody! makes Anonymous irrelevant!” Nobody at Warner Books
58. “Irreverent--NO!--Irrelevant common sense! ‘Nobody! Knows!’” Nobody at Rolling Stones Magazine
59. “Nobody! is a better thief than he’ll ever be a writer!” Nobody at Four Corners Minimum Security Prison and Country Club
60. “Would’st thou Nobody! be better writer than thief?” Nobody at Stratford-upon-Avon [Editor's Note: Nobody! said that he thought this was Elizabethan English for, “What do you want, Shakespeare?”]
61. “Nobody! puts the conviction back in the convict. You can count on it!” Nobody in Monte Cristo
62. “Bam! Nobody! is the Emeril of science writers! He cooks!” Nobody at Emeril Live
63. “When the guards at Four Corners heard that Nobody! had added ‘and country club’ to the prison name, they revoked all inmate privileges and starting serving Spam! I hear that the convicts have put a contract out on Nobody!” Nobody at the Red Onion State Prison
64. “Nobody! is the biggest thing in popular science since Mr. Wizard!” Nobody at Hogwarts’ School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
65. “Popular science? Nobody! subscribes to Popular Science!” Nobody at Popular Science Magazine
66. “Nobody! is the Johnny Cash of the twenty-first century. Too bad he can‘t sing or play the guitar!” Nobody at Folsom Prison
67. “Nobody! has obviously been thrown by one too many rodeo bulls!” Nobody at the Oklahoma State Prison Rodeo
68. “Nobody! casts a life-preserver to a drowning society!” Nobody at ACME Chain & Anchor [Editor's Note: Nobody! said, “ACME is an acronym for ‘American Company Makes Everything!’ Their advertising slogan is ‘Wile E. Coyote shops here!’ The Road Runner owns controlling interest in the company. The cartoons make more sense now, don’t they?”]
69. “Listen to what he says. Nobody! is the Pink Panther of science speakers!” Nobody at Pink Panther Cartoons
70. “If Nobody! were possible, he wouldn’t be as entertaining. Nobody! must be a cartoon!” Nobody at Pixar Animation Studios
71. “In my opinion, Nobody! gives bulldogs a bad name!” Nobody at the American Kennel Club
72. “Nobody! takes science to new heights--and then drops it without a parachute!” Nobody at ACME Parachutes
73. “One of our employees had a nervous breakdown just trying to figure out what shelf to put the damn thing on!” Nobody at Barnes & Nobles Books [Editor's Note: Nobody! sent flowers by way of apology and a note that read: “It should be filed on the Paradoxes and Contradictions Shelf, but absent one, it should go on the Science Shelf, which is where the majority of the paradoxes and contradictions are located.”]
74. “I hear that Nobody! plays the banjo!” Nobody at Gibson Banjos
75. “It’s a one-joke book. And he gives away the punch line. Nobody! is a comic genius!” Nobody at The Comedy Club
76. “A banjo-playing comic genius? Quod erat demonstrandum, Nobody! is Steve Martin!” Nobody at Steve Martin Cattle Prods
77. “Get real! Nobody! is Murphy! We’ll see Steve in court!” Nobody at Murphy’s Law Firm
78. “The whole book is a self-referential paradox! You’d have to be drunk to get it!” Nobody at Zeno’s Bar
79. “You’d have to be drunk to write it!” Nobody at Wild Turkey Bourbon
80. “Nobody! takes literary fiction to new depths!” Nobody at ACME Diving Bells
81. “You get your head shaved; you get de-loused; you get a body-cavity inspection; you get prison clothes; and you get Nobody! Nobody! is required reading for all new inmates!” Nobody at New Prisoner Orientation
82. “The Beatles? The Stones? Tina Turner? Nobody! is a Boomer fossil!” Nobody from Gen-X
83. “Who are Millennials reading? Nobody!” Nobody at the Millennium Ball
84. “WHY?” Nobody from Gen-Y
85. “I think Nobody! did time!” Nobody at the Los Angeles County Jail [Editor's Note: When asked about this, Nobody! said, “Isn’t the world a prison?”]
86. “I think Nobody! drinks too much!” Nobody at Alcoholics Anonymous [Editor's Note: The writer enclosed a photo. When Nobody! saw her picture he said, “From the mouths of babes!”]
87. “A sufficiently rigorous skepticism is indistinguishable from madness!” Nobody at The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
88. “Nothing happens! Nobody comes! Nobody goes! He can’t carry a tune! It’s awful!” Nobody Off-Broadway at Godot! The Musical!
89. “Nobody! writes for the cheap seats!” Nobody at Cheapseats.com
90. “‘The Rolls-Royce of Universes!’ ‘It's Where It's Happening!’ What’d we pay this guy?” Nobody at Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
91. “Nobody! is the undisputed master of product placement! He doesn’t even ask permission!” Nobody at the National Institute of Product Placement
92. “I told you to give the man the California convertible! Potrebbe essere stata ‘La Ferrari degli Universi!’” Nessuno a Scuderia Ferrari
93. “The best chapter in the whole book is ‘Recommended Reading!’” Nobody at the FBI Anti-Drug Task Force Special Investigations Unit
94. “Nobody! doesn’t just think outside the box--apparently he lights the box and smokes it!” Nobody at the California Medical Marijuana Club
95. “Perhaps Nobody! should be illegal!” Nobody in Washington D.C.
