Closer To Truth: Science, Meaning, and the Future

Closer to Truth: Science, Meaning, and the Future

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

PRAEGER

CLOSER TO TRUTH

CLOSER TO TRUTH Science, Meaning, and the Future

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. Closer to truth : science, meaning, and the future / Robert Lawrence Kuhn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-99389-2 (alk. paper) 1. Research—Philosophy. 2. Scientists—Psychology. 3. Critical thinking. 4. Science— History. I. Title. Q175.3.K84 2007 500—dc22 2006038657 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2007 by Robert Lawrence Kuhn All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006038657 ISBN–13: 978-0-275-99389-4 ISBN–10: 0-275-99389-2 First published in 2007 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

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Foreword: No End for Science Exploration Dr. Song Jian

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Introduction: What is Closer To Truth? Chapter 1: Is Science Fiction Science?

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Chapter 2: Why is Music So Significant?

21

Chapter 3: Is Consciousness an Illusion?

33

Chapter 4: How Does the Autistic Brain Work?

47

Chapter 5: Does Psychiatry Have a Split Personality?

65

Chapter 6: Who Gets to Validate Alternative Medicine?

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Chapter 7: Microbes — Friend or Foe?

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Chapter 8: Testing New Drugs — Are People Guinea Pigs?

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Chapter 9: How Does Order Arise in the Universe?

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Chapter 10: How Weird is the Cosmos?

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Chapter 11: Is the Universe Full of Life?

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Chapter 12: Will Computers Take a Quantum Leap?

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Chapter 13: How Does Basic Science Support National Security?

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Chapter 14: Can Religion Withstand Technology?

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Chapter 15: Can We Believe in Both Science and Religion?

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Why Ultimate Reality Works for Us: Toward a Taxonomy of Possible Explanations

235

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Glossary of Key Terms

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About the Author and Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Closer To Truth, based on the pubic television/PBS television series of the same name, brings together leading scientists, scholars, artists, and thinkers to explore fundamental issues of life, sentience, universe, and meaning. We seek to make state-of-the-art ideas in science, philosophy, and human understanding accessible, intriguing, and absorbing to intelligent audiences. There are many people to thank for supporting my lifelong process of imagining, creating, planning, producing, writing, editing, thinking about, talking about, wondering about, and worrying about Closer To Truth— the ideas, the television series, and the book. They are my friends, family, mentors, and associates. I particularly acknowledge Mel Rogers, president of KOCE-TV, the PBS station in Huntington Beach (Orange County), California, for taking a chance on the series and for helping with the name; Jack Martin, for offering the encouragement and providing the platform to produce the pilot; and Dr. Shigehisa Okawara, for being my first mentor when he encouraged a 16-year-old college freshman to work in his neurosurgical laboratory. I am pleased to recognize those who worked on the Closer To Truth television series on which this book is based: Linda Fefferman, for directing and producing the specific shows; Bruce Murray, professor emeritus of planetary science and geology at Caltech, for his ideas and advice; Sharon (‘‘Bunny’’) Taveras for distributing and marketing the television series; and Pamela McFadden, for her competence and commitment in all manner of assistance. I thank my wife Dora and now-grown children Aaron, Adam, and Daniella for their long-standing support, and my parents, Lee and Louis Kuhn, for appreciating (if not always understanding) my sometimes unorthodox activities. In an interesting turn of events, this book was published in China prior to its being published in English, and for this I thank my business partner (and friend) in China, Adam Zhu. Closer To Truth, its ideas and energy, are the product of a passion to comprehend in a lifetime of wonder. I do not deny a continuing search for meaning or purpose while I do affirm that a personal predisposition to challenge current belief demands high standards of analytical rigor and critical thinking. This is the mission of Closer To Truth, which, when it works, may help explore the human condition and spotlight, if not decipher, ultimate issues.


Foreword

No End for Science Exploration

Since the Renaissance human beings have gradually shaken off the mentally constricting shackles of irrational ideas and have walked up the rational road of the experimental sciences. In the subsequent 400 years, humans drove the advancement of modern science and technology, thus enhancing their abilities to understand and deal with nature, and penetrated the profound depths of the physical world. Francis Bacon’s motto ‘‘Knowledge is power’’ has become common wisdom. Before the twentieth century, motivations for scientific study were often personal curiosities, but much has changed in the past 100 years. Since science has become the fundamental driving force for the prosperity of nations, the growth of economies, and the welfare of peoples, each government sets up scientific research systems, guides the cause of research endeavors, implements ‘‘Big Science’’ projects, conducts scientific education, and encourages applications. All these undertakings have generated rapid advances in science and technology, and thereby enabled human society to stride forward into the era of a knowledge-based, high-tech economy in which everyone can enjoy the fruits. The emergence of modern human thinking took place no more than 10,000 years ago, a mere instant of time compared with the three billion years of life on earth. Furthermore, only 400 years have elapsed since modern science first appeared. Humans are still young in their quest for knowledge about Mother Nature. It is as if modern science and technology were born just last night. However much knowledge we seem to have accumulated, our understanding about nature is still limited. Pluto, formerly one of the nine planets of our solar system, has only made one and half orbits around the Sun since

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Copernicus published ‘‘On the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs’’ (1543). The first mammals, the remote ancestors of human beings, appeared less than 200 million years ago, a duration not even sufficiently long for the Sun to complete a single rotation around the center of Milky Way. Some scientific theories, classical or modern, are often recognized to be at best stunning improvisation. For example, the Big Bang Theory, the standard model of the origin of the universe as we know it today, a theory that is consistent with most laws of physics and astronomic observations, is still unable to explain the origin of the singularity from which the Big Bang sprung forth. Many scientists are not convinced that such a singular point could be the origin of the entire mass-energy of the universe. Some physicists claim there was nothing at all before the origin, and would, in their joking manner, ‘‘consign to Hell those who asked such ‘stupid’ questions.’’ Commencing in the latter part of the twentieth century, space technology offered the opportunity for human observation of the universe from outside the earth. Before then, all we knew about nature was gleaned from the surface of the earth. Manned and unmanned space observations have confirmed that, as far as we can see, most of the physical laws are as effective elsewhere in the universe as they are here on earth. But these observations have also challenged some old science paradigms. To my recollection, 50 years ago few people believed that life could exist in extrasolar systems. Although there still is no evidence for extraterrestrial life, mainstream science now recognizes the value of the new discipline of astrobiology. The sun is only one among 100 billion stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. The earth, too, does not seem so special, nothing more than a fortunate planet. In spite of how magnificent modern science and technology seem, and how grand our science mansion looks, the underlying foundation of virtually all we know comes from living on the surface of the earth. We are bound by earth and solar system, and even reaching the nearest exostar, Proxima Centauri (as we call it), seems virtually impossible. To realize the long dream of mankind to travel into extrasolar space we need new ideas, concepts, theories, technologies, and mechanisms far beyond current frameworks. Nothing short of a revolution similar to what quantum mechanics did to Newtonian mechanics would be necessary to make such vast journeys possible. There is much evidence in palaeoanthropology that our human ancestors diverged from Hylobatidae and Pongidae, the fellow families of Hominoidea, many millions of years ago. As Homo sapiens became the first species capable of rational thinking, we are appreciative and justifiably proud of this remarkable increase in mind power. However, we should not be overly arrogant, because we can never disconnect ourselves from our humble biological origins; most of our behaviors and activities have seldom broken free from the instinctive, competitive rules of the animal kingdom. Even after two centuries of arduous campaigning for democracy around the world, there is little change in the Law of the Jungle.

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In the history of science, we often observe the same strictures and rigidities appearing in diverse forms. For millennia human beings considered themselves to be the core and center of all purpose and principle. Before Copernicus even the most enlightened thinkers assumed without question that our sun and all other stars had to circle around the earth, and that the existence of all living things were here solely for the benefit of Adam’s and Eve’s offspring. The masses had to submit to the Son of Heaven, just as monkeys have to obey their king. An elegant postulate in science is called the ‘‘anthropic principle,’’ which means that all scientific laws and processes of Nature, the entire flow of universal history, must somehow exist to favor (or at least be compatible with) the emergence and sustained existence of human beings. Yet human history itself is rife with the absence of such harmony. We witness daily the gross violations of ethics and morality. Science itself has a long history of being resisted or attacked by politics, religion, and common customs. Bruno was burned; Galileo was persecuted for much of his long life; Martin Luther was assassinated; and Ma Yinchu was animadverted1. Does all this, too, come from the ‘‘anthropic principle?’’ Fortunately, from the beginning of the twentieth century, general conditions for intellectuals, at least for scientists, began changing for the better. Physicists who discerned the mechanism of nuclear fusion and predicted the inevitable death of all stars, including our Sun, went free of punishment and won Nobel Prizes even though they were, in essence, the ultimate doomsayers. Their theoretical calculations proved that all life on earth including human beings will become unavoidably extinct along with the death of our Sun some billions of years from now, if we Homo sapiens are not able to find innovative solutions to change our destined fate. Such annihilative forecasts, of course, are terribly discordant with mankind’s long-range, fundamental interest. The fact that such a certain cataclysm could be accepted calmly by society would suggest that in some sense the impact of the ‘‘anthropic principle’’ is weakening. If human beings can evolve up into a higher state of being, perhaps we could penetrate deeper into the still-dark mysteries of scientific truth. However, human beings, dubbed Naked Apes by some anthropologists, are still biological members of the animal kingdom. Hence it would take a great period of time to divest ourselves of inherited habits. Or rather, we can never break away from our animal natures. Throughout the entire history of mankind, a traditional culture of hierarchies dominated societies: young follow elders; son obeys father; populace submits to emperor; all yield to Heaven. Notwithstanding the magnificent social and psychological benefits of such hierarchies for maintaining order and stability, the rigidity of such structures work to suppress the talent of those few human beings who, for the sake of breakthrough scientific inquiry, are able to challenge current belief and change the status quo. Scientific

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development, with its need for creativity, innovation, and for defying the accepted order, is often disadvantaged if children must always submit to their parents, if students must always believe what their teachers impart. When textbooks are sacrosanct, when sermons are as if from God, when authority is absolute, when it is forbidden to modify existing scientific theories or to buck authority, reject parts of standard answers, and find new solutions, true science can only be constrained. All these archaic ways of thinking, though they have their social graces, are incompatible with the modern scientific spirit. The one and only correct way to develop frontier and beyond-the-frontier science and technology is to encourage young people to contribute new ideas without fear or favor, to experiment over and over and again and again, to observe from diverse points, to try to discover new phenomena, to put forward hypotheses no matter how strange, and to devise new theories no matter how different, odd, or unaccustomed. All of our current scientific knowledge, theories, and laws, whatever we have believed and believe with good reason, must be deemed to be correct only relatively and conditionally. We should always be prepared for change. And we should never forget that our view and observations are largely gained from the surface of one planet. Such a perspective, no matter how impressed we are with what our contemporary science has achieved, is far too narrow, and our scientific experiences, measured in scant thousands of years, are far too brief. We know little about the deep ocean, the inner earth, the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the multiple billions of galaxies breathtakingly far away in space and time. It is not exceedingly rare that there may be different hypotheses to account for the same phenomena of nature, and it is only by repeated experiments and continued theoretical substantiation that one hypothesis will come to be favored over the others. For example, between the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, there emerged three kinds of atomic models, each derived from a different perspective (with different extrapolations), that seemed to account for the atomic nucleus: liquid-drop model, shell model, and collective model, each one overlapping, interacting with, and complementing the other two. We continue to use each of these models today. However, even if our current understanding of scientific theories, models, or laws seem perfect, they still may not ultimately hold up intact, because in many areas of human understanding the ultimate truth remains far, perhaps forever far, in the distance. All we humans should expect is to move ‘‘closer to truth,’’ asymptotically closer and closer to our goal of ultimate knowledge, though never knowing for sure if we will ever arrive at the final destination of absolute, last Truth. The age of the earth is proven to be 4.6 billion years, and if we are fortunate enough to escape devastation by impacting asteroids, human beings and our science could last another few billion years before our sun grows

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old and begins to expand to swallow the earth in its fiery gases. Yet before that day of our inevitable obliteration, science and technology should be able to find ways for human beings to move to other oases in our vast universe, other habitable planets in our galaxy, so that the torch of human intelligence will continue to shine. Although science is unable to forecast accurately so far into the future, it is obliged to identify likely roads and suggest reliable directions. Passion for science has become good fashion in almost all human cultures, and it is a particular virtue of oriental culture to respect and esteem forefather scientists. However, science belongs not to any one generation but to all human history. Individual human lifetimes are short and new generations will continue to rise and fall. This is the order of nature: as years pass, the young replace the old. Elder scientists, versed with vast knowledge in their fields, should not be too strict with younger scientists. It is an admirable virtue that elders care for their progeny; as the old saying goes, ‘‘life is short, but caring is long.’’ But such care must include the tolerance and respect for deeper annotation and interpretation about conventional wisdom, common understanding, and assumed truth. History has taught us repeatedly that what elders believe is not always correct, and what elders deny is not always wrong. For the long-term interest of human civilization, it is good for elders to create wider spaces for young scientists to explore, and, if they can, to also keep their own minds open. The history of science also indicates that when a major scientific breakthrough occurs, people tend to regard it as an Ultimate Truth. During the twentieth century, quantum mechanics and particle physics made such remarkable advances so that by the 1980s some declared that ‘‘science had ended’’ and that Ultimate Truth—which could explain anything, a ‘‘Theory of Everything’’—was within our grasp. However, in less than 20 years, new mysteries emerged. Evidences of accelerating cosmic expansion, long believed to be impossible due to the inevitable and dominating power of gravity, were found by the satellite observations of COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer, 1989) and WAMP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, 2001). In 1998, leading cosmologists and astronomers declared that there was some kind of ‘‘dark energy’’ existent throughout the universe, a kind of hidden power source which propels all matter in the universe to expand against the inward pull of gravitational attraction, and that such dark energy would have to account for an astounding 73 percent of the total mass-energy of the universe. Physicists suddenly had no choice other than to realize that something heretofore no one knew existed now constitutes most of everything that exists. Moreover, the observational data indicated that only about four percent of all the energy-matter in the universe is ordinary matter, so that the remaining 23 percent of matter must be ‘‘dark.’’ It is a dark matter that reveals its presence by gravity, such as in the higher rotational speeds of stars

