But What If We're Wrong? (29 page)

25
This controversy was small but still hilarious. Gioia's issue with music writing—that it's become overly obsessed with celebrity and personality—is something music critics had privately discussed among themselves for at least forty years. Gioia just wrote it in public, from the perspective of an uninvolved outsider. But more pressingly, I'm not sure if this categorization (even if true) is remotely troubling. Lifestyle reporting, when done well, informs how art can be understood and received. It aligns with the way most consumers interact with pop music. I don't need to analyze bass tabs in order to recognize how the bass line on “Billie Jean” is a different level of awesome. In what universe is it fun to read about time signatures and chord changes? I want to hear more about the propofol and the Elephant Man bones and the crank calls to Russell Crowe's hotel room. I want to know about the individual who imagined those bass lines in his head.

26
I have a tendency to get fixated on the connotation and definition of specific words, but particularly the word “rock.” Sometimes I think the word “rock” is literally the most important characteristic of the entire genre, in the same way the prefix “rag” seems to be the critical detail within all ragtime music. Perhaps the rock artist who outlives the ravages of time will simply be whichever artist employs the word “rock” most prominently when titling their musical compositions, which would mean the band who'll eventually come to symbolize the entire rock idiom will be AC/DC (who've somehow done this on twenty-three separate occasions throughout their career). Weirdly, this would be a better resolution than almost every other possible scenario.

27
This was probably for the best. NASA would not want the aliens to overestimate the creative role of George Harrison.

28
Some might argue that the artist I'm describing here actually sounds more like a description of Jimi Hendrix. But here's the problem: Hendrix's exploratory genius and musical vocabulary were so unique that he ended up being the polar opposite of a “pure distillation.” He was too inventive to represent anyone but himself.

29
There's a brilliant moment in the 1995 PBS miniseries
Rock & Roll
when Gregg Allman mocks the term “Southern rock,” arguing that all rock music originated in the South: “Saying
Southern
rock is like saying
rock
rock.” This was back when Allman still had his original liver.

30
I used to work at the rock magazine
SPIN
, a print publication that existed for twenty-seven years. Like all rock magazines,
SPIN
annually published an “Albums of the Year” list, diligently selected by its editorial board to exemplify how
SPIN
defined artistic achievement during whatever week they happened to be compiling the list. Almost all of these rankings have been completely forgotten. It's become extremely difficult to remember what album was chosen number one from any given year, even for the people who worked there and nominated the selections . . . except for the year 1991. That was the year
SPIN
placed Teenage Fanclub's
Bandwagonesque
above Nirvana's
Nevermind
. This singular misstep is cited more often than the combined total of every other selection made throughout the magazine's other twenty-six years, exacerbated by the fact that
SPIN
ultimately put Kurt Cobain on the cover ten times, seven of which came after he was dead. Because it feels so wrong in retrospect, the 1991 list is the only one that historically matters.

31
Also known as “kids who were mostly interested in other kids, or at least dogs and cats.”

32
Unless you count Stephen Hawking, who is technically a cosmologist.

33
As a species, the concept of “infinity” might be too much for us. We can define it and we can accept it—but I don't know if it's possible for humans to truly comprehend a universe (or a series of universes) where everything that
could
happen
will
happen. I suspect the human conception of infinity is akin to a dog's conception of a clock.

34
Greene is not exaggerating: He said he's had the same argument at least ten times with David Gross, the winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 2004. “Because we can't falsify the idea,” Gross writes of the multiverse, “it isn't science.” In other words, because there's no way for the multiverse theory to be proven untrue, it can't be examined through the scientific method.

35
When I first met this guy (his name is Mike Mathog), the only thing I knew about him was how much he hated an absurdist joke I'd made in one of my early books, where I claimed the probability of
everything
was always 50-50 (“Either something will happen, or something will not”). Mike has since invested a lot of conversational effort into proving I am empirically wrong about this, which means he's invested a lot of conversational effort into proving I was incorrect about something I never actually believed in the first place. In fact, I feel like he's brought this up in half the conversations we've had ever since the very first night we met. So every time I see him, the odds of this specific interaction happening again are 50-50.

36
If you're the type who hates seeing buzzwords like “paradigm shift” in every piece of cultural analysis you encounter, blame Kuhn. He didn't invent the term, but he introduced it to most normal people. Some have argued that
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
is the most-read science book of all time, among non-scientists.

37
Or maybe just a different context for the word “law.” When people mention Newton's laws, they use the term “laws” because the rules are unbreakable. But perhaps they are unbreakable only in nature. Maybe the barriers they represent are real, but
we
can still break them
, as technology advances beyond the parameters of the natural world.

38
As far as I can tell, the official “edge” of the galaxy cannot be defined.

39
No clue as to how this would become irrefutably known. I guess it would require an anonymous, untraceable transmission from aliens?

40
Though some are tempted to connect this theory to the scenario described in
The Matrix
, there is no relationship.
The Matrix
suggests real human bodies could serve as batteries for the projection of a simulated world. This theory suggests “real humans” are not involved at all, at least within the projection itself.

41
“There have been suggestions that there might be actual evidence [of this] rather than supposition,” Tyson told me, much to my surprise. “The evidence is this: There is something called cosmic rays that are high-energy particles moving through the universe, and they're accelerated to very high energies in the centers of galaxies by astrophysical phenomena we think we understand—though there are a lot of holes in this. It was noticed that there was an upper limit to the energy produced by these cosmic rays. Now, in practically anything else we've ever measured, there's sort of a bell curve of how such things appear. Most are in some group, then there's a tail, and it continues off to zero. With cosmic rays, the tail's off and there's no broad cutoff. It was suggested that if we were a simulation, you'd have to put in a limit to something that goes on within it. And this cutoff could be the program's pre-calculated limit for the energy level of these cosmic rays. We could be up against that boundary. It's an intriguing thought that we're all just one big simulation. That being said . . . it would be hard to swallow.”

