The Canon (5 page)

The last spring of my father's life, before he died unexpectedly of a fast-growing tumor, he told me that it was the first time he had stopped, during his walks through Central Park in New York, and paid attention to the details of the plants in bloom: the bulging out of a bud from a Lenten rose, the uncurling of a buttery magnolia blossom, the sprays of narcissus, Siberian bugloss, and bleeding heart. I was so impressed by
this that, ever since, I have tried to do likewise, attending anew to the world in rebirth. Each spring I ask a specific question about what I'm seeing and so feel as though I am lighting a candle in his memory, a small focused flame against the void of self-absorption, the blindness of I.

Another fail-safe way to change the way you see the world is to invest in a microscope. Not one of those toy microscopes sold in most Science 'n' Discovery chain stores, which, as Tom Eisner, a professor of chemical ecology at Cornell, has observed, are unwrapped on Christmas morning and in the closet before Boxing Day. Not the microscopes that magnify specimens up to hundreds of times and make everything look like a satellite image of an Iowa cornfield. Rather, you should buy a dissecting microscope, also known as a stereo microscope. Admittedly, such microscopes are not cheap, running a couple of hundred dollars or so. Yet this is a modest price to pay for revelation, revolution, and—let's push this envelope out of the box while we're at it—personal salvation. Like Professor Brown, I speak from experience. I was accustomed to looking through high-powered microscopes in laboratories and seeing immune cells and cancer cells and frogs' eggs and kidney tissue from fetal mice. But it wasn't until my daughter received a dissecting microscope as a gift, and we began using it to examine the decidua of everyday life, that I began yodeling my hallelujahs. A feather from a blue jay, a fiddlehead fern, a scraping from a branch that turned out to be the tightly honeycombed housing for a stinkbug's eggs. How much heft and depth, shadow and thistle, leap out at you when the small is given scope to strut. At a mere 40 × magnification, salt grains look like scattered glass pillows, a baby beetle becomes a Fabergé egg, and, as much as I hate mosquitoes, a mosquito under the microscope is pure Giacometti:
Thin Man Takes Wing, with Violin.

Yes, the world is out there, over your head and under your nose, and it is real and it is knowable. To understand something about why a thing is as it is in no way detracts from its beauty and grandeur, nor does it reduce the observed to "just a bunch of"—chemicals, molecules, equations, specimens for a microscope. Scientists get annoyed at the hackneyed notion that their pursuit of knowledge diminishes the mystery or art or "holiness" of life. Let's say you look at a red rose, said Brian Greene, and you understand a bit about the physics behind its lovely blood blush. You know that red is a certain wavelength of light, and that light is made of little particles called photons. You understand that photons representing all colors of the rainbow stream from the sun and strike the surface of the rose, but that, as a result of the molecular
composition of pigments in the rose, it's the red photons that bounce off its petals and up to your eyes, and so you see red.

"I like that picture," said Greene. "I like the extra story line, which comes, by the way, from Richard Feynman. But I still have the same strong emotional response to a rose as anybody else. It's not as though you become an automaton, dissecting things to death." To the contrary. A rose is a rose is a rose; but the examined rose is a sonnet.

That the universe can be explored and incrementally understood without losing its "magic" does not imply a corollary: that maybe "magic" is true after all, is hidden under accretions of apparent order, and that one of these days reality will kick off on a bucking broomstick toward Hogwarts on the hill. The universe still brims with mysteries, of course, but, in their conviction that the universe is knowable, scientists doubt that these question marks, once they have been understood well enough to become commas, will prove to be regions of arbitrary lawlessness or paranormality. "We have a pretty good idea of what kind of world this is, and it is not as mysterious, in the conventional sense of the word, as some people might wish," said Steven Weinberg. "It's not a world in which human destiny is linked to the positions of planets, or where people can be cured by crystals or bend spoons with their thoughts. Sometimes the police will call in a psychic to help solve a crime, and you'll hear a discussion on television for or against. But this isn't really an open question."

