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CHAPTER 13
Beyond Science

13.1 Scientific heresies. The intent of this book is to define the boundaries of science, in order that we can then consider going beyond them. This chapter, however, is a little different. Here we will consider "scientific heresies," ideas that are already beyond the boundaries of accepted science.

I can make an argument that the place where any self-respecting scientist ought to work is in precisely the fringe areas where the uncertainty is greatest and our knowledge is least. Scientific heresies often appear when science has reached some kind of sticking point, but most scientists are reluctant to admit it. These are the areas in which the great leaps forward are likely to be made. In practice, most young scientists cannot afford to take the chance. The probability of failure is too great. Einstein said that the reason he could spend the last quarter-century of his life in a search (unsuccessful) for a unified field theory was that he could afford to; his reputation was already secure. A younger scientist takes a great risk by choosing to work in any field of scientific heresy.

That does not mean the heretical ideas are necessarily wrong. 

I give the previous sentence special emphasis, because when I wrote on this subject a couple of years ago I received outraged letters defending people's favorite theories. How dare I say that such and such an idea was heresy?

In each case, I had to write back and explain: A "scientific heresy" is a theory which runs contrary to the accepted scientific wisdom of a particular time. It is no more than that. It may eventually prove to be an improved description of Nature, so that it later (and often after much argument) becomes part of the standard world view; or it may prove to be misguided, and join the large group of discredited crank theories.

Suppose a scientific idea is heresy. Is it wrong? I don't know. What I do know is that if most scientists, today, don't accept it, that is enough to make it a scientific heresy.

As a first example, I offer something that fifteen years ago was certainly heresy. Now it seems on the way to becoming scientific dogma and uncritically accepted fact.

 

13.2 Dinosaur doom. As proved by the huge success of Jurassic Park, people love dinosaurs. It is a long-lasting love affair. Fifty years ago, one of the most memorable segments of Walt Disney's movie Fantasia involved these animals. First we see dinosaurs feeding, raising their young, and hunting in a humid swamp world of frequent rains. Then we see a climate change, to a barren desert where the dust-clouded sun shines constantly. The water has all vanished, and nothing but dry bones and dead trees remain.

This was an artistic portrayal of one of Nature's greatest mysteries: Why did the dinosaurs, the dominant land animal for one hundred and fifty million years, disappear? Moreover, why did they vanish so abruptly and so completely?

Fantasia's answer, extreme climate change, introduced more questions than it answered. Clearly, our planet's lands did not all change to a dry and barren desert devoid of plants. Had that happened, the conquering of the land by plant forms would have had to start over from scratch, and there is no sign of such a thing in the fossil record. Moreover, since the dinosaurs were widespread, with their remains found everywhere from America to China, any climate change would have to be not only severe, but ubiquitous. More recent suggestions, that dinosaurs were warmblooded creatures, make their worldwide extinction by climate change even more unlikely. Finally, we have to ask why the disappearance of the dinosaurs happened so quickly.

Even fifty years ago, when Fantasia was produced, it was possible to object to the picture painted in the Disney movie. On the other hand, no one had a better answer. Climate change, perhaps accompanying a period of high volcanic activity, seemed like the best available explanation for what is referred to in scientific circles as "the K/T extinction." The K/T boundary is the time when the geological time period known as the Cretaceous Period ended and the Tertiary Period began. Why K/T, rather than C/T? Because geologists refer to geological strata using a single letter, and C is already taken for the Carboniferous Period (which ended about 140 million years before the Cretaceous Period began). At the same time as the dinosaurs vanished from the Earth, so too did all the large flying reptiles and the largest marine reptiles. It is logical to assume that the cause of all three disappearances was the same, on land, air, and sea.

A new possibility appeared in 1978, when a son brought home a rock sample and showed it to his father. The son was Walter Alvarez, a geologist and geophysicist and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. The father was the late Luis Alvarez, a physicist who had won the 1968 Nobel Prize for his contributions to elementary particle physics. The rock had been dug by Walter Alvarez himself from a gorge in the Italian Apennines. Its lower part was white limestone, its middle a half-inch layer of hardened clay, its upper part red limestone. The boundaries between the three sections were quite clearly defined. Walter Alvarez knew that a similar clay layer was to be found all around the world. The clay had been laid down on the ocean floor sixty-five million years earlier—right about the time that paleontologists believed that the dinosaurs became extinct.

Luis Alvarez thought it might be possible to determine how long the clay layer had taken to form by a technique involving induced radioactivity, and he and his son looked in the rock sample's clay layer for the presence of a suitable substance. Sure enough, they and their co-workers found iridium—but they discovered three hundred times as high a concentration of that element in the clay as in the limestone layers above and below it. Since iridium is rare in the Earth's crust and much more common in meteorites that fall to the Earth, it seemed possible that the clay layer might be tied in with some major extraterrestrial event.

After Luis Alvarez ruled out a couple of other candidate ideas, including a nearby supernova explosion, a colleague of the Alvarez's, Chris McKee, suggested that an asteroid, maybe ten kilometers across, might have hit the Earth. That size of asteroid was consistent with the observed iridium content of the clay layer. The energy release of such an impact would equal that of a hundred million medium-sized hydrogen bombs. The effect of the impact would be the disintegration of the asteroid, which along with many cubic kilometers of the Earth's crust would have been thrown high into the atmosphere. The dust would have stayed there for six months or so, halting photosynthesis in plants, preventing plant growth, and thereby starving to death all the larger animals. Upon the dust's return to Earth it would create the thin layer of clay seen between the red and white limestones. The same phenomenon of atmospheric dust had been observed on a much smaller scale following the huge volcanic explosion of Krakatoa in 1883. It is also the mechanism behind the idea of "nuclear winter," a palling of the whole Earth with atmospheric dust which some scientists worry could be one consequence of a large-scale nuclear war.

Twenty years ago, however, the idea of nuclear winter had not been taken seriously. Thus the theory presented by Luis and Walter Alvarez for the vanishing of the dinosaurs was pure scientific heresy. It was widely criticized by paleontologists, and even ridiculed. Today it is widely accepted as the most plausible extinction mechanism, and the same idea has been used to examine other major disappearances of many life forms from Earth. The greatest of these, known as the Permian extinction, occurred about 230 million years ago, when nine-tenths of all Earth's species vanished. The search for asteroid evidence has been less persuasive in this case.

Also unresolved in the case of the K/T extinction is the question of where the incoming destroyer hit the Earth. The most popular theory at the moment is that it struck in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, but that is not fully proved.

Many other details of the asteroid impact theory remain to be defined. However, those who do not believe the idea at all must face one inevitable and awkward question: If it was not the impact of a huge asteroid that suddenly and swiftly killed off all the dinosaurs, then what was it?

If you think it would be a nice idea to write a story in which a large asteroid descends on Earth today and causes all sorts of problems, be warned. The book has already been written, several times. I'll mention just two examples: Lucifer's Hammer (Niven and Pournelle, 1977), and Shiva Descending (Benford and Rotsler, 1980). If you want to read about a large object hitting the Moon, and what that can do to Earth, read Jack McDevitt's splendid Moonfall (1998).

 

13.3 Gaia: the Whole Earth Mother. This, too, borders on scientific respectability, though scientists as well-known as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins have dismissed it as pseudoscience.

It began in the late 1970s, when James Lovelock published a controversial book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Lovelock, 1979). In it he set forth his idea, long gestating, that the whole of Earth's biosphere should be thought of as a single, giant, self-regulating organism, which keeps the general global environment close to constant and in a state appropriate to sustain life. In Lovelock's own words, Gaia is "the model, in which the Earth's living matter, air, oceans and land surface form a complex system which can be seen as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place for life."