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in galaxies, but it cannot be seen at all. Up to now, our best science cannot describe what dark energy and dark matter really are nor explain how they are generated. No wonder this latest astounding discovery silenced those advocates who were announcing the ‘‘end of science.’’ Modern science in China started in the twentieth century, 200 years later than it did in Europe, and in recent decades has begun to flourish. It took China a whole century to make up for its somnolence and end its long hiatus from the frontiers of contemporary science. Most science and technology China learned from the West. Yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century it has become apparent that China’s science cannot follow the old paradigm of simply continuing to be a follower of the West. They must create a new paradigm so that not only does China come to rely on its indigenous intellectual strengths but also make original contributions to enrich all humanity and thereby benefit the entire world. Scientists commonly accept the proposition that students may and must be as good as their teachers, standing on their shoulders, as it were, to reach higher into the knowledge firmament. Young generations must be encouraged to be innovative, creative, and imaginative in all sectors of society, especially in science and technology. I am pleased that my friend, Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, decided to publish Closer To Truth: Science, Meaning, and the Future, which brings together leading scientists, scholars, and artists to debate the fundamental issues of our times, including brain and mind, creativity and thinking, life and health, technology and society, and universe and meaning. The book aims at encouraging young people to create, innovate, and contribute to scientific progress for all humankind. Dr. Kuhn and I often speak on the importance of science and the scientific way of thinking as crucial for the peace and prosperity of all countries and of all humankind. Entrusted by Dr. Kuhn, I am pleased to write this foreword. These are subjects I am thinking about these days, and it seemed to be a good opportunity, in the context of his book on the meaning and implications of frontier science, to communicate with fellow readers with similar interests. My hope is that such thinking might help catalyze a more flexible and innovative academic environment in China and throughout the world, and thus inspire greater progress in science and technology during the twenty-first century. Such is the origin of the above narration. Dr. Song Jian Chairman, Beijing Institute for Frontier Science Past Chairman, State Science and Technology Commission Past Chairman, Chinese Academy of Engineering Beijing, People’s Republic of China March 2006

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Note 1. Ma Yinchu (1882-1982) , the president of Beijing University (who had earned a master’s degree in economics from Yale and a Ph.D. from Columbia), opposed the assertions that unchecked population growth was no longer a problem under socialism.


Introduction

What is Closer To Truth?

Closer To Truth: Science, Meaning, and the Future is a unique series of discussions about fundamental issues that explores the latest scientific research, philosophical thinking, and expressions of human creativity. Critical to the process, Closer To Truth tests conventional wisdom, seeks truth wherever it may change, sees the humor as well as the import of tradition-breaking ideas, and discerns what it means to be human in the twenty-first century with our continuing search for collective purpose and individual meaning. We confront the mysteries of mind, matter, and meaning, bringing together prominent thinkers to discuss what is happening at the leading edge of science and its broad implications for human understanding. Some of the world’s most esteemed experts, including Nobel laureates, best-selling authors, and renowned scholars, engage in a series of spontaneous and intimate conversations that combine leading-edge science and informed intuition. Closer To Truth is an inside opportunity to witness how the pioneers in humanity’s quest for knowledge chart their expeditions into the unknown, journeys that are marked by a rigorous pursuit of truth, a readiness to challenge current belief, a willingness to overturn dogma, an openminded exploration of inferences and implications, and a tough-minded reliance on critical thinking. I seek multi-faceted perspectives on some of the most exciting and controversial ‘‘big issues’’ of our time. Areas of inquiry are brain and mind, cosmos and astrobiology, biology and medicine, science and religion, and science and our world. What organizing theme brings together such topics? My own personal, perhaps idiosyncratic take on the human condition. Whenever and wherever

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new knowledge challenges accepted principles, I find topics. I sometimes use three ‘‘C words’’ to mark Closer To Truth—consciousness, cosmology, creativity. My bet is that what I like, you like. The contributors to this book—participants in the Closer To Truth public television series—are among the leaders in their fields; these informal, unrehearsed discussions, derived from the show’s transcripts, give a good sense of state-of-the-art thinking at our intellectual frontiers. We can’t talk about science’s role in our lives without including its effect on morality, philosophy, religion, and human ingenuity. This is why religious scholars, philosophers, and science fiction authors as well as psychologists, molecular biologists, and astronomers participate in the dialogues. Closer To Truth is feel and flavor more than fact and logic, experience and emotion more than reason and analysis. It’s not the Truth, not even Closest to Truth. It’s more process than conclusion; the discussions reflect educated opinion but no certainty, no smugness. There is a welcome measure of ambiguity, complexity, and even occasional confusion. Topics do not develop linearly; arguments do not flow smoothly. The books our contributors have written are linear and smooth, but these conversations are not. The dialogues in Closer To Truth complement our participant’s more canonical works, which I commend to you for further reading. In each chapter, we follow two to four experts from diverse fields or perspectives as they engage one another in the competitive marketplace of ideas. The transcripts are presented essentially raw, except for verbal clean-ups, to preserve the head-to-head spontaneity and the tang of the original discourse. It is fascinating how the group dynamics move these leading thinkers to express themselves in ways dissimilar from their carefully polished writings, revealing strong passions and subtle nuances not commonly heard. What emerges is personality; it’s fun to meet the people who are challenging truth, changing truth, making truth—to watch them navigating with less control than they normally have when they speak in symposia or craft their elegant books. My role as host of the Closer To Truth television programs was broadbrush—picking the topics, selecting the guests, moving the talk along. My introductions and conclusions to each of the chapters in the Closer To Truth book are more personal mini-essays than analytical outlines; they position or summarize the topic and reflect my particular, perhaps peculiar, orientation. I have fun, and so do the participants, taking the topics seriously but (we hope) not ourselves. Closer To Truth is work in progress, with no artificial deadline. Forget canned surety or cosmetic harmony. Though the book proceeds linearly, the reader need not. Enter and exit at any point. Select by personal interest, not numerical order. Each chapter stands more or less on its own, presenting the take of its diverse contributors. Comments do not fit together neatly as if pieces in a puzzle. Closer To Truth may mean pieces too few or pieces too

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many; chapters are not manicured or neat, but reflect the real-time thinking of real-world thinkers. Look for greater dimension and deeper grain; see subjects from various viewpoints; watch for twists and curves. A primary characteristic of the modern world is science and technology. Knowledge-related changes have a profound effect on our daily lives and on how we perceive ourselves as individuals. Understanding state-of-theart science can help us to make more informed decisions about the choices the world presents to us. The biggest challenge facing scientists, scholars and artists today is to get the public to come to new knowledge with an open mind, to acknowledge that many of the advances brought about by scientific research have changed our lives beyond imagination and ultimately, if we are wise, for the better. We invite readers to visit our two websites—www.pbs.org/closertotruth and www.closertotruth.com—where we provide further resources for exploring these topics, including personal information from our guest experts. We also recommend www.scitechdaily.com, a daily resource for intelligent, informed science and technology coverage and analysis. I hope Closer To Truth encourages readers to become more informed and more passionate about the fundamental issues of human existence. Closer To Truth seeks to become the resource of record for the meaning and implications of scientific discovery and for critical thinking about who we are, why we are here, and where we are going. Closer To Truth will return.1 Robert Lawrence Kuhn Pasadena, California New York, New York October 27, 2006

Note 1. As we go to press, we have begun production of our new season of Closer To Truth, which will focus on cosmology and fundamental physics, the philosophy of cosmology, the philosophy of religion, and philosophical theology.


Chapter 1

Is Science Fiction Science?

Is science fiction scientific? How about diseases from distant galaxies; wormholes in space; fractures and travels in time; black holes with bad attitudes; weird life forms of every variety; telepaths creating superhumans; minds uploaded into silicon chips; souls downloaded from disposable slaves; ‘‘carbon copies’’ of yourself to expand your experiences in multiple lives; and baby universes created on desktops? Those are some of the ideas conjured up by our expert participants and their science fiction colleagues. But science fiction can be conceived as an artistic look at human history, society, and even human nature. In this chapter, three distinguished authors of popular science fiction spar over exactly how science fiction is constrained by known science and then question the value of science fiction. The authors describe the way in which science fiction can inspire scientific research and at the same time serve as a warning against our potential misuse of the awesome power of science (citing the novels Soylent Green and On the Beach). They also good-naturedly point out its limitations—e.g., no science fiction author predicted the personal computer—and wonder why its appeal is not as strong in some countries as in others. Scenario forecasting has been a military tool for thousands of years but only in science fiction is the limit the writer’s imagination. Can science fiction predict the future? Or prevent it? Writer/physicist David Brin argues that George Orwell prevented the 1984 scenario by making people aware of it. But best-selling author Michael Crichton questions why the omnipresence of cameras in society in anyone’s hands is ‘‘a good thing?’’ MacArthur Fellow Octavia Butler thinks we have more pressing things to worry about: ‘‘Global warming, for one.’’

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Closer To Truth: Science, Meaning, and the Future

Although the history of science fiction writing has always reflected the science of the times, it is perhaps most telling that although the times and worlds change, the behavior of people—and aliens—across each fictional society has remained constant. This chapter is a virtual salon with celebrated inventors of alternative futures.

Expert Participants David Brin Author, Kiln People, The Postman, Earth; Ph.D. Space Science

Octavia Butler Author, Survivor, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents (Nebula Award); MacArthur Fellow

Michael Crichton Author, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Sphere, The Andromeda Strain; creator, ER Television series; medical doctor.


Robert Kuhn:

How is science fiction constrained by known science?

Michael Crichton: Robert Kuhn:

It’s fiction; it’s not constrained.

Should it be?

Michael Crichton: No, I don’t think so. Science fiction should make sense; it should be internally consistent; it should relate to contemporary reality in some fashion that’s recognizable—these are more important than whether or not every bit of the physics really works right. I’m very troubled if something really can’t possibly occur. I don’t mind if there’s theoretical running room, but if it’s very clear that something really can’t happen, can never happen, and is never going to happen, then that’s a problem for me. In general, I try and avoid that. Octavia Butler: fiction.

If there are no constraints, I think it’s fantasy, not science

Robert Kuhn: How would you differentiate science fiction from fantasy? It seems that science fiction describes how the world or the universe might look one day, for better or worse, and technology, real or fanciful, plays an important part. Fantasy, on the other hand, takes place in an alternative world, often in an era that has similarities to the Middle Ages where magic is often an important ingredient and technology is seldom very much developed.

Is Science Fiction Science?

3

Octavia Butler: I think the only requirement for fantasy is that it be internally consistent. As for science fiction, if you’re going to use science, you should make some effort to use it intelligently, not necessarily correctly, but intelligently. This means that if you want to do something odd, you are at least aware of it and justifying it. Robert Kuhn: Take mental telepathy, mind reading. Most scientists would say it doesn’t exist, can’t exist. How do you deal with that? Octavia Butler I had a series of books in which people were communicating telepathically. I didn’t care whether it was real or not, possible or not. What I was looking at was how that kind of communication, how a deeper form of communication, would affect people and their relationships. They get involved in war because they understand each other far too well. So, with me, I wasn’t using telepathy as science; I was simply using it as a tool to take a fresh look at the human condition. Robert Kuhn: Do you ever feel the compulsion to push science, to prod science or to predict science? David Brin: Sure, all of the above. Maybe I feel a little bit more liberated because I write hardcore science fiction, about physics and stuff like that some of the time, so I feel at liberty to press the envelope in any direction I choose. Even if my science is implausible, even if it’s impossible. But I feel a compact with the reader to make it clear which kind of science fiction I’m presenting. If we’re taking a vacation from reality in this short story, I try to make it obvious. If in one novel I’m going to try to play with scientific reality, what I write will fit within the plausible range of human science. Of all science fiction authors, only a small minority was trained scientifically, but almost all science fiction authors have enjoyed reading history while growing up. And so, perhaps an alternative name for science fiction should be ‘‘speculative history’’ (including future histories) because we deal with different pasts, alternative presents, and extensions of the human drama into the future. Octavia Butler: I have a problem with alternative histories. So many of them seem to figure out how to lead us to where we are now, in one way or another, instead of going anyplace else. Maybe different people are in charge, but the same basic things are happening I have an ambition to write an alternative history in which things truly do turn out as they haven’t. Robert Kuhn: Can science fiction, though, enable us to deal with alternative futures in a rational way? ‘‘Jurassic Park’’ in a sense is an alternative future, something that may happen. Is this a vehicle for dealing with alternative futures?

