Dreams of Earth and Sky (23 page)

The division of wealth between rich and poor is a problem similar to the division of political power and has a similar history. The great debate has been between the ideals of ethics and of economics. Social justice demands equality. Fair reward for enterprise and achievement demands inequality. Advocates on both sides of the debate have tended to take extreme positions. Numerous utopian communities have been founded to put egalitarian principles into practice. Few of them have lasted for longer than one generation. Children have a regrettable tendency to rebel against their parents’ dreams. Meanwhile, advocates of extreme free-market capitalism have been preaching the gospel of greed. They glorify greed as the driving force that creates new industries and in the end will make everyone wealthy. Unfortunately, in many parts of the world where free-market capitalism prevails, the rich are growing richer and the poor are growing poorer.

The dominant utopian thinker in the great debate over economic power was Karl Marx, who saw the world of the nineteenth century as black and white. Black was capitalism, the existing society of rich factory owners and downtrodden workers, with power concentrated in the hands of the owners. White was communism, the future society of workers seizing power for themselves and owning the means of
production. Communism would achieve social justice for the workers after consigning the former owners to the dustbin of history. Marx was a prophet of hope, describing his dreams of the future in language worthy of his Hebrew forerunner Isaiah. “For, behold,” wrote Isaiah,

Looking back on Marx’s visions today, we can see that much of what he wrote about capitalism was true and almost everything he wrote about communism was false. As long as he was examining the evidence that he saw around him, he was on firm ground. As soon as he moved from evidence to dogma, his imagination led him wildly astray.

Thanks to the magic of modern data search and rapid communication, I received from a cousin in Australia a copy of the marriage certificate of my great-grandparents Jeremiah and Mary Dyson, married in 1857 in the parish church of Halifax in the industrial north of England, the region where Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels had written his classic denunciation of capitalism,
The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Mary did not sign her name. She put her mark X on the certificate. After that, without the help of a Communist revolution, the condition of the Halifax working class slowly improved. They achieved education, and modest prosperity, and the freedom to pursue broader interests. Mary’s son became a skilled machine builder, her grandson became a professional musician, and her great-grandson is a scientist.

The gospel according to Marx is a classic example of bad philosophy as defined by Deutsch. Bad philosophers try to improve the human condition by telling the world how to behave. They deceive themselves, imagining that the world will dance to their tune. Good philosophers continue to observe how the world is behaving and try to explain what they observe. Good philosophers improve the human condition by asking questions and correcting errors. The method of good philosophy is to explain and understand how the world behaves, not to prescribe.

The most important improvement of the human condition in the last half-century was the economic transformation of China. If this transformation continues for another half-century and also includes India, more than half of the population of the world will be rich. The way will be open for new and unpredictable transformations to come. China has a long tradition, extending back through thousands of years, of central government organizing large-scale social experiments. Some of the experiments failed and some succeeded. The Chinese tradition encourages the taking of large risks and the ability to recover from calamities. We should hope that the Chinese tradition will continue to be different from ours, so that they will dare to undertake new ventures that our more timid Western rules forbid. It is a pity that Deutsch does not mention China in his book. He ignores half of our heritage. If he had brought China into his vision of the future, his argument for an infinite expansion of human possibilities would have been strengthened.

Of Deutsch’s eighteen chapters, the one that I recommend most strongly is “A Dream of Socrates,” a lighthearted piece of philosophical fiction. Socrates comes to the oracle at Delphi to ask who is the wisest man in the world. The oracle, speaking for the god Apollo, answers, “No one is wiser than Socrates.” Asleep in his hotel the following night, Socrates is visited by Hermes, the messenger of the
gods. The two of them enjoy a dialogue of jokes and paradoxes, in which Hermes explains to Socrates all the main points that Deutsch is advocating in his book. The most important point that Hermes explains is that wisdom is achieved by asking questions, that is to say, by following the method that we now call Socratic. After that, Socrates is rudely awakened by young Plato and a bunch of other friends bursting into his room, and Hermes disappears. Socrates tries to explain to Plato what he has learned. Plato scribbles Socrates’s words down hastily with a stylus on a writing tablet, but he misunderstands and garbles the message.

Note added in 2014: David Deutsch reappears in
chapter 17
as a character in a book by the philosopher Jim Holt. The Deutsch of
chapter 17
is a more dogmatic speculator, and I criticize him there more harshly. According to my account, philosophy lost its bite when philosophers moved from the public agora of Athens to the cloistered colleges of Oxford.

PHYSICS ON THE FRINGE
describes work done by amateurs, people rejected by the academic establishment and rejecting orthodox academic beliefs.
*
They are often self-taught and ignorant of higher mathematics. Mathematics is the language spoken by the professionals. The amateurs offer an alternative set of visions. Their imagined worlds are concrete rather than abstract, physical rather than mathematical. Many of them belong to the Natural Philosophy Alliance, an informal organization known to its friends as the NPA.

Margaret Wertheim’s book discusses her encounters with the natural philosophers. She is interested in them as characters in a human tragedy, with the seriousness and dignity that tragedy imposes. Her leading character is Jim Carter, and her main theme is the story of his life and work. Unlike most of the philosophical dreamers, Carter is a capable engineer and does real experiments to test his ideas. He runs a successful business that gives him leisure to pursue his dreams. He is a man of many talents, with one fatal flaw.