Lovelock says that the notion is an old one, dating back at least to a lecture by James Hutton delivered in 1785. However, the modern incarnation of that idea is all Lovelock's, although the name Gaia as a descriptor for such an interdependent global entity was provided by the late William Golding (a Nobel laureate for literature, Lovelock's neighbor in England, and author of the classic Lord of the Flies).

Something like Gaia seems to be needed from the following simple physical argument: Life has existed on Earth for about three and a half billion years. In that time, the sun's energy output has increased by at least thirty percent. If Earth's temperature simply responded directly to the Sun's output, based on today's global situation we would expect that two billion years ago the whole Earth would have been frozen over. Conversely, if Earth was habitable then it should today be too hot to support life.

But in fact, the response of Earth's biosphere to temperature changes is complex, apparently adapting to minimize the effects of change. For example, as the amount of solar energy delivered to Earth increases, the rate of transpiration of plants increases, so the amount of atmospheric water vapor goes up. That means more clouds—and clouds reflect sunlight, and shield the surface, which tends to bring surface temperatures down. In addition, increased amounts of vegetation reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, and that in turn reduces the greenhouse effect by which solar radiation is trapped within the atmosphere. Again, the surface temperature goes down. There are many other processes, involving other atmospheric gases, and the net effect is to hold the status quo for the benefit of living organisms. According to Lovelock, it is more than a matter of convenience. Only the presence of life has enabled Earth to remain habitable. If life had not appeared on this planet when it did, over three billion years ago, then by this time the surface of Earth would be beyond the range of temperatures at which life could exist.

Why, then, does the Gaia idea qualify as a scientific heresy? It sounds eminently reasonable, and something like it seems necessary to explain the long continuity of life on the planet.

Part of the problem is that at first thought it seems as though the whole Earth must be engaged in some sort of activist role. Many readers have assumed that intention is a necessary part of the Gaia idea, that the biosphere itself somehow knows what it is doing, and acts deliberately to preserve life. A number of nonscientific writers have embraced this "Earth as Ur-mother" thought in a way and with an enthusiasm that Lovelock neither intended nor agrees with. At the other extreme, two biologists, Doolittle and Dawkins, have offered the rational scientific criticism that the Gaia idea seems to call for global altruism, i.e. some organisms must be sacrificing themselves for the general good. That runs contrary to everything we believe to be true about genetics and the process of evolution.

Lovelock seemed at first to encourage such a viewpoint, when he wrote, "But if Gaia does exist, then we may find ourselves and all other living things to be parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life." There is more than a suggestion here of a being which acts by design. However, Lovelock has later shown through simplified models that neither global intention nor global altruism is needed. The standard theory of evolution, in which each species responds in such a way as to assure its own survival and increase its own numbers, is sufficient to create a self-stabilizing total system.

Today the Gaia hypothesis, that the whole Earth biosphere forms a single, self-regulating organism, is still outside the scientific mainstream. However, over the past fifteen years it has gained some formidable supporters, notably the biologist Lynn Margulis, who has championed Gaia more actively than Lovelock ever did. The theory also provides a useful predictive framework for studying the way in which different parts of the biosphere interact, and particular chemicals propagate among them. Nonetheless, if it is not today outright heresy, to many scientists Gaia remains close to it.

Lovelock ironically comments that we may have come " . . . the full circle from Galileo's famous struggle with the theological establishment. It is the scientific establishment that now forbids heresy. I had a faint hope that Gaia might be denounced from the pulpit; instead I was asked to deliver a sermon on Gaia at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York."

The Gaia concept sometimes permits Lovelock to take an unusually detached attitude to other global events. Some years ago I was driving him from suburban Maryland to the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. On the way we somehow got onto the subject of all-out nuclear war. Lovelock surprised me very much by remarking that it would have very little effect. I said, "But it could kill off every human!"

He replied, "Well, yes, it might do that; but I was thinking of the effects on the general biosphere."

I leave the subject of Gaia with this story idea: suppose that the biosphere did know what it was doing, and acted deliberately to preserve life. How do you think it would deal with humans?

 

13.4 Dr. Pauling and Vitamin C. When sea voyagers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries began to undertake long journeys out of sight of land, and later when Arctic explorers were spending long winters locked in the ice, they found themselves afflicted by a strange and unpleasant disease. Joints ached, gums blackened, teeth became loose and fell out, and bodies showed dark, bruise-like patches. Eventually the sufferers died after a long and painful illness. No one was immune, and as the trip went on more and more people were affected. Thus Vasco da Gama, sailing round the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, lost a hundred of his hundred and sixty crew members. Travelers gave the disease a name, scurvy, but they had no idea what caused it.

After many years of trial and error, sea captains and physicians learned that scurvy could be held at bay by including regular fresh fruit and vegetables in the diet. In 1753, the Scottish physician James Lind showed that the same beneficial effect could be produced by the use of concentrated orange and lemon juice. However, no one knew quite what these dietary additives were doing. That understanding had to wait for almost two more centuries, until 1932, when a substance called Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, was isolated.

Vitamins are part of our necessary diet, but unlike proteins, carbohydrates, or fats, they are needed only in minute quantities. A daily intake of one thousandth of an ounce of Vitamin C is enough to keep us free from scurvy. Most animals can manufacture for themselves all the Vitamin C that they need; just a few species—humans, monkeys, and guinea pigs—rely on their food to provide it (humans, monkeys, and guinea pigs?! A story here, perhaps). Certain foods, such as broccoli and black currants, are especially rich in this vitamin, but almost all fresh fruit and vegetables contain enough to supply human needs. Without it in our diet, however, people sicken and die. Fortunately, Vitamin C is a simple molecule, and by 1933 chemists had learned how to produce it synthetically. It can be made in large quantities and at low cost. No one today needs to suffer from scurvy.

That might seem to be the end of the story of Vitamin C, except that in 1970, the scientist Linus Pauling came forward with an extraordinary claim. In his book Vitamin C and the Common Cold (Pauling, 1970), Pauling stated that large doses of Vitamin C, thirty to a hundred times the normal daily requirement, would help to ward off the common cold, or would reduce the time needed for a sufferer to recover.

Most people coming forward with such a notion would have been brushed aside by the medical profession as either a harmless crank, or some charlatan peddling his own patent nostrum or clinic.

There was just one problem. Linus Pauling was a recognized scientific genius. During the 1930s he had, almost single-handed, used quantum theory to explain how atoms bond together to form molecules. For this work he received the 1954 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Rather than resting on his laurels, he had then gone on to study the most important molecules of biochemistry, in particular hemoglobin and DNA, and was the first person to propose a form of helical structure for DNA.

James Watson and Francis Crick, whom we met earlier in Chapter 6, elucidated the structure of DNA. What did they worry about as they worked? As Watson said in his book, The Double Helix (Watson, 1968), they knew that "the prodigious mind" of Linus Pauling was working on the problem at the California Institute of Technology. In the early spring of 1953 they believed that he would discover the correct form of the molecule within a few weeks if they failed to do so. With a little change in timing, or with better experimental data, Linus Pauling might well have won or shared the 1962 Nobel Prize that went to Crick, Watson, and Maurice Wilkins.

However, Pauling had no reason to feel too disappointed in that year. For he was in fact awarded a 1962 Nobel Prize—for Peace, acknowledging his work toward the treaty banning the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.

