by Carl Sagan
But he wrote: “My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or State, to my circle of friends or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years. Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions and prejudices of others and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations.”
His principal recreations throughout his life were playing the violin and sailing. In these years Einstein looked like and in some respects was a sort of aging hippie. He let his white hair grow long and preferred sweaters and a leather jacket to a suit and tie, even when entertaining famous visitors. He was utterly without pretense and, with no affectation, explained that “I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the President of the University.” He was often available to the public, sometimes being willing to help high school students with their geometry problems—not always successfully. In the best scientific tradition he was open to new ideas but required that they pass rigorous standards of evidence. He was open-minded but skeptical about claims of planetary catastrophism in recent Earth history and about experiments alleging extrasensory perception, his reservations about the latter stemming from contentions that purported telepathic abilities do not decline with increasing distance between sender and receiver.
In matters of religion, Einstein thought more deeply than many others and was repeatedly misunderstood. On the occasion of Einstein’s first visit to America, Cardinal O’Connell of Boston warned that the relativity theory “cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism.” This alarmed a New York rabbi who cabled Einstein: “Do you believe in God?” Einstein cabled back: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who revealed himself in the harmony of all being, not in the God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men”—a more subtle religious view embraced by many theologians today. Einstein’s religious beliefs were very genuine. In the 1920s and 1930s he expressed grave doubts about a basic precept of quantum mechanics: that at the most fundamental level of matter, particles behave in an unpredictable way, as expressed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the cosmos.” And on another occasion he asserted, “God is subtle, but he is not malicious.” In fact, Einstein was so fond of such aphorisms that the Danish physicist Niels Bohr turned to him on one occasion and with some exasperation said, “Stop telling God what to do.” But there were many physicists who felt that if anyone knew God’s intentions, it was Einstein.
One of the foundations of special relativity is the precept that no material object can travel as fast as light. This light barrier has proved annoying to many people who wish there to be no constraints on what human beings might ultimately do. But the light limit permits us to understand much of the world that was previously mysterious in a simple and elegant way. However, where Einstein taketh away, he also giveth. There are several consequences of special relativity that seem counterintuitive, contrary to our everyday experience, but that emerge in a detectable fashion when we travel close to the speed of light—a regime of velocity in which common sense has had little experience (Chapter 2). One of these consequences is that as we travel sufficiently close to the speed of light, time slows down—our wristwatches, our atomic clocks, our biological aging. Thus a space vehicle traveling very close to the speed of light could travel between any two places, no matter how distant, in any conveniently short period of time—as measured on board the spacecraft, but not as measured on the launch planets. We might therefore one day travel to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and return in a time of a few decades measured on board the ship—although, as measured back on Earth, the elapsed time would be sixty thousand years, and very few of the friends who saw us off would be around to commemorate our return. A vague recognition of this time dilation was made in the motion picture Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although a gratuitous opinion was then injected that Einstein was probably an extraterrestrial. His insights were stunning, to be sure, but he was very human, and his life stands as an example of what, if they are sufficiently talented and courageous, human beings can accomplish.
EINSTEIN’S LAST public act was to join with Bertrand Russell and many other scientists and scholars in an unsuccessful attempt to bring about a ban on the development of nuclear weapons. He argued that nuclear weapons had changed everything except our way of thinking. In a world divided into hostile states he viewed nuclear energy as the greatest menace to the survival of the human race. “We have the choice,” he said, “to outlaw nuclear weapons or face general annihilation.… Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind … Our schoolbooks glorify war and hide its horrors. They inculcate hatred in the veins of children. I would teach peace rather than war. I would inculcate love rather than hate.”
At age sixty-seven, nine years before his death in 1955, Einstein described his lifelong quest: “Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation … The road to this paradise was not so comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.”
CHAPTER 4
IN PRAISE
OF SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY
The cultivation of the mind is a kind of food
supplied for the soul of man.
MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO,
De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum,
Vol. 19 (45–44 B.C.)
To one, science is an exalted goddess;
to another it is a cow which provides him
with butter.
FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER,
Xenien (1796)
IN THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century, the largely self-educated British physicist Michael Faraday was visited by his monarch, Queen Victoria. Among Faraday’s many celebrated discoveries, some of obvious and immediate practical benefit, were more arcane findings in electricity and magnetism, then little more than laboratory curiosities. In the traditional dialogue between heads of state and heads of laboratories, the Queen asked Faraday of what use such studies were, to which he is said to have replied, “Madam, of what use is a baby?” Faraday had an idea that there might someday be something practical in electricity and magnetism.
