Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (8 page)

Did it ever occur to them that the reason we had a trial, the reason we hired them in the first place, is because sometimes the man that the police arrest is innocent? Is it reasonable for a prosecutor to cry when a long-suffering jury comes to a decision and acquits a defendant, who is therefore by our highest standard innocent?

I just hope that I don’t ever get arrested back there.

In La Jolla I live on the beach across from one of the nicest surf breaks in California. Waves are intricate things. Our best waves in La Jolla are born way out in the Pacific when a storm,
maybe as far away as New Zealand, a storm with a low pressure area, pulls up a huge convex mass of water from the ocean. It literally sucks it up over a period of days, maybe a few feet above sea level at the center, and the water falls back into the sea, and when it falls it pushes up more water around it in a circle, and that process of water falling and rising in expanding rings travels away in all directions, like the circles of waves that rocks falling leave in a pond; only it starts with suction near New Zealand. One of the directions it travels is La Jolla. And the winds are often blowing this way, too. They blow on that rising and settling expanding mass for a few days, and the friction of the wind over the disturbed water brings up lines and lines of nice waves.

We always surf in the morning because the wind is quiet. The waves are glassy. We paddle out. We sit for a while and talk. Then I see one coming. The peak is aimed just toward me. I paddle hard to get the board moving. Steve, my friend, offers, “This one’s yours, Mullis.”

Maryjane agrees. “Go for it.”

I paddle. It seems sluggish. It’s been a while. The wave lifts me up, I dig into the water, and with a last stroke, I pull myself over the top and plant my feet on the board. I’m there. The wave is holding me up and at the same time rising up behind me. I’m in control. I can cut to the right or the left as if I were skiing down a long hill. I don’t want to go straight down the front of it. It could come up behind and pitch me over. It’s much more fun to take the sharpest angle I can muster, like a sailboat digging into the wind, feeling the power of the angle and screaming across the face.

When I fall, I hold my breath. The sea takes me into her
arms. I’m not bruised. I wait underwater until the action of my board in the whitewater, bouncing around, looking to all the world like it was trying to find my head, is over. Then, I come up.

My friends laugh. They think I’m a bit rusty.

I’ve been away. It’s good to be home.

M
OST OF US
agree that we have five senses—five tiny windows—and we are locked in our own huge castle looking out through these five tiny windows. The world outside, we gather, has no limits except this one little one—it has no end to its hugeness or to the minuteness of its details, or to its tangled vines of complexity that coil around themselves from forever in ways that only very young fools would conspire to untangle.

One of our windows is hearing. When the air around our ears goes back and forth 50 or 60 times a second, it causes our eardrum to sway gently back and forth, and we hear a very deep hum, like the sound of AC power out of the wall outlet in America, getting into your audio system. If the air pulses in and out around 880 times per second, the eardrum vibrates and we hear a sound like the middle A on a piano. At 2 times 880 equal to 1760 cycles per second, we hear an A one octave higher. At 3520 cps, we hear the next A up the keyboard, and so forth. At 20,000 we no longer hear sound, even though the air around our ears is still vibrating. Some component in our detection system fails. Although air can vibrate at even much higher frequencies, we can’t hear it. Dogs can hear higher
pitches than we can, children higher than adults, and women higher than men in general. Our window on sound is narrow. It is pretty much centered on the range of sounds that our bodies can make. Our ears must have evolved mostly for the purpose of listening to ourselves.

Our biggest window is vision. In this case we are tuning in to the vibrations not of air but of something we call electromagnetic fields. If you could wiggle a little magnet 428 trillion times per second, it would start making red light—not because it was getting hot but because the magnetic field was oscillating back and forth. The magnet could be cold. I don’t know anybody who could actually wiggle a magnet that fast—this is what is called a thought experiment. The point is that the magnet is not getting hot from the friction of the movement in air; it could be happening in a vacuum. It is the back and forth motion of the magnetic field around the magnet that is making the light. A little faster, 550 trillion times per second, it would glow green. At around 800 trillion times per second, even in a dark room, the light from the wiggling magnet would no longer be visible to you. A little faster, and it might start causing sunburn on your face, but you could no longer see it. It would be what we call ultraviolet. Any time a magnet wiggles, no matter how small it is, or how fast or slow it wiggles, it makes some kind of light. Most light is made by little magnets called molecules, and our eyes are tuned to a very narrow range of it. Our vision is centered on the 550 stuff we call green, because we developed our vision while we were living under the canopies of giant trees that let in only the green light.

We also have taste, touch, and smell. From birth, we also
have the ability to detect “weightless.” We don’t like “weightless.” Unless we are in orbit, it means we are falling and going to land soon, maybe hard. If we are in orbit we are still falling, but we are moving so fast that by the time we fall to the level of the earth, the earth is behind us and we miss it and just keep on falling. We go around and around like the moon, which is also falling and sliding past at the same time. Our sense of “weightlessness” is not one of our more pleasant ones. It doesn’t have a lot of comforting familiarity of detail about it. Either you are or you aren’t falling, so it’s not much of a sensory mode by itself.

It does, however, accentuate one more frequently acknowledged sensory mode. It accentuates waiting—that is, the sense of time passing. We can count seconds in our head. The notion of waiting and marking time becomes severely hyperactivated by the sense of falling.

And those definite five, plus the dubious two, make up the whole of our acknowledged sensory modes. All of our windows out onto the vastness of outside, from the vantage point of our castle—prison or hermitage, depending on your personal bent—are described in our various languages in terms of those seven modes of perception.

Our brain is accustomed to listening to the news from the windows. Our thoughts are at their clearest when the input is from our eyes, then ears, then nose—maybe nose before ears—then tongue, then skin—maybe skin before tongue. It depends on what you’re licking.

