Knocking on Heaven's Door (62 page)

These solutions aren’t cheating. They would be only if you have additional constraints. Education unfortunately sometimes encourages students not only to learn how to resolve problems, but also to second-guess the teacher’s intention—narrowing the range of correct answers and potentially also the students’ minds. In
The Quark and the Jaguar
,
⁷³
Murray Gell-Mann cites Washington University physics professor Alexander Calandra’s “Barometer Story,”
⁷⁴
in which he tells of a teacher who wasn’t sure he should give a student credit. The teacher had asked his students how they might use a barometer to determine the height of a building. This particular student answered that you could attach a string to the barometer, lower it to the ground, and find out how long the string was. When he was told to use physics, he suggested measuring the time it took for it to fall from the top of the building, or measuring the shadow at a known time of day. The student also volunteered the nonphysics solution of offering the superintendent the barometer in exchange for being told the height of the building. These answers might not have been what the teacher was looking for. But the student astutely—and humorously—recognized that the teacher’s constraints weren’t part of the problem.

When other physicists and I started thinking about extra dimensions of space in the 1990s, we not only went outside the box, we went outside three-dimensional space itself. We thought of a world in which the very stage in which we solved the problems was bigger than we had originally assumed. In doing so, we found potential solutions to problems that had plagued particle physicists for years.

Even so, research doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It is enriched by the many ideas and insights that others have thought of before. Good scientists listen to one another. Sometimes we find the right problem or solution just by very carefully listening to, observing, or reading someone else’s work. Often we collaborate to bring in different people’s talents, and also to keep ourselves honest.

Even if everyone wants to be the first to solve an important problem, scientists still learn from and share with one another and work on common topics. Occasionally other scientists say things that contain the clues to interesting problems or solutions—even unwittingly. Scientists might have their own inspiration, but they will often also exchange ideas, work out the consequences, and make adjustments or start again if the original idea doesn’t work. Imagining new ideas and keeping some while shooting others down is our bread and butter. That’s how we advance. It’s not bad. It’s progress.

One of the most important roles I can play as an adviser to graduate students is to be alert to their good ideas, even when they haven’t yet learned how to express them—and to listen when students find loopholes in my suggestions. This back-and-forth is perhaps one of the best ways to teach—or at least foster—creativity.

Competition plays an important role as well—in science as well as in most any other creative endeavor. In a discussion of creativity, the artist Jeff Koons simply told those of us in the room that when he was young, his sister did art—and he realized that he could do it better. A young filmmaker explained how competition encourages him and his colleagues to absorb each other’s techniques and ideas and thereby refine and develop their own. The chef David Chang expressed a similar thought a little more bluntly. His reaction after going to a new restaurant is, “That’s delicious. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Newton waited to publish until his results were complete. But he might also have been wary of his competitor Robert Hooke, who knew about the inverse square law as well—but lacked the calculus to support it. Nonetheless, Newton’s publication seems to have been prompted in part by a question relayed to him about Hooke’s overlapping research. Darwin, too, was clearly motivated to present his results by the knowledge that Alfred Russel Wallace was working on similar evolutionary ideas—and was likely to steal his thunder if he remained silent much longer. Both Darwin and Newton wanted to have their stories straight before presenting their revolutionary results, and developed them until they were extremely confident they were correct—or at least until they thought they might be scooped.

The universe repeatedly reveals itself to be cleverer than we are. Equations or observations open up ideas that no one would have dreamed of—and only creative open-minded inquiries will unearth such hidden phenomena in the future. Without incontrovertible evidence, no scientist would have invented quantum mechanics, and I suspect that anticipating the precise structure of DNA and the myriad phenomena that make up life would have been pretty nearly impossible unless we were faced with the phenomena or equations that told us what was there. The Higgs mechanism is ingenious, as are the inner workings of the atom and the behavior of the particles that underlie everything we see.

Research is an organic process. We don’t necessarily always know where we are headed, but experiments and theory serve as valuable guides. Preparation and skill, concentration and perseverance, asking the right questions, and cautiously trusting our imaginations will all help us in our search for understanding. So will open minds, conversations with others, wanting to do better than our predecessors or peers, and believing there are answers. No matter what the motivation, and independently of the particular skills that might come into play, scientists will continue to investigate inward and outward—and look forward to learning about the other ingenious mechanisms the universe has in store.

When I first looked at translations of German media reports on my physics research or my book,
Warped Passages
,
⁷⁵
I was surprised by the repeated presence of the words “edge of the universe.” The explanation of the plausible but seemingly random appearance of the phrase wasn’t quite obvious at first—it turned out to be the computer’s German translation of my last name.
⁷⁶

Yet we are indeed at the edge of the universe, both on small scales and on large ones. Scientists have experimentally explored distances from the weak scale of 10
^-17
centimeters to the size of the universe, 10
³⁰
centimeters. We can’t be sure what the scales that demarcate true paradigm shifts in the future will be, but many scientific eyes are now focused on the weak scale, which the LHC and dark matter searches are experimentally exploring. At the same time, theoretical work continues to investigate scales ranging from the weak to the Planck energies, and to larger scales as well, as we attempt to fill in gaps in our understanding. It’s hubris to think that what we’ve seen is all there is. New discoveries almost certainly await.

The era of modern science represents a mere blip on the timeline of history. But the remarkable insights gained through advances in technology and mathematics since its birth in the seventeenth century have taken us an impressively long way toward understanding the world.

