My title: "Queerer than we can
suppose: the strangeness of science." "Queerer than we can suppose" comes
from J.B.S. Haldane, the famous biologist, who said, "Now, my own suspicion
is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer
than we can suppose. I suspect that there are more things
in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can
be dreamed of, in any philosophy." Richard Feynman compared
the accuracy of quantum theories -- experimental predictions -- to specifying the width of North America
to within one hair's breadth of accuracy. This means that quantum theory
has got to be, in some sense, true. Yet the assumptions
that quantum theory needs to make in order to deliver those
predictions are so mysterious that even Feynman himself
was moved to remark, "If you think you understand
quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory." It's so queer that physicists
resort to one or another paradoxical interpretation of it. David Deutsch, who's talking here,
in "The Fabric of Reality," embraces the many-worlds
interpretation of quantum theory, because the worst that you
can say about it is that it's preposterously wasteful. It postulates a vast and rapidly growing
number of universes existing in parallel, mutually undetectable, except through the narrow porthole
of quantum mechanical experiments. And that's Richard Feynman. The biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of modern physics is just an extreme example. Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. Every time you drink a glass
of water, he points out, the odds are that you will imbibe
at least one molecule that passed through the bladder
of Oliver Cromwell. (Laughter) It's just elementary probability theory. (Laughter) The number of molecules
per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls,
or bladdersful, in the world. And of course, there's nothing special
about Cromwell or bladders -- you have just breathed in a nitrogen atom that passed through the right lung
of the third iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree. "Queerer than we can suppose." What is it that makes us
capable of supposing anything, and does this tell us anything
about what we can suppose? Are there things about the universe
that will be forever beyond our grasp, but not beyond the grasp
of some superior intelligence? Are there things about the universe that are, in principle,
ungraspable by any mind, however superior? The history of science has been
one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations
have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness
in the universe. We're now so used to the idea
that the Earth spins, rather than the Sun moves across the sky, it's hard for us to realize what a shattering mental revolution
that must have been. After all, it seems obvious
that the Earth is large and motionless, the Sun, small and mobile. But it's worth recalling
Wittgenstein's remark on the subject: "Tell me," he asked a friend,
"why do people always say it was natural for man to assume
that the Sun went 'round the Earth, rather than that the Earth was rotating?" And his friend replied, "Well, obviously, because it just looks as though
the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well,
what would it have looked like if it had looked as though
the Earth was rotating?" (Laughter) Science has taught us,
against all intuition, that apparently solid things,
like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely
composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration
is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle
of a sports stadium, and the next atom
is in the next sports stadium. So it would seem the hardest,
solidest, densest rock is really almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles
so widely spaced they shouldn't count. Why, then, do rocks look and feel
solid and hard and impenetrable? As an evolutionary biologist,
I'd say this: our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders
of magnitude, of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate
in the world of atoms. If we had, our brains
probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands, precisely because
objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. It's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions
like "solidity" and "impenetrability," because such notions help us
to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world
in which we have to navigate. Moving to the other end of the scale, our ancestors never had to navigate
through the cosmos at speeds close to the speed of light. If they had, our brains would be
much better at understanding Einstein. I want to give the name "Middle World"
to the medium-scaled environment in which we've evolved
the ability to take act -- nothing to do with "Middle Earth" -- Middle World. (Laughter) We are evolved denizens of Middle World, and that limits what
we are capable of imagining. We find it intuitively easy
to grasp ideas like, when a rabbit moves
at the sort of medium velocity at which rabbits and other
Middle World objects move, and hits another Middle World object
like a rock, it knocks itself out. May I introduce Major General
Albert Stubblebine III, commander of military
intelligence in 1983. "...[He] stared at his wall in Arlington,
Virginia, and decided to do it. As frightening as the prospect was,
he was going into the next office. He stood up and moved
out from behind his desk. 'What is the atom mostly made of?'