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GOLDMAN’S BULLDOG PRESENTS
NOBODY KNOWS
(T3RMA)
ANYTHING!
“THE ROLLS-ROYCE OF UNIVERSES!”
“IT’S WHERE IT’S HAPPENING!”
A USERS’ GUIDE
FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
WRITTEN BY:
NOBODY!
Published by NOBODY! at SMASHWORDS
Copyright 2011 by Author
______________________________
SMASHWORDS EDITION, LICENSE NOTES
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.
______________________________
FOR PRISONERS EVERYWHERE!
In fond memory of the Birdman of Alcatraz, the ACME Toilet Printing Company will TP (Toilet Print) this book for prisoners for FREE! (you must order in case lots of 1000 and pay the daily international spot market price for the toilet paper). Even in a 16-point font (for low-light conditions) the book fits easily on a 1000-sheet roll and is, of course, completely recyclable! They even offer a fluorescent ink option so that the words will glow in the dark for prisoners in solitary confinement. Wherever you are in prison, Nobody! is thinking of you! WHYASKWHY?
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: The Way of the Lazy River
Chapter 4: The Day Bohr Killed His Students
Chapter 5: The Golden Age of Science
Chapter 6: Science on the Ropes
Chapter 7: Nobody Knows Gravity
Chapter 8: Nobody Knows the Universe
Chapter 10: Nobody Knows Consciousness
Chapter 12: The Gift of Happiness
Chapter 14: Render Unto Caesar
Chapter 15: Schools and Other Prisons
Chapter 16: Dart-Tossing Chimps (Experts Gone Wild!)
Chapter 17: Money for Nothing!
Chapter 18: The Talking Monkeys of Ethiopia
Chapter 19: The Bandwidth of Consciousness
Chapter 21: The Marriage of Science and Mysticism
Chapter 24: The Search for Meaning
Chapter 25: Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen
Chapter 26: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Chapter 27: What’s It All About, Alfie?
Chapter 28: The Truth about the Truth
Chapter 29: Damned with Faint Praise!
Chapter 30: The Truth is History
Chapter 31: In Defense of Creationists (But Not of Creationism)
Chapter 32: We All Want to Save the World
Chapter 33: The Reenchantment of the World
Chapter 34: The Natural Selection of Science
Chapter 37: Why an Agnostic Talks to God
Chapter 38: Why Do We See the Same World?
Chapter 39: Teach Your Children Well
Chapter 40: The Contradiction at the Center of the Universe
Chapter 41: The Rolls-Royce of Universes!
Chapter 42: The Tale of the Book
Chapter 44: Only Steal from Masters
Chapter 45: The Non-Fiction Novel (or Novel Non-Fiction)
Chapter 46: Recommended Reading
Chapter 48: Seven Questions for George Carlin
Chapter 49: My Name is Nobody!
Chapter 50: The N-List (a.k.a. The Loot)
Chapter 55: Appendix--The Boop Duke
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Here moulds a posing, foppish Actor,
Author of THE SOT-WEED FACTOR,
Falsely prais’d. Take Heed, who reads this
Epitaph; look ye to Jesus!
Labour not for Earthly Glory;
Fame’s a fickle Slut, and whory.
From thy Fancy’s chaste Couch drive her;
He’s a Fool who’ll strive to swive her!1
Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Poet and Laureate of Maryland
1 John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (Anchor Books, Doubleday, New York, 1967, pp. 755-6) For decorum’s sake, Ebenezer’s family chose not to chisel this epitaph on his tombstone, which has never been found.
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“Don Quixote Rides Again!”
Sauncho Pauncho
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“Back to the Future of Literary Non-Fiction!”
Nobody at DeLorean Motor Cars
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“We know nothing
Except that we know nothing.”
Don Nadie
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CHAPTER 1: THE WAY OF THE LAZY RIVER
Don Nadie singing softly, channeling Louis Armstrong (this was before George arrived):
“Up a lazy river by the old mill stream
Crazy, lazy river where we all can dream
Linger in the shade of the Boltzmann tree
Throw away your troubles, live a dream with me.”
There it is; the whole book in just four song lines. If you’re an abstract writer, it fits nicely on a three-by-five card. Nobody! once wrote abstracts for a living; it’s a great way to learn a lot about obscure subjects.
People who don’t live in prison often don’t have time to read a whole book. Nobody! has thought of you. For those who feel that the Lazy River Abstract just isn’t enough, there is both a “long path” and a “short path” to the insights contained in this book.
The long path:
The Way of the Ant!
The Way of the Government Bureaucrat!
The Way of the Prison Inmate!
The Hard Way!
is to read the whole thing twice, hence the name.
The short path:
The Way of the Grasshopper!
The Way of the Slacker!
The Way of the Thief!
My Way!
involves just reading the synopsis before the title page (“Advance Praise for Goldman’s Bulldog”) and then continue on reading through the end of the chapter “The Day Bohr Killed His Students.” Once you understand the set-up (the crime, the murders, the dead students), you can skip to the climactic chapter (“The Rolls-Royce of Universes!”) and then the resolution and denouement (“The Tale of the Book”) and then read on through to the end. An hour tops.