In the same period the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell set down four mathematical equations, based on the work of Faraday and his experimental predecessors, relating electrical charges and currents with electric and magnetic fields. The equations exhibited a curious lack of symmetry, and this bothered Maxwell. There was something unaesthetic about the equations as then known, and to improve the symmetry Maxwell proposed that one of the equations should have an additional term, which he called the displacement current. His argument was fundamentally intuitive; there was certainly no experimental evidence for such a current. Maxwell’s proposal had astonishing consequences. The corrected Maxwell equations implied the existence of electromagnetic radiation, encompassing gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared and radio. They stimulated Einstein to discover Special Relativity. Faraday and Maxwell’s laboratory and theoretical work together have led, one century later, to a technical revolution on the planet Earth. Electric lights, telephones, phonographs, radio, television, refrigerated trains making fresh produce available far from the farm, cardiac pacemakers, hydroelectric power plants, automatic fire alarms and sprinkler syste
ms, electric trolleys and subways, and the electronic computer are a few devices in the direct evolutionary line from the arcane laboratory puttering of Faraday and the aesthetic dissatisfaction of Maxwell, staring at some mathematical squiggles on a piece of paper. Many of the most practical applications of science have been made in this serendipitous and unpredictable way. No amount of money would have sufficed in Victoria’s day for the leading scientists in Britain to have simply sat down and invented, let us say, television. Few would argue that the net effect of these inventions was other than positive. I notice that even many young people who are profoundly disenchanted with Western technological civilization, often for good reason, still retain a passionate fondness for certain aspects of high technology—for example, high-fidelity electronic music systems.
Some of these inventions have fundamentally changed the character of our global society. Ease of communication has deprovincialized many parts of the world, but cultural diversity has been likewise diminished. The practical advantages of these inventions are recognized in virtually all human societies; it is remarkable how infrequently emerging nations are concerned with the negative effects of high technology (environmental pollution, for example); they have clearly decided that the benefits outweigh the risks. One of Lenin’s aphorisms was that socialism plus electrification equals communism. But there has been no more vigorous or inventive pursuit of high technology than in the West. The resulting rate of change has been so rapid that many of us find it difficult to keep up. There are many people alive today who were born before the first airplane and have lived to see Viking land on Mars, and Pioneer 10, the first interstellar spacecraft, be ejected from the solar system, or who were raised in a sexual code of Victorian severity and now find themselves immersed in substantial sexual freedom, brought about by the widespread availability of effective contraceptives. The rate of change has been disorienting for many, and it is easy to understand the nostalgic appeal of a return to an earlier and simpler existence.
But the standard of living and conditions of work for the great bulk of the population in, say, Victorian England, were degrading and demoralizing compared to industrial societies today, and the life-expectancy and infant-mortality statistics were appalling. Science and technology may be in part responsible for many of the problems that face us today—but largely because public understanding of them is desperately inadequate (technology is a tool, not a panacea), and because insufficient effort has been made to accommodate our society to the new technologies. Considering these facts, I find it remarkable that we have done as well as we have. Luddite alternatives can solve nothing. More than one billion people alive today owe the margin between barely adequate nutrition and starvation to high agricultural technology. Probably an equal number have survived, or avoided disfiguring, crippling or killing diseases because of high medical technology. Were high technology to be abandoned, these people would also be abandoned. Science and technology may be the cause of some of our problems, but they are certainly an essential element in any foreseeable solution to those same problems—both nationally and planetwide.
I do not think that science and technology have been pursued as effectively, with as much attention to their ultimate humane objectives and with as adequate a public understanding as, with a little greater effort, could have been accomplished. It has, for example, gradually dawned on us that human activities can have an adverse effect on not only the local but also the global environment. By accident a few research groups in atmospheric photochemistry discovered that halocarbon propellants from aerosol spray cans will reside for very long periods in the atmosphere, circulate to the stratosphere, partially destroy the ozone there, and let ultraviolet light from the sun leak down to the Earth’s surface. Increased skin cancer for whites was the most widely advertised consequence (blacks are neatly adapted to increased ultraviolet flux). But very little public attention has been given to the much more serious possibility that microorganisms, occupying the base of an elaborate food pyramid at the top of which is Homo sapiens, might also be destroyed by the increased ultraviolet light. Steps have finally, although reluctantly, been taken to ban halocarbons from spray cans (although no one seems to be worrying about the same molecules used in refrigerators) and as a result the immediate dangers are probably slight. What I find most worrisome about this incident is how accidental was the discovery that the problem existed at all. One group approached this problem because it had written the appropriate computer programs, but in quite a different context: they were concerned with the chemistry of the atmosphere of the planet Venus, which contains hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids. The need for a broad and diverse set of research teams, working on a great variety of problems in pure science, is clearly required for our continued survival. But what other problems, even more severe, exist which we do not know about because no research group happens as yet to have stumbled on them? For each problem we have uncovered, such as the effect of halocarbons on the ozonosphere, might there not be another dozen lurking around the corner? It is therefore an astonishing fact that nowhere in the federal government, major universities or private research institutes is there a single highly competent, broadly empowered and adequately funded research group whose function it is to seek out and defuse future catastrophes resulting from the development of new technologies.