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Michael Crichton: There’s no question that the kinds of things that we’re doing, broadly speaking, are alternative scenarios and that the value of alternative scenarios is to explore futures in a way that’s safe and to say something about what they might mean. Robert Kuhn:

When you say ‘‘safe,’’ you mean in a fictional world.

David Brin: Einstein used the word gedanken experiment, thought experiment, a term he coined. He said that just sitting on a streetcar in Bern, leaving the clock tower and imagining he was riding on a beam of light, was 50% of the creative work that led to his Theory of Relativity. And we all do these kinds of thought experiments with these little nubs of brain above our eyes called the prefrontal lobes, which the Bible refers to as lamps on the brow, to look into the future, to do these kinds of thought experiments. We imagine, ‘‘What might happen if. . .?’’ But, our failures are obvious: no science fiction author predicted the home computer. Murray Leinster and John Brunner came close, but backed away at the last moment because each thought, ‘‘computers in the home, it seems logical, it’s heading that way, but people will laugh at me.’’ Octavia Butler: home?

Or, what possibly could we do with computers in the

Robert Kuhn: ‘‘Jurassic Park’’ is great entertainment, but is it more? You’re probably the wrong person to ask, but I’ll ask anyway. Michael Crichton: I’ll give you an anecdote. The book came out, and I was at a resort in Hawai with a lot of physicians from my old alma mater. One of these guys, who was also a bioengineer, read it, slapped it down and said, ‘‘It can be done!’’ And I thought, this is exactly the opposite of what I’m trying to accomplish here. Robert Kuhn:

What was your motivation for writing the book?

Michael Crichton: At that time, I was concerned about two things, which remain concerns: the first is that, in my lifetime, one of the biggest changes that has occurred in science is that it has become commercialized. When I was a student, the majority of scientists worked in academic settings or they worked in places where research was freely available unless you were in a classified, military situation. Now, more and more that’s not the case, more and more science is private, more and more of it is secret for financial reasons, and more and more of it is rushed. The problem with biotechnology in particular is, unlike nuclear technology, you don’t need a tremendous amount of money, you don’t need an Oak Ridge Processing Plant, you can get a little kit and start doing it yourself. Robert Kuhn:

So ‘‘Jurassic Park’’ is a warning?

Is Science Fiction Science?

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Yes. A warning about incautious research.

Octavia Butler: Do you think you seduced a lot of young people into thinking about paleontology? Michael Crichton: I think it’s great if kids become interested in science as a result. Robert Kuhn: So science fiction writers are stimulating more scientists who can work for more of those secret companies to do more of these dangerous biotechnology things. David Brin: If you take my sunny attitude, my sunny interpretation is that the more educated and enthusiastic a public we have, then the harder it is going to be for a small conspiracy to keep things secret. Octavia Butler: I don’t think that a conspiracy is the real problem. There is a serious problem with people knowing, for instance, what is science? Creationism in the science classroom, that kind of thing. Michael Crichton: Most people don’t have any idea about what constitutes scientific information. 15 years ago, many people I know (particularly from San Francisco) were having experts walk around their house with these little meters to check the electromagnetic fields because of the health hazard [of radon]. Today, those people are now buying, at great expense, magnet devices that they stick in their back and on their arms because they now think that these provide a health benefit. So, in 15 years we’ve gone from a health hazard to a health benefit. Robert Kuhn: Jurassic Park probably taught more people about DNA than most colleges. Is that a way science fiction can influence society? Michael Crichton: There has been much criticism that Jurassic Park is anti-science. The reason is that it took a critical posture to a new technology. At one point, a congressman was going to introduce legislation to ban dinosaur-creating research. I wish it had come to the floor, but someone apparently whispered in his ear that this was not likely to happen. Octavia Butler: People tend to believe the movies because they see it. I remember having an argument with somebody who was insisting that a tornado was the greatest storm the world could ever know, and there was nothing I could say that would convince her otherwise. David Brin: Let’s beware of our anecdotes, because if there’s anything that we need to watch out for as writers, it is cliche´s—and the biggest cliche´ in our civilization is that everybody else is stupid. I don’t know anybody who calls himself a member of the masses.

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Octavia Butler: Not that everybody else is stupid, but that it’s terribly easy to fool people. We’ve all been fooled. Daivd Brin: As authors, there are some very serious issues we have to think about. Our job is to keep a character, or several characters (with whom the reader or the viewer identifies closely) in peril or in jeopardy for 90 minutes of film or 400 pages of a book. The easiest way to do that is to simply posit that they’re not members of a civilization filled with skilled professionals who will help them if they’re in trouble. Or to have a really plausible excuse for why your heroes must remain in jeopardy. This is one of the things I liked in Jurassic Park in that the characters were very isolated, they had taken precautions, but somebody had deliberately destroyed the precautions. So you have the ridiculous situation of people running away from dinosaurs who should be properly penned up, really having been fairly well explicated how you can have 90 heart-thumping minutes, even though help should be on the way; well, it is on the way, but it’s going to arrive too late. Robert Kuhn: Do you desire to use future fiction to deal with the lack of scientific knowledge in society? Michael Crichton: I don’t know in what way we can help people to understand, when they see a number, how that number is arrived at, unless you’ve been doing some experiments yourself. David Brin: My wife is a science teacher and she finds it appalling that so much of the testing going on focuses on memorization. The latest big fad is attempting to emulate what foreign kids do to enable them to test well on standardized exams. So we are stressing memorization, when the font of our success, the reason why 90 out of the 100 best universities on the planet are in the United States, is not our memorization of past facts but our creativity and innovation to pioneer new thinking. But that’s not what our kids are now being taught. This emphasis on memorizing facts from lists, from worksheets, undermines the entire basis of science. Where my wife enjoys her best teaching is in conducting experiments and getting her students to draw conclusions and then criticize each other’s conclusions and come up with new experiments to settle the matter between them. Robert Kuhn: Are there issues in the world that you would like to see handled in a science fiction kind of model? David Brin: I think the most powerful science fiction stories are not those that accurately predict the future, but, rather, those that have prevented futures, the self-preventing prophecy that came across so chilling, and so many people read it and were so moved, that the very scenario that might have plausibly happened didn’t happen. The best two examples that really prevented the terrible futures they described are 1984 by George Orwell and Das Kapital by Karl Marx, who was probably the greatest science

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fiction author who ever lived. Both books utterly and thankfully prevented the scenario that they described. Michael Crichton: I actually think that 1984 came to pass. Orwell was writing about a totalitarian state, but even though that part isn’t the case, the notion that you might live in a society that rather rigorously limits your available behavior, and that watches you to make sure that you do what is desired, is the case. I think we are increasingly seeing behavioral control, but it’s not Big Brother doing it to us, we’re doing it to ourselves. David Brin: But that’s a major distinction. We are not falling into Orwell’s failure mode of allowing the cameras to just look one way in a pyramidal social structure, which is what he feared, the ancient elites lording it over those languishing below. My point is that we’ve gotten our freedom from elites. Instead, most of the cameras are now in the hands of private people. Governments can install cameras but private people will have many more of them. Michael Crichton:

Why is that a good thing?

David Brin: What we’re talking about is evading Orwell’s failure mode of the elites staring at us and us not staring back. Michael Crichton: The notion that every single thing we do is recorded, that every purchase, even every mouse click, can be tracked in every way, that there is no part of our lives where we can truly be alone and where we can say that what we are doing is not available for observation—except maybe going to the bathroom and that’s soon to change (how about intelligent toilets that test your excreted fluids and solids). I think the notion that we’re all on camera now is going to cause a subtle shift in our natural behaviors. If we were having a conversation before the camera started, we experience some subtle but genuine difference now that the cameras are rolling. I’m on the air, I’m being broadcast, and I’m not being my normal self. I’m concerned that there isn’t going to be any part of my life where I can be my normal self. Robert Kuhn: Isn’t science fiction a vehicle for sharpening our perspective of contemporary problems, the technique being to move those problems to a radically different environment so that by stripping away the trappings of normal society, those problems become dissected out and exposed in all their purity? David Brin: One hopes that this is so, but the problem is this: Orwell warned us about the State looking at us without us looking back at the State, so we’re working on a society that might prevent such a situation. Where is science fiction’s warning about the kind of society Michael was just describing, a society in which everybody has the cameras—all right, so now we’re

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free from spying elites, but we all spy on one another incessantly and nobody has any privacy. Michael Crichton: Let me tell you a story. A friend of mine’s husband works in the State Department and since he was about to retire they wanted to have a farewell party for this person. So this friend of mine, she cooks the dinner herself, she has her son serve it, and she has her son’s school friend also serve it, because she knows that if she brings in an outside person, a catering person, that no one at the table will talk. And I said to her, ‘‘This is a travesty: how is this different from living in the old Soviet Union?’’ David Brin: In all of history, no government ever knew as much about its people, as does ours. And in all of history, I contend, no people have ever been quite as free as ours. And both are still true after 9/11. Michael Crichton:

I’m not sure of this at all.

David Brin: We can argue about this, but you find me the historical counter-examples. Michael Crichton: Just to start, I can give you an easy one. When Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court and it appeared that it was going to be difficult to knock him down on intellectual content alone, one of the mechanisms that was suggested was that they might introduce his videotape rentals. David Brin:

And there’s a law that resulted from that.

Michael Crichton:

But, the fact is it’s recorded!

Octavia Butler: I have a feeling that some of the things that we’re doing environmentally, for instance, are going to hurt us a lot worse than the fact that we’ve got cameras trained on each other. Robert Kuhn:

Have you dealt with that in your fiction?

Octavia Butler: Yes, particularly global warming. In my books Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents global warming is a character. It’s there doing things while people are trying to live their lives. And it’s not a very popular notion. Global warming is something that people can still forget about, ignore, and, no matter how many novels come out, it’s just not that important to most people right now. Robert Kuhn: David, in your latest book, Kiln People, do you look beyond pure entertainment? Do you see an alternative future? Do you seek to push science? David Brin: Kiln People is one of my less plausible ideas. Most science fiction has fallen into the cliche´ of extending human life by extending it serially, tacking on more years at the end. In contrast, Kiln People is founded

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on the notion that instead of extending human life serially, how about doing it in parallel, having more life, multiple lives, at the same time—when you are young, when you could really use it. Every morning you lie down on a fanciful ‘‘home copier,’’ which then turns out five or six clay copies of yourself (Golems) with your memory, your motivation, your personality, so that you can be in multiple places at once. You then collect the memories at the end of the day and integrate them together in your psyche. The next day, another five places at once—you can work out the enormous permutations. It’s a real science fiction novel in the sense that it works out what such a society might be like. Octavia Butler: enough?

Do you really think that five or six parallel lives would be

David Brin: People will never have enough, but I believe that human sanity is based, to some degree, on satiability: if you get what you want, assuming that you’re fairly sane, it should at least make you a little bit happier. And it should shift your ambitions from what they were to something else. Octavia Butler: I think one of the worst things that could happen to you is you get what you want. Then you’re finished, you might as well cut your throat now, your life is done. David Brin: Humans are monkeys; that’s not going to happen. People complain that 30% of Americans watch 40, 50 hours a week of television; 100 years ago, that same 30% of Americans watched the fire burning in their fireplace for 40 hours a week. Michael Crichton:

They had better programming back then.

Octavia Butler: When I was a kid, I got to live a nineteenth century existence for a little while. My grandmother had a chicken ranch and there was no electricity, we used a well for water. We told stories. I think they enjoyed scaring the heck out of me. Some of them were true, some of them weren’t. Robert Kuhn: Octavia Butler:

It enriched your life. It did. For one thing, I developed a real love for stories.

Robert Kuhn: Why has science fiction become more mainstream now? What’s happened? Michael Crichton: I think that technology is phenomenally important in our lives. And it’s developing at a much more rapid rate. I was born in 1942, so I spent 10 years without television, in the way that Octavia is talking about, and then the arrival of television made an enormously different world. And, a few years after that, the arrival of jet aircraft made an enormously different world. And, by the time you get to personal computers

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and the internet, life has become very, very different. Talking about an early book I wrote, The Andromeda Strain, today’s kids say to me, ‘‘Well, why did you write it that way?’’ meaning that old way with all those old things. They can’t conceive of the world just 35 years ago, it’s such a totally different world today. Robert Kuhn: Some people say that The Andromeda Strain helped prepare us for bio-terrorism, how we would react to an anthrax attack. Michael Crichton: Robert Kuhn: character?

I always thought it was a remake of War of the Worlds.

