Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  Although there was an increased interest in his ideas towards the end of his life, he did not live long enough to see how seriously they are now taken. There are many physicists who view the many-worlds interpretation, as it is now known, as the best description of reality that we have. According to the Oxford physicist David Deutsch, ‘The quantum theory of parallel universes is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging from arcane theoretical considerations. It is the explanation – the only one that is tenable – of a remarkable and counterintuitive reality.’

  Deutsch’s view is not universally shared by his colleagues. The jury is still out on whether the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a true description of reality or whether it is ridiculous. We are not yet able to say with any certainty whether parallel universes exist, or whether scientists such as Everett and Deutsch are simply falling for their own metaphors, and confusing the map with the territory.

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  One of the most surprising discoveries about the atom was that it was mostly empty. To be more specific, an atom was 99.9999999999999 per cent nothing. If an atom is as big as St Paul’s Cathedral, then the nucleus will be the size of a cricket ball and the electrons orbiting it will be like flies buzzing around inside an otherwise empty cathedral. Apart from the cricket ball and the flies, there is nothing else. If you take the entire human race and compress them, in order to remove all that empty space from their atoms, then the remaining matter will be about the size of a sugar cube. It is an odd thought, when you trust a chair to hold your weight, that the chair barely exists in any physical way. It is an even odder thought to realise that neither do you.

  This is little comfort when you stub your toe on a doorframe. The world appears annoyingly solid in those circumstances. But there is a big difference between the world at the subatomic level and the human-scale world we live in. The chairs we sit on hold our weight, most of the time, and we are frustratingly unable to walk through walls. The bits of matter which do exist are locked in place by strong forces of attraction and repulsion, and these forces mean that nearly empty objects will refuse to pass through other nearly empty objects.

  Why does the world appear so different to us? In the quantum world things bumble about in a vague state of potential existence and can happily be in a number of places at the same time. The human-scale world is not like this. A box of biscuits is never in two locations at once, sadly. Systems behave differently at different scales, and when one factor changes significantly an otherwise functioning system can collapse. At the human scale, the universe’s vagueness and potential are removed.

  The models physicists use to understand the quantum world are highly reliable at the scales they are designed for, but they are no use for larger things. They predict the likelihood of a particle existing by squaring the height of the associated wave, and in doing so neatly treat the quantum world as both waves and particles at the same time. These models allow us to build smaller and smaller microchips, among their many other uses. Yet they flatly contradict relativity, even though it perfectly describes the movements of big things like stars and planets.

  The contradictions between relativity and quantum physics annoy the hell out of many physicists, who dream of finding one perfect ‘Theory of Everything’ which would accurately describe the universe. As yet, such a perfect multi-scale model remains elusive, and so our knowledge of the universe is dependent on which of our contradictory models we choose to use to understand it with. To gain a more objective understanding, we have to act like Picasso in his cubist period, and somehow merge multiple different viewpoints together into some strange-looking whole. What we know of the world depends on decisions that we make when we look at it. The dreaded poison of subjectivity is alive and well, and lurking at the borders of science.

  One of the most unexpected aspects of the quantum world is known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. This was discovered in 1927 when the German physicist Werner Heisenberg proved that knowing a particle’s momentum made it impossible to know its position, and vice versa. The more accurate we are about one of a complementary pair of variables, the less it is possible to know about the other. Digesting the implications of this was something of a dark night of the soul for many physicists.

  More than anything, this was what was unsettling about the subatomic world. Sure, it’s odd when one thing is in multiple places at the same time. It’s weird that entangled particles can communicate instantaneously over vast distances. But it was Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that was as shocking to physicists as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem had been to mathematicians. The problem was not that we didn’t know the exact facts about physical reality, but that we couldn’t know them.

  The world of solid matter had turned out to be resting upon a bedrock as incomprehensible as the unconscious. Just as our conscious minds were only a bubble of rationality in a larger unconscious mind that we were usually unable to observe or understand, so the physical world of solid matter and comprehensible cause and effect was just a hiccup in a larger reality, produced by the quirk of a human-scale perspective. Mind and matter had both initially seemed understandable, but when we drilled down to find out what they rested on we found not firm foundations, but the unknowable and the incomprehensible. There was nothing down there that might conceivably come to act as our much needed new omphalos. Our world, both mind and matter, was a small bubble of coherence inside something so alien we haven’t even been able to find adequate metaphors to describe it.

  All this would take some coming to terms with. Fortunately, many writers and artists were prepared to try.

  Brigitte Helm, partially in costume, on the set of Metropolis, 1927 (Prismatic Pictures/Bridgeman)

  SEVEN: SCIENCE FICTION

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away

  The opening of the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s proposed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune, would have been the most ambitious single shot in cinema.

