Geek Wisdom

by Stephen H. Segal

  Europa is the sixth moon of Jupiter. Galileo discovered it (see next page). It has an oxygen atmosphere. And NASA and the European Space Agency hope to send a joint unmanned mission there circa 2020 to get a closer look.

  “THE BOOK OF NATURE IS WRITTEN IN

  THE LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS.”

  —GALILEO, THE ASSAYER

  NEVER MIND THAT THERE ARE geometric shapes in mineral crystals, fractals in vegetables, chaotic equations in weather patterns. We get all that. Galileo was onto something even deeper: the idea that nature itself could be read and encapsulated as a book or any other comprehensible source of information, rather than simply elided as beyond human understanding. This, of course, is what got him into trouble with the Catholic Church, which positioned itself as the defending champion in the age-old contest of the spirit versus reason—or, more precisely, politics versus facts. There is that indefinable something in the geek nature that rejects such distinctions as a false dichotomy, insisting that reason informs the spirit and politics should be rooted in facts. Sadly, society just isn’t that rational, as Galileo discovered after his prosecution and lifelong house arrest by the Inquisition. Yet it was Galileo’s geekish insistence that he was right, and his willingness to die to prove his rightness—and, mind you, the fact that he was right, which matters—that helped make the world a safer place for proper geekery. For this, as much as for his scientific accomplishments, he should be celebrated.

  Galileo’s scientific manifesto The Assayer (1623) was written primarily as a slam against Jesuit astronomer Orazio Grassi. In doing so, Galileo pissed off a number of Jesuit scholars who might otherwise have stood with him during his Church troubles. Trolling: risky since 1623.

  “TO A NEW WORLD OF

  GODS AND MONSTERS!”

  —DR. PRETORIUS, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

  IN TOASTING HIS IMPENDING CREATION of a mate for Dr. Henry Frankenstein’s misbegotten monster, Septimus Pretorius betrays a barely concealed glee at his impending traversal of the boundaries between the laws of man and the laws of god. In that glee, he anticipated the new world that would arrive just a few years hence, birthed in the crucible of science, where man’s ability to harness the power of the atom would elevate him to godhood, and the subsequent unleashing of that power would debase him to monsterhood. The simple lesson of Pretorius, and Frankenstein before him, is the need for man to balance his unending thirst for knowledge—the “what” and the “how” and even the “why”—with the consequences of that knowledge—the “what next.” Simple enough to make the enduring appeal of Mary Shelley’s immortal story (and its most famous movie sequel) easy to understand but, unfortunately for us, not so simple that we’ve taken that lesson to heart.

  Bride of Frankenstein (1939), for all its good points, might well have faded into obscurity as an unnecessary follow-up to a self-contained classic if not for the incredible power of the pure visual. The Bride’s iconic two-tone tower of a hairdo ensured that she could never be forgotten.

  “THE CLAW IS OUR MASTER.

  THE CLAW DECIDES WHO WILL GO

  AND WHO WILL STAY.”

  —VENDING MACHINE ALIEN DOLLS, TOY STORY

  EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, you meet someone who just doesn’t seem to know what the deal is. They sit next to you in the movie theater and guess the plot loudly and incorrectly; they laugh at the joke three lines before the punch line. Usually the culprit is a fundamental glitch in perspective. The dolls stuck in Toy Story’s claw-grab machine don’t understand the scope of the world, because they literally have no outside perspective. And yet, even as we smile at them, the alien dolls are a source of pity; their myopia is a result of circumstances beyond their control; they’re victims of their own little plushie predestination. It can be tempting to dismiss those whose views differ fundamentally from ours in ways that make us socially uncomfortable. However, it’s worth remembering that everyone is a victim of circumstance in one way or another, and that when one is under the regime of the Claw, it can be hard to get a good look at the larger universe.

  The Claw is not to be confused with Inspector Gadget’s villainous Dr. Klaw, voiced by animation legend Frank Walker, who is also Megatron, Baby Kermit, and Fred from Scooby-Doo.

  “NOW I AM BECOME DEATH,

  THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS.”

