Seeing Further
Page 43
Nobel prizes to, 255, 260, 263, 266, 267, 270
Perutz, 255, 263–66, 264, 267–68
Watson/Crick, 264–65, 266
Stuart, Dave, 268
Sulston, John, 267
Sun:
energy of, 398
expansion of, 460
planets in orbit around, 326–27
Sundrum, Raman, 368n
supernovae, 329, 397
superstring theory, 366–67, 370, 371
Susskind, Leonard, 338
Sustainable biofuels (Royal Society), 418, 418
Sutherland, Graham, portrait by, 270
Swan, Joseph, 9
Swift, Jonathan, 40, 422
Gulliver’s Travels, 39, 41–42, 44–49, 55–57
symmetry, 364–65, 373, 375
synthetic materials, 308–14
T
Tableau de Paris, Le, 161, 163
Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 245, 245, 248
Talbot, William Henry Fox, 9
Tasmanian devil, 282, 283
taxonomy, development of, 188
Tay Bridge, 238–39
Taylor, Geoffrey, photograph by, 408
technology, 298, 475–78
dual-use, 319
Teflon, 312
Tegmark, Max, 104
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 79
teleology, 110, 111, 117, 119, 120, 126, 129
Telford, Thomas, 231, 235, 246
Thatcher, Margaret, 270, 418
theory of everything (TOE), 109–10, 366, 368, 369–70, 374, 470, 473
thermodynamics, 101, 397, 457, 460
Thorpe, Thomas, 11
time:
clocks, 10, 193, 408, 454
cosmological, 462–63, 465, 474
cyclic, 446, 448
Deep, 450, 461–62, 465
flow of, 457
and gravity, 329
Historical, 449
Intuitive, 449, 465
linear, 448, 457–60
mathematical, 449–50
and motion, 117
Newton on, 446, 449–50, 452, 455
relative, 452–57
and space, 64, 74, 92, 449–50, 454–55
and space-time, 74, 454, 455–56, 460, 463
and theology, 74
Tobacco Institute, 440
Toldbod, Björn, 344
Tradescant, John, 197
truth, physical vs. mathematical, 128
twin paradox, 453–54
Type I error, 437
Type II error, 437
U
Ulam, Stanislaw, 98
uncertainty:
in climate change, 408, 426–27, 428–29, 437, 439, 441–43, 479–80
management of, 442–43
theory of probability, 353
unifying system of thought, 109–10, 124, 365–66, 366, 472, 473
universe:
age of, 328–29, 465
eternal, 463
expanding, 325, 460, 463, 465
mathematical models of, 337
multiverse, 339
virtual, 478
University at Uppsala, 195
Uranus, 135
Urey, Harold, 332
Ussher, Archbishop James, 452
V
van der Zee, John, The Gate: The True Story of the
Design and Construction of the Golden Gate
Bridge, 243
Varenius, Bernhardus, Geographia, 24
Venter, Craig, 285
Verfaillie, Hendrik, 154–55
Verkolje, portrait of Leeuwenhock by, 6
“victimless leather,” 57
Viking space probes, 331
Virlogeux, Michel, 249
viruses, 333
vitamin B12, 263
volition, 74
Voltaire, Candide, 100
von Laue, Max, 254
Vulcan (planet), 11
W
Walker, John, 267
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 206, 210, 211–19, 212, 224
bridges crossed by, 219, 221, 226
and Darwin, 211–18, 221, 461
On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, 211–14
Waller, Richard, botanical print by, 194, 195
Wallich, Nathaniel, botanical print by, 194, 195
Wallis, John, 27–28, 32
Waterhouse, Alfred, 201
Watson, James, 264–65, 267
see also Wat son / Crick
Watson, William, 140, 145, 146
Wat son / Crick:
DNA double helix, 256, 264–65
and genetics, 223, 224, 225, 265
molecular biology of, 315
Nobel Prize to, 266
Watt, James, 136, 137
weapons of mass destruction, 259
weather, vs. climate, 427
weather forecasts, 291, 377
Wedgwood, Thomas, 305
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, 267
Wells, H. G.:
The Island of Dr Moreau, 54
The War of the Worlds, 42, 43
Wells, W. C., 211
White, Rev Gilbert, 193, 195–96
Whitehead, Alfred, 79
Wiesenfeld, Kurt, 381
Wigner, Eugene, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences, 105, 129
Wilde, Oscar, 56
Wilkins, Maurice, 256, 264, 266
Wilson, Benjamin, 145–48, 149, 150, 152
Wilson, Harold, 271
Winer, Norbert, 97
Withering, William, Botanical Arrangement, 193
Witten, Edward, 368
Wolpert, Lewis, 298
wolves, re-introduction of, 288
world line, 455
World Summit for Sustainable Development, 281
World Wide Web, 475
Wren, Christopher, 3, 22, 26, 108, 122–23, 189, 468
Wright, Joseph, portrait by, 168
Wright, Sewall, 223
Wulf, William A., 318–19
X
X-rays, 254–56, 269, 271
Y
“Year 2K Bug,” 408–9, 414
Yellowstone National Park, 288
Yorke, James, 379
Z
Zalta, Edward N., 104
Zambeccari, Francesco, 160
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank all the contributors, including the President of the Royal Society, for so generously taking part in the making of this book. I also wish to thank the Council of the Royal Society, Aosaf Afzal, Stephen Cox, Julia Higgins, Julie Hodgkinson, Jo Hopkins, Joanne Madders, Keith Moore, Dominic Reid and Martin Taylor.