Faced with a two-time Nobel Laureate who was close to being a three-time Laureate, a man still intellectually vigorous at age 69, the medical profession could not in 1970 dismiss Pauling's claims out of hand. Instead they investigated them, performing their own controlled experiments of the use of Vitamin C to treat the common cold. Their results were negative, or at best inconclusive.

That should have quieted Pauling. Instead it had just the opposite effect. In a new book, Vitamin C and the Common Cold and the Flu (Pauling, 1976), he claimed that the medical tests had used totally inadequate amounts of Vitamin C. Massive doses, a gram or more per day, were needed. And he went further. He asserted that Vitamin C in such large doses helps with the treatment of hepatitis, mumps, measles, polio, viral pneumonia, viral orchitis, herpes, and influenza. He proposed mechanisms by which Vitamin C does its job, both as a substance that mops up free chemical radicals in cells and as a component of a cancer-cell inhibiting chemical called PHI. He also pointed out that there was no danger of a vitamin overdose, since excess Vitamin C is harmlessly excreted from the body.

Again, the medical control experiments were done. Again, Pauling's claims were denied, and dismissed. That is where the question stands today. Books have been written, proposing Vitamin C as a practical panacea for all ailments. Others have totally rejected all its beneficial effects. The use of large doses of Vitamin C remains a scientific heresy.

However, in discussing this subject with scientists, I find that a remarkably high percentage of them take regular large doses of Vitamin C. Perhaps it is no more than a vote of solidarity for a fellow-scientist. Perhaps it is a gesture of respect toward Linus Pauling, who died in August 1994 in his ninety-fourth year.

Or perhaps it is more the attitude of the famous physicist Niels Bohr. He had a horseshoe nailed up over the doorway of his country cottage at Tisvilde, for good luck. A visitor asked if Bohr, a rational person and a scientist, really believed in such nonsense. "No," said Bohr, "but they say it works even if you don't believe in it."

 

13.5 Minds and machines. In Chapter 10, we described the extraordinary advance of computers. The first ones, in the 1940s, were used for straightforward calculations, of tables and payrolls and scientific functions. Since then the applications have spread far beyond those original uses. Computers today perform complex algebra, play chess and checkers better than any human, control power generating plants, keep track of everything from taxes to library loans to airplane reservations, check our spelling and the accuracy of our typing, and even accept vocal inputs that may soon make typing unnecessary.

Given a suitable program, no human effort of calculation and record-keeping seems to be beyond computer duplication. This raises natural questions: Is every function of the human mind really some form of computer program? And at some time in the future, will computers be able to "think" as well as humans?

To most of the scientists represented in Chapter 10, the answer to these questions is an unequivocal "Yes." Our thought processes operate with just the same sort of logic as computers. Our brains are, as Marvin Minsky said, "computers made of meat." The field of Artificial Intelligence, usually abbreviated as AI, seeks to extend the range of those functions, once thought to be uniquely powers of the human mind, that computing machines are able to perform. The ultimate goal is a thinking and "self-conscious" computer, aware of its own existence exactly as we are aware of ours.

That ultimate goal seems far off, but not unattainable—unless a distinguished mathematician, Roger Penrose, is right. In 1989, he offered a radically different proposal. This is the same Penrose that we met in Chapter 2. He is the Rouse-Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, and a man with a reputation for profound originality. Over the past thirty years he has made major contributions to general relativity theory, to numerical analysis, to the global geometry of space-time, and to the problem of tiling the plane with simple shapes. His work is highly diverse, and it is characterized by ingenuity and great geometrical insight. More important, many of his results are surprising, finding solutions to problems that no one else had suspected might exist, and stimulating the production of much work by other investigators. Even his harshest critics admit that Roger Penrose is one of the world's great problem solvers. He cannot be dismissed outright as a crank, or as an intellectual lightweight.

What then, does he propose?

In a book that was a surprising best-seller, The Emperor's New Mind (Penrose, 1989), he claimed that some functions of the human brain will never be duplicated by computers that develop along today's lines. The brain, he asserts, is "non-algorithmic," which means that it performs some functions for which no computer program can be written.

This idea seems like perfect scientific heresy, and it was received with skepticism and even outrage by many workers in the field of AI and computer science (for a brief summary, see How the Mind Works [Pinker, 1997]). For one thing, prior to this book, Penrose was very much one of their own kind. Now he seemed like a traitor. Marvin Minsky even called Penrose a "coward," which is a perplexing term since it takes a lot of nerve to propose something so far out of the scientific mainstream.

What does Penrose say that is so upsetting to so many? In The Emperor's New Mind, he argues that human thought employs physics and procedures quite outside the purview of today's AI and machine operations. The necessary physics is drawn from the world of quantum theory. In Penrose's words, "Might a quantum world be required so that thinking, perceiving creatures, such as ourselves, can be constructed from its substance?" (Penrose, 1989).

His answer to that question is, yes, such a quantum world is required. To see the direction of his argument, it is necessary to revisit what was said in Chapter 2 about quantum theory.

In the quantum world, a particle does not necessarily have a well-defined spin, speed, or position. Rather, it has a number of different possible positions or speeds or spins, and until we make an observation of it, all we can know are the probabilities associated with each possible spin, speed, and position. Only when an observation is made does the particle occupy a well-defined state, in which the measured variable is precisely known. This change, from undefined to well-defined status, is called the "collapse of the quantum mechanical wave function." This is a well-known, if not well-understood, element of standard quantum theory.

What Penrose suggests is that the human brain is a kind of quantum device. In particular, the same processes that collapse the quantum mechanical wave function in subatomic particles are at work in the brain. When humans are considering many different possibilities, Penrose argues that we are operating in a highly parallel, quantum mechanical mode. Our thinking resolves and "collapses to a thought" at some point when the wave function collapses, and at that time the many millions or billions of possibilities become a single definite idea.

This is certainly a peculiar notion. However, when quantum theory was introduced in the 1920s, most of its ideas seemed no less strange. Now they are accepted by almost all physicists. Who is to say that in another half-century, Penrose will not be equally accepted when he asserts, "there is an essential non-algorithmic ingredient to (conscious) thought processes" and "I believe that (conscious) minds are not algorithmic entities"?

Meanwhile, almost everyone in the AI community (who, it might be argued, are hardly disinterested parties) listens to what Penrose has to say, then dismisses it as just plain wrong. Part of the problem is Penrose's suggestion as to the mechanism employed within the brain, which seems bizarre indeed.

As he points out in a second book, Shadows of the Mind (Penrose, 1994), he is not the first to suggest that quantum effects are important to human thought. Herbert Fröhlich, in 1968, noted that there was a high-frequency microwave activity in the brain, produced, he said, by a biological quantum resonance. In 1992, John Eccles proposed a brain structure called the presynaptic vesicular grid, which is a kind of crystalline lattice in the brain's pyramidal cells, as a suitable site for quantum activity.

Penrose himself favors a different location and mechanism. He suggests, though not dogmatically, that the quantum world is evoked in elements of a cell known as microtubules. A microtubule is a tiny tube, with an outer diameter of about 25 nanometers and an inner diameter of 14 nanometers. The tube is made up peanut-shaped objects called tubulin dimers. Each dimer has about ten thousand atoms in it. Penrose proposes that each dimer is a basic computational unit, operating using quantum effects. If he is right, the computing power of the brain is grossly underestimated if neurons are considered as the basic computing element. There are about ten million dimers per neuron, and because of their tiny size each one ought to operate about a million times as fast as a neuron can fire. Only with such a mechanism, Penrose argues, can the rather complex behavior of a single-celled animal such as a paramecium (which totally lacks a nervous system) be explained.