For example, one of the great conundrums in astronomy is the nature of something called dark energy, a kind of antigravitational force that appears to be pushing the accelerator pedal of the universe. The universe, as we'll discuss later, was born in the celebrated Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since; that much is clear and nearly incontrovertible. Yet until quite recently scientists thought that the rate of expansion was slowing down. You know how it is: a youthful burst of levity, and then the years start tugging on the back of your shorts. So, too, it was believed, for the universe: the gravitational pull of all its mass was supposed to be slowing down its rate of expansion. Instead, researchers have seen the opposite. The expansion is speeding up. Galaxies are flying away from one another at an ever increasing pace. Our universe has found a second wind. What is the meaning of this shadowy force, this type A provocateur, this energy so studiously seditious it hides behind dark glasses? Does its existence call into question the entire edifice of astrophysics, of what we've learned about the universe to date? To quote that most cerebral of comics, Steve Martin: "Nah!" Scientists are dazzled by dark energy. They are
impressed by its size and strength. They want very, very much to understand it. Nobody I spoke with, however, felt threatened by it. They have some ideas about what dark energy may be. They're open to other, better suggestions. They're just not about to consult a psychic for help in finding the body.

After all, history is replete with "unfathomable" mysteries that have been fathomed into the archives. The physicist Robert Jaffe of MIT cited the case of what might be called spire and brimstone. The cathedrals and churches of Christendom traditionally were built on the highest promontory in town and outfitted with the loftiest steeples parishioners could afford, the better to reach toward heaven and vamp for the neighbors. Unfortunately, those tall, wooden towers attracted more than envy: churches were regularly struck by lightning and burned to varying degrees of a crisp. "Every time this happened, there would be a wrenching dialogue about sin and the vengeance of God," said Jaffe, "and what the parish had done to bring the wrath of the Lord upon them." Then, in the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin determined that lightning was an electric rather than an ecclesiastic phenomenon. He recommended that conducting rods be installed on all spires and rooftops, and the debates over the semiotics of lightning bolts vanished. Nowadays, a fire in a church is less likely to be considered an act of God than of a tippling priest who neglected to blow out the candles.

Scientists may believe that much, if not all, of the universe will prove comprehensible, yet interestingly, this comprehensibility continues to astound them. Immanuel Kant observed that "the most astonishing thing about the universe is that it can be understood." This was hardly a clause in a prenuptial agreement. As the Princeton astrophysicist John Bahcall put it in an interview shortly before he died, we crawled out of the ocean, we are confined to a tiny landmass circling a midsize, middle-aged, pale-faced sun located in one arm of just another pinwheel galaxy among millions of star-spangled galaxies; yet we have come to comprehend the universe on the largest scales and longest time frames, from the subatomic out to the edge of the cosmos. "It's remarkable, it's extraordinary, and it didn't have to be that way," Bahcall said.

In other words, we can count our lucky stars that the stars can be counted. "You can imagine a universe that's complicated no matter how you look at it or try to break it down," said Brian Greene. "But we don't live in that kind of universe, and I for one am grateful." The world may seem confusing, chaotic, unspeakably rude, yet underlying it all is a certain amount of order. "The wonder of science is that a few very simple ideas can yield incredibly rich phenomena," said Greene. "It's astounding that a few symbols on a blackboard underlie so much of what we experience." Ah, yes, "a few symbols on a blackboard," the smudged garden of glyphs that covered Greene's blackboard, and the green boards and the black-markered white boards of every physicist I visited. Physicists don't just scribble equations when they're posing for cartoonists. They scribble to one another, too. They talk the talk, they chalk the chalk, and they, like us, marvel at how often their abstract computations fit the fleshiness of life. The physicist Eugene Wigner talked of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics"—in delineating the present, disinterring the past, and baking a trustier fortune cookie. With the aid of mathematics, scientists can calculate solar eclipses thousands of years in advance, for example, or gauge when to launch a space probe so that it will rendezvous with Neptune, or predict the life span and death throes of a distant star. Mathematics has proved to be such a potent means for dissecting reality that many scientists see it as not merely a human invention, like a microscope or a computer, but a reflection of traits inherent to the cosmos, a glimpse into its underlying architecture and operating system. By this view, you needn't be the hominid descendant of a lungfish or the intellectual descendant of the Greek mathematician Euclid to realize that the structure of space-time has a distinct saddleback geometry to it, which we earthlings label non-Euclidean. "When somebody says they were the first person to discover quantum mechanics or relativity or the like, I always think to myself, it's probably been discovered millions of times before, by other civilizations elsewhere in this galaxy or in other galaxies," said the theoretical physicist John Schwarz of Caltech.

