Read Online The Science of Discworld Revised Edition by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online
Authors: Terry Pratchett
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more people are interested in it. Hardly anybody cares about left-handed glucose, but nearly all of us wonder why red looks the way it does, and we vaguely wonder whether it looks the same to everybody else.
Out on the fringes of scientific thought are questions that are big enough to interest almost everybody, but small enough for there to be a chance of answering them reasonably accurately. They are questions like ‘How did the universe begin?’ and ‘How will it end?’ (‘What happens in between?’ is quite a different matter.) Let us acknowledge, right up front, that the current answers to such questions depend upon various questionable assumptions. Previous generations have been absolutely convinced that their scientific theories were well-nigh perfect, only for it to turn out that they had missed the point entirely. Why should it be any different for our generation? Beware of scientific fundamentalists who try to tell you everything is pretty much worked out, and only a few routine details are left to do. It is just when the majority of scientists believe such things that the next revolution in our world-view creeps into being, its feeble birth-squeaks all but drowned by the earsplitting roar of orthodoxy.
Let’s take a look at the current view of how the universe began. One of the points we are going to make is that human beings have trouble with the concept of ‘beginning’. And even more trouble, let it be said, with ‘becoming’. Our minds evolved to carry out rather specific tasks like choosing a mate, killing bears with a sharp stick, and getting dinner without
becoming
it. We’ve been surprisingly good at adapting those modules to tasks for which they were never ‘intended’ – that is, tasks for which they were not
used
during their evolution, there being no conscious ‘intention’ – such as planning a route up the Matterhorn, carving images of sea-lions on polar bears’ teeth, 1 and calculating the combustion point of a complex hydrocarbon molecule. Because of the way our mental modules evolved, we think of beginnings as being analogous to how a day begins, or how a hike across the desert begins; and we think of becomings in the same way that a polar bear’s tooth becomes a carved amulet, or a live spider becomes dead when you squash it.
That is: beginnings start from somewhere (which is where whatever it is
begins
), and becomings turn Thing One into Thing Two by pushing it across a clearly defined boundary (the tooth was not carved, but now it is; the spider was not dead, but now it is). Unfortunately the universe doesn’t work in such a simple-minded manner, so we have serious trouble thinking about how a universe can begin, or how an ovum and a sperm can become a living child.
Let us leave becomings for a moment, and think about beginnings. Thanks to our evolutionary prejudices, we tend to think of the beginning of the universe as being some special time, before which the universe did not exist and after which it did. Moreover, when the universe changed from not being there to being there, something must have
caused
that change – something that was around before the universe began, otherwise it wouldn’t have been able to cause the universe to come into being. When you bear in mind that the beginning of the universe is also the beginning of space and the beginning of time, however, this point of view is distinctly problematic. How can there be a ‘before’ if time has not yet started? How can there be a cause for the universe starting up, without space for that cause to happen in – and time for it to happen?
Maybe there was something else in existence already … but now we have to decide how
that
got started, and the same difficulties arise. All right, let’s go the whole hog: something – perhaps the universe itself, perhaps some precursor – was around forever. It didn’t
have
a beginning, it just was, always.
Satisfied? Things that exist forever don’t have to be
Out on the fringes of scientific thought are questions that are big enough to interest almost everybody, but small enough for there to be a chance of answering them reasonably accurately. They are questions like ‘How did the universe begin?’ and ‘How will it end?’ (‘What happens in between?’ is quite a different matter.) Let us acknowledge, right up front, that the current answers to such questions depend upon various questionable assumptions. Previous generations have been absolutely convinced that their scientific theories were well-nigh perfect, only for it to turn out that they had missed the point entirely. Why should it be any different for our generation? Beware of scientific fundamentalists who try to tell you everything is pretty much worked out, and only a few routine details are left to do. It is just when the majority of scientists believe such things that the next revolution in our world-view creeps into being, its feeble birth-squeaks all but drowned by the earsplitting roar of orthodoxy.
Let’s take a look at the current view of how the universe began. One of the points we are going to make is that human beings have trouble with the concept of ‘beginning’. And even more trouble, let it be said, with ‘becoming’. Our minds evolved to carry out rather specific tasks like choosing a mate, killing bears with a sharp stick, and getting dinner without
becoming
it. We’ve been surprisingly good at adapting those modules to tasks for which they were never ‘intended’ – that is, tasks for which they were not
used
during their evolution, there being no conscious ‘intention’ – such as planning a route up the Matterhorn, carving images of sea-lions on polar bears’ teeth, 1 and calculating the combustion point of a complex hydrocarbon molecule. Because of the way our mental modules evolved, we think of beginnings as being analogous to how a day begins, or how a hike across the desert begins; and we think of becomings in the same way that a polar bear’s tooth becomes a carved amulet, or a live spider becomes dead when you squash it.
That is: beginnings start from somewhere (which is where whatever it is
begins
), and becomings turn Thing One into Thing Two by pushing it across a clearly defined boundary (the tooth was not carved, but now it is; the spider was not dead, but now it is). Unfortunately the universe doesn’t work in such a simple-minded manner, so we have serious trouble thinking about how a universe can begin, or how an ovum and a sperm can become a living child.
Let us leave becomings for a moment, and think about beginnings. Thanks to our evolutionary prejudices, we tend to think of the beginning of the universe as being some special time, before which the universe did not exist and after which it did. Moreover, when the universe changed from not being there to being there, something must have
caused
that change – something that was around before the universe began, otherwise it wouldn’t have been able to cause the universe to come into being. When you bear in mind that the beginning of the universe is also the beginning of space and the beginning of time, however, this point of view is distinctly problematic. How can there be a ‘before’ if time has not yet started? How can there be a cause for the universe starting up, without space for that cause to happen in – and time for it to happen?
Maybe there was something else in existence already … but now we have to decide how
that
got started, and the same difficulties arise. All right, let’s go the whole hog: something – perhaps the universe itself, perhaps some precursor – was around forever. It didn’t
have
a beginning, it just was, always.
Satisfied? Things that exist forever don’t have to be
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