Dear K.C.,
So now I have moved across the bay–still sunny, still that angelic air–to the shiny new Nikko. Actually I can still see a sliver of bay, along with a lot of freeway. I’ve spent $110 on cab fare in the last 24 hours, and the inside of the rear door came off in my hand when I tried to close it, and the trunk wouldn’t close on this car. And I thought New York taxis were a little funky.
The gap has been closing between us, and tomorrow you will be coming here as well. So we can seal this looooong breakfast with a drink. In the meantime, here’s another thought that you will probably agree with: The era of easy answers is over.
In inner space we now know that genes can do quintuple duty and that there is no simple linear relationship between genes and proteins and illness–or alcoholism or infidelity or addiction and so forth. In outer space, the last decade has seen the crash of cosmologists’ dreams that the simplest solution of Einstein’s equations of general relativity–the one that predicted the bending of light and the expanding universe–would suffice to describe our universe. “The simplest answer works,” people like David Schramm, a.k.a. Schrambo, used to say proudly 10 or 15 years ago.
But the universe would not go along. First there was dark matter lurking in intergalactic space, mocking a long history of thinking the universe was what we saw when we looked up. Suddenly it was what we didn’t see. Then there was dark energy, apparently speeding up the expansion of the universe, an extra mathematical term in Einstein’s equation that he had once called his greatest blunder. Now there are hints that not even one type of dark matter will do, that astrophysicists need to posit more than one type in order to make the galaxies come out right.
We saw the week before last that there may be whole new families of elementary particles lurking in the void. To the features of the world, we might have to add something called supersymmetry, which on one level is a step toward unification, but it is a notion even harder to understand and to explain than what we live with today. And beyond that are strings and space-time foam. Beyond the mountains are more mountains.
Artificial intelligence still doesn’t work, nor does your cell phone in Europe. And there are no humans on their way to Mars.
Modern physics and modern genetics tell us that we live in an interactive universe in which relationships somehow define even the masses of the tiniest particles. No electron is an island, nor any man or woman or any cell thereof. In his book, The Life of the Cosmos, the quantum gravity theorist Lee Smolin argues that we are about as far as we can be from absorbing that lesson, either in our science or in our metaphysics and politics. Is there a connection between our political and physical worldviews? If the word got out that all particles are entangled, would we accept that our lives, too, are entangled; would democracy get better and more caring? There’s a charge for your students. Show the fly the way out of the bottle, as my old high-school philosophy teacher, Mr. Wichterman, wrote in my yearbook.
I’m off to look for a young Einstein. See you in San Francisco. This has been fun.
Cheers,
Dennis