42
The
cosmological constant
is the value of the energy density of the vacuum of space. Now, I don't understand what that means. But it's one of those “twenty numbers” Brian Greene mentioned a few pages back—a number that has a value so specific and so inimitable that the universe as we know it could not exist if it were even .0001 percent different.

43
This is a super-fun book, but I don't understand how the publisher was supposed to market it: It rejects every possible conspiracy theory, yet would only be of interest to people who are actively obsessed with conspiracy theories (and who would read this book with the sole purpose of examining the details of theories the author is illustrating to be false). It would be kind of like if I wrote and researched a 390-page book about Fleetwood Mac's
Rumours
LP, but my whole point was that Fleetwood Mac is not worth listening to.

44
In his seven-volume collection
History: Fiction or Science?
Fomenko specifically cites Joseph Justus Scaliger, although it appears the Jesuits would also be involved here.

45
The “Dream Argument” is a two-pronged proposition: The first prong is that dreams sometimes seem so real to us that there's no way to know when we're dreaming and when we are not. The second prong is that—in the same way we usually don't recognize we're dreaming until we begin to wake up—it's possible that what currently appears to be regular day-to-day reality will disintegrate the moment we reach lucidity. In other words, you may think you're reading a footnote right now, but maybe you're just having a nonlucid dream where a footnote is being read. And as soon as you realize this, the page will start to dissolve.

46
These psychiatrists are referred to as Hobson-McCarley (John Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley), the Lennon-McCartney of not caring about dreams.

47
This belief is so pervasive that even those who believe otherwise feel obligated to concede its prevalence. “In Western society, most people don't pay too much attention to their dreams,” said Deirdre Barrett, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. Barrett has studied dreaming for forty years.

48
This is mirrored by the growth of cognitive behavioral therapy, a model of psychoanalysis that suggests many thoughts are merely “automatic thoughts” that should not be taken as literal depictions of what we truly believe or desire. For example, just because you spontaneously imagine killing someone should not be taken as an indication that you secretly want to do this.

49
Dimethyltryptamine (usually referred to as DMT) can also be smoked recreationally. Manufactured DMT crystals are sprinkled atop marijuana buds and inhaled in one hit, generating a heavy, optical trip that lasts around ten minutes. Because the experience is so brief and fleeting, DMT is sometimes called “the businessman's hallucinogen.” It doesn't demand a lot of free time. But in the same way that dream time is elastic, ten minutes on DMT can feel much, much longer.

50
I sometimes think I should have titled this book
Aristotle: The Genius Who Was Wrong About Fucking Everything
.

51
Some might question the espoused veracity of “the modern verification process,” on the basis of the publication of Stephen Glass's imaginary exposés in
The New Republic
, Jayson Blair's tenure at
The
New York Times
, and the unreal University of Virginia rape account in
Rolling Stone
. But two things must be considered here. The first is that the process of fact-checking does have one unavoidable problem—there's almost no way to verify a story that the writer has fabricated
entirely
, because you can't disprove a negative. It's unreasonable for a magazine fact-checker to start from the premise that the reporter concocted a story out of thin air, since only a psychopath would do so. It would be like a doctor initiating every medical examination by asking the patient if she's lying about feeling sick. The second point is that all these stories
were
, eventually, proven to be false. It just took a little longer than we'd prefer.

52
One of these historians, Polybius of Megalopolis, supposedly retraced Hannibal's path himself in order to understand how Hannibal did it. But imagine how difficult this would be, with the limited resources of the era. It might
decrease
the story's accuracy. Much more recently, an international team of microbiologists discovered massive numbers of a microbe belonging to the class Clostridia embedded in the soil of an Alpine pass, the Col de la Traversette, dated to the same period Hannibal would have crossed the Alps. The Clostridia bacterium is a product of horse manure, and the quantity discovered reflects the bowel movements of a huge army of mammals moving through a relatively small area. It's the best evidence that something akin to the classic Hannibal legend happened at this specific place at this specific time. But that's still a long way from knowing what actually transpired 2,200 years ago.

53
There's a temptation to argue that television
is
part of a continuum, and that it represents the second step in a technological ladder that starts with radio and will continue through whatever mode eventually usurps network TV. There is, certainly, a mechanical lineage (the Paley Center for Media was originally known as the Museum of Television and Radio). But anecdotally, this will never happen. We will not connect the content of television with the content of whatever replaces it. The two experiences will be aesthetically incomparable, in the same way that TV and radio are incomparable. Over time, society simply stopped connecting the content of the radio era with the content of the TV era, even though many performers worked in both platforms and the original three networks started as radio outlets; from a consumer perspective, they just
felt
different, even when trafficking in the same milieu. For example, sitcoms were invented for radio. There were situation comedies on radio long before even the richest Americans owned TVs, and that includes a few sitcoms that were conceived on radio and jumped to the tube. But the experience of watching a sitcom was totally alien from the experience of hearing a sitcom. It altered things so much that the second definition became the universal definition. By 1980, using the word “sitcom” to describe anything that wasn't a TV show required explanation. Its origin in radio is irrelevant, and we would never compare
Cheers
or
M*A*S*H
to something like
Fibber McGee and Molly
. They have a mechanical relationship, but not a practical one. They seem entwined only to the specific generation of people who happened to live through the transition.