he thought, 'Space.' He started walking. 'What am I
mostly made of? Atoms.' He quickened his pace,
almost to a jog now. 'What is the wall mostly made of?' (Laughter) 'Atoms!' All I have to do is merge the spaces. Then, General Stubblebine banged
his nose hard on the wall of his office. Stubblebine, who commanded
16,000 soldiers, was confounded by his continual failure
to walk through the wall. He has no doubt that this ability
will one day be a common tool in the military arsenal. Who would screw around with an army
that could do that?" That's from an article in Playboy, which I was reading the other day. (Laughter) I have every reason to think it's true; I was reading Playboy because I, myself,
had an article in it. (Laughter) Unaided human intuition,
schooled in Middle World, finds it hard to believe Galileo
when he tells us a heavy object and a light object,
air friction aside, would hit the ground at the same instant. And that's because in Middle World,
air friction is always there. If we'd evolved in a vacuum, we would expect them to hit
the ground simultaneously. If we were bacteria, constantly buffeted by thermal
movements of molecules, it would be different. But we Middle-Worlders are too big
to notice Brownian motion. In the same way, our lives
are dominated by gravity, but are almost oblivious
to the force of surface tension. A small insect would reverse
these priorities. Steve Grand -- he's the one on the left, Douglas Adams is on the right. Steve Grand, in his book,
"Creation: Life and How to Make It," is positively scathing about our
preoccupation with matter itself. We have this tendency to think
that only solid, material things are really things at all. Waves of electromagnetic fluctuation
in a vacuum seem unreal. Victorians thought the waves
had to be waves in some material medium: the ether. But we find real matter comforting only because we've evolved
to survive in Middle World, where matter is a useful fiction. A whirlpool, for Steve Grand,
is a thing with just as much reality as a rock. In a desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of the volcano
Ol Doinyo Lengai, there's a dune made of volcanic ash. The beautiful thing
is that it moves bodily. It's what's technically known
as a "barchan," and the entire dune walks
across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 meters per year. It retains its crescent shape and moves
in the direction of the horns. What happens is that the wind blows
the sand up the shallow slope on the other side, and then, as each sand grain hits
the top of the ridge, it cascades down on the inside of the crescent, and so the whole horn-shaped dune moves. Steve Grand points out
that you and I are, ourselves, more like a wave than a permanent thing. He invites us, the reader, to think of an experience
from your childhood, something you remember clearly, something you can see,
feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there
at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell:
You weren't there. Not a single atom
that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff
of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up
on the back of your neck, read it again until it does,
because it is important. So "really" isn't a word that we should
use with simple confidence. If a neutrino had a brain, which it evolved
in neutrino-sized ancestors, it would say that rocks really
do consist of empty space. We have brains that evolved
in medium-sized ancestors which couldn't walk through rocks. "Really," for an animal, is whatever
its brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival. And because different species
live in different worlds, there will be a discomforting
variety of "reallys." What we see of the real world
is not the unvarnished world, but a model of the world,
regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so it's useful
for dealing with the real world. The nature of the model depends
on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs
a different kind of model from a walking, climbing
or swimming animal. A monkey's brain must have
software capable of simulating a three-dimensional world
of branches and trunks. A mole's software for constructing models
of its world will be customized for underground use. A water strider's brain
doesn't need 3D software at all, since it lives on the surface of the pond, in an Edwin Abbott flatland. I've speculated that bats may see
color with their ears. The world model that a bat needs
in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects must be pretty similar to the world
model that any flying bird -- a day-flying bird like a swallow --
needs to perform the same kind of tasks. The fact that the bat uses
echoes in pitch darkness to input the current
variables to its model, while the swallow uses
light, is incidental. Bats, I've even suggested, use
perceived hues, such as red and blue, as labels, internal labels,
for some useful aspect of echoes -- perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces,
furry or smooth and so on -- in the same way as swallows or indeed,
we, use those perceived hues -- redness and blueness, etc. -- to label long and short
wavelengths of light. There's nothing inherent about red
that makes it long wavelength. The point is that the nature of the model
is governed by how it is to be used, rather than by the sensory
modality involved. J.B.S. Haldane himself had
something to say about animals whose world is dominated by smell. Dogs can distinguish two very similar
fatty acids, extremely diluted: caprylic acid and caproic acid. The only difference, you see, is that one has an extra pair
of carbon atoms in the chain. Haldane guesses that a dog would probably
be able to place the acids in the order of their molecular
weights by their smells, just as a man could place
a number of piano wires in the order of their lengths
by means of their notes. Now, there's another
fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the other two, except that it has two more carbon atoms. A dog that had never met
capric acid would, perhaps, have no more trouble imagining its smell than we would have trouble
imagining a trumpet, say, playing one note higher than we've heard
a trumpet play before. Perhaps dogs and rhinos and other
smell-oriented animals smell in color. And the argument would be exactly
the same as for the bats. Middle World -- the range
of sizes and speeds which we have evolved to feel
intuitively comfortable with -- is a bit like the narrow range
of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see as light of various colors. We're blind to all
frequencies outside that, unless we use instruments to help us. Middle World is the narrow
range of reality which we judge to be normal,
as opposed to the queerness of the very small, the very large
and the very fast. We could make a similar
scale of improbabilities; nothing is totally impossible. Miracles are just events
