Hieroglyph (87 page)

SADDLING THE FUTURE
—Ron Broglio

Ron Broglio, a scholar of literature and sustainability at Arizona State University, responds to “Tall Tower” in the context of spirituality and human-animal relationships at hieroglyph.asu.edu/cowboy-tower.

FORUM DISCUSSION
—Contemporary Skyscraper Construction

Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and other Hieroglyph community members search for the ideal location for the Tall Tower at hieroglyph.asu.edu/cowboy-tower.

SCIENCE AND SCIENCE FICTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL DAVIES

Ed Finn sat down to discuss Project Hieroglyph with physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science in Arizona State University.

EF:
I'm going to start with a very simple question: why do you write books?

PD:
As a much younger man I came in for a lot of criticism from my peers. The feeling was that if you were writing what we might today call a popular book as opposed to textbook, that this somehow meant that you couldn't be taken seriously as a scientist. Indeed, one colleague of mine said for every book you write, you should subtract ten from your journal publication list. That was the feeling in those days.

Why did I do it? I think partly because I discovered quite unexpectedly that I had a talent for communicating in plain language, using analogies, mathematics, and so on, quite advanced and subtle concepts in physics in particular. People seemed to like it when I did it, and there's nothing like having an appreciative audience out there to make you carry on.

I'm such a passionate scientist. I find science so deeply exciting and important and significant that I want to tell people the good news. When I talk to nonscientists, then I realize that they have no idea about things like quantum reality or the Higgs boson or what happened before the big bang or any of these sorts of really important things or even stuff about the nature of time that we've known for a hundred years.

They're missing out on this vast universe of excitement. I just want to share this, my own sense of excitement, and not just excitement of science, but its significance for what it means to be human and what it means to be living in this universe. A bit of a sort of missionary zeal. Then it all changed in the 1980s, partly because physics, which is really my discipline, was beginning to wither.

Students found it hard. They found it too abstract. Girls seemed to hate it. The whole subject was really in decline. Universities began to wake up to the fact that if they had someone writing really good, exciting popular physics books that that might improve student recruitment. Then Stephen Hawking wrote his famous book,
A Brief History of Time,
reaching parts of the reading public that the rest of us had been unable to reach.

Suddenly it was okay to write popular books. Then all my colleagues began doing it. Now I think it's almost part of the job description. It's obviously not obligatory, and not everybody can do it or do it well. The days when it was frowned upon are long gone, and I'm thankful for that. Although I think there are probably rather too many popular science books on the market at the moment.

EF:
Would you say that's true primarily in physics or do you also see that happening in other scientific disciplines? Is there now a broader expectation of this kind of public communication?

PD:
Biology has really stolen a march on physics. When I was first embarking on this, there weren't very many people doing popular science. Most of those were from physics or cosmology backgrounds. It's easy to talk about astronomy and cosmology because you can discuss objects that are out there like stars and black holes. Biology was rather the poor relation. That changed, perhaps because of Richard Dawkins's books. He writes very well. He really did popularize biology.

My first thought when I began to read Richard's books—which I think he just writes beautifully and I enjoy them immensely—my feeling was well, what's new? This is about Darwin's theory of evolution, it's 150 years old.
[Laughing]
Why is he writing about this stuff? It's old hat isn't it? But of course I guess it's anything but old hat. Now when you look at lists of popular science books, they tend to be dominated by biology.

Biologists have an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that we can all imagine certain animals and plants. The concept isn't very abstract. The disadvantage is that at the molecular level it's so incredibly complex, and everything you want to talk about has some horrible unpronounceable name.
[Laughing]
It's only in recent years that they're coming around to doing what the physicists have long done [with naming]. For example, black holes. That's a pretty pithy explanation. In the beginning they used to be called totally gravitationally imploded stars or something.

Biologists now talk about things like junk DNA or they give genes funny names like hedgehog and NANOG. I think they've learned that if you're trying to communicate something, it really does pay to have some pithy acronym or description.

EF:
Names have a lot of power, of course. So many names also come prepackaged with these metaphors—the black hole is a great example. It conveys very powerfully this particular image of what the thing is. There are so many popular science books out on the market now. What do you see as your responsibilities as a public communicator of science? How does one do it well?

PD:
Don't pretend that doing science is ultimately for making money. There is this horrible trend among people who are trying to popularize science:
Why are we looking for the Higgs boson? Well, maybe in a hundred years somebody will make a buck out of this
. That's not why we're doing it. The reason that we do basic science is to understand how the universe works, and what our place is within the universe. It's a noble quest.

Not something you're going to devote 50 percent of the GDP to, but some small fraction of the GDP is spent basically exploring how the universe is put together, what the underlying laws are, and how it began, and how it's going to end. All these things are just as important as—well, for previous generations were the great religious questions. People built the medieval cathedrals in Europe. I suppose there were a few people who said, “Well, what is this doing for the GDP? Where is the productivity in this, all these resources?”

EF:
Those people probably got their heads cut off.

PD:
That's right. They were doing it because this was a great, collective human venture for trying to understand our place in nature. It was uplifting. It was giving people a sense of belonging and purpose. Science is exactly the same. It doesn't cost as much as the medieval cathedrals to do our type of science. I think science isn't just entertaining; it is part of what it means to be human.