Think of it as The Way of the Lazy River.
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The nineteenth-century English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his early impassioned advocacy of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Huxley was largely responsible for popularizing Darwin’s new--and controversial--theory with the general public. I am quite sure that when novelist and screenwriter William Goldman wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t think that he needs a “bulldog,” but genius cannot always be expected to recognize the full potential of its own ideas. Goldman’s brilliance lay in creating a principle for a specific purpose that turns out to have a universal applicability, like Darwin’s theory of natural selection which seems to apply to everything from the origin of species to the evolution of fins on Cadillacs. Goldman may not know that he needs a “bulldog,” but he does.
Goldman coined the phrase:
NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.1
in his 1983 book about writing screenplays for Hollywood titled Adventures in the Screen Trade. He wrote it just like that--as a single, standalone, centered, capitalized paragraph. Actually, he wrote it just like that twice, “for emphasis.”2 He considered this epigram to be “the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry.”3
“Because nobody, nobody--not now, not ever--knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.”4
The interesting point here is that all of the people involved in the process of making movies are experts. Studio executives are experts at selecting the best projects. They are experts at casting the biggest stars and hiring the best directors who, in turn, pick the best actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, composers, editors, and set designers. Experts all. They live and breathe movies. They can design a movie to make you laugh or make you cry--or better yet, both. They can thrill you with hair-raising action and special effects. The only thing they can’t do really, and this is the NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING part, is know if anyone will come to see the movie that they’ve made.
Of course, whether or not people come to see your movie is “the thing that really matters” to people in the movie industry (it is, after all, a business). Not the only thing, obviously, but the most important thing, the central core--that’s what “the thing that really matters” means. Goldman details many Hollywood disasters: movies that cost a fortune to make and had major stars, directors, and screenwriters; movies that everyone involved knew would be big hits, but that nobody went to see; movies that bled red ink. Or movies that all the studios passed on because they knew that no one would go to see them; movies that went on to become record-breaking super-hits.
What Goldman failed to do (because his interest was in writing about Hollywood) was to extend his idea to a wider arena, which is my purpose here. Goldman’s idea actually applies to every field of human knowledge. It is a universal truism: “Nobody knows the thing that really matters about anything!”
During the go-go nineties, I started reading books about science to discover how science knew that the universe started in a big bang and how they knew that all life evolved from a single cell. An early book that I read was Leon Lederman’s The God Particle about the oddly named “Standard Model” as if it were an economy car...like a Rambler American. Oddly named or not, the Standard Model explains how the universe could have popped out of, essentially, nothing. Today, my library contains over one thousand books. After almost twenty years of reading about science, I finally realized that all the books had the same disquieting feature. When you got to the really important part, the part you really wanted to know about, they always said that they didn’t know yet. Hmmph! Nobody knew anything!
I might have described this book as A Skeptics’ Guide instead of A Users’ Guide, but I am afraid that the current champions of skepticism have somewhat damaged the brand. Modern-day skeptics and skeptic societies are, more often than not, shills for the scientific point of view. They are predominately interested in skepticism of non-scientific viewpoints. They have a pro-science agenda that is, of course, anti-skeptic. True skeptics are also skeptics of science, as are true scientists.
1 William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (New York, Warner Books, 1983, page 39)
2 Ibid. (“Ibid.” means, “It’s in the same book and on the same page” in Latin)
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., page 41 (Unless, of course, it’s on a different page!)
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Nobody! needs no introduction.
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CHAPTER 4: THE DAY BOHR KILLED HIS STUDENTS
Why does the hero always outdraw the villain in a western showdown? This isn’t a trick question; I’ll give you the answer upfront. The hero always outdraws the villain in a western showdown because he draws second. Sounds simple enough, but why does the person who draws second always win? And why is the person who draws second always the hero? The answers are all quite simple, but it took a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to figure them out.
The great Dane, Neils Bohr--the father of quantum mechanics, complementarity, and the infamous (in Einstein’s and Schrodinger’s houses, at least) Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics--was a big fan of American westerns. Bohr used to take his students to the matinee on Saturday mornings to watch the weekly western. Bohr became obsessed with the showdown at the end of every western, and the question we asked earlier. Being a scientist, Bohr decided he’d figure out why the hero always won.
He got the obvious part right away. The hero always drew second, but why was drawing second an advantage? Bohr decided that the advantage lay in the fact that whoever drew first had to think about what he was doing, while whoever drew second just reacted. Bohr reasoned that it took longer to make a conscious decision than it took for an instinctive reaction. Whoever drew second took less time; enough less time that even drawing second he would always win. His students, being students, disagreed with him.
Bohr rose to the challenge, and they all went to a local toy store, bought toy guns and holsters, and returned to the lab. Since it was his idea, Bohr got to be John Wayne (the hero) and go second. One by one, his students strapped on their six-guns and faced him down, eventually drawing first. That afternoon, Bohr “killed”1 them all!
Those who engaged in western showdowns in the Wild West (if anyone really did) knew all this, of course, as did the people who made the movies about them. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that whoever draws first always loses even if you don’t understand how it works. The solution is obvious. If you’re in a showdown, never draw first.