Penrose's critics point out that microtubules are also found elsewhere in the body, in everything from livers to lungs. Does this mean that your spleen, big toe, and kidneys are to be credited with intelligence?

My own feeling is that Penrose's ideas sounded a lot better before he suggested a mechanism. The microtubule idea feels weak and unpersuasive. Like the Wizard of Oz, the theory was more impressive when it was hidden away behind the curtain.

My views, however, are not the issue. Is Penrose wrong, destined to be remembered as a scientific heretic? Or is he right, and a true prophet?

It is too soon to say. But if he proves to be right, his ideas will produce a huge change in our conceptions of physics and its relation to consciousness. More than that, the long-term future of computer design will become incredibly difficult.

With the latter point in mind, we might paraphrase Bertrand Russell. He said of Wittgenstein's theories, as we can say of Penrose's: "Whether they are true or not, I do not know; I devoutly hope that they are not, as they make mathematics and logic almost incredibly difficult."

Meanwhile, I am waiting for a story to appear making use of Penrose's extraordinary claim that we are controlled by quantum processes within the brain's microtubules.

 

13.6 Diseases from space. In the late 1970s, two respected scientists proposed an interesting and radical new theory (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1977): Certain diseases are often not carried from one person to another by the usually accepted methods, sometimes mutating as they go to become other strains of the same infection; instead, the diseases arrive on Earth from space, and the observed variations arise there.

In the words of Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe (1977), the joint proposers of the theory:

"In Diseases from Space we shall be presenting arguments and facts which support the idea that the viruses and bacteria responsible for the infectious diseases of plants and animals arrive at the Earth from space."

They support their contention on biochemical grounds, and also from statistical evidence on the spread of influenza in Britain.

The same two workers also suggest that life itself did not develop on Earth. It was borne here, as viruses and bacteria.

Again in their words: "Furthermore, we shall argue that apart from their harmful effect, these same viruses and bacteria have been responsible in the past for the origin and evolution of life on the Earth. In our view, all aspects of the basic biochemistry of life come from outside the Earth."

Where, then, did life originally develop? Hoyle and Wickramasinghe give their answer: It arose naturally in that great spherical collection of comets known as the Oort Cloud, which orbits far beyond the observable solar system. They argue that conditions for the spontaneous generation of life were far more favorable there than they were on Earth, three and a half billion years ago when life first appeared here.

This idea is not totally original with them. Early this century, the Swedish chemist Svante August Arrhenius proposed that life is widespread in the universe, being constantly diffused from one world to the next in the form of spores. The spores travel freely through space, now and again reaching and seeding some new habitable world (Arrhenius, 1907). Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, while not accepting this panspermia concept totally, and substituting viruses and bacteria for Arrhenius's spores, do claim that life was brought to Earth in a similar fashion.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also deny that many epidemics of infectious disease are spread by person-to-person contact or through intermediate carriers (such as lice and mosquitoes). They claim that influenza, bubonic plague, the common cold, and smallpox all originate in the fall of clouds of infecting spores (bacteria or viruses) from space, and are mainly spread by incidence from the air.

This sounds, on the face of it, somewhat unlikely. No one has ever observed a virus or a bacterium present in space, or arriving from space. However, the reaction of the medical community went far beyond polite skepticism. The new idea was ignored or vilified as preposterous, and it was treated as a true scientific heresy.

Why was the reaction of the medical establishment so strong?

First, there was a question of qualifications. Not as scientists, where the credentials of both proposers are impeccable. Hoyle is one of the world's great astrophysicists, a man who has made profound contributions to the field, and Wickramasinghe is a well-known professor. However, neither Hoyle nor Wickramasinghe is a physician or a microbiologist. They were astronomers, operating far outside their own territory.

Second, the presently accepted idea for disease transmission was itself once a scientific heresy. It took three hundred years for the notion that tiny organisms can invade the human body and cause infections to change from wild surmise to scientific dogma. Such a theory, so hard-won, is not readily abandoned. Thus, in 1546, Girolamo Fracastoro proposed a germ theory of disease. In his book De Contagione, he suggested three modes of transmission: by direct contact, indirectly through such things as clothing, and through the air. He was generally ignored, if not actively ridiculed.

The situation changed only in the late eighteenth century, when scientists were able to verify the existence of bacteria by direct observation with the microscope. And it was not for almost a hundred years more, until the second half of the nineteenth century, that Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch put the matter beyond question when they isolated the specific bacterial agents that cause anthrax, rabies, cholera, and tuberculosis, and used inoculation to protect against several of them.

The modern picture of disease transmission then appeared to be complete, and it is not far from Fracastoro's original ideas. Contagious diseases spread from person to person. Some call for personal contact, like syphilis. Some can be transmitted through the air, like the common cold. Some diseases, like malaria, require the action of an intermediate organism such as a mosquito; and some, like trichinosis, can be transmitted by the ingestion of infected food. However, all communicable diseases have one thing in common: they originate somewhere on the surface of the Earth, and they are carried by terrestrial organisms.

This leads at once to the third and perhaps the biggest objection to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's theory: there is overwhelming direct evidence for the conventional means of disease transmission. Even if the new theory were to prove right in part, it cannot be the whole story. Thus, the rapid spread of bubonic plague through Europe in the fourteenth century, and the almost instantaneous and devastating effects of smallpox on native American Indians when it was brought by Europeans in the early sixteenth century, owe nothing at all to space-borne spores. The attacks were too sudden and the timing too coincidental. These diseases ran riot in populations which had no previous exposure to them, and therefore lacked protective antibodies against them.

Ultimately, then, the main argument against the theory offered by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe may not be that it is ridiculous, or biologically unfounded, or in some way impossible. It is that it is not necessary, since the established notions of disease propagation seem quite sufficient to explain everything that we see, and are required for that explanation.

Until today's theories prove inadequate, or there is better evidence for the new theory, the idea that diseases arrive from space will remain what it is today: a scientific heresy.

 

13.7 Cold fusion. On March 23, 1989, a press conference was held at the University of Utah. The organizers of the conference stated that they had managed to initiate and sustain a nuclear fusion reaction. That announcement astonished the world, for several unrelated reasons.

First, the use of a press conference is not the normal method for announcement of a scientific discovery. Scientists have a well-defined procedure for doing this: the discovery is described in enough detail for others to know what has been done, and to begin the process of verification; in the case of an important discovery, where precedent may be important, a brief note is sent to the appropriate scientific journal and preprints are sent to professional colleagues. Today, the preprint often takes the form of an e-mail letter. Scientists do not choose a press conference as the appropriate mechanism to reveal their discoveries. Those discoveries do not, as this one did, take over newspaper headlines around the world and lead to wild speculation in certain metals.

The second reason for astonishment was the nature of the claimed discovery itself. Nuclear fusion is well-known to science. The fusion of hydrogen to helium is the main process that allows the sun and stars to shine. Here on Earth, nuclear fusion makes possible the hydrogen bomb. Large experimental facilities in this country and elsewhere have spent billions of dollars over the past forty years, trying to tame the violent fusion of the hydrogen bomb to permit a controlled release of energy. Nuclear fusion looks like the Holy Grail of endless and clean energy production, but the experimental equipment needed is large and complex, and employs temperatures of tens or hundreds of millions of degrees—hotter than the center of the sun.

By contrast, the nuclear fusion described in the Utah press conference takes place at room temperature—"cold" fusion—and calls for only the simplest of means. All that is needed is a beaker of "heavy" water and a palladium electrode. Heavy water is water in which the normal hydrogen atoms have been replaced by deuterium, a rare but well-known heavier form of hydrogen (see Chapter 5). Heavy water is naturally present in ordinary water, at a concentration of about one part in six thousand. Palladium is a steely-white metal, also rather rare but well-known and widely available.