Does science fiction in other cultures have a different

David Brin: Japanese science fiction, Brazilian science fiction are very different than American science fiction. There was very different, and very interesting, science fiction literature that arose out of the old Soviet Union, written by enthusiastic socialists. But if you travel around the world as a science fiction author, you know the difference between those countries in which science fiction is popular and those in which it isn’t. In Japan, people pick me up at the airport; in India they don’t. Octavia Butler: I remember a conference in New York for ‘‘African Women of the Diaspora,’’ called The Yari Yari Conference, actually, The Future of the Future. There were a lot of people from third world countries where it wasn’t as much a matter of press freedom so much as finding the necessities for publishing, such as a printing press, paying for paper, figuring out how to distribute your book, and often all by yourself. David Brin: But there is another essential point why science fiction is an American literature to some degree, and that is because most of the propaganda coming out of the American experience promote suspicion of authority and, to some degree, tolerance. As Octavia was saying, there are a lot of cultures in which authority is a much more revered thing, or much more of a problematical thing in day-to-day life. Octavia Butler: being met.

Or cultures where there are a lot more needs that aren’t

Robert Kuhn: If we had somebody here from China or India or Africa, how do you think they would react to our discussion about science fiction? Octavia Butler: I think they probably would want us to focus on topics that were more important to them. Take the writer Arundhati Roy who has been arrested in India because she went beyond her writing fiction and criticized something that her government was doing which was very worthy of criticism. People in third world countries would want us to pay more attention to what’s really going on in their countries and what shouldn’t be.

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Robert Kuhn: Theoretically though, all of your fiction is non-culturally based, if you’re in a different era, a different galaxy, a different dimension . . . Octavia Butler:

But, really, it’s all culturally based, of course.

Robert Kuhn: Though the environment may be different superficially, the characters think and act as if they are in the current culture of the author. Because most science fiction is generated in the United States, does the genre reflect a cultural bias? Michael Crichton: Or building into our stories a bias that has to do with the level and nature of technological sophistication—which is not worldwide—but it’s a technology bias as opposed to a social one. Octavia Butler: I don’t think you can have this level of technology without it affecting the social, and therefore the bias is social as well. Robert Kuhn: What are some of the issues you’d like to see discussed in the science fiction in the future? Octavia Butler: We don’t have a focus now that was like, for instance, the Cold War or the space race; we don’t have anything that grabs everybody. And since we don’t have such an overriding cause, what we write probably seems more scattered than we intend it to be. The future of science fiction is not what we thought it would be years ago. David Brin: This is especially true since the best science fiction is about the human response to change. And since change is a salient feature of our civilization, I think that science fiction has, logically speaking, philosophically speaking, an important role to play. The issue is whether or not it’s playing that role well. Michael Crichton: To do these kinds of scenarios in our science fiction is valuable, but it is not the same as holding a newborn child, it is not the same as holding a parent while they die in your arms. How you explain that feeling is orders of magnitude more important than what we do.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary: It doesn’t matter whether science fiction is really scientific; here are three reasons why it can be important. First, science fiction can break free from the scientific method: if your imagination doesn’t have to worry about verification, just maybe you’ll discover something truly original. Second, science fiction can explore contemporary issues in different environments, so that when all normal trappings of society are stripped away, just maybe real problems will be exposed.

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Third, science fiction can examine a vast number of alternative futures, which just maybe can prepare humanity for all eventualities, like, say, marauding asteroids or malevolent aliens. Only theology claims greater reach, and I’ll let you decide how science fiction, religion, and science can each explain the world, predict the future, and bring us Closer To Truth.


Interviews with Expert Participants Michael Crichton Why did you become a science fiction writer? Because when I was a kid I loved the Arthur Conan Doyle stories of Sherlock Holmes. And one of the things that really impressed me about them was the sense of how real they were, how true to life they were. People go to London and look for Holmes’s famous address, 221B Baker Street. I always aspired to have that quality of realism in my writings, trying to make people think it was true. What’s changed in your field since you were a kid? Storytelling has enormously changed in my lifetime as a result of two new kinds of storytelling which have emerged. The first is commercials and the second is cartoons. And they have produced an enormous change: in commercials in terms of pace and rapid change; and in cartoons in terms of the kind of exaggeration in storytelling that people have come to expect. Does the general public appreciate science? In the last survey that I saw people were asked what scientific instrument or what technological device they appreciated most in their house, and the overwhelming majority named the microwave. Any advice for young people? It’s my strong belief that people who are engaged in any kind of technology should not fall too much in love with it. Do not lose your human characteristics. How would you like to be remembered? I would like to be remembered by the people that knew me as a good person who made a difference in their lives.

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Has your audience surprised you? When I wrote the first novel that was successful, The Andromeda Strain, I was really writing about technology that was already at that time 20 years old. And it was, ‘‘Oh wow, this is so hip and slick and up to date.’’ And I thought, ‘‘Really? Okay. Well, I’ll write something that really is up to date.’’ And the next book was ‘‘The Terminal Man,’’ which was about psychosurgery and atomic pacemakers and stuff like that. And it was based on real patients; it was all happening. And people said, ’’This is ridiculous! Who could possibly believe this?’’ It’s very hard to persuade your audience about what’s happening right now. They’re living in the past, so you have to write a little bit that way. What do you think the biggest threat to life is today? The greatest hazard now comes from biotechnology. Even in the worst years of the Cold War and the nuclear standoff, a nuclear war never conceived of totally wiping out the species. I think it is absolutely conceivable that somebody could do something in biotechnology that could wipe us out. Is technology irreversible? I’m actually not persuaded that technology cannot be turned back. In most of my lifetime, what powered adolescence was the desire for the freedom as exemplified by the mobility of the automobile. That was a peculiarly American dream, an early 20th Century dream; and now we have the entire world sitting in traffic jams. Today, the most forward thinking people are dreaming of a world without cars. And I think we’ll eventually have that. I think we’re going to eventually have to begin to crank this one technology, autos, backwards. Talk about the technology in fiction. To me, all fiction of the past seems simplistic, except for James Joyce. Certainly anything that’s technical, you look at it and just think, ‘‘Oh well, that’s just like child’s play.’’ I’m sure that 100 years from now people will look at the problems that we find overwhelming and say, ‘‘What was the big deal? That was nothing.’’ This progressive attitude is characteristic of technology. You write books about serious science; do you think entertainment can educate? Tom Wolfe once said, ‘‘Movies are great, but cannot explain anything.’’ And what people need now in terms of science and technology is that they need explanations. They need to understand what are the risks of this

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technology? What are the benefits of that technology? What are the issues involved? What are the tradeoffs? Because there are always tradeoffs. Most people don’t understand the notion of tradeoffs; nor do they understand the notion of risk. You can say to them, ’’Do you want arsenic in the drink you ordered?’’ And they go, ‘‘No, not me.’’ But if you say, ‘‘Would you be willing to spend this amount of money on cleaning up the water, but this would mean that you couldn’t buy a new car,’’ they go, ‘‘Oh, wait a minute.’’ Most people can’t weigh tradeoffs, especially regarding societal issues.

David Brin Why did you become a scientist? I wanted to become a scientist because it seemed like this was an honest way to see the world. Every civilization has had artists—art flows from our pores. All the fine scientists I know have artistic hobbies. Most of my neighbors have artistic hobbies. The idea that art is rare is a myth foisted on us by artists. All civilizations have had art, and I was born to be an artist, I was scribbling from an early age. But science—only one civilization has ever had science—training millions of people to actually be honest in how they saw things, and to doubt themselves and to try to find out what’s true whether they like it or not. I wanted to be part of that and I struggled. I wasn’t very good at it. I got my union card—my Ph.D. You know what? Science is hard. ‘‘Lying’’ is easy. This civilization is willing to pay me a lot more to fib about people who can’t sue me because they are all fictitious, and who am I to argue with civilization? Ever had any close encounters? If you go to the Encounters Restaurant at the center of Los Angeles airport (LAX), you enter this little brushed aluminum elevator and all of sudden as soon as the door closes Star Trekkie music comes on, ‘‘Ooh-e-o-ooh.’’ You have all the waitresses wearing Star Trek miniskirts and there are lava lamps everywhere. Will technology outpace civil control? It seems likely that the biologists and the biochemists will do to their big, huge, building-size laboratories what the cyberneticists did to the computer. And not only make them smaller, but cheaper. In biotechnology, this miniaturization is happening at a curve that’s even faster than Moore’s Law. Within 10 to 15 years you will see the MolecuMac in which any teenager in America will be able to fabricate—on his desktop—any known or unknown organic compound. There are all sorts of possibilities. Science fiction is supposed to look ahead a little ways and see these possibilities: I see

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the MolecuMac. Under circumstances like those, if we remain so stupid, civilization cannot hold together. Do you think the impoverished are doomed to exploitation? I like to use a ‘‘social diamond’’ as an economic metaphor of society and in which the well-off, empowered, and comfortable middle class far outnumber the poor. This contrasts with the typical ‘‘social pyramid’’ on which those at the top are extremely few. The social diamond shows how huge and obvious genuine progress has been, at least in the West, under our Modernist Agenda. No image demonstrates more clearly how this society is different from all predecessors, how much we ALL have benefited from science and accountability. . .and how much we have to lose if we return to the traditional human social pyramid. The chief argument among Republicans and Democrats is how to keep the diamond rising faster so that the poor live better lives than kings did in the past. In this respect, the absolute fundamental moral minimum is that no child born into poverty should automatically remain in poverty—Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians all agree that this would be a bad thing. Some may respond that the social diamond rests on the back of a social pyramid and that Americans stand at the top of the pyramid and exploit those beneath us. I agree, but not in the sense that the American economy and globalization makes poor people of the Third World poorer. That’s easily disproved. The more a foreign economy is enmeshed with the American economy, the richer the people are in that foreign economy. It’s those countries whose economies are least attached to the American economy that are the poorest, so that argument is easily disposed. So what is this pyramid on which we are on top and those beneath us we exploit? They are called machines. And here the science fiction writer comes in because in a few years will the machines be the latest slave population demanding their share of the diamond? It could happen. Is mankind exploiting the earth? Another perspective is that the pyramid is the earth and we’re extracting resources from it—we’re taking away the resources that our children will need. A science fiction author feels this very deeply because, of course, it’s going to take a great deal of surplus for us to be rich enough to colonize space, to plant colonies on Mars, to venture out to the stars. Only very rich, human, earth-wide civilizations will have the surplus that it takes to go and do these bold things. We are in a window of time during which we have enough surplus that we can spend some of it on trying to help raise up the poor while at the same time investing in making our children better than us, while at the same time putting enough aside for research so that the whole pie gets bigger. The resource-intensive approach to getting wealthier

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cannot be sustained, but in the long run, it’s going to be human creativity that’s going to be the ultimate resource. Talk about anti-globalization—is it a democratic movement? Karl Marx was the greatest of all science fiction authors because in the East, where he was taken seriously and followed as if he were a prophet, his effects were actually fairly ineffective at changing humanity in positive directions. It was in the West, where his work was read as a plausible scenario for a failure mode, that something happened that he never imagined could happen because he felt contempt for the masses. He never imagined that the masses would read his work and then say, ‘‘Ah, interesting, let’s reform this scenario right away.’’ And he never imagined that elites like Franklin Delano Roosevelt would say the same thing. That’s the point. The young antiglobalization men and women are assuming that international law will be controlled by these elites, but their own countries are counterexamples. They should be out there in the streets demanding a place at the table, demanding institutions, doing what the Jeffersonians did when Madison and Monroe were writing ‘‘The Federalist Papers,’’ acting as the counterbalance, demanding that the people have a say. This is a good role they could be playing. But they are not doing it. What’s going to be our failure mode, if we have one? Failure modes are a fascinating topic. Of course, they attract a lot of science fiction because if you can expose a failure mode very vividly as in On the Beach, Fail-Safe, Dr. Strangelove, Soylent Green, 1984, and Das Kapital, then you can create the greatest of all science fiction stories, the selfpreventing prophecy, the prophecy that does not come true because people actually paid attention to you because people were smarter than you had expected. So we’re all looking for that next danger. Let me put this in perspective. Barring UFO fantasies, the obvious fact is that the Earth has never been visited by aliens for two billion years because if they had flushed their toilets in our primitive ecosystem, it would have changed the history of life on Earth. This virtually proves that there is a lot of empty loneliness out there in the universe. Now I believe that there are aliens—that alien life is out there—I worked on that both as an astronomer and as a science fiction author, but alien life seems to be extremely sparse. Why? One possibility is that some set of failure modes is always encountered by intelligent life forms before they reach the stars. Carl Sagan came up with this when he discussed nuclear winter, that this might be how civilizations destroy themselves. If that’s true, we’ve proved that it’s at least possible to get past the nuclear crises. We’ve proved that self destruction is not automatic, but what about resource depletion and environmental degradation? What about

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bioengineering of diseases? I don’t know. It could be that human beings are anomalously smart. If that’s true, it’s a scary universe. How do you think we can insure survival of the species? I don’t think we’re even going to have colonies on Mars, let alone in the asteroids, let alone on other planets and other solar systems unless we do something that is very rarely portrayed in science fiction—actually grow up a bit. Gene Roddenberry is one of the only creators of science fiction who ever posited the possibility that our grandchildren might be better than us. And when you think about it, what’s the point in having kids if they won’t be? If we raise a generation of boys who are three times as responsible and girls who are three times as confident, all the rest is petty details and the next generation will be smarter than we are. We don’t have to preach to them what ideology they should have. They’ll be smarter than us. That’s our hope. Has science fiction served us well? Why have so few science fiction writes portray futures in which people are better than they are today? Gene Roddenberry, Ray Bradbury, and me are the few. Why? Because of the need to use ‘‘idiot plots.’’ Because your main job in a novel or in a movie is to keep your hero or heroine in jeopardy for 90 minutes of the film or 400 pages of a novel. And it’s hard to do, hard to keep your heroes in heart-pounding jeopardy, hard to keep the reader turning pages or the viewer glued to the screen if what is told is a story of a better society. So I think the ‘‘idiot plot’’ requirement has had a deleterious effect on us, because we tend to absorb through our books and through our movies the assumption that we live in this horrible civilization filled with idiots. Yes, it’s comforting to think, ‘‘I got my opinions because of rational analysis of the evidence, but everyone else got their opinions because of flaws in their character.’’ One hundred percent of us do that. But it’s time to wake up and smell the roses. Sorry folks, you actually live in a pretty decent civilization that’s getting better every day.

