by Richard Farr
The Chinese Communist Party rewarded Fang Lizhi for this insight in a way that would have been instantly familiar to the guardians of absolute truth (and absolute power over what is to be counted as the truth) in the medieval Catholic Church: prison, “reeducation,” and exile.
Of course, the five axioms are about how science aspires to work. Fang Lizhi knew very well that it doesn’t always live up to its own ideals. Scientists are almost as prone as authoritarian bureaucrats to thinking they know more than they do; see especially the note below on the very word unscientific. The great institutional difference between science on the one hand, and both late-medieval Catholicism and China’s peculiar brand of pseudocommunism on the other, is that science—usually, eventually—rewards skepticism.
“Become what you are”
The German version, “Werde, der du bist,” was a favorite saying of nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who learned it from the Greek poet Pindar. Nietzsche and Pindar are both talking about discovering your real, inner nature and setting that nature free from the social and psychological constraints into which it was born. Both men were highly skeptical of an afterlife, so they’d have been surprised and troubled by the spin being given to the idea here by the leader of the Seraphim: his view is that our true nature will be revealed to us only in an afterlife.
PROLOGUE
Bill Calder, the supernatural, and Zeus having a snit
In response to Bill Calder, you could argue that the Greek idea about Zeus and lightning was a perfectly sensible protoscientific theory, until we came along with a better theory that explains what static electricity does inside clouds. In other words, the Zeus theory, which we think of as “supernatural,” was the only intelligible “natural” option at the time and shows that the Greeks didn’t think of Zeus as “supernatural” in our sense—they thought of the gods as a part of the world and interacting with the world. That’s probably right, but it doesn’t undermine Bill’s argument against supernatural explanation.
Let’s suppose there are unexplained bumps in the night, and you tell me it’s a poltergeist, which you say is “an immaterial or supernatural spirit that can’t be explained scientifically.” The right response is surely this: either we can make sense of these bumps by doing more scientific or common-sense investigating, or we can’t. If we can (“Aha, it was the plumbing all along”), then the evidence that there’s a poltergeist vanishes. But if we can’t, to say, “See, told you, it was a poltergeist!” is just to dishonestly admit but not admit that as yet we still have no idea (repeat: no idea) what the cause really is. Evidence for a “poltergeist” would count as evidence only if we could make sense of that term in a way that links it up with the rest of our understanding of the world. (“Tell me more about these polter-thingys. Are they an electromagnetic phenomenon, or not? Do they have mass, or not? Are they ever visible, or not? How do they work? And how do you know any of this?”) Without good answers to these kinds of questions, the concept is empty, since you’ve given me no reason not to be equally impressed (or unimpressed) by infinitely many alternative theories, like the Well-Hidden Domestic Dragon theory, the Clumsy Dude from Another Dimension theory, and the creepier Undead Wall Insulation theory—to invent and name just three. So instead of saying, “See, told you, it was a poltergeist,” you might as well say, “See, told you, it was, um, Something We Don’t Know About Yet.” And the only response to that is “Precisely. Let’s keep investigating.”
Notice that some modern believers think God is, as it were, above and beyond the physical—an immaterial creator-spirit who doesn’t interact with the world. Others, on the contrary, think that, like Zeus, He makes decisions and then acts on those decisions (by answering your prayer for an easy chem test, drowning Pharaoh’s army, etc.). That raises interesting questions about what you commit yourself to when you say that God (or anything, for that matter) is “supernatural.” According to Bill’s argument, the former doesn’t even make sense, because it sounds superficially like a claim about what God’s like but really it’s a disguised admission that we cannot know anything about what He’s like. On the other hand, the latter seems to have the consequence—weird to most people today, but a commonplace in the eighteenth century—that God’s nature is a possible object (even the object) of scientific knowledge.
Einstein in delighted free fall
One of the key insights leading Einstein to the general theory of relativity was the equivalence principle, which says that being in a gravitational field is physically indistinguishable from being accelerated at an equivalent rate. A special case of this is that being in no gravitational field is indistinguishable from not being accelerated. That’s free fall, and it’s why astronauts say that the transition from the high-g launch phase to the zero-g of orbit is like falling off a cliff.
Khor Virap
Worth looking up (or visiting) for the spectacular location, it’s built on the site where Saint Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned in a pit for thirteen years for trying to convert the Armenians to Christianity.
PART I: AFTERMATH
“Limbo . . . a traffic jam in the afterlife”
Catholic theologians struggled for centuries with the question of what happened to children who died unbaptized. Heaven or hell? Neither seemed to be the right answer, and Limbo, which literally means “border,” was conceived of as a place between the two, a sort of celestial no-man’s-land where such souls would at least temporarily reside. Vatican theologians more or less abandoned the idea early this century. However, why they now think unbaptized souls don’t go to Limbo seems to me every bit as puzzling as why they previously thought they did. (See the note on futurists, theology, and unicorns.)
“Freshly dead saints in corny baroque paintings”
The florid baroque style in European painting runs from about 1600 to 1725. Morag might be thinking of Sebastiano Ricci’s Apotheosis of Saint Sebastian, or any of dozens more in the genre. An unexpected “saint” gets a similar treatment more than a century later—though the expression is more constipated than amazed—in John James Barralet’s epically unfortunate The Apotheosis of Washington.