Some species have other, somewhat amazing to us, sensory abilities. They are amazing because we have this inaccurate perception that everything that is real is perceptible by at
least one of our senses, and invisible things are kind of freaky. A bumblebee can find its way, supposedly, by observing the polarization angle of light, which we ourselves can’t observe without equipment. Dogs can sense when their masters may be in jeopardy. Mailmen are quite familiar with the phenomenon, which, in their case, is dysfunctionally aroused in the dog unless they are bringing a notice of foreclosure. Dolphins use sound to visualize three-dimensional space. Sharks, I am told, can smell a drop of blood in water hundreds of feet away. Ants sense one another’s needs well enough to work in huge teams. Bats navigate by sonar.

How do I know when someone is standing behind me even though I can’t see them? I can’t hear or smell the person, but I have a sense about it. I also have a non-visual, non-scent-related, non-intelligence-linked sense for finding my way out of the woods at night, which is convenient because I’m in there a lot and it can be very dark in Mendocino when it’s foggy.

Intuition is used to describe those odd feelings we get from time to time that cannot be ascribed to our five favorite channels. We don’t have names for the remainder of our senses, and they have gotten a bit of a tawdry reputation because of the amazing success of the five that do have names. We have made a lot of cool things, some of them charming and some of them horrible, using the logic that developed out of those Fantastic Five. But perhaps the most important thing that those five senses and the rules of mathematics that we created from them have told us is that they cannot tell us everything. They are a narrow slit, swept only briefly through a glass darkly.

What do senses have to do with logic and mathematics?

In the mid-nineteenth century, anybody who thought about
it thought science was based on mathematics, and mathematics was an abstraction based on sensory input. It was assumed that mathematical laws, and in particular geometry and calculus, were at the root of the way things worked. The parabola that Newtonian physics predicted for the trajectory of a cannonball could be trusted to drop the cannonball on the heads of the Prussians if necessary. The relationship between the charge in the cannon, the weight of the ball, and the angle of the shot would faithfully define the parabola. Only a few people have the slightest idea how to deal with math. Most of us just light the fuse.

You probably didn’t like math in high school and you probably still don’t. You also probably think math is arithmetic. Arithmetic is the part of math that is useful for balancing your checkbook. Most professional mathematicians can’t balance their checkbooks. Some of them are involved with trying to understand whether a basketball could be turned inside out—if the only restraint on the substance of the basketball was that it could not be crinked excessively. It could, for instance, be pushed through itself. It just couldn’t be crinked—without causing any folds in it from becoming infinitesimally thin. Remember that this is abstraction supposedly based on sensory information. Sounds bizarre, doesn’t it? The very few strange people in the world working on this are called mathematicians and would be further classified as differential topologists. What they are doing is similar to what most theoretical mathematicians are doing. They are taking the things that our senses can tell us, drawing some conclusions from that, and then trying to understand things that are not, and may never be, discernible through our senses. It may have something to
do with whether we can make a device that will transport us to Venus in a heartbeat without stopping our heart or, more to the point just now, make our computer keyboards stop freezing up. We all know the aggravation of having none of the buttons or devices on the computer function except for the plug—the final act—and then when it comes back on, it has the nerve to suggest that you turned it off wrong. In some way, unknown to you or me, the guys thinking about inverting basketballs are really thinking about this. It’s called mathematics. It derives from our senses. Maybe. Things have a tendency to drift away from their origin.

Pay attention to your senses. Neither differential topology, nor geometry, nor calculus has turned out to be the real underlying root of how things work. The rules of geometry and calculus were derived from sense perceptions and can be applied to the things that usually concern us—throwing a baseball, shooting a missile—things that we can access and confirm with our five senses, but they are not the reality that we consider in this century to underlie our lives. And this is an important sociological point. At a certain level in physics—the realm of the smallest things—calculus means nothing. It is too dependent on time and space. Time and space don’t really count for much in the inferno of the very small things that we now think are fundamental. So senses don’t either. Geometry doesn’t work at all on the really small things.

Maybe this is saying something important to us. If geometry doesn’t work, then our attempt to understand things way down there in weirdness space may be inappropriate. Sensory perceptions have nothing to do with things there. Sensory perceptions confirm calculus, and calculus doesn’t work there either.
We can’t do any engineering down there. Nobody who is sane understands what goes on down at the level where the fundamental things like quarks and electrons do not have any volume or any position. If you can understand something with zero volume and no position, then welcome to insanity.

Do we need to use billions of dollars to build machines that maybe will put a few of our rightfully treasured eggheads in touch with things so far from what can be engineered into useful items that only they will get a thrill out of finding them? Do we need to do this when there is an obvious threat over our heads, something falling right now onto our planet? Something big, heavy, and headed our way. Something that already has our number on it, a number we could read if we would just point enough telescopes out there to see it.

I once heard, and I think it is true, that only one man in the world—some Indian mathematician—understood the mathematics of string theory in eleven-dimensional space, and he dreamed it. That may be an exaggeration, but it isn’t far from the facts as I know them. We would need a big machine to find out whether he was right.

We humans, including mathematicians, have an idea. It is that the smaller something is, the more fundamentally important it is. And the bigger something is, the more fundamentally important it is. Maybe we want to reconsider what we mean by fundamental.

There is an important story here. It is the story about how, as a culture worldwide after the big wars, we have begun to drift into the idea that reality is not what you see with your senses. That reality can be seen only by specialists with heavy lenses and special machines. It doesn’t seem to matter that for
millions of years we’ve been developing some of the best sensory apparatus in the solar system. It grows in the wall of the castle that forms around us as soon as we are conceived, and unless something fucks it up, it works quite well for fifty or more years.