Octavia Butler Why did you become a writer? I came to be a writer by accident. I discovered I liked it; I was writing when I was 10 years old. I was writing to get away from my boring life, so fantasy was a natural. And a couple of years later, I saw a bad movie called Devil Girl from Mars, and watching it on television, I sat there and said, ‘‘Jeez, I could write a better story than that. Anybody can write a better story than that.’’ And finally it hit me that someone had been paid for writing that bad story, so I grabbed my notebook and began to write. I didn’t see the

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end of that movie until many years later, when a Texas fan actually gave me a copy of it and I watched it, and I kind of admired my good taste as a 12 year-old. Whom do you admire most, and why? I began trying to sell stories when I was 13. If I found somebody I liked, I would read everything I could find that they had written. And that’s how I discovered John Bruner and Marion Zimmer Bradley and Harlan Ellison and J.T. McIntosh and a number of other old-time writers, people who were writing a lot when I was a kid. Because it was nice to find somebody dependable. I could just go back and find everything that they had written that was at the library or the Salvation Army bookstore. What advice do you have for young people A bit of the Hippocratic Oath: ‘‘Do no harm,’’ but also a bit of my own philosophy, ‘‘Do the thing that you love and do it as well as you possibly can and be persistent about doing it.’’ It’s really important to find a way to earn a living doing what you care about and trying to do as much good as you can in the world. Did you major in science in school? I don’t have a science background, but I do know where the library is, and that’s pretty much what I’ve leaned on throughout my career. Do you stress science research? For the most part, I don’t write hard science fiction. My Xenogenesis Trilogy is as close as I’ve gotten to hard science fiction and it’s biological science fiction. So far, I haven’t been writing about the scientist busily doing science. I’m more likely to be writing about the people who are affected by the science. I always wondered when I watched movies or television what was going on with the ordinary people because so often you would see the leaders and the scientists and the generals, and I was much more interested in how all this was affecting Joe Blow and Jane Doe. Why science fiction and not just fiction? I began writing because life was incredibly boring, and I began with fantasy. And when I went to science fiction it was mainly because of Devil Girl. It was supposedly science fiction, and if I was going to compete with it, which I was at first, then I should write science fiction. And I went off and got a little book on astronomy and read it. I was very disappointed in Mars, but I wrote anyway and tried to just see what I could do. It was fun. I got to learn

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things that I had not known before. I really enjoy having an excuse to stick my nose into all sorts of things. I think most writers are just ‘‘natural liars,’’ but that’s not really the word I want. We eavesdrop. We do all sorts of things that get us into everyone else’s business, and we’re also into a little bit of everything. If you’re talking to a writer about almost anything, you can at least have a brief conversation that isn’t stupid. Were you surprised when the MacArthur Foundation called and you had been selected as a Fellow? When a total stranger with a very nice voice called me and said, ‘‘You’ve been chosen for the MacArthur Fellowship,’’ my immediate reaction was, ‘‘What is this? When is she going to ask me for my credit card number so I can hang up?’’ I couldn’t believe it. And I didn’t really know very much about it. I’ve heard of it vaguely. And it took me a while to begin to believe it. They asked me not to tell anyone for a while, and I thought, ‘‘That will be my choice.’’ I want to see what’s going to happen here before I run out and tell people and then later look really bad. How do you think you will be remembered? People will say that I’m a black science fiction writer, or I’m a feminist scientist fiction writer, something like that. People have to affix these labels because it’s shorthand and because it’s an excuse for failing to think. You don’t have to read my stuff if you already know what I am. How would you like to be remembered? I would like to be read and remembered for what I’ve written, and really that’s kind of up to the person who reads me. Now, if they read my books and don’t like them – and I’ve had some people tell me so – well, there’s nothing I can do about that. On the other hand, if they read my books and get something from them, well, that’s very good.


Chapter 2

Why is Music So Significant?

Music is a fundamental defining factor of the human mind; from brain development to cultural progression, music pervades the human psyche. Virtually every known human culture has some form of musical expression, and the neurobiology of music—how the brain appreciates and processes music—is an exploration of what it means to be human. Although there are specific parts of the brain dedicated to the sense of sound, vast areas of the brain (particularly the cerebral cortex) must work together to process the complex process we call music, including areas of working memory, forethought, movement, and emotion. Music has a special relationship to various kinds of brain patterns—melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, pitch, and style of sound each have their unique representations. Music’s nonverbal character expresses a different way of thinking than do other kinds of human cognition and thus may have broader impact on the body, such as lowering blood pressure and easing pain. Like theories of a universal grammar hardwired into our brains to enable language, there may be a universal set of rules that governs how patterns of sounds can become music and how a limited number of sounds can be combined in an infinite number of ways. Two streams of research come together, one anatomical, one psychological. First, the plasticity of the brain, active during infancy and early childhood and perhaps into adulthood and old age, may be activated by music in diverse ways, thus stimulating richer, healthier, better functioning brains. Recent data goes further, contradicting long-standing maxims that no new brain cells—called neurons—can form in the adult brain, growth that may be enhanced by music. Second, there is anecdotal evidence that children and even adults who are exposed to music, especially complex forms, do

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better in other areas of development. This seems true in infants and young children and may also be true in adults and even the elderly. Can music aid mental development? Running on treadmills increases brain size and function in young rats. Can listening to music do the same in young humans? Three musicians—a neuroscientist, a dean of a fine arts college program, and an education innovator—discuss music’s universal appeal and its importance to the development of human society. One panelist asserts that music could have easily predated human language, and all concur that music’s inherent symmetry and organizational principles tap into a deep human need to order, or manage, our environment. They investigate how music may affect brain development, whether or not listening to classical music can make us smarter, and music’s possible role in the development of cooperative action.

Expert Participants Jeanne Bamberger Professor of Music and Urban Education, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; pianist.

Robert Freeman Dean, College of Fine Arts, University of Texas at Austin; past director, Eastman School of Music; past president, New England Conservatory of Music

Mark Jude Tramo Director, The Institute for Music and Brain Science, Massachusetts General Hospital; neurologist and neuroscientist, Harvard Medical School; musician, songwriter


Robert Freeman: I grew up with music all over my house and I had a music teacher who shared with everyone the huge excitement that I have always gotten out of music. What I don’t know is whether music is part of my genetic background or part of the fact that it was the first language I really learned. I also still don’t know how best to teach music to other human beings. Mark Tramo: I would argue that music in the form of song predated our ability to speak. We were communicating emotions and ideas with grunts and groans and chants and hums well before we were enunciating complex ideas like the ones we are sharing right now.

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Jeanne Bamberger: Out of the grunts and groans has grown the complexity of the music that has been created since those early human days, because music embodies a lot of the organizing principles that we find in almost every other domain, such as symmetry and periodicity. Mark Tramo: And that symmetry relates to our natural affinity for music, the degree to which children, for example, naturally gravitate to music. It seems that as humans we have a compulsion to order, organize, control the environment around us. And music relates to our acoustic environment; we’re surrounded routinely by a cacophony of sounds coming from all around us, and we take all of those sounds and organize them with respect to their frequencies, with respect to when those combinations of frequencies are occurring in time, and with this beautiful regularity, beautiful structure —and that’s how we experience sound. Jeanne Bamberger: On the basis of my research, it turns out that what everybody knows how to do by the time they are five or six years old in this culture, they know how to hear beginnings and endings and they know how to hear what is usually called functions; for example, they can hear when musical passages do not have proper resolutions in their endings. Furthermore, I’ve seen a little girl, three years old, sitting on the floor, listening to a performance of The Magic Flute. When she got bored, she stood up and began walking: she walked one direction and at the ends of the phrases she turned around and walked in the other direction, and she kept that up for the whole tune. So what people can hear are beginnings and endings, and they can hear finished and unfinished, stability and instability, so one of the problems is that when we traditionally begin music education, we start with notes. We teach kids how to read music, which captures features that are very different from what we’re paying attention to when we listen. Robert Freeman: Of course, I don’t know what you hear when you hear music and you don’t know what I hear. Jeanne Bamberger: No, I don’t; that’s right. But I tried to find that out by asking kids to invent ways of putting down on paper something they had clapped, for example. And what they capture is different in very specific ways from what’s captured in the standard music notation. But it’s also very much inherent in what we do when people see our gestures, or movement from and to, but they don’t measure either time or pitch, which is exactly what music notation captures. Kids use squiggles on paper, say that show a whole little figure. Robert Kuhn:

What are some examples?

Jeanne Bamberger: Take mechanical gears. We have kids playing with great big cardboard gears of different sizes that they had made of different numbers of teeth, and the question was, when you turned them around,

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which one went faster? Well, one little girl said, ‘‘It depends on what kind of ‘fastness’ you mean. Because if you’re talking about the number of times around, then the little one is going faster. But if you’re talking about those things (i.e., gears) that connect to each other, then they’re going the same.’’ She was nine, and she was failing in school because the way she thought about things was so much more complex, so much more integrated, and using so many different sensory modalities and modes of representation that nobody, not the other kids and not the teacher, could understand her. Robert Kuhn:

How did she relate to the gears?

Jeanne Bamberger: There were eight teeth on the little gear and it went around four times when the big one went around once, and the question was, how many teeth does the big one have? And the other kids said, ‘‘You better count them.’’ And she said, ‘‘You don’t need to count them, it’s 32!’’ Because eight times four is 32. Then I said, ‘‘Can you clap this relationship?’’ And we hit the table with one hand four times for every time we hit the table with the other hand one time. Then we went to the computer and I said, ‘‘Can you get the computer synthesizer to play that rhythm using numbers?’’ And at that point they had to get into ratio and proportion, because the slower gear had to have a number of teeth that was four times bigger than the faster one, so they could use something like 12 and three, this could be a 12-er, as they called it, and this could be a three-er. So at that moment they had gone across all these different sensory modalities, modes of representation, including their own body action and different kinds of materials. I think there are many things that meet in different domains and function actively in music. Robert Freeman: Though we don’t normally teach music as though that were the case—and we should. Robert Kuhn: When all this is happening there are vast areas of the brain that are involved, it’s not just the auditory part. Mark Tramo: The concept that there is a single, solitary music center in the brain is surely not correct. The auditory system is what allows us to decode the music, makes sense of the music. To derive the meaning or to evoke the emotions of music, one has to develop some expectations about where the music is going. So if I’m expecting a pianist to end on a particular note, I can tell you that the anterior frontal cortex of the brain is what is most active, trying to discern what’s coming next—it is not the auditory cortex in the superior temporal lobe. Robert Freeman:

What are the brain structures measuring?

Mark Tramo: The structures in the brain’s auditory system are measuring the frequency, the duration, and the timing of the events as we listen to them, and their complex combinations.

Why is Music So Significant?

Robert Freeman:

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Patterns.

Mark Tramo: Yes, patterns. The anterior frontal cortex is expecting those patterns to resolve or not resolve in some way. You’re going to associate them with events that happened in your past life by recalling them in the medial temporal lobe. Robert Kuhn:

It shows the power and pervasiveness of music.

Mark Tramo: Music taps into so much of what makes us human. On the one hand it seems so simple: sing Happy Birthday, the simplest thing. But when you put it altogether, it is so meaningful and it involves so much of the brain, it’s astonishing. Jeanne Bamberger: Music recruits so much of our mental and emotional lives; why music has this capacity is a mystery. Mark Tramo: The amazing thing is that we think of music as being sound, acoustical energy, but it no longer exists as acoustical energy once it gets past the ear. It exists entirely in the activity of tens of millions of nerve cells throughout the auditory system. Robert Kuhn:

It starts out mechanical in the ear.

Mark Tramo: It starts out mechanical but there’s no sound in the brain; all we have are minuscule brain cells, called neurons, firing short, fast electrical impulses (called ‘‘action potentials’’) and communicating with one another. The electrical activity is one neuron splashing a chemical onto another neuron and causing it to fire sparks. How many sparks it fires, when it fires those sparks, that’s the code that the brain uses to say ‘‘Oh, Professor Bamberger is playing this particular piece,’’ or ‘‘she is climaxing the piece in just the right way to evoke the emotion.’’ The neurons themselves experience no sound per se; there’s no acoustical energy in the brain. The pitches that we hear that characterize individual notes can only exist within a particular range of the audible spectrum. We don’t have instruments that play tones above 20,000 Hz because we couldn’t hear them. So the physiology of our auditory system has to constrain the pitches that we use. When one plays different combinations of notes, we can actually see differences in the way that neurons fire. For certain types of sounds, there’s more regularity in terms of the neural firing, something Galileo wrote about when he was under house arrest for his work on astronomy. He pointed out that the timing of fluctuations and air vibrations, and therefore the fluctuations in the ear drum (which we know result in fluctuations in the sparking of neurons) is much more regular for certain musical structures like an octave. Robert Kuhn: Does music affect brain development? In other words, does brain development just enable us to hear different tones, or do those tones in fact impose themselves on the brain and influence brain development?