For all the power of math in making sense of reality, though, math should not be thought of as something inviolate, matchless, even sacred. A mathematical description of a phenomenon is not a "truer" description than an equivalent, nonmathematical explanation would be, any more than the word "table" is a truer rendering of "a piece of furniture having a smooth, flat top on legs" than are the words "mesa," "tavolo," or "Tisch." Math is
a
language, not
the
language, and its symbols can be explained in other idioms, including that lovely English dialect called Plain. For all but a tiny clique of researchers known as pure mathematicians, who have scant interest in connecting the dots between theorem and you-are-here, math is a means to an end, and the end must do more than make the pi higher. It must deliver reality back to us, this time with chapter headings, annotations and footnotes, and wise verbs strong enough to bear the weight of the inevitable sentence endpoint, the question mark. I get irritated with scientists who complain about the reluctance of popular science writers to include a sprinkling of math in their narrative, and who insist that the story told is therefore incomplete and even slightly misleading, as though the point of the math was the math was the math. "In principle, every equation can be expressed in English as a sentence," said Brian Greene. Admittedly, such transpositions often would be clumsy sentences, and you wouldn't want to curl up with a book of them, but the moral is clear: even if you remain numb to numbers, you can still understand what they have to tell us about the universe. You can become scientifically quite sophisticated without mastering much if any math. "I have never felt that science was quite so dependent on mathematics as some scientists do," said Kip Hodges, director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. "Mathematics is a way of describing nature but not necessarily of understanding it."

Yes, our children should be taught much more math and in far greater depth than they currently are in the average American classroom. Absolutely. But we must face the sad truth that children can take it, and adults cannot. As a consequence of brain biology, children are brilliant at learning new languages of all sorts. Their neurons are practically liquid, pouring across local loci and making new friends and synapses with hardly a grunt of effort. As we age, however, the cells settle into place, maybe invest in a sofa and china cabinet, and the entire neuronal matrix, slowly but unmistakably, starts to harden. By our late twenties or early thirties, the mind is made up: it has taken a stand on life, it knows from whence it speaks, and that commitment is reflected in its structure. Of course we can learn new things, up until the day we learn how to die; but chances are excellent that most adult learning takes place through the prism of preexisting skills. So if math is all Greek to you, take comfort in the following: (a) Why shouldn't it be? Many of the symbols used in math are letters from the Greek alphabet; and (b) it's Greek to a surprising number of scientists, too. As it happens, many biologists, chemists, geologists, and astronomers are relatively poor mathematicians. Bonnie Bassler of Princeton, considered one of the brightest young stars in the field of bacterial ecology, confessed to me that she is "terrible at math" and always has been. "I can balance my checkbook if I have a calculator," she said. "I can do fractions. But that's it. Somehow it didn't matter, and I ended up here."

Even physicists, for whom math is indispensable, have their limits. Steven Weinberg may have won a Nobel Prize for helping to develop the mathematics that merged two of nature's four fundamental forces, electromagnetism and the weak force, into a single theoretical bundle
called the electroweak force—and this is not something you could do by reviewing your old high school algebra notes—yet he said he recently switched from particle physics to cosmology because the math in particle physics was getting beyond him.