The Universe Within

by Neil Turok

  Ever since the ancient Greeks, science has well appreciated that a free exchange of ideas, in which we are constantly trying out new theories while always remaining open to being proved wrong, is the best way to make progress. Within the scientific community, a new student can question the most senior professor, and authority is never acceptable as an argument. If our ideas are any good, it does not matter where they come from; they must stand on their own. Science is profoundly democratic in this sense. While its driver is often individual genius or insight, it engenders a strong sense of common cause and humility among its practitioners. These ways of thinking and behaving are valuable well beyond the borders of science.

  However, as science has grown, it has also become increasingly specialized. To quote Richard Feynman again, “There are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other.”108 As science fragments, it becomes less accessible, both to other scientists and to the general public. Opportunities for cross-fertilization are missed, scientists lose their sense of wider purpose, and their science is reduced either to a self-serving academic exercise or a purely technical task, while society remains ignorant of science’s great promise and importance.

  There are ways of overcoming this problem of disconnection, and they are becoming increasingly important.

  I AM FORTUNATE TO live in a very unusual community in Canada with a high level of public interest in science. Every month, our institute, Perimeter, holds a public lecture on physics in the local high school, in a hall with a capacity of 650. Month in and month out, the lectures are packed, with all the tickets sold out.

  How did this happen? The key, I believe, is simply respect. When scientists make a serious attempt to explain what they are doing and why, it isn’t hard to get people excited. There are many benefits: for the public, it is a chance to learn first-hand from experts about cutting-edge research; for scientists, it is a great chance to share one’s ideas and to learn how to explain them to non-specialists. It is energizing to realize that people outside your field actually care. Finally, and most importantly, for young people, attending an exciting lecture can open the path to a future career.

  In the heyday of Victorian science, many scientists engaged in public outreach. As we learned in Chapter One, Michael Faraday was recruited into science at a public lecture given by Sir Humphrey Davy at the Royal Institution in London. Faraday went on to succeed Davy as the director of the institution and give many public lectures himself. While a fellow at Cambridge, James Clerk Maxwell helped to found a workingmen’s college providing scientific lectures in the evenings, and he persuaded local businesses to close early so their workers could attend. When he became a professor at Aberdeen and then King’s College, London, he continued to give at least one evening lecture each week at the workingmen’s colleges there.109

  Today, the internet provides an excellent medium for public outreach. One of the first students to attend the new master’s program at our institute, Henry Reich, went on to pursue an interest in film. A year later, he launched a YouTube channel called MinutePhysics. It presents cleverly thoughtful, low-tech but catchy explanations of basic concepts in physics, making the ideas accessible and captivating to a wide audience. Henry realized there is a treasure trove of insights, many never before explained to the public, lying buried in the scientific literature. Communicating them well requires a great deal of care, thought, and respect for your audience. When quality materials are produced, people respond. Henry’s channel now has more than three hundred thousand subscribers.

  At our institute, we also engage in scientific inreach. The idea is to bring people from fields outside science, from history, art, music, or literature, into our scientific community. Science shares a purpose with these other disciplines: to explore and appreciate this universe we are privileged to inhabit. Every one of these human activities is inspiring, as they stretch our senses in different and complementary ways. However much any of us has learned, there is so much more that we do not know. What we have in common, in our motives and loves and aspirations, is much more important than any of our differences. Looking back on the great eras of discovery and progress, we see that this commonality of purpose was critical, and it seems to me we have to recreate it.

  Throughout these chapters, we have looked at the special people, places, and times that produced profound progress. We have looked at ancient Greece, where a great flowering of science, philosophy, art, and literature went hand in hand with new ways of organizing society. The philosopher Epicurus, for example, seems in some respects to have anticipated the arguments of Hume and Galileo, arguing that nothing should be believed without being tested through direct observation and logical deduction; in other words, the scientific method.110 Epicurus is also credited with the ethic of reciprocity, according to which one should treat others as one would like to be treated by them. These two ideas laid the foundations for justice: that everyone has the same right to be fairly treated and no one should be penalized until their crime is proven. Likewise, the methods and principles of scientific discourse were foundational to the creation of our modern democracy. We all have the capacity to reason, and everyone deserves an equal hearing.

  We also looked at the Italian Renaissance, when the ancient Greek ideals were recovered and enlightenment progressed once more. In the Scottish Enlightenment, people encouraged each other to see the world confidently and with fresh eyes, to form new ways of understanding and representing it, and of teaching and communicating. These periods represented great liberations for society and great advances for science.