“Macedonian badass Cleopatra”
Cleopatra VII and her family became perhaps the most famous Egyptians, but they weren’t really Egyptian. Like Alexander the Great, they came from Macedonia, on the northern border of Greece—though by Cleopatra’s time they’d ruled Egypt for almost three hundred years. The dynasty was started by Ptolemy I, who had been a general in Alexander’s army. In a sense, he and his descendants were even more spectacularly successful than the great conqueror: by taking control of Egypt, they were able to become gods.
“The beast with two backs”
Shakespeare uses this euphemism for sex in Othello, but it was invented at least a century earlier. I’m not sure about a gold bed, but it’s no fiction that Jules and Cleo were having a very cozy time together; she gave birth to Caesarion—little Caesar—in the summer of the year following his visit.
Caesar and the library
He probably was responsible for a fire at the Library of Alexandria in 48 BCE, but it wasn’t devastating: in reality, the institution survived for centuries after that. Alexandria remained a polytheistic city, with many ethnicities and languages and a rich intellectual life, until the middle of the fourth century. In 313, the emperor Constantine may have converted to Christianity. In any case, over the next two decades, until his baptism and death in 337, he made Christianity more and more the semi-official religion of the Roman Empire, with an atmosphere increasingly hostile to the old pagan religions. There was a brief respite for non-Christians after his death, but in 380 the emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the state religion, began to ban pagan rites throughout the empire, passed laws that made it economically difficult and even dangerous to be a non-Christian, and encouraged the destruction of pagan temples. Alexandria’s newly monotheist rulers drove out Jews and other non-Christian groups, and—in a startlin
g echo of current policies by radical Sunni Muslims—took it upon themselves to destroy everything pre-Christian in the city, including books, monuments, and even the Serapeum, Alexandria’s most magnificent Greek temple. Hatred of the past—and the firm conviction that you’re right about everything, and that only the future of your own faith matters—are not new inventions. (See the note “‘A recovering fundamentalist’—and what Adam could have learned from Socrates.”)
When the great library was finally destroyed or abandoned is unclear, but its contents were probably lost because of piecemeal destruction followed by long neglect, rather than a single great fire. Whatever the exact cause of the loss, during this period most of ancient culture disappeared. You could fill a big lecture hall with the major ancient figures in geography, medicine, history, mathematics, science, drama, poetry, and philosophy from whose writings we have either fragments or nothing. A few examples: Leucippus and Democritus, who invented atomic theory; the mathematician Pythagoras; the philosophers Cleanthes of Assos, Chrysippus, and Zeno of Elea; the great polymath Posidonius of Rhodes, who features in The Fire Seekers; the poet Anacreon; and last but not least, the most famous female intellectual of the entire ancient world, the poet Sappho.
The situation in drama sums it up pretty well. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Menander are famous on the basis of fifteen surviving plays, plus some fragments. But we know from other evidence that between them they wrote over three hundred plays. All the rest have vanished. It’s like knowing the Harry Potter books from one damaged photocopy of the bits about Hagrid.
Futurists
Morag’s dig about futurists and fortune-tellers is probably well deserved, but I’ve always thought the term has more in common with theologian—and unicorn expert.
If I claim to know a lot about unicorns, you might reasonably assume this means that I can tell you what shape their horns are supposed to be, which cultures refer to them in their folklore, what magical powers they’re alleged to have, and so on. This is perfectly reasonable—and is consistent with the idea that, in another sense, I can’t possibly know anything about unicorns, because they’re not a possible object of knowledge: they don’t exist.
The very idea that there’s a legitimate subject called theology could be said to trade on a related conflation (or confusion) of two different things the term could mean. The etymology (theos = god + logos = thought/study/reasoning) seems clear enough, but it raises the question: Does doing theology result in knowledge about God—for example, “Ah: we find, after careful investigation, that He’s male, bearded, and eternal; wears an old bedsheet; and kicked Lucifer out of heaven”? Or does it result only in historical knowledge about what other people have thought they knew about God—for example: “Martin Luther set off the Protestant Reformation in 1517 by disagreeing with the Catholic Church about their alleged power to influence what He does to souls in purgatory.” The second kind of knowledge is unproblematic, or as unproblematic as any kind of historical knowledge can be. But no amount of it shows that the first kind isn’t an illusion. And we do at least have reason to worry that the first kind is an illusion, because it’s unclear (relative to the ordinary standards we insist on in any other kind of inquiry) what the evidence for that sort of knowledge could possibly be. (See the note about Limbo.)
Similarly, we can ask whether a futurist is (a) someone who charges large sums of money to intellectually naive corporate executives for spouting opinions about the future of human technology and society (including, of course, opinions about other futurists’ opinions about that future), or (b) someone who actually knows something the rest of us don’t know about that future. As with the other two examples, one might worry that (b) is implausible even in principal. (A good starting point for a discussion of this would be the observation that, as a potential object of knowledge, the future shares an important property with unicorns: it doesn’t exist.)