The final surprise in the Utah announcement was the identity of the two scientists given credit for the discovery. Martin Fleischmann had a distinguished career in England before retiring as an emeritus professor from the University of Southampton and beginning the work in Utah. He is a Fellow of Britain's most prestigious scientific group, the Royal Society, and has been described by colleagues as "more innovative than any other electrochemist in the world." Stanley Pons had been a student under Fleischmann at Southampton, before becoming the prolifically productive head of the University of Utah chemistry department. Both men thus had excellent credentials—as chemists. Nuclear fusion, however, is a problem calling for knowledge not of chemistry but of physics. It requires an understanding of the processes by which the nuclei of atoms can be combined.

Physicists as a group often do not have the highest regard for chemistry, which they consider as messy and unsystematic and more like cooking than science. It was, therefore, unusually satisfying to chemists and galling to physicists when Fleischmann and Pons, using the simplest of means, seemed to have made the whole expensive business of conventional nuclear fusion experiment, as performed by physicists, seem irrelevant.

Fleischmann and Pons had an explanation for the way their results had been achieved. At first sight that explanation seemed very plausible. It has been known for generations that palladium has a high natural affinity for hydrogen. A palladium rod, placed in a hydrogen atmosphere, will absorb up to nine hundred times its own volume of hydrogen. It will do the same thing if heavy hydrogen is used in place of ordinary hydrogen. According to Fleischmann and Pons, the palladium electrode would absorb heavy hydrogen from the heavy water, and within the palladium the heavy hydrogen nuclei would be so close to each other that some of them would fuse. The result would be helium and heat. Neutrons, an elementary particle present in the heavy hydrogen, would be released as a by-product. Fleischmann and Pons reported seeing significant heat, more than could possibly be produced by chemical processes, and a small number of neutrons. All of this happened at room temperature, in a beaker no bigger than a peanut butter jar.

The press conference did not give details of the process, so other groups had trouble at first either confirming or denying the claimed results. It took several months before a coherent picture emerged. When the dust settled, the verdict was not in favor of Fleischmann and Pons. Some other groups observed a few, a very few, neutrons, barely more than the normal background level. Others reported excess heat, but no neutrons, and again it was nowhere near what had been claimed by the Utah group.

Why didn't Fleischmann and Pons seek confirmation from those other groups, before they made their announcement? To some extent, they did, and they were still in the process of doing so. However, great pressure to make that announcement prematurely, and to do it through a press conference, came not from the two chemists but from officials at the University of Utah. The university administrators could see an enormous profit potential if the cold fusion claims held up. That potential would only be realized if patents were granted and the Utah claim to precedence recognized. It must have seemed like a good bet, at least to the officials: the reputation of two professional chemists, against possible multiple billions of dollars of gain for the university.

Today, the bet appears to be over. Fleischmann and Pons were the losers. They still insist that their original results are correct, and continue their research not in Utah but in France, with private funding. However, few other reputable scientists believe they will find anything valuable.

Even at the very beginning, there were basic physical reasons to discount the "cold fusion" claim. The number of neutrons observed was far too small, by a factor of billions, to be consistent with the claimed heat production. Real fusion would produce huge numbers of neutrons, enough to be fatal to anyone in the same room as the beaker with its palladium electrode.

Many people continue to believe ardently in cold fusion. I do not, though some new phenomenon—not fusion—may be there. And I must say, I feel a great deal of sympathy for Pons and Fleischmann. They were pushed by university administrators into making the premature announcement of results.

Had they followed a more conventional route, the results might have been very different. The obvious parallel is in the area of high temperature superconductivity. In 1986, Müller and Bednorz produced the first ceramic superconductors. Such things were "impossible" according to conventional theories. But when experiment and theory disagree, theory must change. Müller and Bednorz won the 1987 Nobel Prize for physics.

Were Pons and Fleischmann robbed of similar fame by the actions of others? Possibly. However, martyrdom is not enough to make a theory correct. Today, cold fusion remains as scientific heresy.

 

13.8 No Big Bang. The standard model of cosmology sees the Universe as beginning in a primordial, highly condensed fireball that has been expanding ever since. Such a model explains the recession of the galaxies, the 2.7 Kelvin microwave background radiation, and the relative abundance of the elements, particularly hydrogen and helium. Each of these independent phenomena seems to provide powerful observational evidence.

Critics of the Big Bang point out that the theory does not explain the mystery of the missing matter, nor how galaxies formed in the first billion years of an originally smooth universe. The nature of quasars is also open to question.

It is one thing to object to a theory. It is another to offer a viable alternative. What do we have that might replace the Big Bang cosmology?

There are two independent groups critical of the Big Bang theory. The first is led by Fred Hoyle, Halton Arp, and Geoffrey Burbidge. Arp has done considerable observational work on quasars, showing that some of them with large red shifts seem to be physically connected to galaxies displaying much smaller red shifts. If this is the case, then the whole redshift-distance correlation falls apart. And Hoyle, back in the late 1940s, along with Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi, proposed an alternative to the Big Bang known as the "continuous creation" or "steady state theory." (Hoyle, more recently, says that the word "steady" was a bad choice. He, Gold, and Bondi meant only to indicate that the rate of recession of the galaxies does not change with time, as is the case with Big Bang cosmology.) The original form of the steady-state theory, however, had other problems; observations did not support the independence of galactic age with distance that it predicted.

Hoyle, along with the Indian astronomer Narlikar, has developed a new and different version of the steady-state theory, this one consistent with ideas of cosmological inflation needed also by the Big Bang theory. Instead of a single, one-time Big Bang, however, Hoyle and Narlikar posit a large number of small acts of creation, arising from vacuum fluctuations and suffering rapid expansions or "inflations."

Hoyle also proposes another mechanism to explain the microwave background radiation, although in a sense, he hardly needs to. Scientists long ago, knowing nothing about an expanding universe or the recession of the galaxies, had calculated the temperature of open space. Charles Guillaume, in a paper published in 1896, calculated a temperature of 5.75 Kelvin. Eddington in 1926 estimated the temperature as 3 Kelvin. Early proponents of the Big Bang, by contrast, believed the temperature ought to be higher, anywhere from 7 to 30 Kelvin.

Hoyle and his associates argue that the microwave background radiation stems from a well-known process called thermalization. All that is happening, they say, is that the light from stars is being scattered to longer and longer wavelengths by its interactions with metallic "whiskers" (length-to-width ratios of 1:100,000) seeded throughout interstellar and intergalactic space by supernova explosions. In Hoyle's words, Nature is an "inveterate thermalizer," and the process will continue until actual stellar radio sources dominate—which is in the microwave region.

The second group of Big Bang critics began with Hannes Alfven, a Swedish Nobel Prize winner in Physics. His work has been continued by Anthony Peratt and Eric Lerner, and the resulting theory is usually termed "plasma cosmology."

Plasma cosmology has its own proposed mechanism for explaining the 2.7 Kelvin background radiation. It is based on a theory proposed in 1989 by Emil Wolf. The "Wolf shift" shows how light passing through a cloud of gas is shifted in frequency toward the red end of the spectrum. This effect and the thermalization effect (both of which may be operating) throw question on the recession rates of the galaxies.