that are extremely improbable. A marble statue could wave its hand at us; the atoms that make up
its crystalline structure are all vibrating back and forth anyway. Because there are so many of them, and because there's no
agreement among them in their preferred direction of movement, the marble, as we see it
in Middle World, stays rock steady. But the atoms in the hand
could all just happen to move the same way at the same time,
and again and again. In this case, the hand would move, and we'd see it waving at us
in Middle World. The odds against it,
of course, are so great that if you set out writing zeros
at the time of the origin of the universe, you still would not have written
enough zeros to this day. Evolution in Middle World
has not equipped us to handle very improbable events;
we don't live long enough. In the vastness of astronomical space
and geological time, that which seems impossible
in Middle World might turn out to be inevitable. One way to think about that
is by counting planets. We don't know how many planets
there are in the universe, but a good estimate is about 10 to the 20,
or 100 billion billion. And that gives us a nice way to express
our estimate of life's improbability. We could make some sort of landmark points
along a spectrum of improbability, which might look like the electromagnetic
spectrum we just looked at. If life has arisen only once on any -- life could originate once per planet,
could be extremely common or it could originate once per star or once per galaxy or maybe only
once in the entire universe, in which case it would have to be here. And somewhere up there would be the chance that a frog would turn into a prince, and similar magical things like that. If life has arisen on only one planet
in the entire universe, that planet has to be our planet,
because here we are talking about it. And that means that if we want
to avail ourselves of it, we're allowed to postulate chemical events
in the origin of life which have a probability as low
as one in 100 billion billion. I don't think we shall have
to avail ourselves of that, because I suspect that life
is quite common in the universe. And when I say quite common,
it could still be so rare that no one island of life
ever encounters another, which is a sad thought. How shall we interpret
"queerer than we can suppose?" Queerer than can in principle be supposed, or just queerer than we can suppose,
given the limitations of our brain's evolutionary
apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World and achieve some sort of intuitive
as well as mathematical understanding of the very small and the very large? I genuinely don't know the answer. I wonder whether we might help ourselves
to understand, say, quantum theory, if we brought up children
to play computer games beginning in early childhood, which had a make-believe world of balls
going through two slits on a screen, a world in which the strange goings-on
of quantum mechanics were enlarged by the computer's make-believe, so that they became familiar
on the Middle-World scale of the stream. And similarly, a relativistic
computer game, in which objects on the screen manifest
the Lorentz contraction, and so on, to try to get ourselves -- to get children
into the way of thinking about it. I want to end by applying
the idea of Middle World to our perceptions of each other. Most scientists today subscribe
to a mechanistic view of the mind: we're the way we are because our brains
are wired up as they are, our hormones are the way they are. We'd be different, our characters
would be different, if our neuro-anatomy and our
physiological chemistry were different. But we scientists are inconsistent. If we were consistent, our response to a misbehaving
person, like a child-murderer, should be something like: this unit has a faulty component;
it needs repairing. That's not what we say. What we say -- and I include
the most austerely mechanistic among us, which is probably me -- what we say is, "Vile monster,
prison is too good for you." Or worse, we seek revenge,
in all probability thereby triggering the next phase in an escalating
cycle of counter-revenge, which we see, of course,
all over the world today. In short, when we're
thinking like academics, we regard people as elaborate
and complicated machines, like computers or cars. But when we revert to being human, we behave more like Basil Fawlty,
who, we remember, thrashed his car to teach it a lesson, when it wouldn't start on "Gourmet Night." (Laughter) The reason we personify things
like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live
in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface
tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world. We swim through a sea of people -- a social version of Middle World. We are evolved to second-guess
the behavior of others by becoming brilliant,
intuitive psychologists. Treating people as machines may be scientifically
and philosophically accurate, but it's a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person
is going to do next. The economically useful way
to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful,
goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains,
desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness. Personification and the imputing
of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful
way to model humans, it's hardly surprising
the same modeling software often seizes control when we're
trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate,
like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people,
with the universe as a whole. (Laughter) If the universe is queerer
than we can suppose, is it just because
we've been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive
in the Pleistocene of Africa? Or are our brains so versatile
and expandable that we can train ourselves to break out of the box of our evolution? Or finally, are there some things
in the universe so queer that no philosophy of beings,
however godlike, could dream them? Thank you very much. (Applause)
In a previous lecture given by Dawkins (found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxGMqKCcN6A&feature=relmfu)
around the 28 minute mark, he made this comment: "If you are rich, give some thoughts to how you might make a difference... If my books sold as well as Stephen Hawkins book instead of only Richard Dawkins' books, I'd do it myself"
That was in 2002.
The God Delusion was released October 2006.
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science was founded in 2006.
This guy follows through on his word. Can't give him enough credit for that.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe.html
Thanks for sharing this, watching this completely changed my opinion of Richard Dawkins, who I perceived to be just a populist preacher of the obvious
Like most visionaries, Dawkins is more brilliant than even his adherents can suppose.