But What If We're Wrong? (11 page)

This kind of willful, unilateral agreement is not unique to famous scientists—most of the unfamous scientists would agree, too. You're not really a scientist if you don't. The core components of science—say, the structure of DNA or the speed of light or the weight of carbon—have to be uniform. This is a card game that can be played with only one specific deck, and that should increase
our confidence in what we believe to be true. If everyone is using the same information to do different things and still coming to the same reliable conclusions, there isn't much room for profound wrongness.

Yet there is something about the depth of this consensus that makes me slightly
less
confident.

Can I point to a specific example? I can't point to any specific example. If someone demanded I outline an unambiguous scientific truth that seems dangerously misguided, I could not do it (and if someone else did so, my contradictory inclination would be to immediately disagree). But herein lies the problem. If we're playing a card game that works with only one deck, we can interrogate only the deck itself. If we assert, “This Queen of Diamonds is actually a Joker,” the rest of the cards will prove the assertion is wrong. What we can't do is allege that we're all playing the game wrong, because this is the only game anyone plays. We can't assert that this card game is actually a board game, because nobody knows what that would mean if we can't visualize the board. This is the ultimate model for naïve realism: It's irrational to question any explicit detail within a field of study that few rational people classify as complete.

“There are certainly some ideas that many of us are starting to anticipate will be jettisoned, even if we can't quite jettison them just yet,” Greene says. “The most basic being that space and time are ingredients that are somehow fundamental, and that space and time will be the starting point for any understanding of physics. Even going back to Aristotle, there is this basic assumption that physics take place in an arena—basically, inside a container. And that container involves some expanse that we call
space
, and events
in the space take place over a duration we call
time
. Now, it's certainly the case that our view of space and time has shifted, mostly because of Einstein. We now see space and time as much more malleable. But we still see them as ‘being there,' for lack of a better term. But some of us anticipate that—in the future—our theories will not start with space and time. They will start with something more fundamental. What that fundamental thing is—we still don't know. Sometimes we give it names like ‘the atoms of space and time' or ‘the constituents of space and time.' We don't really have a name for whatever this is, because it's not necessarily a particle, per se. It's an even more basic entity. It's something that—when arranged in a specific way—
builds
space and time. But if those ingredients were somehow arranged differently, the concepts of space and time wouldn't even apply.”

Whether or not you take Greene's position as radical is open to interpretation (some might classify it as inordinately safe). I'm in no position to adequately consider what it would mean if physics were no longer based on space and time, or what that would change about day-to-day life. But his central point is my obsession: the possibility that we are unable to isolate or imagine something
fundamental
about the construction of reality, and that the eventual realization of whatever that fundamental thing is will necessitate a rewrite of everything else. Here again, I'm not the first person to fantasize about this possibility. It's the controversial premise of Thomas Kuhn's 1962 masterwork
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
. Kuhn's take was that science does not advance through minor steps, but through major ones—basically, that everyone believes all the same things for long stretches of time, only to have the entire collective worldview altered by a paradigm
shift
36
transforming the entire system. Prior to these massive shifts, researchers conduct what Kuhn called “normal science,” where scientists try to solve all the puzzles inside the existing paradigm, inadvertently propping up its dominance. In essence, Kuhn saw science as less coldly objective than scientists prefer to believe.

It's easy to recognize why
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
annoys a lot of people who earn a living trying to figure out why and how the world works. There's something a little insulting about the term “normal science,” in the same way it's insulting to describe a woman's outfit as “basic.” There's also a high degree of intellectual hopelessness ingrained within this philosophy—it makes it seem like whatever science is happening at any given time is just a placeholder, and that the main purpose of any minor scientific advance is to wait for its inevitable obsolescence. Tyson strongly criticized the book, noting that its main arguments are (again) stuck in the seventeenth century.

“[
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
] was hugely influential,” Tyson tells me, “especially on the liberal arts, giving them ammunition to suggest that science was no better way of knowing the truth than any other way of investigating. It made a huge case of scientists gathering around one truth, and then there's a tipping point and everyone moves away from that truth to gather around another truth. Hence the title of the book. And this left people
with the sense that science is just whatever is in fashion. Kuhn used, as his best example of this, Copernicus. That's half his book . . . almost half of that book describes the Copernican Revolution as an example of the way science works. But that's not how science works. It's just not. It's how things happened until 1600.”

Kuhn died in 1996, so he can't respond to this accusation. But I assume his response would be something in the neighborhood of “Well, of course
you
think that. You have to. You're a scientist.” A philosopher can simultaneously forward an argument's impregnable logic and its potential negation within the same sentence; a scientist can't do that. There is no practical purpose to fungible physics. If Tyson were to validate the possibility that his entire day-to-day vocation is just “normal science” that will eventually be overwritten by a new paradigm, it would justify the lethargic thinking of anyone who wants to ignore the work that he does (work that he believes is too important to ignore). It is, in many ways, a completely unbalanced dispute. Tyson (or Greene, or any credible scientist) can present ten thousand micro arguments that demonstrate why our current structure of scientific inquiry is unique and unassailable. A Kuhnian disciple need only make one macro argument in response:
Well, that's how it always seems, until it doesn't.

My limited brain tells me that ten thousand micro arguments are better than one macro abstraction. My limited sense of reality tells me that Kuhn's abstraction is reasonable and unavoidable, and that the attacks against it define naïve realism. And it's that latter sensation that prompts me to pose the following: If we're destined (as Kuhn would argue) for an inevitable paradigm shift, what would that shift feel like?