The plasma cosmology group also argues that most of the matter in the universe is not electrically neutral, but charged—free electrons, or positively charged nuclei. Since this is the case, electromagnetism, rather than gravity, is the controlling force. Alfven, making this assumption, concluded that sheets of electric current must crisscross the Universe. Interacting with these, plasma clouds would develop a complex structure and complex motions. Alfven predicted that the universe would display a cellular and filamentary nature over very large scales.

At the time, the universe seemed to be smooth at such scales, and his ideas were not accepted. Evidence of "walls" and "voids" and galactic super-clusters did not appear until the mid-1980s. Today, the supporters of the Big Bang are hard pressed to explain what Alfven's theory establishes in a natural way.

Finally, there is the question of the abundance of the elements. Both the Hoyle school and the plasma cosmology school have pointed out that, according to the Big Bang's own equations, the abundances of four light nuclei—hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and lithium—must all be linked. If the helium abundance of the universe, today, is below 23 percent (as observation indicates) then there will be more deuterium than observed. In fact, there will be eight times as much. On the other hand, if the density of the universe is high enough to avoid producing too much deuterium in the very early days, then there is not enough helium now. It should be more than 24 percent. And finally, when we put lithium and deuterium together into the picture, the necessary helium abundance comes out as over 25 percent.

In other words, juggle the Big Bang theory as you like, you cannot come up with a version that provides the observed amounts of the three substances.

We see that the three mainstays of Big Bang theory are subject to alternative explanations or open to question. So where does that leave us?

Well, today the Big Bang remains as standard dogma; anything else, steady-state or continuous creation or plasma cosmology, is still scientific heresy.

However, I can't help feeling that Big Bang theory has some major problems. Its proponents, if they are at all sensitive, must feel the winds of change blowing on the back of their necks. In science, that is usually a healthy sign.

 

13.9 Free energy. Energy from nothing, free electricity drawn from the air. Who could resist it? I include this more for fun than anything else, and because I experienced the matter at first hand.

It began in February 1996, with a telephone call from Arthur Clarke in Sri Lanka: "There's going to be a demonstration on March 5th, at Union Rail Station in Washington, D.C. A group claims to have a way of generating free electricity. I can't go. Can you?"

I could, and did. The East Hall of Union Station had been rented for the occasion, with an overflow room upstairs that offered a real-time video of the live performance. The event was scheduled to begin at 7:30. I went along early, and made a point of talking with the group (the Columbus Club) who rented out the space. One man talked of the event as a "show"; i.e., an entertainment. A lady responsible for registration had been told to expect about nine hundred people. My estimate of the actual turnout is maybe one hundred, at the beginning. By the time I left, roughly at ten o'clock, no more than fifty were left.

The man who did most of the talking was tall, American, dark-haired, and very experienced in presentation. He spoke for two and a half hours, without notes. He had a disarming manner, and constantly referred to himself as more lucky than clever. In fact, because he disdained technical knowledge, it was hard to question him about technical matters.

He began by describing a heat pump that seemed quite conventional and comprehensible. The "low-temperature phase change" technology is exactly that employed in a refrigerator, with freon as the material that is cycled. He described his heat pump as better than anyone else's, and that may be true. It would require a good deal of study to prove otherwise. Less plausible was the method by which the pump was designed. He said he came across it by accident, taking an evaporator, a compressor, and a condenser, of rather arbitrary sizes, dumping freon into them, and finding that the result performed better than anything else available—by a factor of three. Because he said he was not technical, answers to some important questions were not forthcoming. Did he vary the parameters of his system? Or, how does he know that his design is the best that there is?—a claim that he made.

However, the heat pump claim was completely testable. If he had stopped there (we were maybe forty minutes into his two and a half hour presentation) I would have been favorably impressed.

I had more trouble with the next, nontechnical statements that he made. He asserted that he had built this device in the early 1980s and made 50 million dollars in 18 months. The electric companies then drove him out of business, made three attempts on his life, threatened his associates, and in some way not altogether clear arranged for him to serve two years in jail. Time not wasted, he says, because he had 17 new energy production ideas while locked up.

Ignoring all that, I was disturbed by three technical aspects of the next part of the presentation. First, there was a continuing confusion between energy storage and energy production. Second, he moved smoothly from the statement that he had a very efficient heat pump, which I could accept, to a statement that he had a pump that produced a net energy output—in other words, the efficiency was more than a hundred percent. Third, every method of producing energy that I know of relies on the existence of a thermal gradient, usually in the form of a hot and a cold reservoir. These two seemed to be muddled in his discussion, with the heat flow going in the wrong direction. In other words, he took energy from his cold reservoir and put it into his hot reservoir. That's a neat trick.

We move on. Next he introduced a new device, which he termed the Fischer engine. This, as he describes it, is a steam (or, if you prefer, freon) engine which uses super-heated water (or freon) under high pressure and requires no condenser. His explanation of how it works left me unsatisfied. However, I believe that the Fischer engine could be a genuine advance. He stated that "the Carnot cycle is not a major concern." Since the Carnot cycle represents an ideal situation in which all processes are reversible, his statement is equivalent to saying that the second law of thermodynamics is not a major concern, at least to him. It is to me.

After this, things became less comprehensible. He coupled his heat pump with the Fischer engine, and asserted that the result would be more powerful than an internal combustion engine of the same size, would never need gasoline (or any other fuel), would not need any oil changes, and would run for 400,000 miles before it wore out.

If some of those statements seem remarkable, during the final hour several much more striking ones were offered. He declared that he knew five different ways to produce free electricity. He stated that he had seen a working anti-gravity machine. Finally, he again insisted that his desire to offer the world (or at least the United States) free, unlimited, pollution-less energy was being thwarted by the utility companies.

In summary, it was a fascinating evening. However, it seems a little premature to sell that Exxon or BP stock. It also proves to me that entrepreneurs are still out there, trolling the deep waters for sucker fish.

 

13.10 Wild powers. So far in this chapter we have discussed what might be called "offshore science." The ideas might be heretical, and an occasional proponent might suggest lunacy or charlatanism, but they live within the general scientific framework. Now we are heading for deep water.

Let us begin with a quandary. What can you say about something for which every scientific test has turned up no evidence, but which 90 percent of the people—maybe it's 99 percent—believe?

I am referring to the "wild powers" of the human mind. A short list of them would have to include telepathy, clairvoyance, prescience, psychokinesis, divination, dowsing, teleportation, reincarnation, levitation, channeling, faith healing, hexing, and psychics.

In addition to these, another group of widely-held beliefs involves aliens: abduction by aliens, sightings of alien spacecraft, rides in alien spacecraft, impregnation by aliens, and—a central element of the movie Independence Day—aliens who landed on Earth, only to have their existence concealed by the U.S. Government.

I know at least one person who believes in each of these things, often while rejecting many of the others as ridiculous. People who pooh-pooh the idea of, say, UFOs, will accept that humans, in times of stress, can communicate over long distances with close family members—and I am not referring to telephone calls. At least one United States president, Ronald Reagan, permitted astrology to play a part in his administration. Another's wife, Hillary Clinton, may have tried to channel Eleanor Roosevelt, though she later claimed that it was just a game. I know several trained scientists who believe that the government is covering up knowledge of alien landings on Earth—although they acknowledge that the government has been singularly inefficient in hiding other secrets.

This is a book about science. Rather than engage in pro and con arguments for the hidden powers of the human mind, or the presence or absence of aliens, I will say only this: good science fiction stories have been written using every item on my list. Some of them are among the best tales in the field. Thus, Alfred Bester used telepathy in The Demolished Man (Bester, 1953), and teleportation in The Stars My Destination (Bester, 1956). Robert Heinlein had aliens taking over humans in The Puppet Masters (Heinlein, 1951). Theodore Sturgeon employed a variety of wild powers in More Than Human (Sturgeon, 1953), as did Frank Herbert in Dune (Herbert, 1965). Zenna Henderson, in her stories of The People, used aliens and wild powers to great effect (Henderson, 1961, 1966).