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Mark Tramo: Here is the way I think about it: we come into the world and we are primed to extract regularities in the acoustic environment and in the visual environment. For example, we’re primed to recognize faces. Our nervous system gives us that capacity. Robert Kuhn: So are music principles built into the brain, hard wired from birth? Or are they only out in the external world and we learn to recognize them? Mark Tramo: Both, in a way. They are certainly out in the external world, and we come into that world with a predisposition to apprehend it. It’s the old differentiation between nature and nurture. There’s a continual interaction between what we’re born with and what exists in the world. It is part of our nature to change with the environment, but brain and environment are inextricably linked. Robert Kuhn:

It’s the plasticity of the brain.

Mark Tramo: What’s new and exciting is that we’re not just talking about plasticity in three year olds, we’re talking about that the plasticity of the brain lasting throughout life, though to a lesser degree. Brain plasticity continues on into adulthood; the brain is changing well into our seventh and eighth decades of life. Robert Freeman: For any piece of music to make sense—whatever culture it’s in, whether it’s high art or pop art—there has to be some kind of regularity or repetition. If I play the beginning of Beethoven’s First Sonata, then two measures of Beethoven’s Second Sonata, then two measures of Beethoven’s Third Sonata, even though all of which are a part of Opus II, you would get something which makes no sense. Jeanne Bamberger: Robert Kuhn: hold?

Without repetition, there would be no coherence.

Suppose we go to a different culture, do the same principles

Jeanne Bamberger: If I listen to Chinese music, because I do not know it, I have the feeling that it goes on and on and on. If you can’t tell where the stops and starts are, then it’s like listening to a foreign language that you don’t understand. In learning a foreign language, one must learn where the stops and starts are. In other words, ‘‘how to chunk it,’’ what generates boundaries, what generates edges. Robert Freeman: I like comparing music to baseball, which is my avocational passion. You cannot understand a baseball game if you don’t know something about its basic rules or structure. Baseball can seem endless in much the same way. That’s what I get out of cricket—a feeling of endlessness—because I don’t know what the rules and objectives are.

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Robert Kuhn: Doesn’t this mean that music is more culturally based than genetically determined? Mark Tramo: There are some data of cross cultural studies that have compared how Stanford undergraduates, and how Balinese villagers who have never seen a pair of headphones, perform on tasks. So if I were to play a sequence on the piano and you had to decide how well that last note completes the sequence, then you would have some opinions about how well the last note worked. Now, a reasonable proportion of these Balinese villagers will rate how well that final tone completes that sequence very similarly to the way the Stanford undergraduates rated the tone in the goodness of the fit. Robert Kuhn: This would means that although the Balinese villages had no prior cultural exposure to this kind of music, the similarity of response indicates a universality of how music is perceived. This is turn would suggest that there are some basic structures of the brain that are innate and common to all human beings and generate similar cognitive experiences irrespective of cultural experience. Jeanne Bamberger: That study has come under a lot of criticism since what they use as stimuli are not related to the music that people in the culture know. So while it may demonstrate something, I don’t think it demonstrates how we make sense of real music. Mark Tramo: But isn’t that part of the power of the result, that although the Balinese villagers didn’t know anything about this music, yet they perceived the music in the same way that Stanford undergraduates perceived the music? Robert Kuhn:

Let’s talk about consonance and dissonance.

Jeanne Bamberger: I don’t know whether that’s cross-cultural or not. I doubt it because actually in Yugoslavia they sing in a way we might think it dissonant. We used to sing it that way in the twelfth or thirteenth century. And that’s not considered dissonant at all. Mark Tramo: There’s a whole semantics around the use of the terms consonance and dissonance. Robert Kuhn:

Is that culturally determined?

Mark Tramo: Although consonance and dissonance is culturally determined, there are universals. There is context here. Let’s say we’re watching a movie together and we hear crashing noises, it’s not a happy point in the film. The emotion that we associate with that crashing noise is very much learned, but even four month old children can tell the difference noise and music.

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Robert Kuhn: Let’s talk about the impact of music on children, something that many people know as the ‘‘Mozart Effect,’’ which supposedly will make you smarter—do better on tests—by listening to certain music. Robert Freeman: As a music school director, that’s something I would love to see proven. Mark Tramo: Let’s see how that experiment worked, by illustrating an example with our host that will illustrate the particular studies that came out of the University of California at Irvine, which are referred to as the Mozart Effect. We’ll imagine that there are three Robert Kuhn’s: one of them was in Dressing Room 1 listening to 10 minutes of Mozart’s Sonata For Two Pianos in D Major; there was another Robert Kuhn who was isolated in complete silence; and there was a third Robert Kuhn listening to relaxation music or maybe a modern composer like Phillip Glass. And then after ten minutes we ask all three Robert Kuhn’s to come and join us and what we did was to take several pieces of paper, folded them up, cut them in various ways, and then ask you to imagine that if we unfold the papers which papers will match. So, Robert, please choose! Robert Kuhn: The obvious answer would be this one, but I think you’re trying to fool me, so I will choose that one. Mark Tramo: You are correct, although you thought the obvious answer was actually the wrong one. Now that’s the particular task that the experiments used in ‘‘proving’’ the so-called Mozart Effect, and they determined that people would do better on this task, if just prior to the task, they had listed to Mozart for 10 or 15 minutes. Now that’s promising in the sense of showing some effect, but it’s very short lived and it can be explained by non-cognitive mechanisms that have to do with arousal and positive mood induction. Explaining the results in terms of the underlying brain mechanisms is difficult to sort out. Robert Kuhn: This focuses public attention on the fact that music may be important for the intellectual development of children. Jeanne Bamberger: But we don’t know why! Even the people who did the experiments can’t account for it. Mark Tramo: We need more data. What’s exciting about the Mozart Effect was that the experiment was in the right spirit. Music taps into so many different aspects of cognitive as well as emotional processing that it would be hard to believe that it wouldn’t have some sort of a positive effect. If we’re talking about phonological processing and language, and learning how to read, listening to music forces you to be able to decode very complex sequences, so that may confer a positive effect. There’s some evidence that music may be useful in the treatment for dyslexia. If we think of music in

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terms of proportions and ratios and symmetry, that would suggest a relationship with mathematical ability. Robert Kuhn: suspected.

The relationship between math and music has long been

Jeanne Bamberger: It only goes in one direction: there are very few musicians who are interested in math. Mark Tramo: If you put first graders into an intensive arts program that includes music training emphasizing sequencing, by the end of the year, they go ahead of the rest of the class in math. These kinds of longer term training programs are more important than what might happen in ten minutes. We need to know what happens when children begin to study piano at the age of four to nine years old. We need to collect the data. Perhaps we should institute a national effort. If one is trying to draw children into an activity that will exercise the brain, help to develop mental strategies and cognitive structures, do something that’s fun. Don’t drill the children on rote questions and canned answers. Music encompasses so many things that have to do with cognition, perception and motor function, that if the individual, apriori, likes music, gravitates to music naturally—it’s not for everybody—take advantage of it. Robert Freeman: I have a dream of a musical society in America that, just as with athletics, all kids are involved when they’re 5 to 7 years old. It’s not about becoming a professional musician—we don’t need more professional musicians. What we need is a whole army of avocational musicians, people who take great pleasure in being involved with music from an early age. Music is truly one of God’s great gifts to humanity. Mark Tramo: Music is one of the things that help bring us together. As humans we never would have survived, we would have been eaten up and killed by animals, if we hadn’t bonded together and form civilizations, so that we could fight our predators. We needed to develop social bonds, cement the collective identity, and music has been a part of virtually every collective ritual. Robert Freeman: A number of female art students at the University of Texas (Austin) decided when they were freshmen that Mozart and Beethoven were for everybody, and that they would invite non-art students on this vast campus of 51,000 people to accompany them on dates to go to artistic events. They started a whole cottage industry.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary: This much we know about music: Every known culture has it, vast areas of the brain are involved, emotions are quickly recruited, and there are

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cognitive connections with other aspect of the intellect. There may be a universal set of rules that governs how patterns of tones and rhythms can become music. Its nonverbal essence may enable physical, mental and emotional benefits beyond listening enjoyment, because the plasticity of the brain, active during infancy and early childhood and even into adulthood and old age, may be stimulated by music, yielding richer, healthier, betterfunctioning brains. While the so-called ‘‘Mozart Effect’’ may have some minor validity—kids seem to do better at a task for 10 minutes after hearing Mozart,but longer lasting effects are not evident—neurobiologists suspect that someday we’ll understand how music positively enhances brain processes, intelligence, and social interaction. Can music literally mold the plasticity of the brain? When I listen to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, or the songs of Judy Collins . . .it doesn’t much matter. There is something special about music that reaches deep into our psyches and helps define us as human beings.


Interviews with Expert Participants Mark Tramo Why did you become a scientist? I grew up playing music and at a fairly early age starting writing songs in the pop rock genre. When I was in college at Yale, I studied drama and music even while I was a biology major and very interested in understanding brain mechanisms of behavior. Then, when I learned that there in fact was a science trying to understand music perception and cognition, I seized the opportunity to really pursue this new field and combine them in my career. Ultimately, I trained in neurology and became a neurologist at New York Hospital, and now at Massachusetts General Hospital. I find many very interesting questions in trying to understand the brain mechanisms responsible for something that comes so naturally to all of us as being able to apprehend the emotion and meaning in music. Is the appreciation of music innate or learned? Music appreciation as you and I experience it in everyday life is learned. What we’ve been exposed to, the associations that we have with music, what our personalities are, where we’re coming from—all these heavily influence the kind of music that we like to hear. All of us are born with the capacity to apprehend the emotion and meaning in music. There have been a considerable number of experiments done in infants that show that with a minimal

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amount, if any, exposure to music they showed sensitivities to some of the same musical structures that we experience as adults. We can’t forget the natural affinity for music that we all have at a very early age—even before we develop our tastes, and even before we identify with different subcultures and peer groups that lead us to like one music over another. There’s something basic about the ability to extract pitch and melody and harmony and rhythm that we all experience very early in our lives.

Jeanne Bamberger Why do you think music is a universally shared human experience? Music encompasses all aspects of our life. Everything from athletic to pure sensory experience to all kinds of higher level organizing abilities that we all have. I just keep being more and more impressed that the whole brain and the whole body is involved in music—it’s one holistic activity. Music is certainly an activity in which our whole humanness cooperates and participates.

Robert Freeman What are the key developments in your field? The program that we’re working on right now is the use of CAT scanning and positron emission tomography to better understand how music is created, how music is performed, and how music is perceived. I want to make sure that in the work of a brilliant young neurobiologist like Mark Tramo, the right questions are being asked and that his research is going down a positive track. Because I believe if we understood better how the human brain works, it would not only be better for musical instruction throughout the world, but that contribution would also help us understand how human function occurs generally. For example, I think that playing the piano or the organ or the violin at a very high level of technical accomplishment is about as complex a neurobiological function as the human body has mastered. Hitting fastballs in baseball is something that you do in a batting cage several times a minute, but once you start the last movement of the Brahms B-flat major concerto with an orchestra, there is no stopping and you are playing hundreds of notes every minute. Should public money be used to support the arts? There has been some nagging doubt about whether it’s a good idea to put any public money behind the arts in the United States. While there is always a possibility of misusing practically anything, there’s so much good that can be done through the arts. America has a public relations problem in certain

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parts of the world in that many people think that America stands for sex and violence and consumerism and egocentrism. A reinvigorated program promoting all the arts, not only in America but throughout the world, would help counter this negative image and portray what a wonderful and compassionate and generous country this is.


Chapter 3

Is Consciousness an Illusion?

Is consciousness an illusion? You see; you feel; you act. You think you’re conscious. Some say you’re not. Modern neuroscience—the chemistry and physiology of the brain—has made remarkable progress. But is there something of the mind that is not in the brain? Philosophers have debated the ‘‘mind-body problem’’ and the existence of ‘‘free will’’ for thousands of years. What do we mean when we say ‘‘consciousness’’? Are our ‘‘minds’’ just the artificial integration of multiple brain systems? Are our feelings of self, that unique personal sense of mental ‘‘qualia’’—does the color ‘‘red’’ look the same to you as it does to me?—anything other an ‘‘epiphenomenon,’’ seemingly real but in reality an illusion? Furthermore, are non-human organisms ‘‘conscious’’? And, what about non-biological intelligences like advanced computers? Consciousness is a fundamental fact of human existence, and the nature or essence of consciousness is a core issue of human inquiry. It all comes down to one compound question: is there anything beyond current laws of physics that is needed to cause consciousness? If something new is needed, do we extend our notion of the physical? Or is consciousness somehow an independent, non-reducible, fundamental factor of existence? And if nothing new is needed, how do firings of neurons, or ultimately motions of atoms or vibrations of strings, emerge up into human self awareness? There are more radical theories about consciousness today, from religion and parapsychology to philosophy and quantum physics, than ever before. Four renowned brain scientists tackle the conundrum of how to define and study consciousness. One problem is that there are too many definitions! And getting these four guests to agree on what consciousness is and what causes it is an engaging but hopeless task that is revelatory at the same time.