Carter’s flaw is his unshakable belief in a theory of the universe
based on endless hierarchies of circlons. Circlons are mechanical objects of circular shape. The history of the universe is a story of successive generations of circlons arising by processes of reproduction and fission. He verified the behavior of circlons by doing experiments with smoke rings at his home. A smoke ring is a visible manifestation of a circlon. He built an experimental apparatus using garbage cans and rubber sheeting to make long-lived smoke rings under controlled conditions. The fact that smoke rings can interact with one another and maintain a stable existence proves that circlons can do the same. Just as the standard theory of nuclear physics is verified by accelerator experiments, he claims that his theory is verified by his garbage-can experiments at a million times lower cost. Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, he tells his story over and over to listeners who will not believe it.

The most dramatic period of Carter’s life was the 1970s, when he made a living as a diver collecting abalone from the sea bottom around Catalina Island. His first vision of a circlon was a perfect ring of air bubbles that sometimes rose from the exhaust valve of his underwater breathing apparatus when he exhaled. In those days, abalone were abundant and the demand for them insatiable. He could make enough money in a day of diving to allow him to stay at home for a week and work out the theory of circlons.

The practical limit to his income was the difficulty of transporting large quantities of abalone from the sea bottom to land. He solved this problem by inventing a device called a lift bag, which is a large bag with one compartment for freight and another compartment inflated with air. A small tank of compressed air released into the bag can lift hundreds of times its own weight. The lifting capacity of the bag is the weight of water displaced by the air, and the water weighs a thousand times as much as the air. With the help of his wife, he designed a lift bag that was elegant and user-friendly, using brightly
colored materials to improve its underwater visibility. He was soon receiving orders for lift bags from people engaged in underwater operations of all kinds, from raising sunken ships to drilling for oil. The Carter Lift Bag Company was bringing him a larger income than he had ever earned from abalone.

Carter was unaware, until Wertheim told him the news, that his smoke-ring experiments had been done with similar apparatus and for a similar purpose 130 years earlier. William Thomson and Peter Tait, a famous physicist and a famous mathematician, had invented a theory of matter similar to Carter’s theory of circlons. They imagined every atom to be a vortex in a hypothetical fluid known as ether that was supposed to pervade space and time. They imagined the vortices to be knotted in various ways that explained the chemical differences between atoms of various elements. Vortices in a perfect fluid, either knotted or unknotted, would be permanent and indestructible.

Like Carter, Thomson and Tait used smoke rings as visible images of their imagined atoms. Like Carter, they failed to find any convincing evidence of a connection between image and atom. Unlike Carter, they were professional scientists, highly respected leaders of the international scientific community. Thomson was later ennobled by Queen Victoria and became Lord Kelvin, his name immortalized in the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature. Tait created a mathematical theory of knots, which grew in the twentieth century into a new branch of mathematics known as topology. Thomson and Tait were honored and respected, even as their theory of vortex atoms fell into oblivion. Wertheim asks: Why should Carter be treated differently?

In my career as a scientist, I twice had the good fortune to be a personal friend of a famous dissident. One dissident, Sir Arthur Eddington, was an insider like Thomson and Tait. The other, Immanuel Velikovsky, was an outsider like Carter. Both of them were tragic figures, intellectually brilliant and morally courageous, with the
same fatal flaw as Carter. Both of them were possessed by fantasies that people with ordinary common sense could recognize as nonsense. I made it clear to both that I did not believe their fantasies, but I admired them as human beings and as imaginative artists. I admired them most of all for their stubborn refusal to remain silent. With the whole world against them, they stayed true to their beliefs. I could not pretend to agree with them, but I could give them my moral support.

Eddington was a great astronomer, one of the last of the giants who were equally gifted as observers and as theorists. His great moment as an observer came in 1919 when he led the British expedition to the island of Principe off the coast of West Africa to measure the deflection of starlight passing close to the sun during a total eclipse. The purpose of the measurement was to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The measurement showed clearly that Einstein was right and Newton wrong. Einstein and Eddington both became immediately famous. One year later, Eddington published a book,
Space, Time and Gravitation
, that explained Einstein’s ideas to English-speaking readers. It begins with a quote from Milton’s
Paradise Lost
:

Milton had visited Galileo at his home in Florence when Galileo was under house arrest. Milton wrote poetry in Italian as well as English. He spoke Galileo’s language, and used Galileo as an example in his campaign for freedom of the press in England. Milton had
witnessed with Galileo the birth struggle of classical physics, as Eddington witnessed with Einstein the birth struggle of relativity three hundred years later. Eddington’s book puts relativity into its proper setting as an episode in the history of Western thought. The book is marvelously clear and readable, and is probably responsible for the fact that Einstein was better understood and more admired in Britain and America than in Germany.

As a student at Cambridge University I listened to Eddington’s lectures on general relativity. They were as brilliant as his books. He divided his exposition into two parts, and warned the students scrupulously when he switched from one part to the other. The first part was the orthodox mathematical theory invented by Einstein and verified by Eddington’s observations. The second part was a strange concoction that he called “fundamental theory,” attempting to explain all the mysteries of particle physics and cosmology with a new set of ideas. Fundamental theory was a mixture of mathematical and verbal arguments. The consequences of the theory were guessed rather than calculated. The theory had no firm basis either in physics or mathematics.

Eddington said plainly, whenever he burst into his fundamental theory with a wild rampage of speculations, “This is not generally accepted and you don’t have to believe it.” I was unable to decide who were more to be pitied, the bewildered students who were worried about passing the next exam or the elderly speaker who knew that he was a voice crying in the wilderness. Two facts were clear. First, Eddington was talking nonsense. Second, in spite of the nonsense, he was still a great man. For the small class of students, it was a privilege to come faithfully to his lectures and to share his pain. Two years later he was dead.