MARTIN REES
CONCLUSION:LOOKING FIFTY YEARS AHEAD
Martin Rees FRS is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. In 2005 he was appointed to the House of Lords and elected President of the Royal Society. He writes and broadcasts regularly about science, and among his books are Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century? (2003), Just Six Numbers (1999) and Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others (1997).
IN 350 YEARS, OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE UNIVERSE HAS EXPANDED BEYOND THE DREAMS OF THE FOUNDERS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY. BUT SCIENTISTS NEVER REACH FINALITY, WRITES MARTIN REES. NEW KNOWLEDGE AND NEW APPLICATIONS WILL MAKE A VITAL CONTRIBUTION TO HUMANITY IN THE COMING DECADES.
The Royal Society’s founders were inspired by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon. For Bacon, science was driven by two imperatives: the search for enlightenment, and ‘the relief of man’s estate’. Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and the other ‘ingenious and curious gentlemen’ who regularly convened in Gresham College were enthusiasts for what we would now call ‘curiosity-driven’ research. But they engaged also with the practical life of the nation. Indeed, in 1664 John Evelyn reported on the optimum management of forests to ensure a steady supply of good oak for the navy’s ships.
And the first issue of Philosophical Transactions – the world’s oldest surviving scientific periodical – contained a paper by Christiaan Huygens on improvements to the pendulum clock and how to get it patented.
Bacon’s dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim ‘there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied’. There can be no better aim, for the next fifty years, than to sustain the curiosity and enthusiasm of our founders, while also achieving the same broad engagement with society and public affairs as they did.
The Society aims, above all, to support and recognise the creative individuals on whom scientific advance depends. What issues will engage such people in 2060, when the Society celebrates its 400th anniversary? Will we continue to push forward the frontiers, enlarging the range of our consensual understanding?
WHAT WILL WE UNDERSTAND IN 2060?
It is sometimes claimed that the big ideas have been discovered already, and that it only remains to fill in the details and apply what is already known. But nothing could be more wrong. Science is an unending quest: as its frontiers advance, new mysteries come into focus just beyond those frontiers. Most of the questions now being addressed simply couldn’t have been posed fifty years ago (or even twenty); we can’t conceive what problems will engage our successors.
A prime aim is to understand our world – and, in my own field of astronomy, to probe what lies beyond it. Just as geophysicists have come to understand the processes that made the oceans and sculpted the continents, so astrophysicists can understand our Sun and its planets – and even the other planets that may orbit distant stars. Astronomy is the grandest environmental science. And our exploration is just beginning. There are still domains where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must inscribe ‘here be dragons’.
Armchair theory alone cannot achieve much. We are no wiser than Aristotle was. It is technical advances that have enabled astronomers to probe immense distances, and to trace the evolutionary story back before our solar system formed, back to an epoch long before there were any stars, when everything was initiated by an intensely hot ‘genesis event’, the so-called big bang. The first microsecond is shrouded in mystery, but everything that happened since then – the emergence of our complex cosmos from amorphous beginnings – is the outcome of processes that we are starting to grasp in outline. And our cosmic horizons are still expanding. What we’ve traditionally called our universe could be just one island – just one patch of space and time – in an infinitely larger cosmic archipelago.
Could there be, far beyond our Earth, other forms of life – perhaps even more complex and advanced than humans? Here again we’re flummoxed. Until we find out how life began on Earth we can’t understand how likely it is that life may have started elsewhere – nor where to focus our search. However, as Paul Davies describes, there is now some progress: exciting new ideas, and new ways to seek signs of life beyond our home planet. Perhaps we’ll one day ‘plug in’ to a galactic community. On the other hand, searches for extraterrestrial intelligence may fail. Earth’s intricate biosphere may be unique. Either way, the search for alien life – exobiology – will surely be one of the most exciting scientific frontiers in the next fifty years.
An undoubted intellectual peak of twentieth-century science was the quantum theory, which describes how atoms behave, and how they combine with each other to make the complex chemistry of the everyday world. The second ‘peak’ was Einstein’s general relativity. More than two hundred years earlier, Isaac Newton had achieved the first major ‘unification’ by showing that the force that makes apples fall is the same as the gravity that holds planets in their orbits. Newton’s mathematics is good enough to fly rockets into space and steer probes around planets. But Einstein transcended Newton: his general theory of relativity could cope with very high speeds, and strong gravity, and offered deeper insight into gravity’s nature.