In all three cases, if knowledge of type (b) really is illusory, then knowledge of type (a) seems a lot less worth paying for.
“Not even the extent of your own ignorance”
At his trial for impiety in 399 BCE, Socrates shocked the Athenians by claiming, with apparent arrogance, that he was the wisest man in Athens. It must be true, he insisted: no less an authority than the great Oracle at Delphi had said so to his friend Chaerephon! He was puzzled by the oracle’s judgment too, he said, so he went about questioning many people who claimed to have some special expertise or knowledge (such as Euthyphro: see the note “‘A recovering fundamentalist’—and what Adam could have learned from Socrates”). At last Socrates grasped that the oracle’s meaning was simply this: everyone else believed they understood matters that in fact they didn’t understand, whereas he, Socrates, knew how poor and limited his knowledge really was. (See also the note above on Fang Lizhi, who might equally have said, “Science begins with philosophy, and philosophy begins with doubt.”)
But surely, you might say, in most fields there are reliable experts? Yes, Socrates agrees: if you want a box, go to a carpenter; if you want to get across the sea, trust a ship’s captain. But we love to think we know more than we do. And, even when we do know a subject well, expertise is paradoxical. In studies Socrates would have loved, Canadian psychologist Philip Tetlock and others have shown that in some areas so-called experts are often systematically worse at judging the truth than nonexperts. How is that possible? One reason is “overconfidence bias”: amateurs tend to notice when they’re wrong and accept that they’re wrong, whereas experts have a vested interest in (and are good at) explaining away their past mistakes—and thus persuading even themselves that they were “not really” mistakes.
In short, there are many circumstances in which both “experts” and those who look to them for “enlightenment” can be poor judges of whether what they say is believable.
The Slipher Space Telescope
As a big fat hint to NASA, I’ve launched this multibillion-dollar fictional planet-hunter in honor of Vesto Slipher, one of the greatest and most inadequately recognized American astronomers. Along with many other achievements, in 1912 he established for the first time the very high relative velocity of the Andromeda Galaxy (then known as the Andromeda Nebula), and thus, along with Henrietta Swan Leavitt and others, paved the way for Edwin Hubble’s momentous discovery that the universe is expanding. Hubble was a great man, but he doesn’t deserve to be incorrectly credited with both achievements.
Zeta Langley S-8A, and Goldilocks
For how to name an exoplanet—I know you’ve been dying to find out—see the website of the International Astronomical Union. The conventions are on the messy side, but Zeta Langley S-8A can be taken to mean “Slipher discovery 8A, orbiting Zeta Langley,” where Zeta Langley means the sixth-brightest star, as seen from Earth, in the Langley star cluster.
Like the planet, the Langley star cluster is fictional. Sci-fi nuts may detect here a whisper of a reference to HAL’s instructor, as mentioned in the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (“My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it, I can sing it for you.” Oooh, oooh, I love that scene.)
The “Goldilocks Zone” (not too hot, not too cold, just right) is the orbital region around a given star in which life as we know it is possible—roughly, the zone within which liquid surface water is possible. Or that’s the short version. If you look up “circumstellar habitable zone,” you’ll find all sorts of stuff explaining why it’s far more complicated than that—and then you’ll be able to amaze your friends by going on at length about topics like tidal heating, nomad planets, and carbon chauvinism.
Kelvin’s basement
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, got degrees Kelvin named after him not because he thought of the idea of absolute zero but because he was the first to accurately calculate its value. But Morag is wrong on the detail: apparently, if you really want to try cryogenic self-storage, the optimal condition for your experiment in time travel is a s
ignificantly warmer nitrogen slush.
“Same myths in different forms, over and over”
In The Fire Seekers, Bill Calder is struck by the way similar myths emerge in cultures that have had no contact with one another, and in the notes there I mention some interesting cases of other Babel-like myths, or combinations of an Eden / Tree of Knowledge myth with a Babel myth. While writing Ghosts in the Machine, I read Sabine Kuegler’s memoir about growing up among the Fayu, a tribe in Indonesian West Papua, during the 1980s. Before the Kueglers showed up, the Fayu had had no contact with Western influences such as Christianity, and yet part of their creation myth was the following story. As Kuegler tells the story:
There once was a large village with many people who all spoke the same language. These people lived in peace. But one day, a great fire came from the sky, and suddenly there were many languages. Each language was only spoken by one man and one woman, who could communicate only with one another and not with anyone else. So they were spread out over the earth. Among them were a man and a woman named Bisa and Beisa. They spoke in the Fayu language. For days they traveled, trying to find a new home. One day they arrived at the edge of the jungle, and it began to rain. The rain wouldn’t stop. Days and weeks it rained and the water kept rising.
Bisa and Beisa built themselves a canoe and collected many animals that were trying to escape from the water . . .
Tok Pisin . . . creole
A pidgin is a shared vocabulary that helps users of different languages communicate. That’s how Tok Pisin (“talk pidgin”) began in the nineteenth century. But Tok Pisin evolved from a salad of English, German, Dutch, and Malay words, with bits of Malay grammar, into a full-blown language of its own, capable of a full range of expression and with a grammar distinct from any of the parent languages. That’s a creole.