If science leads to some practical application, that's a bonus. The prime reason that we're doing basic science—not
applied
science but
basic
science—is to probe the secrets of nature, to figure it all out. And I think that's a wonderful thing to do. I think authors who communicate that sense of wonder—that we're doing it, not because we're trying to invent a better type of can opener, or something—that this really
is
part of the human adventure! That's what goes over well.

What doesn't go over so well, and my literary agent cautioned me against it right at the outset, is to take a subject and just give a sort of rundown of it, a survey of the latest thinking about data mining or something. That isn't going to do too well. If it's something like
chaos theory completely transforms the way that we understand the relationship between cause and effect,
that's pretty deep. Quantum reality shows there may be parallel worlds.
That
is attention grabbing.

There's got to be something in it that—and this touches on science fiction—takes us outside of our daily world into another realm; some people might say an Alice in Wonderland realm of weird and wonderful concepts. Things that are counterintuitive, defy common sense, really lie outside the scope of everyday experience. Yet we can still understand them. That's the magic of the human mind. We can go into territory where our imagination and our common sense completely desert us. And yet we can still make sense of it. Science has the power to reveal how the world works, even in areas where we could never guess it just by looking.

EF:
I want to draw out two things that you just mentioned. First, the cathedral metaphor, which I think is very apt. Second, the sense of wonder. What I love about the idea of cathedrals is that they were literally building an architecture of the universe. It was a way to make sense of the world by putting a frame around it.

I think that is very much what the scientific endeavor is, more abstract at times, but in an equally sweeping and ambitious way. Science fiction becomes a kind of cathedral of the imagination. It's a space to do that playfully, to do it in an exploratory way.

Tell me how you try to capture and convey that sense of wonder as a writer and then let's use that as our bridge into science fiction, which is of course for many people a core engine for that experience of wonder in the world.

PD:
The great advantage science fiction writers have over people like me is that they can bend the rules, sometimes quite a lot. They can make up different laws of physics or pretend that some of the things that we now cherish will be overthrown.

When I'm writing speculative science, I really try to be very careful about, first of all, being honest. Second, differentiating between speculations, which are firmly rooted in accepted understanding of science, and those that might require some future change or ideas that are being kicked around in academia, which are sort of taken semiseriously by the scientist concerned, but may never work out. Often people will say, “All this stuff about string theory and so on. We can't take it seriously, can we?”

Well, the answer is maybe, to a certain extent. I always think it's really important if you're doing responsible science popularization to say, “This is a popular idea. It's a coherent idea. It's been worked on in a lot of detail. We know there's a lot of mathematical modeling of it, but there's not a shred of evidence at this stage that it's correct. It may turn out to be useful or may fade away.” That's really important.

You can certainly push the boundaries. You don't have to remain exactly at a current state of knowledge. You can talk about ideas that challenge that. You can't just wave a magic wand and travel faster than light. If you're going to talk about faster-than-light travel, it's got to be done in this very cautious way.

EF:
Much to the disappointment of many Hollywood screenwriters.

PD:
Yes, if ever there is a spoiler for science fiction, it is the finite speed of light. It's a pretty big speed, but in astronomical terms it's very slow of course. It takes light one hundred thousand years to cross the galaxy. If you really believe nothing can go faster than light and you can't even send information faster than light, then that dissuades one from a lot of very popular science fiction scenarios. Now maybe one day we find out that this speed of light restriction is wrong, that there are ways of circumventing it. I personally don't think so, I think it's here to stay.

As a scientist I must always be prepared to be open-minded. The whole point is that nobody has the last word. All I can do is report to the best of my ability what is the current understanding of this or that subject area whilst being open to the fact that that may change in the future. If you take a sort of “anything goes” attitude—so I wrote a book recently called
The Eerie Silence
about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Well, a wonderland there of speculation. You could imagine all sorts of civilizations out there, all sorts of things going on and so on.

I am careful in the book to say, “Well, you know, if we can imagine supercivilizations as a possibility, why not invent civilizations that can travel faster than light? What effect would that have on looking for aliens?” What I point out is that really to do responsible speculative science you have to take the best understanding that we've got at this time in the knowledge that we may be proved wrong in the future.

If you take the attitude that we can make up anything, any laws, any old ideas that we want, then it becomes rather valueless: your speculation is as good as my speculation. It's got to be informed speculation, informed by the very best understanding we have of science in the full knowledge that we don't have the last word. There's more to come.

EF:
How in your life have you seen the intersection of science fiction and science? Do you see that as a positive feedback loop? Were there science fiction stories that were particularly inspirational to you when you were younger?

PD:
I don't think there's any doubt that not only myself, but many of my colleagues, particularly those who went into the physical sciences, were deeply inspired by reading science fiction, probably in their teens. I certainly did. For me, part of the love of physics and astronomy was reading those early books. I particularly liked reading Fred Hoyle, who was a practicing cosmologist. In fact, he gave me my first job. It was long before I had a professional relationship with him that I was reading his books, which I thought were very good because they were rooted, again, in the very best science.

Because I read Asimov, H. G. Wells, I've always been a little bit choosey in the science fiction that I liked to read, inasmuch as for me it's better if it's hard science fiction, close to what I feel I can believe. In some ways I think I enjoy rather more reading the biological stories than the physics-type stories because it's easier for me to suspend my disbelief in a field I don't understand so well.