The problem with this solution is that somebody has to go first. That’s why a showdown is really a battle of nerves. You’re waiting for the other guy to go first so you can win. You know that just a twitch in the direction of your holster might cause an instinctive reaction in your opponent, getting yourself killed without even going for your gun. Nerves!
So why is the villain always the person who draws first? That part’s easy. You can see it in his face as the hero stares him down. The villain is afraid. He’s afraid because, deep down inside, he knows that he’s a coward. The very definition of a hero is that he is not a coward. The story is the process by which the hero learns that he is not a coward.
[Historical sidebar: Like everything in Darwin’s world, the western evolved. The hero learning that he was a hero was just the early stage. It all changed with one man who was royalty in the movie west, the Duke himself. The Duke, who apparently had the best agent in Hollywood, put it bluntly: “I don’t want to be the one who learns; I want to be the one who KNOWS!” (The rumor that Nobody! might be related is understandable but false, although Nobody! does, coincidentally, ride a KTM Duke, The Boop Duke.) Few actors have the clout to bend genres to their whim. That single phrase effectively ended the western as a genre for the rest of us. From then on, the western was nothing more than the modern action movie--Man Against Many, Man Wins! Drat! That’s another murder! John Wayne killed the western!]
Anyway, in the classic western, the villain always looks a bit panicked just before he draws. The hero gets the second draw advantage, and wins, because he has courage, because he’s a hero.
Bohr reasoned that it took longer to make a conscious decision than it took for an unconscious reaction, and he demonstrated it empirically, but he could not quantify his answer scientifically. Half a century later, a scientist named Benjamin Libet would “put a number” on just how much longer it took to go first in a western showdown. (It’s important to understand that nothing really exists in science until somebody “puts a number on it.” Once the Silver Surfer of Hitchhikers2 gave the universe its number--FORTY-TWO--we all slept much better, although many thought the number was too low. If you think that numbering universes seems a bit strange, it will make more sense later.) A conscious act, it turns out, takes a full half-second to initiate while an instinctive reaction can take as little as two-tenths of a second. That gives whoever goes second three-tenths of a second advantage. Libet is justifiably famous for having discovered the “half-second delay of consciousness.”3
As it turns out, a half-second is too long for consciousness to have any real utility in a western shootout, and one would think, in any life-threatening emergency. Whatever consciousness is doing, it doesn’t seem to be protecting our genes in life-threatening emergencies. That’s odd. Things that don’t protect our genes in life-threatening emergencies aren’t supposed to evolve. In the world of evolution, protecting our genes in life-threatening emergencies is Job #1. If consciousness gets you killed in a showdown, what good is it from an evolutionary perspective? Bohr didn’t ask this question because he was a physicist, not an evolutionary scientist.
Like Newton’s falling apple, the fact that a conscious thought takes longer than an instinctive reaction may be the single most important scientific fact in the human world we all live in. It unlocks a great secret about us as human beings--one which scientists seem to prefer we not know.
1 George Gamow tells the story about how Bohr “killed” his students in his book Thirty Years That Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory (Dover Publications, Inc., Mineola, N.Y., 1985, pages 55-56)
2 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Del Ray Ballantine Books, New York, 2009)
3 Benjamin Libet, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Harvard University Press paperback edition, Cambridge, 2005)
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CHAPTER 5: THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE
“Science is not powerful because it is true, but true because it is powerful.”1
Hilary Lawson
And science has never been more powerful. We are living, quite literally, in the golden age of science that was predicted by the geneticist Gunther Stent in the hippie days of the sixties when he was a professor at University of California at Berkeley in his book, The Coming of the Golden Age.2 (Historical sidebar: In this book, Stent was one of the first geneticists to notice the remarkable similarity of the genetic code of DNA to the life code developed in the ancient Chinese book, the I Ching or Book of Changes, but that’s another story.) Stent saw the golden age of science as a double-edged sword. The road to Polynesia (in Stent’s scenario, a paradise where naked people no longer had to work--you gotta remember, this was the sixties) would also, quite paradoxically, mark the end of progress. The subtitle of his book was “a view of the end of progress.” He claimed that science was not an open-ended enterprise. Like everything else, the heyday of science would have a beginning, middle, and end.
The most powerful tool that humans ever “invented” was language. Language made everything else possible--civilization, conquest, writing, progress, science, everything. But even language, which evolved from grunts to Shakespeare and continues to evolve constantly, had a beginning (grunts), middle (grammar), and end (as a metaphor--Shakespeare). Nobody works on the improvement of language anymore; today people are more concerned with the preservation of language. New words are added effortlessly, although sometimes painfully for the preservationists.
Stent argued that the end of progress would occur after the golden age of science had peaked. While we aren’t all lounging naked in paradise yet (bit of a “Drat!” there, Gunther), many of Stent’s predictions have already come to pass. We currently live in times where almost any problem seems capable of a scientific solution--if not today, then in the near or distant future. The acceleration of scientific progress is so great right now that most scientists today are perfectly aware that they are already in the midst of the golden age of science, although few believe that this will also mark the end of scientific progress. Much like the medieval Church just before the Reformation, which was at the peak of its spiritual and temporal power, modern science has become a victim of its own successes and what some might call excesses. One needs to remember that when Martin Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the door of the Wittenberg church that he had no idea that they would cause controversy--let alone the Reformation. He thought that by pointing out the obvious that the Church would reform itself out of embarrassment--clearly, he was a bit of a medieval Pollyanna. Even the Reformation was an unintended consequence.
