Authors: Bill Bryson
Einstein averred: ‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.’ It is remarkable that atoms on Earth are the same as in distant stars. And that our minds, which evolved – along with our intuitions – to cope with life on the African savannah, can grasp the highly counterintuitive laws governing the quantum world and the cosmos.
Scientists can never reach finality. Let me recall something that puzzled Isaac Newton three hundred years ago. He could explain why the planets traced out ellipses around the Sun, but the initial ‘set-up’ of the solar system was a mystery to him. Why were the orbits of the planets all close to a single plane, the ecliptic, whereas the comets plunged in from random directions? In his book
Opticks
he writes: ‘blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in orbits concentrick’. ‘Such a wonderful uniformity’ must, he claimed, be the result of providence. This coplanarity of the orbits, however, is now understood: it’s a natural outcome of the solar system’s origin as a spinning protostellar disc. Indeed, we can trace things back far further still – to the initial instants of the big bang.
But this ‘flashback’ to Newton reminds us that, in conceptual terms,
things are not qualitatively different from his time. However much the causal chain may have been lengthened – however much further back we can trace our origins than he could – we still at some stage have to say ‘things are as they are because they were as they were’.
The phrase ‘theory of everything’, often used in popular books to denote a unification of the fundamental forces, has connotations that are not only hubristic but very misleading. Such a theory would actually offer absolutely zero help to 99 per cent of scientists. There is another open frontier: the study of things that are very complicated. This is the frontier on which most scientists work. They aren’t impeded at all by ignorance of subnuclear physics or the big bang. They are challenged and perplexed by complexity – by the way atoms combine to make all the intricate structures in our environment, especially those that are alive.
There are nonetheless reasons to hope that simple underlying rules might govern some seemingly complex phenomena. John Conway is one of the most charismatic figures in mathematics. His research deals with a branch of maths known as group theory. But he reached a wider audience with his ‘game of life’. In 1970 Conway (then based in Cambridge) wanted to devise a game that would start with a simple pattern and use basic rules to evolve it again and again. He began experimenting with the black and white tiles on a Go board and discovered that by adjusting the simple rules and the starting patterns, some arrangements produced incredibly complex results seemingly from nowhere. The simple rules merely specify when a white square turns into a black square and vice versa. But when applied over and over again, they create a fascinating variety of complicated patterns. Objects emerged that seemingly had a life of their own as they moved around the board. Some of them can reproduce themselves. The real world is like that – simple rules allow complex consequences.
The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up
to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse. But the analogy is poor. The superstructures, the ‘higher level’ sciences dealing with complex systems, aren’t imperilled by an insecure base, as a building is. There are laws of nature in the macroscopic domain that are just as much of a challenge as anything in the micro world, and are conceptually autonomous: for instance, those that describe the transition between regular and chaotic behaviour, and which apply to phenomena as disparate as dripping water pipes and animal populations.
Problems in chemistry, biology, the environment and human sciences remain unsolved because scientists haven’t elucidated the patterns, structures and interconnections – not because we don’t understand subatomic physics well enough. In trying to understand how water waves break, and how insects behave, analysis at the atomic level doesn’t help. An albatross may return predictably to its nest after wandering thousands of miles in the Southern ocean. But its behaviour couldn’t be predicted, even in principle, by regarding it as an assemblage of atoms and solving Schrödinger’s equation. Finding the sequencing of the human genome – discovering the string of molecules that encode our genetic inheritance – is one of the greatest achievements of the last decade. But it is just the prelude to the far greater challenge of post-genomic science: understanding how the genetic code triggers the assembly of proteins, and expresses itself in a developing embryo.
It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial. But astronomy is, quite genuinely, far simpler than the human sciences. Stars are simple: they’re so big and hot that their content is broken down into simple atoms – none match the intricate structure of even an insect, let alone a human. Our everyday world presents twenty-first-century Einsteins with intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum.
The Royal Society’s founders, though fascinated by weird animals, air-pumps and telescopes, were also engaged with the practical issues of their time – the rebuilding of London, navigation and the exploration of the New World. Our horizons have expanded. But the same engagement is imperative in the twenty-first century: there are more people than ever on our planet, all empowered by ever more powerful technology.
Technology advances in symbiosis with science. Computers, for instance, owe their burgeoning power to progress in materials science (and in mathematics too, as Ian Stewart’s chapter reminds us). The silicon chip was perhaps the most transformative single invention of the last century. It has allowed miniaturisation, spawning mobile phones and an Internet with global reach – promoting economic growth, while being sparing of energy and resources.
It was physicists who developed the World Wide Web, and the international scientific community has benefited immensely. Astronomers or geneticists can quickly download any body of data and analyse it. And the Internet has hugely benefited our colleagues in the developing world who formerly depended on slow and inefficient postal services.
A few years ago, three young Indian mathematicians invented a faster scheme for factoring large numbers – something that would be crucial for code-breaking. They posted their results on the web. Such was the interest that within just a day, twenty thousand people had downloaded the work, which was the topic of hastily convened discussions in many centres of mathematical research around the world.
There is a stark contrast here with the struggles of an earlier Indian mathematician to achieve recognition. In 1913 Srinivasa Ramanujan, a clerk in Mumbai, mailed long screeds of mathematical formulae to G.H. Hardy in Cambridge. Hardy had the percipience to recognise that Ramanujan was not the typical green-ink scribbler who finds numerical patterns in the bible or the pyramids. He arranged for Ramanujan to come to Cambridge, and did all he could to foster his genius. (Ramanujan became an FRS. But culture shock and poor health led him to an early death.)