[
5
]
Here's the thing with paradigm shifts: They tend to be less dramatic than cultural memory suggests. There's a tendency to imagine that all those who upend the nature of existence are marginalized as heretics and crucified by crazed mobs, because drama confirms the importance of what those people thought. But it rarely happens like that, and the last monster shift in science—the Copernican Revolution—was a textbook example.

Nicolaus Copernicus surmised that the Earth rotated around the sun in about 1514, and no one killed him for thinking that. He lived another twenty-nine years and died at the age of seventy. Throughout those final twenty-nine years, his revolutionary description of outer space mostly seemed like an unprovable thought experiment that had the ancillary benefit of making the calendar more accurate, which made it easier to schedule Easter. When Galileo later declared that Copernicus was right (and that the Bible was therefore wrong) in the seventeenth century, he was eventually arrested by the Inquisition and forced to recant—but not before the Catholic Church told him (and I'm paraphrasing here): “Hey, man. We all know you're probably correct about this. We concede that you're a wizard, and what you're saying makes sense. But you gotta let us explain this stuff to the rest of the world very, very slowly. We can't suddenly tell every pasta-gorged plebeian in rural Italy that we live in a heliocentric universe. It will blow their minds and fuck up our game. Just be cool for a while.” Galileo famously refused to chill and published his
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
as soon as he possibly could, mocking all those who believed (or claimed to believe) that the
Earth was the center of the universe. The pope, predictably, was not stoked to hear this. But the Vatican still didn't execute Galileo; he merely spent the rest of his life under house arrest (where he was still allowed to write books about physics) and lived to be seventy-seven.

I don't mention this to negate what these guys learned, the adversity they faced, or what they accomplished. But it does serve to illustrate the pace at which ideological transformations actually occur: This revolution took over one hundred years, invisible to the vast majority of the planet. Granted, a revolution within our accelerated culture would happen far faster. The amount of human information exchanged is exponentially different, as is the overall level of literacy. But that still doesn't mean a transformative period would be transparent to the people actually experiencing it; this is why I ask how a modern paradigm shift would
feel
, as opposed to what it would look like or how it would operate. Like a fifteenth-century monk, my perspective is locked by fixed boundaries. I cannot depict a transformation I don't have the ability to visualize. But I can envision the
texture
of how such an experience might feel. I can imagine the cognition of my current worldview slowly dissolving, in the same way certain dreams dissolve within the same instant I wake up and realize that I was not experiencing my actual life.

Every so often, minor news stories will surface suggesting something major about science is already shifting. “NASA successfully tests engine that uses no fuel [and] violates the laws of physics,” read an August 1, 2014, headline in the citizen-journalist-run
Examiner
. Nine months later, the Silicon Valley–based
Tech Times
proclaimed, “NASA may have accidentally discovered faster-
than-light travel.” Both articles were about the EmDrive, an experimental rocket thruster that supposedly violates Newton's Third Law (the conservation of momentum). By the time any reader reached the conclusion of these articles, it was clear that the alleged breakthroughs were more interesting than practical. But if a series of similar stories kept appearing in greater depth, and if they ran in places like
The Guardian
and
Scientific American
and
Wired
, there'd be a general sense that a rethinking
37
of how we viewed space and time was necessary. This is not the type of paradigm shift I try to imagine, however. To me, this feels closer to a typical conversation about technology (which is, obviously, always advancing). Instead, I tend to think about two distinct varieties of potential shifts: the world beyond us, and the world around us.

What I classify as “the world beyond us” are notions like the aforementioned multiverse—the possibility of a cosmos that is way more complicated than the cosmos we conceive. Does such a cosmos seem plausible? Sure. It almost seems likely. I cautiously suspect there are universes beyond our universe, the laws of which might contradict the most basic things we believe. But what is the
feeling
that would accompany the validation of this hypothesis?

Nothing.

There would be no feeling at all. It would just be an interesting thing to know. I mean, even if NASA did “accidentally” invent faster-than-light travel, it wouldn't even be a useful tool for
exploring these particular possibilities. Depending on what estimate you use, Earth is somewhere
38
between 24,000 and 94,000 light-years away from the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. Even if EmDrive technology allowed us to travel at the improbable top speed of the USS
Enterprise
from
Star Trek: The Next Generation
(1.04 light-years per hour), and even if we used the low end of the distance estimate, it would still take 2.6 years just to reach the Milky Way's edge. The distance to the next major galaxy is another 2.5 million light-years, so that would be a 26-year trip. Most critically, the known universe is over 90 billion light-years in diameter (and that's just the observable part, which—even in a non-multiverse theory—might be one-thousandth of its actual size). Even if we irrefutably knew
39
there was a cosmos beyond our cosmos, it could never be reached by anything except a wormhole, the likes of which have been found only in fiction. The multiverse could not be seen or described, and certainly not visited. Which means incontrovertible proof of an infinite multiverse would be like incontrovertible proof of purgatory—we'd just have to dogmatically accept it, with no functional application to our daily lives. For non-scientists, the same could be said for a similar super-discovery in quantum mechanics: If we realized something profound and insane about atomic structure, happening on a level so microscopic that it could never be touched or observed or manipulated, the only thing it would really change is the language of textbooks. Here again, the (very real) paradigm shift would
feel
like nothing at all. It would mirror the reaction of a seventeenth-century shepherd who had just been told we live in a heliocentric universe: “Oh.”