Starting early in the seventeenth century, science set out to understand how the world works using Descartes’ formulation of understanding “matter in motion.” Matter in motion, it turns out, is a powerful tool for understanding the physical world. With Galileo’s laws of inertia, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, scientists have come to understand how things move on the earth and in the heavens.
Then in the nineteenth century, Darwin and Wallace developed the theory of evolution, and Mendel developed the theory of genetics. When Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and a cast of many discovered the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule in the mid-twentieth century, we pretty much had the puzzle of life figured out. Now scientists understand heredity and why our children only “sort of” look like us.
Earlier in this century, with Einstein’s theories of relativity (special and general), scientists have come to understand time (relative), space-time (curved), and gravity (curves space-time) in a whole new way. Einstein’s formula E=mc2 (certainly, the most famous formula ever conceived) unleashed the power of the atom, for better and for worse.
By mid-century, light arriving from distant stars had been interpreted to mean that the entire universe started in an explosion of sorts around fourteen billion years ago and contained such exotic things as black holes (gravity-sucking monsters from which no light can escape that are formed by the collapse of stars). Basically, science understands pretty much what can be understood about matter in motion, at least locally in the corner of the universe where we live.
Not that we’ve come to the end of science by any means, but the low-hanging fruit has mostly been culled. The deterministic sciences (physics, chemistry, planetary motions) have been mostly worked out. We have moved beyond the discovery phase and into what the scientist Eddington referred to as the “stamp collecting” phase of science where there is a lot to do but little new basic knowledge to be gained. The creative scientists leave the field to the technicians.
The most powerful blow to modern science was delivered in the 1920s by the new science of quantum mechanics (what Bohr and his students were doing when they weren’t shooting each other), which taught us that our knowledge of the atom would come at the cost of understanding (that pesky Copenhagen Interpretation). We can measure the atomic world and make predictions, which have probabilistic outcomes--but that is all that we can do. We can say nothing about what the atomic world is like; we can make no absolute predictions (if you do “this,” “that” always follows--apparently Hume got it right when he said that you can never say that for sure), and we have to live with a host of contradictions like wave-particle duality, which nobody can understand, let alone explain (you cannot imagine the number of experts working in this area alone; it’s a regular cottage industry in physics). Worse, we have to believe that an atomic particle does not even have a location and a velocity unless--and until--we measure it. Einstein had to ask Bohr if he really believed that the moon wasn’t there when he wasn’t looking at it.
Just to be clear--quantum mechanics is the most accurate science ever invented, but its creation destroyed two of science’s greatest illusions. The first illusion was that the future could be predicted from the past. At the subatomic level, at least, that proved to be impossible. Predictability did not “go all the way down” but stopped somewhere around the second floor of the scientific edifice as probability--how embarrassing. The second illusion was that by using the tools of science we could come to an understanding of how the world works. At the subatomic level, we were not simply denied that knowledge--any traditional sense of understanding we may have had was dragged for several miles behind science’s pick-up truck and left gasping for survival. We are fortunate that knowledge of how the quantum world works is not necessary to our survival in this one. If it did, we’d be quantum toast! You kind of have to thank God that science isn’t that important, don’t you?
The other sciences that interest us are the non-deterministic sciences like the weather, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology and the like. These sciences relate to the things that matter most to us as human beings, but at the same time they are remarkably hard to get our hands on because they are not predictable (they are not deterministic). As a rule, you can’t predict the weather for more than a day or two into the future with any accuracy.
The most non-deterministic science of all is biology. Scientists believe that biological systems have evolved over billions of years as DNA molecules interacted with their environments and some survived while others didn’t. As this was a random and non-deterministic process, biology remains to this day the most complex and elusive of sciences. Our greatest triumphs in biology have had more to do with hygiene, diet, antibiotics and vaccines than with any great scientific breakthroughs in our battles against smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria, cancer or AIDS--or the flu, or the common cold, for that matter. We remain better surgeons than doctors.
As it solved the simple problems and moved on to the more intractable ones, science has gotten to be more and more complex and, therefore, more and more expensive. It is no surprise that the greatest risk to our financial future is not due to the retirement bubble of baby boomers but to the skyrocketing costs of their medical care. Doing science is outrageously expensive and provides us with diminishing returns; we spend almost $8000 per person per year for health care in the United States (double that of the rest of the industrial world) but get progressively less and less. The quality of our medical care has deteriorated compared to other industrialized countries, while our investment in it has skyrocketed so we have the most advanced, but by no means the best, medical care in the world (a pesky contradiction). It’s as if science was once a nice sturdy fishing boat that daily brought in loads of fish. Now, it has become a luxury yacht, which is a far superior sailing boat but a distinctly mediocre fishing boat. More than one owner has been humbled by yacht ownership--defining it as “a hole in the ocean into which one shovels money.” Even the US Congress--possessor of the largest money shovel in the known universe--is starting to realize this.