The establishment of such research and environmental assessment organizations will require substantial political courage if they are to be effective at all. Technological societies have a tightly knit industrial ecology, an interwoven network of economic assumptions. It is very difficult to challenge one thread in the network without causing tremors in all. Any judgment that a technological development will have adverse human consequences implies a loss of profit for someone. The DuPont Company, the principal manufacturers of halocarbon propellants, for example, took the curious position in public debates that all conclusions about halocarbons destroying the ozonosphere were “theoretical.” They seemed to be implying that they would be prepared to stop halocarbon manufacture only after the conclusions were tested experimentally—that is, when the ozonosphere was destroyed. There are some problems where inferential evidence is all that we will have; where once the catastrophe arrives it is too late to deal with it.
Similarly, the new Department of Energy can be effective only if it can maintain a distance from vested commercial interests, if it is free to pursue new options even if such options imply loss of profits for selected industries. The same is clearly true in pharmaceutical research, in the pursuit of alternatives to the internal-combustion engine, and in many other technological frontiers. I do not think that the development of new technologies should be placed in the control of old technologies; the temptation to suppress the competition is too great. If we Americans live in a free-enterprise society, let us see substantial independent enterprise in all of the technologies upon which our future may depend. If organizations devoted to technological innovation and its boundaries of acceptability are not challenging (and perhaps even offending) at least some powerful groups, they are not accomplishing their purpose.
There are many practical technological developments that are not being pursued for lack of government support. For example, as agonizing a disease as cancer is, I do not think it can be said that our civilization is threatened by it. Were cancer to be cured completely, the average life expectancy would be extended by only a few years, until some other disease—which does not now have its chance at cancer victims—takes over. But a very plausible case can be made that our civilization is fundamentally threatened by the lack of adequate fertility control. Exponential increases of population will dominate any arithmetic increases, even those brought about by heroic technological initiatives, in the availability of food and resources, as Malthus long ago realized. While some industrial nations have approached zero population growth, this is not the case for the world as a whole.
Minor climatic fluctuations can destroy entire populations with marginal econom
ies. In many societies where the technology is meager and reaching adulthood an uncertain prospect, having many children is the only possible hedge against a desperate and uncertain future. Such a society, in the grip of a consuming famine, for example, has little to lose. At a time when nuclear weapons are proliferating unconscionably, when an atomic device is almost a home handicraft industry, widespread famine and steep gradients in affluence pose serious dangers to both the developed and the underdeveloped worlds. The solution to such problems certainly requires better education, at least a degree of technological self-sufficiency, and, especially, fair distribution of the world’s resources. But it also cries out for entirely adequate contraception—long-term, safe birth-control pills, available for men as well as for women, perhaps to be taken once a month or over even longer intervals. Such a development would be very useful not just abroad but also here at home, where considerable concern is being expressed about the side effects of the conventional estrogen oral contraceptives. Why is there no major effort for such a development?
Many other technological initiatives are being proposed and ought to be examined very seriously. They range from the very cheap to the extremely expensive. At one end is soft technology—for example, the development of closed ecological systems involving algae, shrimp and fish which could be maintained in rural ponds and provide a highly nutritious and extremely low-cost dietary supplement. At the other is the proposal of Gerard O’Neill of Princeton University to construct large orbital cities that would, using lunar and asteroidal materials, be self-propagating—one city being able to construct another from extraterrestrial resources. Such cities in Earth orbit might be used in converting sunlight into microwave energy and beaming power down to Earth. The idea of independent cities in space—each perhaps built on differing social, economic or political assumptions, or having different ethnic antecedents—is appealing, an opportunity for those deeply disenchanted with terrestrial civilizations to strike out on their own somewhere else. In its earlier history, America provided such an opportunity for the restless, ambitious and adventurous. Space cities would be a kind of America in the skies. They also would greatly enhance the survival potential of the human species. But the project is extremely expensive, costing at minimum about the same as one Vietnam war (in resources, not in lives). In addition, the idea has the worrisome overtone of abandoning the problems on the Earth—where, after all, self-contained pioneering communities can be established at much less cost.