  —J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, QUOTING/TRANSLATING THE BHAGAVAD GITA

  IMAGINE, IF YOU WILL, being central to the development of a power that could snuff out tens of thousands of lives in an instant. Not in the geeky world-domination-daydream kind of way, but in a real, tangible, fire-and-horror-and-corpses kind of way. When Oppenheimer watched the Trinity atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, he knew he had helped usher in something so frightening as to be almost godlike in its power—hence his quoting Vishnu, supreme god of the Vaishnavism tradition of Hinduism. So, too, had America taken an enormous power upon its shoulders, a responsibility so vast it’s unlikely many of us could truly grasp it. Science-fiction writers had been warning of atomic holocaust for some years already, but when their speculation was made reality, the world changed. We stood then on the third stone from the sun, animals still, but now animals with the ability to crack the very stone upon which we stood. Oppenheimer did not need Stan Lee to tell him what wielding such great power meant.

  This has become one of the two most clichéd quotations in science fiction. The other is Percy Shelley’s “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

  “THE COSMOS IS ALSO

  WITHIN US. WE’RE MADE

  OF STAR STUFF.”

  —CARL SAGAN

  “WE ARE ALL CONNECTED:

  TO EACH OTHER,

  BIOLOGICALLY; TO THE

  EARTH, CHEMICALLY;

  TO THE REST OF THE

  UNIVERSE, ATOMICALLY.”

  —NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

  FAMOUSLY AGNOSTIC, Carl Sagan carried us with him on his search for God. That search extended to the edges of the universe, and on an episodic basis Sagan reported back to us with his results: that we were insignificant, yet magnificent. That human life, and Earth itself, formed a part of the cycle of stellar birth and death. In a way, Sagan almost single-handedly fought off the modern encroachment of creationism, intelligent design, and other religious efforts to downplay science, by offering a competing and equally powerful spiritualism—the conscious awareness of our place in the physical universe. He made us feel his excitement and humility at astronomical discoveries; using the latest technologies, he showed us the miracles taking place at any given moment, at the limit of our telescopic vision. For any number of geeks and non-geeks, Sagan was the only priest whose catechisms made sense, and his temple—the vault of the heavens itself—became the only church worthy of their worship.

  Sagan’s iconic catchphrase “billions and billions”—of stars, that is—is another one of those linguistic formulations that fans distilled from several almost-but-not-quite things their hero actually said. Sagan eventually picked up on it and made it so.

  “IT’S A NOBLE GOAL THAT

  SCIENCE SHOULD BE

  APOLITICAL, ACULTURAL,

  AND ASOCIAL, BUT IT CAN’T

  BE, BECAUSE IT’S DONE

  BY PEOPLE WHO ARE ALL

  THOSE THINGS.”

  —MAE JEMISON

  “HE WHO BREAKS A THING

  TO FIND OUT WHAT IT IS,

  HAS LEFT THE PATH

  OF WISDOM.”

  —GANDALF, THE LORD OF THE RINGS

  THE EXISTENCE OF GEEKDOM is proof that science can never be just science. Geeks are science’s fans. We love it, celebrate it, grok and cherish it, and are willing to defend it to the death—occasionally with a fervor bordering on zealotry. But this is necessary, as the fans of science have a collective nemesis: the anti-intellectualism so pervasive in much of American society. Given the influence that this anti-intellectualism exerts over education, religion, politics, the media, and more, it’s a good thing so many of us are in science’s corner. Sci
ence could use a friend or two.

  At the same time, it’s important to pay attention to who, exactly, is befriending it.

  In the early 1940s, using victims from their concentration camps, the Nazis began a series of experiments on humans that even today chills the blood. Body parts such as bone and muscle were removed without anesthesia. In chronicling the effects of freezing on the human body, some victims were forced to endure agonizing hours inside tanks of ice water. Thousands of victims were poisoned, gassed, or burned using phosphorous material from incendiary bombs. Those who were not left mutilated and disabled—and many who were—were then murdered so that Nazi scientists could study the experiments’ impact on their bodies postmortem. Few dispute the unspeakably barbaric, inhumane nature of these experiments, but as a fait accompli, they nonetheless presented humanity with a dilemma: whether it’s ethical to use the data derived from them.