Since medical care is so expensive, it has become big business that is practiced by pharmaceutical companies, government agencies (like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control), universities, hospitals, insurance companies, health maintenance organizations (HMOs), and independent biotech companies. The lone scientist working in his lab has long been extinct (except in Hollywood, of course).
Almost every day, some scientists somewhere announce the discovery of “a new gene, which will one day...” Actually, they never tell you what that new gene will lead to one day because they don’t have the slightest idea. Instead, they have high hopes. The news media continues to report each new gene as if it were actually news. The reason for this is that science is so complex now that it has become the “science of promises.” It cannot accomplish anything in the present--science just takes too long--everything must be accomplished in a future that sometimes never seems to arrive. There’s a joke in the physics’ community that “hot fusion is the energy source of the future--and it always will be!” If the news media did not report on the promises of science, the science page would all but disappear from modern newspapers. It does seem remarkable, however, that the science page has evolved into science’s horoscope--predictions of a future that may or may not come to pass!
What we have come to learn in the postmodern era of science is that everybody--including scientists--has an agenda and that agendas can interfere with the good practice of science. Agendas interfere with peer review--the process by which colleagues can block the publication of scientific papers by their peers simply because they disagree with them (it’s every bit as prone to abuse as its description implies). Agendas cause studies and experiments with negative results not to be published for what are, essentially, personal, political, judicial, or commercial--certainly not scientific--reasons (effectively, the published data is slanted towards a desired result). Agendas can stifle scientific debate in the name of public health or safety (necessary perhaps, but stifling debate can never be scientific as the very essence of science is debate, which is also the problem with peer review). Since much of science is funded by grants, scientists who publish opinions that other scientists disagree with can be cut off from the source of their funding (another process especially ripe for abuse as large amounts of money are involved). Ridicule is used frequently in the scientific community, although it seems unscientific to call colleagues names just because they disagree with you. Needless to say, there are a lot of big egos in science, with all the baggage that big egos entail (think rock stars or movie stars with PhDs and a lot less money). Fraud is a word that seems to be associated with science more frequently than in the past. Or maybe it’s just that so much more science is being done today that there is more fraud uncovered.
Just to use pharmaceutical companies as an example, they have a need to generate profits. They have a limited window of opportunity to financially exploit any innovation they develop (the patent period). They have no desire to share their expensively acquired knowledge with others (read “competitors”) hence the openness that science depends on can deteriorate. They have a tendency to defend their own products while they are protected by patent and then to cast them to the wolves of litigation when the patents have run out, and they move on to the next big thing. While science is at the heart of the process, its objectivity is in question. We essentially have to trust the big pharmaceutical companies to do good science and to report it accurately. Repeated scandals have made that trust more difficult to regenerate.
Imagine that you ask a government scientist if a given ingredient in drinking water is dangerous? You would assume that this is a fairly straightforward scientific question, but you would quickly discover that it is an extremely complex social/political/scientific question that cannot be addressed simply (i.e., by the scientific method alone). There are logistic and economic considerations. Who will have to pay for cleaning up the water? We don’t want to panic people. What would happen if everyone thought their drinking water was dangerous? How dangerous would that be? How dangerous is dangerous, really?
The same is true of many of the scientific questions that you can ask today. Is the new CERN Large Hadron Collider potentially dangerous? That would seem to depend on whether you’re a physicist who thinks we should worry about obscure possibilities (when the consequences are the most devastating imaginable--the disappearance of the earth into a collider-created black hole) or a collider scientist anxious to conduct experiments and dispel fears. If you ask a biotech company how the new product they are working on is coming along, do you think you’ll hear the truth, or a statement made to keep their investors calm so they won’t sell their stock? Can you expect a hospital that is afraid you will sue them to tell you the truth about a mistake that they have made? The answer would have to be, “Maybe yes, maybe no.” And what about universities? Certainly, institutions of higher learning are above the fray. But where do they get the funding to do the research that they engage in? Who do they answer to? It’s nice to believe that the answer is “the pursuit of truth,” but we wonder.
The simple reality is that we don’t know and can’t know the motivations of scientists, but we have become suspicious of the scientific enterprise as we understand that science is a “special interest group”--and one that needs huge amounts of our cash. In the sense of a financial juggernaut, science is the medieval Church of the modern age; super-colliders and genome projects are its modern cathedrals. The reason that we trust in science is that we were trained to do so as children in school, but for many adults living in the real world, that belief structure is eroding (noticeable, perhaps, as an erosion of funding). Science has been revealed to have deep flaws in addition to its positive points, and yet it seems blissfully unaware that a problem even exists. Perhaps, like the medieval Church, science believes that it is too powerful to have to worry.
The most interesting thing about science is that it has no Church, no Pope--no umbrella organization that is even nominally in charge. Like evolution, science is a process, not an actor on the human stage. No organization exists that regulates science, except locally--with locally determined rules. There is no place to file a grievance (except locally)--no door to which Martin Luther can nail his complaints against Mother Church.
All golden ages eventually end (the Scientific Revolution ended the Golden Age of Alchemy, as well as chopping the medieval Church down to size), but the Catholic Church continues as a powerful force in the world today even though it no longer possesses the near omnipotent power that it possessed in its medieval heyday. Science has every expectation of a similar important continuing role long after its golden age has passed.
