Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (9 page)

When did we as a culture decide that extremely little things were fundamental? I think it was this century and the advent of nuclear bombs. At the same time, we decided that very big things were also important. Medium-sized things like us were relegated to the not-so-important closet. How did that come about? Academic departments like Aesthetics and Existential Philosophy vanished without a trace. Their questions about medium-sized things were still largely unanswered. Medium-sized things are still pushing grocery carts around full of their last possessions, international diplomacy still involves threats of explosions, and nobody knows what the weather will be like next fall in Florida.

We are out here, culturally, somewhat alone today. We have no counsel from colleagues writing from ages past about this kind of thing. It is a place where we have arrived, hell bent on knowing what’s going on everywhere but inside of us, or even close by. We have applied geometry and calculus over and over. We have built machines that can see farther and deeper, and we have analyzed the results we get from these machines farther and deeper, by building computing machines. And now, in subatomic nature, we have found a set of structures that don’t look like anything we know. They don’t look like cubes or spheres, or tetrahedrons, or even sexy little dodecahedrons, or horrible icosehedrons. They don’t even look like zebras. They don’t look at all. They come in and out of existence
unannounced—no RSVP, no clue as to why they are there or why they wouldn’t be there.

Also out on the cutting edge of physics are the cosmologists—the physicists who thrive only on the things that can be described as 1 quadrillion times the size of a basketball. It’s a different part of the cutting edge. It’s cosmology, the part of physics described as “examination of and speculations concerning the whole universe.” It is explored by viewing light that was emitted billions of years ago, which we couldn’t see even if we were on some mountain where a big array of detectors was looking at it, because that kind of light doesn’t even register in our eyes. We can think about what it means, but we can’t see it. It’s exciting.

But the comets are falling. They are on their way right now. We can’t see them in the moonlight yet, but we can predict them. We are a smaller planet than Jupiter, but we are a planet just the same, and things have often fallen on us. Some of them have been rather large. One of them, 65 million years ago landed off the coast of Baja and sent a tidal wave five hundred feet high over Kansas City. The dust from that impact resulted in a hundred years of darkness on Earth that caused 99 percent of all species to vanish. And how often do gigantic things like this happen? How often do things like the crash of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 on Jupiter happen on Earth? What causes all the craters on the moon? Do we think that craters don’t happen here just because the evidence washes away in the rain?

Isn’t it reasonable that we should put some of our brightest minds on this? Won’t it seem short-sighted if we look up at the sky one day and say, “Holy shit, we’re done for now!” Three
comets will be falling on us tomorrow, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.

About 6 billion people will die in one or two minutes following the collision. We could have been ready with any number of technological solutions—mainly missiles with big bombs—but we had failed to notice that our existence here had never been guaranteed. We weren’t ready. We had been distracted by the pleasure of being the kings of existence and the inventors of thought.

In 1992 the Earth-orbit-crossing asteroid called 4179 Toutatis passed within 3 million miles of earth. It is 2.9 miles wide and it is coming back in the year 2004. They watched it come by last time with the Deep Space Network Goldstone radar antenna in California and the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. It may miss us this time by about a million miles—that’s four times the distance to the moon—plenty of room. But it will definitely be back again, and it’s hard to know what the precise orbit of an asteroid might turn out to be until it’s really close and you happen to be in the cross-hairs. Maybe it would be a good idea if we paid a little more attention.

There are two really important things we could be doing now with our physicists. One of them would be to put physicists on the problem of things that may fall on our heads from space. How to detect them coming in and how to deflect them. The other would be putting another bunch of them seriously into action trying to get in touch with other cultures in space that have dealt with these problems and can help us solve them. Nobody has any idea about whether there are beings in space that are broadcasting, on seven hundred channels
unknown to us, useful hints about how to take care of potentially destructive comets. The former solution is certainly something we can do and it doesn’t rely on the unknowable existence of other cultures. Give it first priority—our boys can solve that one for sure. The latter solution, asking for help from someone who may not exist, is worth some effort, but it isn’t a certainty. I’d put 90 percent of our present expenditures for physics and space technology on the former problem. It is crucial and we can solve it. The other 10 percent I would distribute among the latter problem and the trivial ones that involve our insatiable need to think that we can understand the fundamental nature of the universe.

I am not at all suggesting that we abandon physics. I am gingerly suggesting that we may be looking for it in the wrong place. I think we should fund the hell out of it. It has too many interesting twists and turns. I’m saying, however, that we should fund the kind of physics that deals with things that we can see and still don’t understand, but once we understand, we can do something about. Why look any deeper? We can easily measure a lot of things that are puzzling. Weather is a good example of something that we should know more about. I’m not talking about global climate change. That’s political. I’m talking about regular weather that has to do with whether there will be high winds in the Sierras next week. Very bright people should be directed into things that matter to them and to us—and that can be solved—rather than wasting them in fields that are very romantic but have very little relation to our lives and no relationship to the great referee of all things—our senses.

Don’t lose track of the fact that 65 million years ago an
asteroid that had been pitched out of its orbit between Mars and Jupiter by a chance interaction with several other asteroids was deflected on a course for Earth that nobody at the time could even contemplate. In a few months it devastated Earth. Another lovely ecosystem almost completely down the drain. Oh well. Some lucky creatures always survive.

S
OME PEOPLE IN
Denver may survive the next Big One. They may have to eat frozen carcasses for a hundred years, fumbling around in the frigid dark while the fine black dust settles. Finally in summers, they may begin to see an orange area in the sky that in a few years may become the Sun. They may discover how to write again—first on the black in their caves, then on stone tablets. Then they may move south looking for salad, and a few thousand years after that, when they are once again on the verge of understanding the secrets of the quark, some ominous dark object may cross the full of the moon one night. In the morning, it is much larger, a star that should not be there.

