Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

by Neal Stephenson

  d. That much is true of classical (i.e. pre-quantum) state space theory, even though it adds nothing beyond Newton’s original laws. The quantum version of the theory, on the other hand, requires that actions over all possible worlds be brought together in a calculation yielding the probability that any one state of affairs will eventuate. As Feynman puts it, “It isn’t that a particle takes the path of least action but that it smells all the paths in the neighborhood and chooses the one that has the least action. . . .” The picture is reminiscent of Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds.”

  7. Possible-world theory has come in for serious study in recent decades both by philosophers and physicists. For impressively technical reasons that are likely to leave lay readers nonplussed, David Lewis (Plurality of Worlds) posited that all possible worlds really exist and are no less real than the one we live in. Such notions are the subject of current philosophical research, under the rubrics of modal realism and actualist realism. Among physicists, Hugh Everett launched the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics in the late 1950s, since which time it has slowly but steadily garnered support. A particularly eloquent latter-day treatment can be found in David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality.

  8. Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), who early in his life became known as “the greatest logician since Aristotle” because of his astonishingly original work on the foundations of mathematics, devoted much of the second half of his life to the development of a rigorous metaphysical system that was to be based upon the work of Leibniz, with whom he had a fascination that became notorious. Gödel was a strong mathematical Platonist who thought in a serious way about the notion that the entities that are the subject matter of mathematics really exist, though not in our physical universe, and that when we do mathematics we in some sense perceive those entities. An almost painfully meticulous scholar, he was well aware of Kant’s objections to Leibniz’s metaphysics, and understood that those objections would have to be dealt with in order for him to make any progress. According to his friend and biographer Hao Wang, Gödel discovered the works of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) in the late 1950s and devoted much of the remainder of his life to studying them. He felt that Husserl had solved many, if not all, of the metaphysical problems that Gödel had set for himself, including doing away with Kant’s objections to Leibniz’s work. Husserl is prolix, prolific, and infamously difficult to read (even Gödel complained of this) and so a reader of sub-Gödel I.Q., eyeing a heap of Husserl translations on a table, might despair of ever putting his finger on the passages that Gödel is thinking of. Fortunately, Hao Wang did us the favor of listing the specific Husserl books that Gödel most admired. One of them is Cartesian Meditations, based on a series of lectures that Husserl delivered late in his career. In the fifth and last of these, Husserl gets around to mentioning, in an approving way, Leibniz and monads. Husserl has come round to Leibniz’s way of thinking, but he has got there by taking a different route, pioneered by Husserl, through phenomenology, the premises and development of which I’ll spare the reader. Since Gödel’s death, Mathematical Platonism has come in for serious study both by philosophers such as Edward N. Zalta, a metaphysician at Stanford University, and scientists such as Max Tegmark, an MIT cosmologist. Zalta and Tegmark (like Deutsch) have been influenced by David Lewis’s work on modal realism. Beginning from different premises, they have arrived at markedly similar approaches.

  NONE OF THESE LATTER-DAY ECHOES OF LEIBNIZIAN THINKING HAS GENERATED traceable, exact results in the same way that, for example, Newtonian mechanics was able to predict the orbit of the moon. If such a thing happens in the future—if, for example, the practitioners of Loop Quantum Gravity use their theory to make predictions that are verified by experiment—then credit will have to go to them and not to Leibniz, who could never have imagined such a science. It’s not the point of this chapter, in other words, to argue that Leibniz was right, much less that Newton was wrong. Leibniz was not even doing science as we now define the term. My conclusions are two. First of all, that the infamous duel between Newton and Leibniz—which was only superficially about who had invented the calculus—came back from the dead a hundred years ago to exert remarkable influence over the course of modern science. Secondly, that Leibniz’s most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science. In 1960, Eugene Wigner wrote a paper, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences, in which he addressed the nearly miraculous way in which pure mathematics—seemingly a product of human cognition, and nothing else—predicts the behavior of the physical world. The examples cited by Wigner would have made sense to Leibniz. Leibniz, however, would have been baffled by Wigner’s use of the adjective “unreasonable” in the title of his paper. Wigner was a modern: a product of a skeptical age. He was uneasy (or felt obliged to pretend to be uneasy) with the philosophical implications of the way in which the physical world answered to mathematics. This unease could not have been more alien to Leibniz, who, during his long philosophical career, questioned many things that would have been easier to leave alone, but believed, with a kind of medieval serenity, in the reasonableness of Creation.