1 BBC Documentary Film “Science...fiction?” written and directed by Hilary Lawson
2 Gunther S. Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress (The American Museum of Natural History, The Natural History Press, Garden City, 1969)
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CHAPTER 6: SCIENCE ON THE ROPES
While the quantum revolution dealt it a serious blow, the public perception of science did not significantly change until August 6, 1945, when we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That bomb simultaneously revealed to the world the miracle that such a thing was possible along with the horror of its effects. The second bomb taught the world that we had two.
The scientists who built the atomic bomb in the fear that Hitler might develop it first were originally led to believe that it would be used as a demonstration weapon to convince the Japanese to surrender. That naivete soon gave way to an understanding of a simple reality--the military does not build weapons that it does not intend to use (it only started doing that after our atomic bombs exploded). This led some of the scientists involved in the project to say, “We have sinned.”
After the war, the public’s perception of science changed in a dramatic way, and suddenly science was seen to be something more akin to Pandora’s Box--full of wondrous delights but also a source of extensive unforeseen troubles or problems. Out of nowhere, new threats like nuclear radiation in the atmosphere and milk appeared, and later, the politics of mutually assured destruction and scientific wonders like nuclear winter. More mundanely, Freon in our air conditioners seemed to be causing a potentially disastrous hole in the ozone layer. Almost overnight, the perception of modern science went from savior to destroyer.
Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have to add global warming to our list of “unintended scientific consequences.” An equally dangerous build-up of nitrogen in soil and water because of modern agricultural practices has led to predictions of new disasters (algae blooms, dead lakes, permanently fallowed land, crop failures)-- which could cause major disruptions in food and drinking water supplies worldwide. The same carbon dioxide that is building up in our atmosphere is also accumulating in our oceans where it turns to carbonic acid that destroys fish habitats. The frozen tundra releases methane gas as it defrosts; methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide so the process of global warming may accelerate.
We trust science to deflect an incoming asteroid if necessary (a nice deterministic science), but we do not trust it to attempt to reverse the effects of global warming because we do not trust its ability to manipulate the weather (that it can’t successfully predict)--not that scientists won’t want to try. At best, we are willing to try to reduce the production of carbon dioxide in an attempt to forestall what seems to be inevitable. When global warming strikes, we are as likely to blame science as turn to it to save us.
Scientists will tell us that what we need to combat global warming is the equivalent of a new Manhattan Project (the project that developed the atomic bomb). The problem with this analogy is that, as amazing as an atomic bomb is, the reason that it works is that it functions on highly deterministic principles. The Apollo moon program was based on deterministic science too, but even deterministic science is no guarantee of success. Both super-conductivity and hot fusion power plants are deterministic sciences with immense promise that we have spent billions of dollars pursuing without success. Scientists like to use the phrase “Manhattan Project” because the Manhattan Project was a success, but not all Manhattan Projects have been a success--not by any means.
The key question to ask any scientist who wants money for a new Manhattan Project is whether or not the science behind it is deterministic or non-deterministic. We have had Manhattan Projects for many non-deterministic phenomena--mostly diseases. How did they do? Actually, they were bombs, but at least they weren’t the atomic kind. Scientists spent ten years and billions of dollars seeking a “cancer virus” in the 1970s as part of Nixon’s War on Cancer (we don’t call them “Manhattan Projects” anymore; we call them “Wars” now). No cancer virus was ever found. Untold billions have been spent to combat the HIV virus (The War on AIDS), but the basic science hasn’t progressed much in over a quarter of a century, and even with electron microscopes, scientists still can’t find the live virus in people who are dying of the disease (these are the same scientists that managed to find quarks inside atoms). Ask yourself, have we cured ANY disease? Mention this to scientists, and they’ll talk about the importance of negative results in science--science, actually, is mostly negative results. Fair enough.
Visionary scientists today want to conduct a Manhattan Project for aging. These scientists have formed biotech companies to conquer aging (you guessed it, it’s The War on Aging) even though there is currently no scientific definition or consensus of what aging is, let alone what causes it (except time, of course) or how to prevent it. The salesmen of the War on Aging claim that they have increased the life spans of worms and laboratory mice numerous times using a variety of techniques. Perhaps they need to be reminded that scientists have often cured cancer in laboratory mice too--without curing cancer in humans. The upcoming “we-have-to-support-the-hippies” generation:
GEN-BUSTMYBALLS!
probably doesn’t have to worry that it will be forever.
The best example of science on the ropes is the impassioned debate that takes place between theoretically objective scientists and religious fundamentalists over Darwin’s theory of evolution. It is a uniquely American controversy, and its most noticeable features are its strident volume and antagonistic tone. Europeans are baffled that it takes place at all. It’s easy to suspect that the scientists involved are motivated more by their memories of Galileo forced to stand trial before the Inquisition and publicly recant his belief in Copernicus’ theory than over any need to refute arguments that few believe need refuting. A huge amount of time, money and energy is spent on a debate that seems as intractable and irresolvable as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You have to wonder how the scientists got themselves into such a fix.