This book has explored how high-energy physicists and cosmologists today determine their course and how a combination of theory and experiment could shed light on some deep and fundamental questions. The Big Bang theory describes the universe’s current expansion, but it leaves open the questions of what happened earlier—and what is the nature of dark energy and dark matter. The Standard Model predicts elementary particle interactions, but leaves unresolved questions about why its properties are what they are. Dark matter and the Higgs boson could be around the corner—as could evidence for new spacetime symmetries or even new dimensions of space. We could be lucky and have answers soon. Or—if the relevant quantities are too heavy or too weakly interacting—it could take a while. We’ll only know if we ask and look.

I’ve also presented speculations about some even more difficult-to-test ideas. Though they expand the imagination and might eventually connect to reality, they could also remain in the domain of philosophy or religion. Science won’t disprove the landscape of multiple universes—or God for that matter—but it’s unlikely to verify them either. Even so, some aspects of the multiverse—such as those that could explain the hierarchy—do have testable consequences. It’s up to scientists to ferret these out.

The other major element of
Knocking on Heaven’s Door
has been the concepts—such as scale, uncertainty, creativity, and rational critical reasoning—that inform scientific thought. We can believe that science will make progress toward reaching answers and that complexity can emerge over time even before we have a fully fleshed-out explanation. The answers might be complicated, but that doesn’t justify abdicating faith in reason.

Understanding nature, life, and the universe poses extraordinarily difficult problems. We all would like to better understand who we are, where we came from, and where we are going—and to focus on things larger than ourselves and more permanent than the latest gadget or fashion. It’s easy to see why some turn to religion for explanations. Without the facts and the inspired interpretations that demonstrated surprising connections, the answers scientists have arrived at so far would have been extremely difficult to guess. People who think scientifically advance our knowledge of the world. The challenge is to understand as much as we can, and curiosity—unconstrained by dogma—is what is required.

The line between legitimate inquiry and arrogance might be an issue for some, but ultimately critical scientific thinking is the only reliable way to answer questions about the makeup of the universe. Extremist anti-intellectual strands in some current religious movements are at odds with traditional Christian heritage—not to mention progress and science—but fortunately they don’t represent all religious or intellectual perspectives. Many ways of thinking—even religious ones—incorporate challenges to existing paradigms and allow for the evolution of ideas. Progress for each of us involves replacing wrong ideas and building on the ones that are right.

I appreciated the sentiment when at a recent lecture, Bruce Alberts, former president of the National Academy of Sciences and current editor in chief of
Science
magazine, highlighted the need for the creativity, rationality, openness, and tolerance that are inherent to science—the robust combination of qualities that Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, called “the scientific temper.”
⁷⁷
Scientific ways of thinking are critical in today’s world, providing essential tools for dealing with many tough issues—social, practical, and political. I’d like to close with a few further reflections about the relevance of science and scientific thinking.

Some of today’s complex challenges might be addressed with a combination of technology, information about large populations, and raw computing power. But many major advances—scientific or otherwise—simply require a lot of thought by isolated or small groups of inspired individuals working on hard problems for a long time. Although this book has focused on the nature and value of basic science, pure, curiosity-driven research has—along with advancing science itself—led to technological breakthroughs that have completely changed the way we live. In addition to giving us important ways of thinking about hard problems, basic science can lead to technological tools today that—when combined with more scientific thinking that absorbs the creativity and principles we’ve discussed—will help find solutions tomorrow.

The question now is how to address bigger questions in that context. How do we take technology beyond mere short-term goals? Even in a world of technology, we need both ideas and incentives. The company that makes a must-have gadget may be very successful, and it’s easy to get caught up in the pursuit of a new one. But this can distract from the real issues we’d like technology to address. Although iPods are fun, the iPod lifestyle isn’t going to solve the big problems of today’s world.

Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, said when we were on a panel together at a conference about technology and progress: “Technology is the greatest force in the universe.” If that is indeed the case, science is responsible for the greatest force, since basic science was essential to the technology revolution. The electron was discovered with no ulterior motive, yet electronics has defined our world. Electricity too was a purely intellectual discovery, yet the planet is now pulsing with wires and cables. Even quantum mechanics, the esoteric theory of the atom, turned out to be the key to Bell Labs’ scientists developing the transistor—the underlying hardware of the technology revolution. Yet none of the early investigators of the atom would have believed that the research they were doing would ever have any application, let alone one as grand as the computer and the information revolution. Both basic scientific knowledge and scientific ways of thinking were needed for the deep insights into the nature of reality that ultimately led to these breakthroughs.

No amount of computing power or social networking would have helped Einstein develop the theory of relativity any faster than he did. Scientists probably wouldn’t have understood quantum mechanics any more rapidly either. This is not to deny that, once there is an idea or some new understanding of a phenomenon, technology expedites advances. And some problems simply do require sifting through large amounts of data. But usually a core idea is essential. The insights into the nature of reality that the practice of science gives us can ultimately lead to transformative breakthroughs that affect us in unpredictable ways. It is vital that we continue to pursue it.

It is now a given that technology is central. This is true in the sense that most new developments critically employ technology. But I would add that it is central in the sense of being neither the beginning nor the end, but rather a means of getting things done and communicating and connecting developments. What we want to use it for is our choice. And the insights that go into solving problems or new developments can arise from many forms of creative thought.