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Their differences are immediately apparent as they attempt to describe consciousness and determine why it should include our sensory inputs, our experiences and our inner lives. They introduce the concept of ‘‘zombie’’ consciousness—where a patient is capable of performing certain tasks while remaining unaware of the surrounding environment—as one pathway to understanding. They all agree that other productive areas of study focus on how exactly the brain reacts to anesthesia or how it enables the process of making choices. The chapter concludes with a lively exchange of ideas about the meaning and measure of nerve cell activity—if it involves quantum mechanics or simply chemical reactions, or if molecular biology has advanced to a level that can make this kind of study feasible.

Expert Participants Joseph Bogen Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery, University of Southern California; adjunct professor in Psychology, University of California at Los Angeles; former consultant in neurosurgery (split brain), California Institute of Technology

Leslie Brothers Psychiatrist, neuroscientist; author, Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind

Stuart Hameroff Professor, Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology; Associate Director, Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona

Christof Koch Professor of Cognitive & Behavioral Biology & Executive Officer for Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology; author, The Quest for Consciousness: A Scientific Approach


Robert Kuhn:

Why do we call consciousness a ‘‘hard problem’’?

Joe Bogen: Consciousness is like the wind: you don’t see it; what you see are the effects of it. Stuart Hameroff: Proto-consciousness, something from which consciousness is derived, is fundamental and irreducible; it’s something like spin, or charge. Leslie Brothers: I think we have to be careful not to toss this term ‘‘consciousness’’ around too readily, as though somehow it’s a given that there

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is such an entity as consciousness just because we have that word and we use it. It could be that just like we have the word ‘‘aliveness,’’ we have a concept, but that doesn’t mean that there is a single thing called consciousness. There may be many processes, many ways that we engage with the world with our own sensations and with the sensations that we get from the outside world, but to say that that means there’s some overarching entity called consciousness may be a mistake. Stuart Hameroff: We have a semantics problem here—consciousness is used incorrectly to group of all kinds of things. But I have to disagree with what you said, Leslie, because I think that consciousness, when used properly, is something very specific—it’s experience, it’s awareness that biological systems have, and as far as we know, only biological systems have. Joe Bogen: So far. Stuart Hameroff So far, and it’s just a matter of figuring out exactly what consciousness is or means. Joe Bogen If we’re going to find a scientific explanation for something, we have to be a little bit restrictive about what we’re trying to explain. Because if we try to explain all of those things that different people mean, in all of the different ways they use the word ‘‘consciousness,’’ we’re not going to be able to find any explanation. We have to focus on what we’re really after, which is closer to the idea of qualia. Stuart Hameroff: I agree. Sensations are qualia, our internal experience, the sense of our inner life that distinguishes us from computers, which do not have sensations, flavors, emotions, feelings, what philosophers call qualia, which do not have consciousness. Leslie Brothers: Christof and Francis Crick have said, let’s look at visual awareness as sort of a paradigmatic case. And see if we can find the neural correlates of consciousness beginning with one aspect of consciousness— vision. My question would still be, are the results going to be able to be generalized in some way, or is all we are going to find the neural correlates of visual awareness in a specific experimental setting? Christof Koch: It’s an experimental program. The hope is that you uncover any one aspect of consciousness: sensual consciousness, visual consciousness, pain, self consciousness, whatever, then the other aspects of consciousness are probably closely related in kind. The same principles held when scientists tried to study heredity in the origin of life. The belief was that studying that aspect of heredity and how the genetic information was transmitted in this very simple case probably would illuminate the way humans pass on genetic information to their children.

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Robert Kuhn: One of the theories would be that each of the different aspects of consciousness—the visual, the auditory, each separate sensory and motor system, memories—somehow gets integrated together and collectively give an illusion of consciousness. We call such an illusion an ‘‘epiphenomenon,’’ something that seems fundamentally real but it is not. Joe Bogen: I disagree with that theory: I don’t think that integrating all this stuff together is what’s crucial about consciousness. Robert Kuhn:

What’s important in your view?

Joe Bogen: What’s important about consciousness is the experience. Christof Koch: When you have a toothache, when you have tooth pain, it might override everything else because it can hurt so bad. But why does it hurt? Why is it that the release of some ions sloshing around in your brain, some calcium and potassium ions, gives rise to this really bad feeling? Leslie Brothers:

That’s the hard problem.

Christof Koch: That is a hard problem. In this case there is very little information integration going on, it’s all that one tooth that hurts. Consciousness does not have to be integration, it can be just the sensation. Here’s the critical question: how can a physical system—how can any physical system, a human, a fly, a robot—have subjective states? Robert Kuhn: We do many things that we’re not conscious of. We use the term ‘‘zombies’’ in consciousness. What’s a zombie? Christof Koch: A ‘‘zombie’’ is a set of sensory-motor systems that can do very complicated behaviors in the absence of awareness or consciousness. Leslie Brothers: A concept like ‘‘zombie’’ is a creative game that we play with our everyday notions of people; it’s the body without the mind. Christof Koch: For example, when I talk to you and I drink from a glass at the same time—this is a very complicated move. We have great difficulty getting robots to do this, to judge the distance to my mouth, to tilt it at just the right angle. This is a really difficult problem for robotics, yet I do it all the time effortlessly. Now there are some brain-damaged patients who cannot see the glass, who can’t tell how big it is, yet if you ask them just to grab it and drink it, they can do that. So here you have a beautiful dissociation: you have part of the visual system that mediates a zombie behavior that’s intact, yet another part of this visual system that mediates the conscious sensation that enables one to actually see this glass of water is destroyed. Robert Kuhn:

If you ask them, ‘‘Do you see a glass?’’ they say ‘‘No’’?

Christof Koch: Correct, they cannot see it, yet they can still do certain highly trained behaviors, like taking the glass and drinking from it.

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Robert Kuhn: Your point is that the zombie part of the brain is not conscious but is still able to do sophisticated behaviors. Christof Koch: That’s correct, and there’s a whole range of these unconscious systems that move your eyes, adjust your gait, that come into play unconsciously when, for example, you shake somebody’s hand. Leslie Brothers: Zombies do all the things that bodies do but without the subjective locus of experience. For example, when I look at what’s on this table I believe that I am having my experience; I don’t think I’m having Christof’s experience. Robert Kuhn consciousness?

Does the concept of zombie help us understand

Christof Koch: Yes, because if you look at the brain basis of zombie behaviors, if you can identify what part of the brain or what brain systems are responsible for mediating unconscious behavior—zombie behaviors, call it whatever you like—and compare that with those parts of the brain that are responsible for mediating conscious behaviors, you want to ask, where is the difference? Is there a special type of neuron involved? Special parts of the brain? What is the brain difference between conscious and unconscious behaviors? Leslie Brothers: It is an assumption that conscious and unconscious behaviors are two kinds of separate categories. It may be that visual awareness, being awake as opposed to asleep, being in a light state of anesthesia as opposed to being fully awake, feeling toothache pain, these may not be unified in any overarching way. Christof Koch: But the history of biology in the last 150 years has shown that for every specific function that you can identify, there’s always one or more specific systems, specific cells, specific molecules, specific molecular machineries, that carry out this function. That’s how biology works. Leslie Brothers: Sure; each function may have its own specific systems. The question is whether there is some overarching system. Joe Bogen: You bet you there is! Stuart Hameroff: You have to be careful about not confusing ‘‘attention’’ with ‘‘consciousness’’ because it could be that our sensory inputs give us states of mind that are really not conscious until other systems like the cholinerrgic system come along and select for attention, for conscious attention. Robert Kuhn: Stuart, you are an anesthesiologist; you’re in the operating room; you literally have your hands on consciousness; you see it fade and disappear, and then you bring it back. What can you tell us?

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Stuart Hameroff: Consciousness is an amazing thing; even though I do it daily, I still wonder, well, where my patients go? But then it makes me wonder why are they conscious in the first place? It’s interesting that the anesthesia gasses that go into the lungs and into the blood and the brain don’t form any chemical bonds at all; they actually form very weak quantum mechanical forces. This implies that quantum mechanical interactions are generators of consciousness. Robert Kuhn: It wouldn’t have to be quantum mechanical; it could still be chemical. Or put another way, it is quantum mechanical only because everything, ultimately, is quantum mechanical. Leslie Brothers: If a mechanism is not known, one has to be careful to claim that it must be quantum mechanical, because they are both black boxes. Stuart Hameroff: The confluence of mystery theory. But what I’m saying is that proteins change their shape depending on quantum mechanical forces inside the proteins. Anesthetics get in there, form their own quantum mechanic reactions and prevent the protein from working. Robert Kuhn:

Suppose that’s true, so what? What follows?

Stuart Hameroff: It implies that there’s a quantum coherent state among these proteins throughout given nerves and given systems. Robert Kuhn: Let’s talk a little bit about the social brain because, as individuals, we only know what we are ourselves are thinking. I don’t know what you’re thinking. So what is it about the social relationship among people that helps define who we are? Leslie Brothers: You can think of it like language. Language is a system that is outside of us essentially, but we all participate in it, and our brains seemed to be well adapted to use it. And I think that’s the same thing with the social system that I’m talking about. Call it ‘‘the person system,’’ where I am a person with a mind, you are a person with a mind, and our brains are well adapted to perceive both ourselves and other people as persons, that is, bodies with minds. In a sense what gives us the feeling of unity is that each of us has a source of perception, feeling, awareness that resides in us. I call it an illusion. The sense that my experience somehow emanates from me or belongs to me, I believe that that’s an illusion. The reality, I suggest, is that we participate socially as we do in language. Joe Bogen: There’s some things that we really need to say here. Number one is that consciousness is real. Leslie, you some reservations about that, but you’re kind of willing to go along. Leslie Brothers:

I’ll play the game.

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Joe Bogen: Number two is where does consciousness come from? Most of us believe that brains produce consciousness. Number three is at what level in the brain is consciousness produced? We can look at the subcellular level, at the cytoskeleton, the microtubules. We could look at the cellular level: some people think that there are some cells that are conscious (or have the capacity for it) and other cells that are not conscious. You can look at the level of brain circuits, which is where I happen to look. I believe that consciousness emerges at the circuit level. Or you could postulate that you need great, massive systems before you have consciousness. And then some people think that only whole brains can be conscious. Robert Kuhn: Yes, and there are other some people who believe that you need more than the brain to have true human consciousness. Joe Bogen: Yes, some people (like Leslie) don’t want to use the word consciousness unless you have a brain interacting with other brains. I’m not very happy with that opinion because I think that a totally isolated human being, or a cat or dog that never saw another cat or dog can experience pain and hunger and thirst. Robert Kuhn: Don’t we find it absolutely fascinating that first-rate brain scientists differ so substantially even as to the gross level in the brain that is the primary generator of consciousness—from the subcellular, to cellular, to systems of neurons, to neural circuits, to brain systems, to whole brains, to beyond. Is that the state of play today? Stuart Hameroff: You started too high, or too large. To find the real locus of consciousness—call it ‘‘proto-consciousness,’’ something from which consciousness is derived, something so fundamental and irreducible that it is a component of the universe that has been there all along, something like spin or charge or mass—it’s probably down there at the quantum mechanical level, at the most fundamental level of space-time geometry, and it has probably been there since the Big Bang. Christof Koch: Stuart Hameroff: is testable.

That’s a mystical statement. It is totally untestable. Christof, nothing you’ve said so far about consciousness

Christof Koch: No, there are lots of experiments you can do in mice, in monkeys, you in humans that involve consciousness. That’s what progress is. Progress is not at fundamental levels of space-time geometry. Experiments that brain scientists are doing today avoid all these philosophical arguments, because otherwise we would be sitting here 100 years from now having the same arguments. We progress by focusing on where in the brain are the correlates for sensations and emotions.

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Stuart Hameroff: Correlates! So you’re going to give up on consciousness and just worry about correlates. Christof Koch: Yes, for the foreseeable future, because we have not made any progress on pure consciousness; neither philosophers and nor scientists. Stuart Hameroff: That’s because you have tunnel vision, and you’re looking just in one direction—you’re looking under the lamp post for the keys because that’s where the light is. Christof Koch: That’s possible, but the way we will undoubtedly make progress in studying consciousness is the way scientists have made spectacular progress in molecular science and neuroscience. So we’ll focus for, say, the next 10 or 20 years, on the experimental approach, finding the location of the correlates of specific sensations, perceptions, acts and memories. And that’s where the funding is and that’s where the experiments are. Joe Bogen: If you think that consciousness is produced by a brain, then you say to yourself, which parts of that brain are more important in producing consciousness than other parts? How do you decide? You see which parts of brain you can take away and the cat or whatever animal is still conscious. And which parts of the brain do you need to remain intact or unimpaired for the creature to be conscious. (In animals we do surgical experiments to extirpate specific brain parts. In humans we see the results of traumatic accidents that destroy brain parts.) Robert Kuhn: And in fact an animal or a human can lose large parts of its brain and remain conscious. Joe Bogen: In certain parts of the brain you can take out great cupfuls of tissue without destroying consciousness, and then there are two places where you can make extremely teeny destructions, the size of a head of a kitchen match, and the human or animal is going to be totally unresponsive. Stuart Hameroff: But unresponsiveness doesn’t mean they’re not conscious, because the problem could be the brain’s attention mechanism. Joe Bogen: Now wait a minute: when we’re trying to decide if somebody is conscious, we never see consciousness—consciousness is like the wind, you don’t see it—what we see are the effects of it. . . Stuart Hameroff:

You can’t measure consciousness.