  The enlightenments of the past did not begin in the most powerful countries: Greece was a tiny country, constantly threatened from the east and the north; Scotland was a modest neighbour of England. What they had in common was a sense among their people that this was their moment. They were countries that grasped an opportunity to become centres for reason and for progress. They had the courage to shape themselves and the future, and we are all still feeling the impact.

  It is tempting to draw parallels between eighteenth-century Scotland, one step removed from its far more powerful colonial neighbour, and today’s Canada, which, compared to the modern Rome to its south, feels like a haven of civilization. Canada has a great many advantages: strong public education and health care systems; a peaceful, tolerant, and diverse society; a stable economy; and phenomenal natural resources. It is internationally renowned as a friendly and peaceful nation, and widely appreciated for its collaborative spirit and for the modest, practical character of its people. There are many other countries and places in the world that hold similar promise, as centres to host the next great flowering of civilization on behalf of the planet. I can think of no better cause than for us to join together to make the twenty-first century unique as the era of the first Global Enlightenment.

  · · ·

  THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS traces back to the dawn of civilization. It is a story of how we have steadily realized our capacity to discover nature’s deep secrets, and to build the understanding and the technologies that lay the basis for progress. Again and again, our efforts have revealed the fundamental beauty and simplicity in the universe. There is no sign of the growth in our knowledge slowing down, and what lies on the horizon today is every bit as thrilling as anything we have discovered in the past.

  Today, we have many advantages over the scientists of earlier times. There are seven billion minds on the planet, mostly those of young people in aspiring, developing countries. The internet is connecting us all, providing instant access to educational and scientific resources. We need to be more creative in the ways we organize and promote science, and we need to allow more people to get involved. The world can become a hive of education, collaboration, and discussion. The entry of new cultures into the scientific community will be a vital source of energy and creativity.

&nbs
p; We are better placed, too, to understand our position in the cosmos. We have just mapped the universe and pieced together the story of its emergence from a tiny ball of light some fourteen billion years ago. Likewise, we have detected the vacuum energy which dominates the universe and determines the Hubble length, the largest distance on which we will ever be able to see galaxies and stars. We have just discovered the Higgs particle, a manifestation of the detailed structure of the vacuum, predicted by theory half a century ago. Today, theory is poised to understand the big bang singularity and physics on the Planck length, a scale so tiny that classical notions of space and time break down.

  All the indications are that the universe is at its simplest at the smallest and largest scales: the Planck length and the Hubble length. It may be no coincidence that the size of a living cell is the geometric mean of these two fundamental lengths. This is the scale of life, the realm we inhabit, and it is the scale of maximum complexity in the universe.

  We live in a world with many causes of unhappiness. In these chapters, I have compared one of these, the information overload from the digital revolution, with the “ultraviolet catastrophe” that signalled classical physics’ demise at the start of the twentieth century. One can draw further parallels with the selfish, individualistic behaviours that are often the root cause of our environmental and financial crises. Within physics, I see the idea of a “multiverse” as a similarly fragmented perspective, representing a loss of confidence in the prospects for basic science. Yet, I believe all of these crises will ultimately be helpful if they force us, like the quantum physicists, to remake our world in more holistic and far-sighted ways.

  Through a deeper appreciation of the universe and our ability to comprehend it, not just scientists but everyone can gain. At a minimum, the magnificent cosmos provides some perspective on our parochial, human-created problems, be they social or political. Nature is organized in better ways, from which we can learn. The love of nature can bring us together and help us to appreciate that we are part of something far greater than ourselves. This sense of belonging, responsibility, and common cause brings with it humility, compassion, and wisdom. Society has too often been content to live off the fruits of science, without understanding it. Scientists have too often been happy to be left alone to do their science without thinking about why they are doing it. It is time to connect our science to our humanity, and in so doing to raise the sights of both. If we can only link our intelligence to our hearts, the doors are wide open to a brighter future, to a more unified planet with more unified science: to quantum technologies that extend our perception, to breakthroughs allowing us to access and utilize energy more cleverly, and to travel in space that opens new worlds.

  What a privilege it is to be alive. Truly, we are faced with the opportunity of all time.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE: MAGIC THAT WORKS

  1.James Clerk Maxwell, quoted in Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (Chichester: Wiley, 2004), 48.

  2.Aristotle, quoted in Kitty Ferguson, Pythagoras: His Lives and the Legacy of a Rational Universe (London: Icon Books, 2010), 108.