We are no longer the tree shrews we were 65 million years ago. There are no more dinosaurs roaming Earth. But we are just as helpless against an asteroid as the tree shrews. The next time it happens, we will have to deal with something that the tree shrews didn’t. We will have to deal with NASA showing us increasingly detailed pictures of our approaching doom and CNN speculating on how the stock market will react during the final few days. We will have to cry on each other’s shoulders about our tragic simplicity. Do we ever buy an umbrella on a sunny day? Do we understand that our big blue
and green planet attracts big mountains of rock from outer space with the same force that it employs to drive apples to the ground?

I say that everything, bar nothing, being a possibility, we are placing our bets right now on the wrong tables, exploring regions of reality where our senses are not reliably sensitive, when there are obvious things needing our attention right now, where our senses are reliable. Let’s look out for long-term comets and straying asteroids. Let’s go to Mars. Let’s do biochemistry. Let’s think about what kinds of senses people have and how they can use them to their advantage. Let’s not spend our time and resources thinking about things that are so little or so large that all they really do for us is puff us up and make us feel like gods. We are mammals, and we have not exhausted the annoying little problems of being mammals.

I
STARTED PLAYING
with electricity when I was six. I was learning how to spell at about the same time. By the time I learned how to spell “volts D.C.,” I had given up batteries for 110 volts A.C., which came out of the wall and never ran down. It made bigger sparks, but sometimes it melted the insulation off my wires before the circuit breaker tripped. The box was beside the back door in the kitchen, and it would shut down my plug and my mother’s room at the same time. By day it was no big deal. I knew which switch to reset, and the circuit breaker kept no records. At night it was a different matter, but I had a little flashlight to find my way downstairs. From the dark of her room, my mother did not openly encourage me.

But while she said no, in fact, she placed no real restrictions on me. She made sure that each of her boys had a little closet of his own where he could do whatever he wanted. A storage room in the house that was not filled with useless things was assigned to each of us. Mine contained the water heater and a light bulb, to which I had added an outlet. I installed a magnetic lock on the door. To open it I would pass a magnet over a particular spot on the door. A nail inside would raise up and out of the eye on the end of a bolt that held the
door closed. There was a string holding the nail so it wouldn’t fall down into spaces between the roof and the insulation. No one but me knew how to do it and I didn’t let anyone watch. I had a totally private place where I could launch my life when I was six.

I knew, maybe from birth, where the circuit breakers were. I don’t remember Mom ever telling me not to do something specific with electricity, but she wouldn’t have known what to tell me not to do anyway. From my closet I shut down the power several times. If the power suddenly went out in the house and my closet smelled like an electrical fire, she would tell me to stop doing whatever it was that I was doing, but she was not very specific, and there was a note of “please” in her voice.

When her Maytag broke, I took it apart. After I won the Nobel Prize she enjoyed telling reporters that as a child with an “overactive brain” I had ruined her washing machine by taking it apart. Mother knew a good story when she told it. The washer had been discarded and was sitting in the garage before I ever touched it.

I wanted to know what made the different cycles turn on and off. How did this machine know when to rinse? There was no power in the garage, so I couldn’t do any experiments, but by looking at it carefully, I learned that there were little things along the water lines that I later learned to call solenoids. I learned this from looking at the wires and pipes. A solenoid is an electromagnet that can control a valve. Something that blocked a tube got pulled up when an electromagnet came on. The magnet worked only when the power was on, and that happened because a switch was closed. The switch in the washing
machine was part of a notched wheel that rolled around constantly when the main power was on. It was a timer and I later learned to call the little notches castellations and the whole device a cam. It was cut out of a plastic disk that I think was made out of Bakelite, named after L. H. Baekeland, who invented plastic. Years later I heard that in the mornings he would stand out in his yard in a ritzy Florida neighborhood completely naked. The neighbors objected, but what do you say to the father of the Age of Plastic about his personal dress code in his own yard—in Florida?

When a stationary copper lever dropped into the notches of the Bakelite wheel, connections were made and power flowed through wires into the solenoids. It was very simple.

I took one of the little electromagnets and attached it to the cellar door. When I pushed a button I had wired up on the windowsill, the electromagnet would pull its little cylindrical piece of metal up and out of the way of a metal loop that I had attached to the door, and the door would swing open. The door would not have swung open, on being released, if I had not repositioned the hinges. I could let my dog out from under the house by pushing a button, and then, through the picture window in the den, I’d watch him bolt. I never knew why we had to shut him up under the house every night in the first place. I guess that’s why I’ve always been an engineer and never an administrator.

B
Y THE LATE 1970S
my second wife had left and I was still living in Kansas City. I had moved there so she could attend medical school, but she ended up leaving me. It was a
well-documented phenomenon and it didn’t hurt my feelings. In fact, it was about three months before I realized that she had left. I was working in a laboratory at the University of Kansas Medical Center. I had a nice little house, and after she moved out, I filled the space she had occupied with electronic equipment.

I had an abundance of really cool stuff. Every month one of the labs at the university would close down—the funding had run out or a key researcher was leaving—and almost always the equipment was available to anyone who wanted it. I would go into those labs and salvage. Much of the equipment was old, from the early 1960s, and really wasn’t of any use to anyone in the modern world. I could put it in the trash and then come back and get it, take it home, and there it was of some very serious use.