Advances in information technology amaze us by their rapidity – iPhones would have seemed magic thirty years ago. Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme. We can’t of course guess what twenty-first-century inventions will seem ‘magic’ to us today. Scientists have a poor record as forecasters. Ernest Rutherford averred that nuclear energy was moonshine; Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), said, ‘There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home’; and an earlier Astronomer Royal said space travel was utter bilge. I have no crystal ball and won’t add to this inglorious roll call.
Francis Bacon pointed out that the most transformative advances are the least predictable. He cited gunpowder, silk and the mariner’s compass, and contrasted them with (for instance) the techniques for printing, which progressed incrementally.
Incremental steps from today’s technology will, perhaps within a decade, offer each of us (at least in the developed world) high-bandwidth communication with everyone else, and instant access to all recorded knowledge, all music and all visual art. As the genome is better understood, the read out of our genetic code may tell us how (and perhaps when) we are most likely to die. Computer networks will continue to become ever more powerful and pervasive.
Computers may, within less than fifty years, achieve a wide range of human capabilities. Of course, in some respects this has happened already. The most basic pocket calculators can hugely surpass us at arithmetic. IBM’s ‘Deep Blue’ beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion. But not even the most advanced robot can recognise and handle the pieces on a real chessboard as adeptly as a five-year-old child. There’s a long way to go before interactive human-level ‘robotic intelligence’ is achieved.
An arena where advanced robots will surely have clear advantages over humans is outer space. By mid-century, the entire solar system will have been explored by flotillas of tiny robotic craft. And, even if people haven’t followed them, ‘fabricators’ may perform large construction projects, using raw materials that need not come from Earth.
Future robots may relate to their surroundings (and to people) as adeptly as we do, through our eyes and other sense organs. Indeed, their far faster ‘thoughts’ and reactions could give them an advantage over us. Everyone’s
lifestyle and work patterns will then surely be transformed. Robots will be perceived as intelligent beings, to which (or to whom) we can relate, at least in some respects, as we would to our fellow-humans. Moral issues then arise. We generally accept an obligation to ensure that other human beings (and at least some animal species) can fulfil their ‘natural’ potential. Will we have the same duty to sophisticated robots, our own creations? Should we feel guilty about exploiting them? Should we fret if they are underemployed, frustrated, or bored?
‘Deep Blue’ didn’t work out its strategy like a human player: it exploited its computational speed to explore millions of alternative series of moves and responses before deciding an optimum move. Likewise, machines may make scientific discoveries that have eluded unaided human brains – but by testing out millions of possibilities rather than via a theory or strategy. However, the programmer will get the acclaim – just as, in Olympic equestrian events, the medal goes to the rider, not the horse.
Some kind of mental prosthetics may become essential if theorists are to make headway in the most difficult fields. Meteorology and astronomy have been hugely boosted by the ability to simulate a ‘virtual universe’. A unified theory of the physical forces, or a theory of consciousness, might be beyond the powers of unaided human brains, just as surely as quantum mechanics would flummox a chimpanzee.
Another speculation – and a ‘wild card’ in population projections – is that the human lifespan could be substantially extended. Some Americans, worried that they’ll die before this nirvana is reached, bequeath their bodies to be ‘frozen’ on their death, hoping that future generations will resurrect them or download their brains into a computer. For my part, I’d rather end my days in an English churchyard than a Californian refrigerator.
But flaky futurologists aren’t always wrong. Students can derive more stimulus from first-rate science fiction than from second-rate science. We should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to wacky-seeming concepts – just as the Royal Society’s first Fellows did 350 years ago.
One thing we can be sure of, however: there will be an ever-widening gulf between what science allows us to do and what it is prudent or ethical to do – more doors that science could open but which are best kept closed. In respect of (for instance) human reproductive cloning, genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology and robotics, regulation will be called for, on ethical as well as prudential grounds.
But the social and geopolitical context in which these issues will be debated fifty years hence is even harder to forecast than the science itself. The upheavals of the present century will surely be as turbulent as those in the last.
An overwhelming challenge for governments will be to ensure food, energy and resources for a rising and increasingly empowered population, and to avoid catastrophic environmental change or societal disruption. By 2060 there will, barring a global catastrophe, be far more people than today. Fifty years ago the world population was below 3 billion. It has more than doubled since then, to 6.8 billion today. And it’s projected to reach around 9 billion by mid-century. By then, it will be in Asia – not Europe nor the US – that the world’s physical and intellectual capital will be concentrated.
More than half of the world’s people live in countries where fertility has now fallen below replacement level. If this trend quickly extended worldwide, then the global population could gradually decline after mid-century – a development that would surely be benign.
Another firm prediction is that, half a century from now, the world will be warmer than today – though by how much is uncertain, as Stephen Schneider’s chapter explains. Shifts in weather patterns (especially in rainfall) impact most grievously on those least able to adapt, and on countries that have themselves contributed minimally to global CO2 emissions. The prospects seem especially gloomy in Africa, where there will be a billion more people by mid-century than there are today and the birth rate remains high. Climate change aggravates the challenge of feeding this growing population. What should make us more anxious is the significant probability of triggering a grave and irreversible global trend: rising sea levels due to the melting of Greenland’s icecap; runaway release of methane in the tundra, and so forth.