  It was to begin outside a spiral galaxy and then continuously track in, into the blazing light of billions of stars, past planets and wrecked spacecraft. The music was to be written and performed by Pink Floyd. The scene would have continued past convoys of mining trucks designed by the crème of European science fiction and surrealist artists, including Chris Foss, Moebius and H.R. Giger. We would see bands of space pirates attacking these craft and fighting to the death over their cargo, a life-giving drug known as Spice. Still the camera would continue forwards, past inhabited asteroids and the deep-space industrial complexes which refine the drug, until it found a small spacecraft carrying away the end result of this galactic economy: the dead bodies of those involved in the spice trade.

  The shot would have been a couple of minutes long and would have established an entire universe. It was a wildly ambitious undertaking, especially in the pre-computer graphics days of cinema. But that wasn’t going to deter Jodorowsky.

  This scale of Jodorowsky’s vision was a reflection of his philosophy of filmmaking. ‘What is the goal of life? It is to create yourself a soul. For me, movies are an art more than an industry. The search for the human soul as painting, as literature, as poetry: movies are that for me,’ he said. From that perspective, there was no point in settling for anything small. ‘My ambition for Dune was for the film to be a Prophet, to change the young minds of all the world. For me Dune would be the coming of a God, an artistic and cinematic God. For me the aim was not to make a picture, it was something deeper. I wanted to make something sacred.’

  The English maverick theatre director Ken Campbell, who formed the Science Fiction Theatre Company of Liverpool in 1976, also recognised that this level of ambition could arise from science fiction, even if he viewed it from a more grounded perspective. ‘When you think about it,’ he explained, ‘the entire history of literature is nothing more than people coming in and out of doors. Science fiction is about everything else.’

  Jodorowsky began
putting a team together, one capable of realising his dream. He chose collaborators he believed to be ‘spiritual warriors.’ The entire project seemed blessed by good fortune and synchronicity. When he decided that he needed superstars like Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí or Mick Jagger to play certain parts, he would somehow meet these people by happenstance and persuade them to agree. But when pre-production was complete, he went to pitch the film to the Hollywood studios.

  Jodorowsky pitched Dune in the years before the success of Star Wars, when science fiction was still seen as strange and embarrassing. As impressive and groundbreaking as his pitch was, it was still a science fiction film. They all said ‘no’.

  By the time this genre was first named, in the 1920s, it was already marginalised. It was fine for the kids, needless to say, but critics looked down upon it. In many ways this was a blessing. Away from the cultural centre, science fiction authors were free to explore and experiment. In this less pressured environment science fiction became, in the opinion of the English novelist J.G. Ballard, the last genre capable of adequately representing present-day reality. Science fiction was able to get under the skin of the times in a different way to more respected literature. A century of uncertainty, relative perspectives and endless technological revolutions was frequently invisible to mainstream culture, but was not ignored by science fiction.

  One example of how science fiction ideas could help us understand the psyche of the twentieth century was the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s interest in UFOs. Jung, a protégé of Freud who famously split with his mentor over what he saw as Freud’s sexual obsessions, wrote about flying saucers in 1959. He was eighty-three years old at the time, and hence not overly troubled by the effect this book would have on his scientific reputation.

  UFOs were a phenomenon of the post-Second World War world. They arrived in mainstream consciousness following excited 1947 press reports of a UFO sighting by a credible American aviator called Kenneth Arnold. Right from the start they were assumed to be alien spacecraft from far-off worlds. Arnold had witnessed nine unidentified objects in the skies above Washington State. These objects were flat and half-moon-shaped, and looked something like a boomerang crossed with a croissant. He described them as moving like a fish flipping in the sun, or like a saucer skipping across water. From this, the press coined the phrase ‘flying saucers’. Hundreds of further sightings followed, although interestingly these were of the circular, saucer-shaped objects suggested by the newspaper headlines rather than the bulging half-moon-shaped objects Arnold originally reported. After the press coined the term, witnesses reported that they too saw ‘flying saucers’.

  UFO reports evolved over the years. They were intrinsically linked to their portrayal in popular media, and sightings increased when movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) were released. Early accounts included encounters with aliens from Mars or Venus, whereas later reports, after those planets had been discovered to be lifeless, would tell of visitors from distant galaxies. New details became popular, such as abductions, cattle mutilations, big-eyed ‘grey’ aliens and, unexpectedly, anal probes. Links between aliens and secret military airbases became a big theme, although the fact that unusual craft were spotted above places used to develop secret military aircraft should not appear that strange.

  Interest in the UFO phenomenon only really lost steam after the mass uptake of camera-equipped smartphones in the twenty-first century failed to produce convincing evidence of their existence. During their heyday, there was always something about UFOs that was more than just a story of nuts-and-bolts physical space travel. As the slogan of the 1990s television series The X-Files put it, ‘I want to believe.’