  So consider Gandalf’s distinction: There is knowledge and there is wisdom. They are in no way mutually exclusive; nor are they the same. Science brings us one; it can bring us the other. If we are attentive.

  “NOPE.”

  —THE FULL CONTENT OF

  HASTHELARGEHADRONCOLLIDERDESTROYEDTHEWORLDYET.COM

  THERE ARE REASONS TO FEAR SCIENCE. For every valuable advance it gives us—extending and improving human life, providing sufficient food for billions of people, generating energy from wind and water—it has its ugly moments, too. The Tuskeegee syphilis experiments, replicated in Guatemala. Early nuclear weapons testing, which irradiated locations like Bikini Atoll and afflicted the inhabitants with death, miscarriages, and deformities. Early pseudosciences like phrenology and eugenics, which did more to advance bigotry than understanding. Science is a tool like any other, and it can be subverted to serve even the basest human aims. The Large Hadron Collider, however, was not one of these perversions. Much of the concern over its activation was the result of media sensationalism and wild speculation by amateurs: Could it create a black hole that will consume the entire planet??? Well … no. And though many knowledgeable geeks found it hilarious, the public’s reaction was both predictable and preventable, given science’s history of keeping horrors on the down-low. If scientists want to avoid future hysterias, they’re going to need to find better ways of talking with the rest of us. Easier said than done, we know. But come on, scientists, you’re supposed to be smart.

  The awesome thing about this website is that it contains only one word. The even awesomer thing is that it would do its job just as well with no words at all.

  “REALITY IS MERELY AN ILLUSION,

  ALBEIT A VERY PERSISTENT ONE.”

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX, one must first forget there is a box. Ours is a reality infinitely more complex and downright strange than we realize. Given how persistent such bothers can be, it’s easy to forget that our world is not in fact made of 40-hour work weeks, bills to be paid, and lawns to be mowed—though, sure, those things are real—but rather is constructed of miraculously tiny neutrinos passing through our bodies by the billion, galactic clusters on a scale more immense than the human mind can fathom, particles that can exist in two places at once, and seemingly magical universal laws that dictate the movements of invisible atoms and distant stars. The stuff of our world, both on the large scale and the small, comes together to create a cosmos that looks mundane to our unimaginative eyes yet operates as a practically incomprehensibly complex interlocking system of functions. So is our experiential everyday reality the true one, or is the invisible reality of micro-and macroscopic models the true one? The answer, of course, is yes.

  It’s an urban legend that Einstein had a wardrobe filled with multiple copies of the same suit so he wouldn’t have to waste mental energy figuring out what to wear. But it’s a popular enough legend that Marvel Comics writers decided Bruce Banner was emulating Einstein, and used that as justification for why the Hulk was so frequently depicted wearing purple pants.

  “THERE IS NO SPOON.”

  —THE MATRIX

  OF ALL THE PEOPLE who tried desperately to make Neo understand a damn thing that was happening in The Matrix, it was the spoon-bending child who got closest, by pointing out that the world is malleable because the world isn’t real. A little disheartening to a man invested in the realities of his known world, to be sure, but this little home truth came to Neo at a key moment. We’ve all been the recipient of one of these; at a time when we’re confused and unsure, someone tells us something that seems not only contradictory to what we want to hear, but unhelpful to the point of non sequitur. On the other hand, just because we don’t want to hear something doesn’t mean it’s not good advice. If even Neo was able to grasp that—whoa—surely we can, too.

  Inexplicably bending spoons became a visual signifier of supposedly paranormal phenomena during the 1970s boom in ESP studies, thanks to self-declared psychokinetic performer Uri Geller.

  “SPOON!”