A skeptical person might suspect that this emphasis on creationism is a red herring to get us to focus on something that is not important so that we will miss what really is. What is it that scientists might be hiding? It turns out that the answer is something far more radical than Darwin’s theory. It would be easier to convince a fundamentalist that angels evolved from orangutans than to convince society of the dirty little secret that science has uncovered about humankind in the second half of the twentieth century. It’s easy to understand why the debate has been shifted to something cultural. Attacking religion is easier than admitting the scientific truth.
Science’s dirty little secret is that--drum roll please--all conscious action is an illusion.1 Everything that a person does, says, eats, drinks, writes, spits, whatever is a result of unconscious activity. There’s some consolation for alcoholics, drug addicts, and those who can’t stay on their diets here. Actually, if you think about it, there’s some consolation for absolutely everybody here although, admittedly, the information is somewhat disconcerting. Just to be clear--everything means absolutely everything. We are not the actors in our own life drama that we think we are, although we delude ourselves into believing that we are (scientists now understand many of the technical details of how this delusion functions). We are not the puppeteers of our own lives--we are the puppets! We might seem crazy for believing that we are responsible for things over which we have no conscious control, but since we will be held responsible for those activities whether we are responsible for them or not, perhaps we aren’t crazy at all.
Still, whether we are digesting lunch or voting, our conscious mind is not involved in the process. This isn’t an argument about free will (although it does raise some interesting questions about the subject); it is a description of who pulls the lever on a voting machine (or on a slot machine, if you prefer). Surprisingly enough, it isn’t you or me. It’s him or her. But who is “he” if not “me”? Apparently, “he” is everything that I am except for my I-consciousness--and “he” is the only actor in my human drama. “He” is Not-I.
Science has, quite literally, solved the age-old conundrum: How can a conscious thought--a completely ethereal thing--cause a physical action? How can a mere idea in my head cause me to do something? The answer is blissfully simple. It can’t! All actions are caused by Not-I--no conscious thoughts necessary (more on Not-I later).
Since consciousness cannot act--contrary to common sense and our personal perception of our own experience--scientists are baffled to say exactly what role consciousness might play in our lives (other than getting us killed in western showdowns), although, in the great tradition of science, theories are abundant. Of course, the one thing consciousness can do is think. If you think about it, that's a really big deal, even if it can't act. Still, it’s easy to understand why scientists aren’t anxious to confront the public with this particular delusion. No one wants to break that kind of bad news to anyone--especially in public (“We’re talking about you here! You just can’t handle the truth!”). People might think that it’s the scientists who are deluded, and they might decide not to fund all those expensive science projects.
It seems that science has provided us with a conundrum every bit as disturbing as existentialism--the philosophy of meaninglessness. It’s one thing for us to have to accept the fact that life is meaningless, but quite another to accept that it’s impossible to do anything about it--except think about it--because we’re incapable of doing absolutely anything. The response from the average listener to scientific “facts” like these is, essentially, “I don’t frackin’ think so!”
The result is an unspoken conspiracy of silence and an unplanned strategy to attack a non-existent enemy--science on the ropes.
1 Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Bradford Books, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge, 2002)
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CHAPTER 7: NOBODY KNOWS GRAVITY
When scientists want to explain whether or not the theory of evolution is a fact, they often say that it is as much of a fact as gravity, which sounds convincing but might lead a person with a skeptical bent to wonder just how much of a fact gravity really is. Newton’s law of gravity is probably the greatest single scientific achievement ever. For utility, nothing can touch it. It allows us to plot the trajectory of cannon balls and to thread a spaceship through the rings of Saturn. It explains everything from falling apples to how the universe works. It is easy to state: “Every particle in the universe attracts every other particle.” There’s a nifty formula that states the relationship, but the details don’t really matter. Everything attracts everything else--that’s the essence. It’s an attractive universe. It’s quite simple really. That it explains so much is astounding.
Newton almost didn’t publish his work on gravity. He was certain that nobody would believe in a force that was supposed to act mysteriously across the vastness of space. How could gravity possibly accomplish this miraculous feat? Newton had no answer, and he simply fell back on the position that it worked even if he didn’t know how. That was, of course, a long time ago. Certainly, we know how gravity works by now.
Actually, when it comes to theories about gravity, we have an overabundance. There’s a quantum theory of gravity that involves subatomic particles called gravitons. Unfortunately, nobody has discovered a graviton; they are theoretical particles that haven’t been found yet. Nothing new there--lots of theoretical particles had to wait around a long time to be found. We still might find gravitons.
Newton’s gravity remains as a mysterious force that acts across empty space by means unknown. Einstein improved on Newton by explaining gravity as geometry. In Einstein’s universe all particles follow nice straight lines, but they do so through curved space. The curvature of space is caused by the mass of the objects in it--the greater the mass, the greater the curvature. Gravity is space curved by mass--no gravitons or attractive forces necessary. Scientists consider Einstein “truer” than Newton (“truer” in the world of science means that one theory explains “more” than a competing theory). At least, Einstein provides a mechanism for gravity, even if geometry seems like a kind of “cheesy” evasion of the problem, but Newton gets the satisfaction of knowing that when scientists thread spaceships through the rings of Saturn that they do it with his equations and not Einstein’s. Turns out that even Einstein couldn’t solve Einstein’s equations.
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