These writers took unlikely ingredients, and used them to produce absolute classics. Feel free to go and do thou likewise.

 

13.11 Beyond the edge of the world. Finally, let's take a trip right to the edge of the world and off it, with the Kidjel Ratio. I feel fairly confident that this has never been used in a science fiction story, and it's never going to be used in one of mine, so it's all yours.

It's not often that a revolutionary new scientific advance makes its first appearance in the Congressional Record. But here we go:

 

From the Congressional Record
of the U.S. House of Representatives,
3 June, 1960:
The Kidjel Ratio—A New Age in
Applied Mathematics and Arts
Extension of Remarks of
Hon. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii.

"Mr. Speaker, Hawaii's wealth in human resources has once again proved to be unlimited. The ingenuity and pioneering spirit of its citizens have given to the world a new and practical system of solving a multitude of problems in the important fields of applied mathematics, art, and design.

"The Kidjel ratio is now being used to great advantage in more than 40 related activities in the world of architecture, engineering, mathematics, fine arts and industrial arts . . .

"Academically speaking, the Kidjel ratio also led to the discovery of the solutions of the three famous 2,500 year-old so-called impossible problems in Greek geometry, popularly known as:

"First. Trisecting the angle—dividing an angle into three equal parts.

"Second. Squaring the circle—constructing a square equal in area to a given circle.

"Third. Doubling the cube—constructing a cube, double in volume to that of a given cube with the use of compasses and unmarked ruler only . . ."

What is the Kidjel ratio? I have no idea. But as to the three mathematical advances cited, all three have been proved mathematically impossible with the restriction imposed by the Greeks who originally proposed them (solution must be done by a geometrical construction of a finite number of steps, using compasses and unmarked ruler only). The first and third were shown to be impossible by about 1640, when Descartes realized that their solutions implied the solution of a cubic equation, which cannot be done using ruler and compasses only. The second was disposed of in 1882, when Ferdinand Lindemann proved that ? is a "transcendental" number, not capable of being expressed as the solution of any algebraic equation.

What is impossible to mathematicians is apparently simple enough for the U.S. House of Representatives. Moreover, the Kidjel ratio amendment is not without precedent. Here we have another fine example:

"A bill for introducing a new mathematical truth, and offered as a contribution to education to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost by paying any royalties whatever on the same . . ."—House Bill No. 246, introduced in the Indiana House on January 18, 1897.

Section 1 of the bill continues:

"Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana: It has been found that a circular area is to the square on a line equal to the quadrant of the circumference, as the area of an equilateral rectangle is to the square on one side. The diameter employed as the linear unit according to the present rule in computing the circle's area is entirely wrong . . ."

In other words, the value of ?, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and one of the most fundamental numbers in mathematics, was not what mathematicians believed it to be. The value of ? is an infinite decimal, 3.141592653 . . . which can be approximated as closely as desired, but not given exactly. However, a correct and exact value was promised to the Indiana legislature, thanks to the efforts of an Indiana physician, Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin.

This piece of nonsense would probably have become law, except for the timely arrival at the State Capitol of Professor C.A. Waldo, a member of the mathematics department of Purdue University, there on quite other business. He was astonished to find the House debating a piece of mathematics, with a representative from eastern Indiana saying, "The case is perfectly simple. If we pass this bill which establishes a new and correct value of ?, the author offers without cost the use of this discovery and its free publication in our school textbooks, while everyone else must pay him a royalty."

Professor Waldo managed to educate the senators. They voted to postpone the bill indefinitely on its second reading. The State of Indiana learned a lesson, and passed up a wonderful opportunity to become the laughing-stock of the mathematical world. But as Senator Inouye proves, no lesson lasts forever.

 

13.12 One last heresy. Not all science fiction stories have to be serious. They can, if you prefer it, be ridiculous. Here, as an example, is one which plays games with a few basic ideas of physics. I leave it to the reader to pick up the references to theories and people. I will only add that all the formulas quoted in the story are correct.

 

 

THE NEW PHYSICS: THE SPEED OF
LIGHTNESS, CURVED SPACE,

AND OTHER HERESIES

 

Listwolme is a small world with a thin but permanently cloudy atmosphere. The inhabitants have never seen the stars, nor become aware of anything beyond their own planet. There is one main center of civilization which confined itself to a small region of the surface until about a hundred years ago, when an industrial revolution took place. For the first time, rapid transportation over substantial areas of the planet became possible.

Orbital velocity at the surface of Listwolme is less than two kilometers a second. The meetings of the Listwolme Scientific Academy following the development of highvelocity surface vehicles are chronicled below. The highlights of those meetings were undoubtedly the famous exchanges between Professor Nessitor and Professor Spottipon.

 

The first debate: In which Professor Nessitor reveals the curious results of his experiments with high-speed vehicles, and proposes a daring hypothesis.  

Nessitor: As Members of the Academy will recall, a few months ago I began to install sensitive measuring devices aboard the Tristee Two, the first vehicle to move at a speed more than ten times that of a running schmitzpoof. The work was not easy, because it was first necessary to suppress all vibration induced by the car's contact with the surface.

One month ago we achieved the right combination of smooth suspension and vibration damping. It was with some excitement that I placed one of our instruments, a sensitive spring balance, within the vehicle and we began steadily to increase our speed. As you may have heard, there have been reports of "feeling light" from the drivers of these cars when they go at maximum velocity.

Fellow scientists, those feelings are no illusion! Our instruments showed a definite decrease in load on the balance as our speed was increased. There is a relationship between weight and motion!

(As Nessitor paused, there was a murmur of surprise and incredulity around the great hall. Professor Spottipon rose to his feet.)

Spottipon: Professor Nessitor, your reputation is beyond question. What would arouse skepticism from another in your case is treated with great respect. But your statement is so amazing that we would like to hear more of these experiments. For example, I have heard of this "lightening" effect at high speeds, but seen no quantitative results. Were your balances sensitive enough to measure some relation between the lightness and the speed?

Nessitor (triumphantly): With great precision. We measured the weight shown on the balance at a wide variety of speeds, and from this I have been able to deduce a precise formula between the measured weight, the original weight when the vehicle was at rest, and the speed of movement. It is as follows.

 

Here Professor Nessitor went to the central display screen and sketched on it the controversial formula. It is believed that this was the first time it had ever appeared to public view. In the form that Nessitor used, it reads:

 

(Weight at speed v)=(Rest weight)x(1-v2/c2)

 

When the formula was exhibited there was a silence, while the others examined its implications.

 

Spottipon (thoughtfully): I think I can follow the significance of most of this. But what is the constant, c, that appears in your equation?

Nessitor: It is a velocity, a new constant of nature. Since it measures the degree to which an object is lightened when it moves with velocity v, I suggest that the basic constant, c, should be termed the "speed of lightness."

Spottipon (incredulously): You assert that this holds anywhere on Listwolme? That your formula does not depend on the position where the experiment is conducted?

Nessitor: That is indeed my contention. In a series of experiments at many places on the surface, the same result was obtained everywhere, with the same velocity, "c." It is almost four times as fast as our fastest car.

(There was a long pause, during which Professor Spottipon was seen to be scribbling rapidly on a scribe pad. When he had finished his face bore a look of profound inspiration.)