  3.W. K. C. Guthrie, quoted in ibid., 74.

  4.Richard P. Feynman, as told to Ralph Leighton, “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character, ed. Edward Hutchings (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 132.

  5.David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.

  6.Ibid., 6.

  7.David Hume to “Jemmy” Birch, 1785, letter, quoted in E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 626.

  8.David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 12.

  9.Ibid., 45.

  10.Ibid., 120.

  11.Ibid., 45.

  12.See, for example, “Geometry and Experience,” Albert Einstein’s address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin, January 27, 1921, in Sidelights on Relativity., trans. G. B. Jeffery and W. Perrett (1922; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 1983), 8–16.

  13.Leonardo da Vinci, Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Irma Richter (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2.

  14.Ibid., 7.

  15.The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, vol. 1, Wikisource, accessed July 4, 2012, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Notebooks_of_Leonardo_Da_Vinci/I.

  16.Albert Einstein, “Geometry and Experience” (address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin, January 27, 1921), in Sidelights on Relativity, trans. G. B Jeffery and W. Perrett (1922; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 1983), 8.

  17.Wikipedia, s.v. “Mathematical Beauty,” accessed July 3, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty.

  18.For an interesting discussion of this, see Eugene P. Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” (Richard Courant Lecture in Mathematical Sciences, New York University, May 11, 1959), Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1 (1960):1–14.

  19.Albert Einstein, quoted in Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love (New York: Walker, 1999), 326.

  20.John Maynard Keynes, “Newton the Man,” speech prepared for the Royal Society, 1946. See http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html.

  21.Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (New York: Three Rivers, 2001), 190.

  22.George Elder Davie, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), 150.

  23.J. Forbes, quoted in P. Harman, ed., The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 1, 1846–1862 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8.

  24.Alan Hirshfeld, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday (New York: Walker, 2006), 185.

  25.John Meurig Thomas, “The Genius of Michael Faraday,” lecture given at the University of Waterloo, 27 March 2012.

  26.These are Cartesian coordinates, invented by the French philosopher René Descartes.

  27.Michael Faraday to J. C. Maxwell, letter, 25 March 1857, in

  P. Harman, ed., The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 1, 1846–1862 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 548.

  28.Alan Hirshfeld, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday (New York: Walker, 2006), 185.

  29.J. C. Maxwell to Michael Faraday, letter, 19 October 1861, in P. Harman, ed., The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 1, 1846–1862 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 684–86.

  CHAPTER TWO: OUR IMAGINARY REALITY

  30.John Bell, “Introduction to the Hidden-Variable Question” (1971), in Quantum Mechanics, High Energy Physics and Accelerators: Selected Papers of John S. Bell (with Commentary), ed. M. Bell, K. Gottfried, and M. Veltman (Singapore: World Scientific, 1995), 716.

  31.Albert Einstein, “How I Created the Theory of Relativity,” trans. Yoshimasa A. Ono, Physics Today 35, no. 8 (1982): 45–7.

  32.Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2011).

  33.Wikipedia, s.v. “Anaximander,” accessed April 15, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaximander, and “Suda,” accessed April 15, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suda.

  34.Werner Heisenberg, “Quantum-Mechanical Re-interpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations,” in Sources of Quantum Mechanics, ed. B. L. van der Waerden (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1967), 261–76.

  35.Werner Heisenberg, quoted in J. C. Taylor, Hidden Unity in Nature’s Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 225.

  36.Lauren Red
niss, Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (HarperCollins, 2010), 17.

  37.Werner Heisenberg, quoted in F. Selleri, Quantum Paradoxes and Physical Reality (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1990), 21.

  38.Wikipedia, s.v., “Max Planck,” accessed July 10, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck.

  39.Ibid.

  40.Ibid.

  41.Albert Einstein, quoted in Abraham Pais, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 134.

  42.Susan K. Lewis and Neil de Grasse Tyson, “Picturing Atoms” (transcript from NOVA ScienceNOW), PBS, accessed July 4, 2012, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/atoms-electrons.html.

  43.Clifford Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics (New York: Sterling, 2009), 118–24.

  >44.Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 1 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1964), 22.

  45.Werner Heisenberg, “Ueber den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik and Mechanik,” Zeitschrift für Physik 43 (1927), 172–98. English translation in John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech H. Zurek, eds., Quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 62–84.

  46.There is a beautiful animation of diffraction and interference from two slits on Wikipedia, s.v. “Diffraction,” accessed July 2, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction.

  47.F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1993), 69.

  48.Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 81.