  It’s All Geek to Me (2007)

  A week ago Friday, moments before an opening-day showing of the movie “300” at Seattle’s Cinerama, a 20-something moviegoer rushed to the front of the theater, dropped his shoulders, curled his arms into a mock-Schwarzenegger pose and bellowed out a timeless remark of King Leonidas of Sparta that has in the last week become the catchphrase of the year: “Spartans! Tonight we dine in hell!”

  Groans, roars, macho hooting noises and sardonic applause rained down on him. The audience had been standing in line for an hour. Only a few of them were dressed as Greek hoplites. They were much better balanced between men and women than I’d expected and, racially, looked like a fair cross section of Seattle’s populace. Over the next couple of hours, they enjoyed “300” with roughly the same level of energy and audience participation as one would expect in an N.C.A.A. Final Four game.

  The film contains a lot of over-the-top material, reflecting its origin in a graphic novel. As often as not, when I found myself rolling my eyes at something particularly mortifying (the tactical corpse-pile avalanche, the Persian executioner with serrated fins for arms), the crowd reacted much as I did, some even hurling catcalls from the balcony or blurting their own lines of dialogue. It was all pretty festive for a movie about ancient history in which almost all of the characters end up dead.

  This, apparently, was no anomaly. Though it opened on a relatively small number of screens, “300” made money far beyond the most optimistic projections of its producers, racking up the third-best opening weekend ever for an R-rated movie.

  The critics, however, were mostly hostile, and frequently venomous. Many reviews made the same points:

  • “300” is not sufficiently ironic. It takes its themes (duty, loyalty, sacrifice, the preservation of Western civilization against enormous odds) too seriously to, well, be taken seriously.

  • “300” is campy—meaning that many things about it can be read as sexual double entendres—yet the filmmakers don’t show sufficient awareness of this.

  • All of the good guys are white people and many of the bad guys are brown. (How this could have been avoided in a film about Spartans versus Persians is never explained; the distinctly non-Greek viewers at my showing seemed to have no trouble placing themselves in the sandals of ancient Spartans.)

  But such criticisms aren’t really worth arguing with, because they are not serious in the first place—and that is their whole point. Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

  Thermopylae is a wedge issue!


  Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

  Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing—interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

  The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it.

  Lack of critical respect means nothing to sci-fi’s creators and fans. They made peace with their own dorkiness long ago. Oh, there was momentary discomfort around the time of William Shatner’s 1987 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, in which he exhorted Trekkies to “get a life.” But this had been fully resolved by 2000, when sci-fi fans voted to give the Hugo Award for best movie to “Galaxy Quest,” a film that revolves around making fun of sci-fi fans.

  The growing popularity of science fiction, the rise of graphic novels, anime and video games, and the fact that geeks can make lots of money now, have given creators and fans of this kind of art a confidence, even a swagger, that—hard as it is for some of us to believe—is kind of cool.

  Video games have turned everyone under the age of 20 into experts on military history and tactics; 12-year-olds on school buses argue about the right way to deploy onagers and cataphracts while outflanking a Roman triplex acies formation. The near exhaustion of Asian martial arts themes has led a small but growing number to begin reconstructing, or imagining, the forgotten martial arts of the West. And science fiction, by its nature, has had to equip itself with a full toolkit for dealing with alien cultures, mindsets and landscapes.

  Which is exactly how the creators of “300” approach the Spartans and the Persians. The only people in the film who don’t seem as if they came from another planet are the Arcadians (non-Spartan Greeks), who turn tail once the battle becomes hopeless.