Spottipon: Professor Nessitor, the formula you have written has some strange implications. You assert that there is a lightening of weight with speed across the surface. This we might accept, but you have not taken your formula to its logical limit. Do you realize that there must be a speed when the weight vanishes? When v=c, you have a situation where an object does not push at all on the balance! Worse than that, if v exceeds your "speed of lightness" you would calculate a negative weight. If that were true, a car moving at such a speed would fly completely off the surface. You would have created the long-discussed and arguably impossible "flying machine."

Nessitor (calmly): As Professor Spottipon has observed with his usual profound insight, the speed of lightness is a most fundamental constant. My interpretation is as follows: since it is clearly ridiculous that an object should have negative weight, the formula is trying to tell us something very deep. It is pointing out that there is no way that an object can ever exceed the speed of lightness. The speed that we can deduce from these experiments, c, represents the ultimate limit of speed that can ever be attained.

(Sensation. The assembled scientists began to talk among themselves, some frankly disbelieving, others pulling forth their scribe pads and writing their own calculations. At last a loud voice was heard above the general hubbub.)

Voice: Professor Nessitor! Do you have any name for this new theory of yours?

Nessitor (shouting to be heard): I do. Since the effects depend only on the motion relative to the ground, I suggest the new results should be termed the principle of relativity. I think that . . .

(Professor Nessitor's next comments were unfortunately lost in the general noise of the excited assembly.)

 

Six months passed before Professor Nessitor appeared again at a meeting of the Academy. In those months, there had been much speculation and heated argument, with calls for more experiments. It was to an expectant but still skeptical audience that the Professor made his second address.

Nessitor: Distinguished colleagues, last time that I was here there were calls for proof, for some fundamental basis for the formula I presented to you then. It was to answer those calls that I embarked, four months ago, on a new set of experiments with the Tristee Two vehicle. We had installed a new instrument on board our car. It measures distances very accurately, and permits the car's course to be controlled to an absolutely straight line. For it had occurred to me to ask the question, if velocity and weight are so closely linked, could it be that distance itself depends on some unknown factors?

Spottipon (somewhat irritably): With all due respect, Nessitor, I have no idea what you mean by such a statement. Distance is distance, no matter how fast you traverse it. What could you hope to find? I hoped that you would have repeated the experiments on speed and weight.

Nessitor: My esteemed colleague, please have patience. Permit me to tell you what happened. We set the Tristee Two to travel a long distance at various speeds. And indeed, we confirmed the speed-weight relation. At the same time, we were measuring the distance traveled. But in performing this experiment we were moving longer linear distances over the surface of Listwolme than any other scientific group had ever done.

I therefore decided to conduct an experiment. We traveled a long distance in a certain direction, accurately measuring this with our new instrument. Then we made a half turn and proceeded far along this new line, again measuring distance all the way. Finally, we headed straight back to our original starting point, following the hypotenuse of the triangle and measuring this distance also.

Now, we are all familiar with the Sharog-Paty Theorem that relates the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle.

(Nessitor went to the central display panel and scribed the famous Sharog-Paty relation: c2=a2+b2. There was a mutter of comments from behind him.)

Impatient voice from the audience: Why are you wasting our time with such trivia? This relation is known to every unfledged child!

Nessitor: Exactly. But it is not what we found from our measurements! On long trips—and we made many such—the Sharog-Paty relation does not hold. The further we went in our movements, the worse the fit between theory and observation.

After some experiment, I was able to find a formula that expresses the true relation between the distances a, b, and c. It is as follows.

(Nessitor stepped again to the display panel and wrote the second of his famous relations, in the form:

 

cos(c/R)=cos(a/R)xcos(b/R)

 

There was more intense study and excited scribbling in the audience. Professor Spottipon alone did not seem to share in the general stir. His thin face had gone pale, and he seemed to be in the grip of some strong private emotion. At last he rose again to his feet.)

Spottipon: Professor, old friend and distinguished colleague. What is "R" in your equation?

Nessitor: It is a new fundamental constant, a distance that I calculate to be about three million paces.

Spottipon (haltingly): I have trouble saying these words, but they must be said. In some of my own work I have looked at the geometry of other surfaces than the plane. Professor Nessitor, the formula you have written there already occurs in the literature. It is the formula that governs the distance relations for the surface of a sphere. A sphere of radius R.

Nessitor: I know. I have made a deduction from this—

Spottipon: I beg you, do not say it!

Nessitor: I must, although I know its danger. I understand the teachings of our church, that we live on the Great Plain of the World, in God's glorious flatness. At the same time I cannot ignore the evidence of my experiments.

(The Great Hall had fallen completely silent. One of the recording scribes dropped a scribe pin in his excitement and received quick glares of censure. It was a few seconds before Nessitor felt able to continue. He stood there with head bowed.)

Nessitor: Colleagues, I must say to you what Professor Spottipon with his great insight realized at once. The distance formula is identical with that for distances on a sphere. My experiments suggest that space is curved. We live not on a plane, but on the surface of an immense sphere.

(The tension crackled around the hall. The penalty for heresy—smothering in live toads—was known to all. At last Professor Spottipon moved to Nessitor's side and placed one hand on his shoulder.)

Spottipon: My old friend, you have been overworking. On behalf of all of us, I beg you to take a rest. This "curved space" fancy of yours is absurd—we would slide down the sides and fall off!

(The hall rang with relieved laughter.)

Spottipon: Even if our minds could grasp the concept of a curved space, the teachings of the Church must predominate. Go home, now, and rest until your mind is clearer.

(Professor Nessitor was helped from the stage by kind hands. He looked dazed).

 

For almost a year, the Academy met without Nessitor's presence. There were rumors of new theories, of work conducted at white heat in total seclusion. When news came that he would again attend a meeting, the community buzzed with speculation. Rumors of his heresy had spread. When he again stood before the assembly, representatives of the Church were in the audience. Professor Spottipon cast an anxious look at the Churchmen as he made Nessitor's introduction.

Spottipon: Let me say how pleased we are, Professor Nessitor, to welcome you again to this company. I must add my personal pleasure that you have abandoned the novel but misguided ideas that you presented to us on earlier occasions. Welcome to the Academy!

Nessitor (rising to prolonged applause, he looked nervous but determined): Thank you. I am glad to be again before this group, an assembly that has been central to my whole working life. As Professor Spottipon says, I have offered you some new ideas over the past couple of years, ideas without fundamental supporting theory. I am now in a position to offer a new and far more basic approach. Space is curved, and we live on the surface of a sphere! I can now prove it.

Spottipon (motioning to other scientists on the stage): Quick, help me to get him out of here before it's too late.

Nessitor (speaking quickly): The curvature of space is real, and the speed of lightness is real. But the two theories are not independent! The fundamental constants c and R are related to a third one. You know that falling bodies move with a rate of change of speed, g, the "gravitational constant." I can now prove that there is an exact relation between these things, that c2=gxR. To prove this, consider the motion of a particle around the perimeter of a circle . . .

(The audience was groaning in dismay. Before Nessitor could speak further, friends were removing him gently but firmly from the stage. But the representatives of the church were already moving forward.)

 

At his trial, two months later, Professor Nessitor recanted all his heretical views, admitting that the new theories of space and time were deluded and nonsensical. His provisional sentence of toad-smothering was commuted to a revocation of all leaping privileges. He has settled quietly to work at his home, where he is writing a book that will be published only after his death.

And there were those present at his trial who will tell you that as Nessitor stepped down from the trial box he whispered to himself—so softly that the words may have been imagined rather than heard—"But it is round."

 

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