A synthesis of these two great theories – an overarching theory that links the cosmos and the microworld, and applies the quantum principle to space, time and gravity – is unfinished business for the twenty-first century.Success will require new insights into what might seem the simplest entity of all: ‘mere’ empty space. Space itself may have a rich structure – on scales a trillion trillion times smaller than an atom, and also on scales far larger than the entire universe we know.
Einstein was not a first-rate mathematician, despite his deep physical insights. He was lucky that the geometrical concepts he needed had already been developed by the German mathematician Georg Riemann a century earlier. The cohort of young quantum theorists led by Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac were similarly fortunate in being able to apply ready-made mathematics.
But the twenty-first-century counterparts of these great physicists – those seeking to mesh general relativity and quantum mechanics in a unified theory – are not so lucky. The most favoured theory posits that all subatomic particles are made up of tiny loops, or strings that vibrate in a space with ten or eleven dimensions. String theory involves intensely complex mathematics that certainly can’t be found on the shelf and offers a creative stimulus to ‘real’ mathematicians.
Einstein himself worked on an abortive unified theory till his dying day. In retrospect it is clear that his efforts were premature – too little was then known about the forces and particles that govern the subatomic world. Cynics have said that he might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards. But there’s something rather noble about the way he persevered and ‘raised his game’ – reaching beyond his grasp. (Likewise, Francis Crick, the driving intellect behind molecular biology, shifted, when he reached sixty, to the ‘Everest’ problems of consciousness and the brain even though he knew he’d never get near the summit.)
Einstein averred: ‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.’ It is remarkable that atoms on Earth are the same as in distant stars. And that our minds, which evolved – along with our intuitions – to cope with life on the African savannah, can grasp the highly counterintuitive laws governing the quantum world and the cosmos.
Scientists can never reach finality. Let me recall something that puzzled Isaac Newton three hundred years ago. He could explain why the planets traced out ellipses around the Sun, but the initial ‘set-up’ of the solar system was a mystery to him. Why were the orbits of the planets all close to a single plane, the ecliptic, whereas the comets plunged in from random directions? In his book Opticks he writes: ‘blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in orbits concentrick’. ‘Such a wonderful uniformity’ must, he claimed, be the result of providence. This coplanarity of the orbits, however, is now understood: it’s a natural outcome of the solar system’s origin as a spinning protostellar disc. Indeed, we can trace things back far further still – to the initial instants of the big bang.
But this ‘flashback’ to Newton reminds us that, in conceptual terms, things are not qualitatively different from his time. However much the causal chain may have been lengthened – however much further back we can trace our origins than he could – we still at some stage have to say ‘things are as they are because they were as they were’.
The phrase ‘theory of everything’, often used in popular books to denote a unification of the fundamental forces, has connotations that are not only hubristic but very misleading. Such a theory would actually offer absolutely zero help to 99 per cent of scientists. There is another open frontier: the study of things that are very complicated. This is the frontier on which most scientists work. They aren’t impeded at all by ignorance of subnuclear physics or the big bang. They are challenged and perplexed by complexity – by the way atoms combine to make all the intricate structures in our environment, especially those that are alive.
There are nonetheless reasons to hope that simple underlying rules might govern some seemingly complex phenomena. John Conway is one of the most
charismatic figures in mathematics. His research deals with a branch of maths known as group theory. But he reached a wider audience with his ‘game of life’. In 1970 Conway (then based in Cambridge) wanted to devise a game that would start with a simple pattern and use basic rules to evolve it again and again. He began experimenting with the black and white tiles on a Go board and discovered that by adjusting the simple rules and the starting patterns, some arrangements produced incredibly complex results seemingly from nowhere. The simple rules merely specify when a white square turns into a black square and vice versa. But when applied over and over again, they create a fascinating variety of complicated patterns. Objects emerged that seemingly had a life of their own as they moved around the board. Some of them can reproduce themselves. The real world is like that – simple rules allow complex consequences.
The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse. But the analogy is poor. The superstructures, the ‘higher level’ sciences dealing with complex systems, aren’t imperilled by an insecure base, as a building is. There are laws of nature in the macroscopic domain that are just as much of a challenge as anything in the micro world, and are conceptually autonomous: for instance, those that describe the transition between regular and chaotic behaviour, and which apply to phenomena as disparate as dripping water pipes and animal populations.
Problems in chemistry, biology, the environment and human sciences remain unsolved because scientists haven’t elucidated the patterns, structures and interconnections – not because we don’t understand subatomic physics well enough. In trying to understand how water waves break, and how insects behave, analysis at the atomic level doesn’t help. An albatross may return predictably to its nest after wandering thousands of miles in the Southern ocean. But its behaviour couldn’t be predicted, even in principle, by regarding it as an assemblage of atoms and solving Schrödinger’s equation. Finding the sequencing of the human genome – discovering the string of molecules that encode our genetic inheritance – is one of the greatest achievements of the last decade. But it is just the prelude to the far greater challenge of post-genomic science: understanding how the genetic code triggers the assembly of proteins, and expresses itself in a developing embryo.