  Jung was not interested in the question of whether UFOs were ‘real’ or not. He wanted to know what their sudden appearance said about the late twentieth century. Mankind had always reported encounters with unexplained somethings, strange entities which, if they existed at all, were beyond our understanding. Jung understood that the interpretation of these encounters depended on the culture of the observer. Whether a witness reported meeting fairies, angels, demons or gods depended on which of those labels their culture found most plausible. The fact that people were now interpreting the ‘other’ in a new way suggested to Jung that a change had occurred in our collective unconscious.

  As recently as the First World War, we still told stories about encounters with angels. One example, popularised by the Welsh author Arthur Machen, involved angels protecting the British Expeditionary Force at the Battle of Mons. But by the Second World War, Christianity had collapsed to the point where meetings with angels were no longer credible, and none of the previous labels for otherworldly entities seemed believable. As a result, the strange encounters which still occurred were now interpreted as contact with visitors from other planets. The ideas of science fiction were the best metaphor we had to make sense of what we didn’t understand.

  UFOs, to Jung, were a projection of Cold War paranoia and the alien nature of our technological progress. He recognised that the phenomenon told us more about our own culture than it did about alien spaceships. As he wrote, ‘The projection-creating fantasy soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets.’ We no longer considered the heavens to be the domain of loving gods and angels.

  The first science fiction story is often said to be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), because it was a story about a monster that was neither natural nor paranormal, but which had been explicitly created in a laboratory. Frankenstein was about the desire to play God and the discovery that this robs you of your humanity. It is perhaps no surprise that Shelley’s story was so popular in the twentieth century.

  More typical examples of early science fiction arrive in the later part of the nineteenth century. The Voyages Extraordinaires series of adventure stories by the French writer Jules Verne included fantastic machines such as Captain Nemo’s magnificent submarine the Nautilus. Such technology, the stories warned, would be dangerous in the wrong hands. The turn-of-the-century novels by H.G. Wells also warned of the dangers of technology becoming a catalyst for overreaching ambition, from the unnatural biological experiments in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) to the tragic fate of The Invisible Man (1897).

  Wells’s work pioneered the use of science fiction to critique current social problems. The War of the Worlds (1898) depicted England invaded by a race of beings, in this case Martians, who were determined, cruel and who possessed technology which was greatly superior to that of the invaded natives. Wells found that he could use this imaginative type of speculative fiction to present England with a new and disturbing perspective on its own colonial history. Even the ending of the story, in which the advanced invaders were stopped by native diseases, echoed the experiences of the British Empire. Social criticism was also evident in his 1895 novel The Time Machine, which explored the implications of social inequality. He projected the separation of the underclass and the privileged elite into a nightmarish far future, where they had evolved into two separate species, each horrific in its own way. Science fiction may have talked about the future, but its power lay in what it said about the present.

  Late nineteenth-century science fiction may have been European and troubled by the implications of technology, but early twentieth-century science fiction was very different. Science fiction became American, and optimistic. Future technology was no longer the harbinger of nightmares, but something positive and exciting. While Europe collapsed into industrialised warfare and introduced chemical weapons, tanks and aerial bombardment to world history, Americans dreamt about potential technology and found it all hugely thrilling.

  This attitude is evident in the forty Tom Swift books, written by various ghostwriters under the pseudonym Victor Appleton between 1910 and 1941. Tom Swift, the son of an industrialist, is a gifted mechanic and inventor with a spirit of adventu
re and a plucky ‘can-do’ attitude. He is, as the English comics writer Alan Moore has noted, ‘carefully depicted as a healthy macho male who’s handy with his fists and whose scientific genius is mostly innate and self-taught without the need for any sissy book-learnin”. Each Tom Swift book details his adventures with a particular machine. They started out realistically, in books such as Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle and Tom Swift and His Motor Boat (both 1910), but quickly became more imaginative, such as the later titles Tom Swift and His Sky Train (1931) or Tom Swift and His Magnetic Silencer (1941). Some of these inventions were prophetic, including his invention of a proto-fax machine in Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone (1914). Modern tasers were inspired by Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (1911), their trademarked name being an acronym of Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.

  This adventurous and optimistic take on invented technology quickly became the overriding attitude of early twentieth-century science fiction. Film and comic-book characters such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were no-nonsense, all-American heroes who achieved their goals through action, bravery and whatever advanced technology happened to be lying around. They espoused individualism and held out the promise of an exciting future, as long as enough clear-sighted individuals did the right thing and built it.

  These idealised attributes were not unique to stories of the future. They were also present in the cowboy stories which were at the height of their popularity during the same period. The romanticized version of the American frontier story began around the 1880s, when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show made repeated tours of Europe to great acclaim, and the dime novels of writers like Ned Buntline helped mythologise the lives of men like Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok. This was, noticeably, the period immediately after the frontier was tamed. The way of life that Buffalo Bill’s show depicted was being replaced by the advance of law and civilisation, yet the myth of the Old West was becoming increasingly attractive, both in the US and beyond.