  Classics-based sci-fi is nothing new. To name the most recent of many examples, the novelist Dan Simmons published “Ilium” and “Olympos,” science-fictional takes on Homer. When science fiction tackles classical themes, the results may look a bit odd to some, but the audience—which is increasingly the mainstream audience—is sufficiently hungry for this kind of material (and, perhaps, suspicious of anything that’s overly polished) that it is willing to overlook the occasional mistake, or make up for it by shouting hilarious things from the balcony. These people don’t need irony or campiness self-consciously pointed out to them, any more than they need a laugh track to enjoy “The Simpsons.”

  The Spartan phalanx presents itself to foes as a wall of shields, bristling with spears, its members squatting behind their defenses, anonymous and unknowable, until they break formation and stand out alone, practically naked, soft, exposed and recognizable as individuals.

  The audience members watching them play the same game: media-weary, hunkered down behind thick irony, flinging verbal jabs at the screen—until they see something that moves them. Then they’ll come out and feel. But at the first hint of politics, they’ll jump back behind their shield-wall, just like the Spartans when millions of Persian arrows blot out the sun, and wait until the noise stops.

  Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out (2006)

  In the spring of 1977, some friends and I made a 40-mile pilgrimage to the biggest and fanciest movie theater in Iowa so we could watch a new science fiction movie called “Star Wars.” Expecting long lines, we got there early, and found the place deserted.

  As we sat on the sidewalk waiting for the box office to open, others like us drifted in from the towns, farms and colleges of central Iowa and queued up behind. When the curtain in front of the big Cinerama screen finally parted, the fanfare sounded and the famous opening crawl appeared against a backdrop of stars, there were still some empty seats. “Star Wars” wasn’t famous yet. The only people who had heard about it were what are now called geeks.

  Twenty-eight years later, the vast corpus of “Star Wars” movies, novels, games and merchandise still has much to say about geeks—and also about a society that loves them, hates them and depends upon them.

  In the opening sequence of the new Star Wars movie, “Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” two Jedi knights fight their way through an enemy starship to rescue a hostage. Ever since I saw the movie, I have been annoying friends with a trivia question: “Who is the enemy? What organization owns this vessel?”

  We ought to know. In 1977, we all knew who owned the Death Star (the Empire) and who owned the Millennium Falcon (Han Solo). But when I ask my question about the new film, everyone reacts in the same way: with a sudden intake of breath and a sideways dart of the eyes, followed by lengthy cogitation. Some confess that they have no idea. Others think out loud for a while, developing and rejecting various theories. Only a few have come up with the right answer.

  One hyperverbal friend was able to spit it out because he had read and memorized the opening crawl. Another, a hard-core science fiction fan, had been boning up on supplemental materials: “Clone Wars,” an animated TV series consisting of “epic adventures that bridge the story arc between ‘Episode II: Attack of the Clones’ and ‘Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.’ ”

  If you have watched these cartoons—or if you’ve enjoyed some of the half-dozen “Clone Wars” novels, flipped through the graphic novels, read the short stories or played the video game—you will know that the battle cruiser in question is owned by the New Droid Army of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, which is backed by the Trade Federation, a commercial guild that is peeved about taxation of trade routes.

  And that is not the only aspect of Episode III that you will see in a different light. If you watch the movie without doing the prep work, General Grievous—who is supposed to be one of the most formidable bad guys in the entire Star Wars cycle—will seem like something that just fell out of a Happy Meal. But if you’ve been boning up, you’ll have seen Grievous slay many a Jedi. Hayden Christensen, who plays Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, has taken flak for his performance. Anakin is supposed to be a tragic figure endowed with cosmic powers, wrestling with an impossible moral dilemma. In the movie, he seems more like a homecoming king who has just found a scratch on his Camaro. If you’ve seen the Clone Wars cartoons and read the books, you’ll understand that the kid is a seriously damaged veteran, a poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder. But since none of that background is supplied by the Episode III script, Mr. Christensen has been given an impossible acting task. He’s trying to swim in air.

  In sum, very little of the new film makes sense, taken as a freestanding narrative. What’s interesting about this is how little it matters. Millions of people are happily spending their money to watch a movie they don’t understand. What gives?