  —THE TICK, THE TICK

  WELL. APPARENTLY, YOU CAN have it both ways. That, or this is just an example of one innocuous object being given two very different contexts. (Too bad—a Tick-on-Neo fight already feels like one of the most amazing missed opportunities in cinema history.) Strangely, this battle cry has more in common with the quasi-Zen aphorism than would seem immediately apparent: The world in which the Tick lives is mostly imaginary, too—an impenetrable, self-congratulatory head-space. In the real world, the Tick is less likely to be a costumed crime-fighter than he is to be your office’s project manager, unable to understand what’s really going on but enthusiastic about it nonetheless (and more than happy to take the credit for anything that goes well). Since there’s little you can do to get rid of him, maybe seeing him as a “Spoon!”-shouting butt of the joke will at least keep you from boiling over and stapling his hand.

  “WE DO NOT FOLLOW MAPS TO

  BURIED TREASURE, AND X NEVER,

  EVER MARKS THE SPOT.”

  —INDIANA JONES, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE

  AUTHOR ANDRÉ GIDE ONCE SAID: “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Steven Spielberg may have had Indiana Jones offer the above refutation of archaeological stereotypes to the audience with a wink and a nudge, it nonetheless conveys the truth that worthwhile discoveries can come about in unexpected ways. Sometimes it’s just a matter of looking up from our maps long enough to see them. Certainly that is something the good Dr. Jones embodied in a lifetime of daring adventures that he rarely sought but that always managed to find him. Whether he was tracking down Moses’s box, Jesus’s cup or a space alien’s skull, it was always the journey itself that proved far more important than the artifact—both for Indy and for the audience. And that’s usually the way it works. Setting out with specific goals and specific ends in mind is great—except when that single-minded focus keeps us from finding real treasure buried just a few degrees off center.

  An exercise for the reader: Who would win in a scavenger hunt, 20th century archaeologist Indiana Jones or 51st-century archaeologist River Song?

  “IT’S A COOKBOOK!”

  —PAT, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, “TO SERVE MAN”

  WE HAVE A RATHER WISHY-WASHY relationship with our imaginary alien races, don’t we? For every serene, benevolent alien species appearing in our skies and offering us something we need—usually the wisdom to avoid nuclear war or environmental catastrophe, or the tools to fight off some other cosmic danger—there are two more that just show up and start shooting or, just as frequently, hide their sinister intentions behind smiles. The disguised reptilioids of V; the artificial intelligences of The Matrix; and, of course, the hungry Kanamits of “To Serve Man.” There’s no mystery behind the yin and yang of these fictional advanced races: They are us. Look back through Earth’s history and we find that many are the “primitive” people who met an “advanced” society of fellow humans, greeted them in trust, and were betrayed with a shit-eating grin. One
can almost hear Geronimo or Sitting Bull: “This is no land treaty. It’s a cookbook!” So: a planet full of nonhumans smart enough to trap us and use us as they will? Simple projection of our own guilty anxiety.

  Legendary science-fiction editor George Scithers, under the pseudonym “Karl Würf,” got permission from Twilight Zone episode writer Damon Knight to write and publish a “cookbook for people,” titled To Serve Man, in 1976.

  “WHEN THERE’S NO MORE ROOM IN HELL,

  THE DEAD WILL WALK THE EARTH.”

  —PETER, DAWN OF THE DEAD

  ACTOR KEN FOREE ISSUES this signature utterance in George Romero’s 1974 Dawn of the Dead as well as the 2004 update by Zack Snyder, and both times it illuminates the fundamental truth that we seek divine rationalizations for those problems we can’t understand. So it’s not too surprising that this bromide offers the motley survivors of Dawn solace from the zombie plague in which they find themselves. Beyond merely explaining the unexplainable, the implication is that those stricken with the undead munchies are paying the price for lives of sin and transgression. After all, they had to be going to hell for a reason. At once, we’re absolved of any blame and responsibility. If that sounds insensitive or even incomprehensible, tell it to those who said Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for homosexuality, or that the Haitian people had it coming when the Earth swallowed up half their country. Blaming victims for their tragedies is the most predictable occurrence in the world; we can count on it with reliable regularity even when it’s dead wrong.