Joe Bogen: No, you’re trying to determine the level of consciousness. Christof Koch: Most biologists would assume that aspects of consciousness are expressed by animals: a rat and a cat have some sensation; they might not know who they are, they might not know about death, but they certainly have pain and pleasure and sensation—you can see that. And so if

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animals do have these expressions of consciousness, many experiments of the type that Joe was suggesting can help, where you eliminate certain brain areas—either with a surgeon’s knife, or today using molecular techniques, such as genetic knockout or knock-in techniques—where you can manipulate the brain.1 The kinds of questions we ask are: Is this mouse still capable of doing certain things that in humans requires conscious behaviors? Joe Bogen: You can make, if you’re lucky, a zombie mouse. Leslie Brothers:

Zombie mice!

Christof Koch: Zombie mice, that’s exactly the point. If we can create mice that are unable to do certain things then we can learn about those things. Leslie Brothers:

How can I tell a zombie mouse from a non-zombie mouse?

Christof Koch: Because the zombie mouse is not able to do certain types of planning, it doesn’t have access to long-term memory. Leslie Brothers: out planning.

That’s just a mouse without a memory and a mouse with-

Christof Koch: You do exactly what you do in studying disease. Let’s say you’re trying to study a mouse model for autism or a mouse model for schizophrenia, you start by establishing a few characteristics that can distinguish humans who have autism from normal humans who do not—and you try to replicate the same phenomenology in mice. To study consciousness, you do the same thing. Leslie Brothers: You have to be careful. You might end up with some beautiful mice that won’t be able to remember or won’t be able to plan, but their existence doesn’t mean that you can then generalize from them to human consciousness. Christof Koch: I agree, you have to be careful, but 50 years history has shown that molecular biology works. Robert Kuhn: What can we learn about brain systems that can help us make progress? Christof Koch: One popular technique involves studying visual illusions; for example, where in the same image you sometimes see a vase or sometimes you see two people looking at each other. Here your consciousness switches constantly, you either see the vase or the people. Where are the neurons that are involved in this switching? If they are the ones that generate my consciousness, then they should show the same switching dynamic as my conscious perception. Robert Kuhn: consciousness.

At least we would know the neurons involved in

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Christof Koch: Robert Kuhn:

Exactly. How does consciousness impact our sense of humanness?

Stuart Hameroff: I think it depends on how you look at consciousness, if it’s an epiphenomenon, artificial, it doesn’t mean much. But if it’s causal, if consciousness is something kind of unique and has a fundamental role in the universe, then we’re not merely helpless spectators in the universe but we actually have something like free will and causal efficacy in this world. Christof Koch: Whoa! Wait! We’ve now we jumped several levels. Consciousness and volition are separate subjects, and they might or might not relate. I don’t see that they have to relate: consciousness can perfectly well exist, and free will might perfectly well be an illusion. Stuart Hameroff:

I don’t think so.

Joe Bogen: Usually consciousness has two aspects that are usually together, one is awareness, the sensory side, what we call qualia. The other is volition, that we do some things consciously rather than automatically. Robert Kuhn:

And both are intrinsic to our humanness.

Joe Bogen: Well, yes, but they are also intrinsic to cats and dogs. What makes humans special is not being conscious. Stuart Hameroff: Christof Koch:

It depends whether or not you believe in free will.

Cats and dogs can also have free will. . .

Joe Bogen: Cats do things deliberately; dogs make up their minds. Stuart Hameroff: Let me talk about volition because choice is very important, and the best way that I understand it is through a quantum paradigm. Quantum computing is coming at us like a freight train; I think it’s going to revolutionize information technology. Quantum computing utilizes the property of quantum superposition in which things can be in multiple states at the same time, so whereas in classical computation we have bits of one or zero, in quantum computation we have qubits of one and zero which superpose and sort of communicate. So let’s say we’re making a choice, we’re going to decide what to have for lunch: spaghetti, meat, sushi, whatever. One possibility is we have a quantum superposition of all these possibilities that then the quantum waveforms collapse to the specific choice—I’ll have sushi. Christof Koch: This is what Gell-Mann described as quantum mysticism— you’re using these words, there’s no brain involved.

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Joe Bogen: Let me get back to the question of free will. Some things you take responsibility for; you say, ‘‘I did that.’’ Other things, like dropping something on the floor, for example, or stumbling, you don’t take responsibility for. And there are certain conditions where human beings have brain damage and they do some things that they don’t feel that they did. So what we’re talking about is the conviction of volition, the personal feeling that you did it. And you can have exactly the same outwardly observable behavior, say, a knee jerk, or turning one’s head to look at something, sometimes it is volitional and sometimes it is not. And what makes it volitional is the person saying, ‘‘I did that; I am responsible for the knee jerking or for the head turning.’’ Volition is that feeling on the part of the individual that he or she did it, and this feeling must have some physiological correlate in the brain, and that’s what you want to go looking for. So when you have a situation where you can do an act either volitionally or automatically, what you want to know is what’s the difference in nerve cell activity that characterizes that conviction of volition. Robert Kuhn: I want to ask a final question, If we are here 100 years from now discussing the same subject, what would we be saying? Leslie Brothers: We’ll have discovered that we had to leave behind the notion that we could discover anything about the human feeling of being aware. We’ll have discovered that the level of the subcellular, the cellular, the neuronal, were all too low. Ultimately we’ll understand that the highest and most complex kinds of cognition comes from the interaction of brain and brain—i.e., social systems. Joe Bogen: I think it’s going to take 100 years for people to accept what I already believe.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary: These four leading brain scientists couldn’t even agree on at what level a simple ‘‘memory’’ was stored, whether as a gross ‘‘brain circuit,’’ at the synapse between nerve cells, or in the microstructure of the nerve cells as some sort of quantum effect. But why should it be any different now? Philosophers have debated the ‘‘mind-body problem’’ and the existence of ‘‘free will’’ for thousands of years. However, never before have we been in a position to examine the brain with such precision. Even as we begin to understand the deep science that underlies our cognitive processes, there is no letup in arguments whether we are anything other than automata, just reacting to stimuli—vastly more complex than a bacterium to be sure—but fundamentally little different. Although this spirited and highly qualified group manages to disagree on just about everything, in the midst, they transmit good information about the key issues involving the understanding of consciousness today.

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Psychiatrist/author Leslie Brothers firmly believes that there is something of the mind that is not in the brain, but it is not spirit or soul. To her, the seat of consciousness resides in the social interaction of living things between brain and brain in society. Says Brothers, without others to reflect ourselves off of, there would be no consciousness. You see; you feel; you act. You think that by yourself you’re conscious. But are you really?


Interviews with Expert Participants Leslie Brothers Talk about your book, Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind. I think we might be at the beginning of a paradigm shift, away from understanding the mind and the brain as a sort of isolated, unto itself entity, and understanding that most mental phenomena really arise from social processes. And so we’ll be looking to see what the social processing functions of the brain are, and then also how that leads to collective social processes that then circle back and affect the brain. How does brain physiology fit into this view? I think our personal experience arises from the material building blocks—the proteins, the neurons, how they fire together in patterns and all of that—but most important are the complex ways that these patterns are organized, and those have a reality of their own. For example, how it is that you feel yourself to be a person? It is sort of a subjective locus of experience, which is built up from these lower level building blocks, but its fundamental reality is on a higher level, which is derived from its patterns of complexity. Who influenced your ideas about society and the brain? I most admire the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein because he penetrated through a lot of the confusions that beset us in our analytical thinking and said that we have to look at the language that we use. We have to look at our social forms of life and our linguistic forms, and that if we don’t look at these, we’re going to be confused. And so Wittgenstein brought us back to the level of our everyday social practices, which is why he is one of my big heroes.

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Joseph E. Bogen Are animals conscious? When we examine the brains of animals, we see a certain organization. And whether the animal is a monkey or a cat or a dog, the organization is very similar. I’m reasonably confident that mammals are conscious, any mammal; I think it’s part of being a mammal because being conscious helps you learn things faster. Consciousness helps you acquire learning that you either wouldn’t get at all or wouldn’t get as quickly or wouldn’t get as well. But this only applies to mammals. I don’t believe spiders are conscious, for example. They don’t learn much; they can do crazy, wonderful things, but not learn much. Why did you become a scientist? The real question is why didn’t I? My mother was a doctor. My uncle was a doctor. My cousins were doctors. So the real question is why is it that I went all through college as an economics major—and why is it that it wasn’t until several years later that I decided I to go to medical school? The answer undoubtedly involves deep psychoanalytic problems. Whom do you most admire, and why? Historically, Descartes. A good teacher used to say, ‘‘You could tell how big somebody was by how long he held up progress.’’ And Descartes has held up progress on the mind-body problem for about 400 years. That’s world class blockage! What is your outlook on human civilization? There were more baths and more houses with interior heating in England in the year 50 A.D. than there were in the year 1900. The reason was the Pax Romana. If you have peace, you can build all kinds of great stuff. And if you’re going to have war all the time, you’re not going to be able to build much at all. That’s our biggest single problem. What advice do you have for young people? The first thing you have to do is find out what your natural abilities are. And then you must determine how best to cultivate them. Young people have to find out are what they’re good at. Now, the trouble is that society rewards some talents much more than other talents. That’s a fact. So if you’re anxious to get a shiny sports car, which almost any teenager is, you’re not going to encourage your natural talents. You’re going to do whatever it takes to get the shiny sports car.

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Chrisof Koch You’re a nuts-and-bolts scientist. You like to knock out a neuron, then see what’s stopped working. But you’re also a theoretician. That’s unusual. Unusual, probably, from a scientific point of view. The person I collaborated with was Francis Crick, one of the few people I know that one might legitimately call a ‘‘genius.’’ The thing I admire most is the fact that he’s willing to question everything that he’s said, everything he’s done, everything we’ve talked about over the last 15 years. He has this ability to have very little emotional investment in his own ideas. To Crick, his own ideas were just another source of ideas, but they could also be rejected as much as anybody else’s idea could be rejected. In that sense, he was totally fearless. And of course, Crick had an amazing ability to combine facts and ideas, to have flashes of insights about things that I could be looking at but not see. He could bring two elements together that I never thought about, but once he said it, I’d say to myself, well, that was obvious. What are you finding out about animals and consciousness these days? An important development is our scientific capacity to record and differentiate, in the laboratory, hundreds of individual neurons in a behaving animal, like in a monkey. So while the monkey does a particular task—for example, looks at a colorful painting—I can now discriminate among the activity of hundreds of individual neurons. And that, more than anything else, has helped us and will continue to help us decipher the brain. We really need to look at the individual elements, the individual neurons.

Note 1. ‘‘Knockout’’ means suppressing some genes so the animal doesn’t express a certain structure or function, and then observing the losses to behavior.


Chapter 4

How Does the Autistic Brain Work?

How does the brain really work? It’s all in your head, but it’s still a great mystery. Funny how the brain is often compared to a current technology— first a telephone exchange, then a computer. Now neuroscience has fascinating new theories of brain function. You’ll marvel at what’s crammed into your cranium.

Expert Participants Eric Courchesne Professor of Neuroscience, University of California at San Diego.

Portia Iversen Founder, Cure Autism Now

Soma Mukhopadhyay Teacher of autistic children; Tito’s mother

Tito Mukhopadhyay Autistic adolescent; author, Beyond the Silence

Erin Schuman Executive Officer for Neurobiology, Associate Professor of Biology, California Institute of Technology

Terrance Sejnowski Professor, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies; co-author, The Computational Brain.

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Robert Kuhn: Tito, we appreciate having you here. We’d like to talk about how people study other people. How do you feel when scientists ask you questions and want to see how your brain works? Tito writes on pad Soma Mukhopadhyay (reading what Tito wrote): Robert Kuhn:

I get flattered.

What are the primary characteristics of autism?

Eric Courchesne: Poor speech and language, particularly in very young affected children, two years old; sometimes an absence of speech and language altogether. Poor social communication skills; a disinterest in interacting with other people, the willingness to just stand up and walk away when people are talking with you; ritualistic and repetitive behavior. Autistic patients may exhibit body mannerisms like flapping the hands or twiddling the fingers, or rocking and twiddling strings. Or they may have obsessive interests, interests in maps, for instance—just looking at maps continuously for no particular reasons. Portia Iversen: Tito, would you mind telling people why you flap your hands and rock back and forth, and how you experience your body? Tito writes Portia Iversen (reading what Tito wrote): I just need to find my position in space. Terry Sejnowski: Robert Kuhn: Tito?

Interesting, exploring space.

How does rocking help you find your position in space,

Tito writes on pad Soma Mukhopadhyay (reading what Tito wrote): body and it reminds me that I have one.

I forget that I have a

Terry Sejnowski: Our brain is built to actively explore the world, and I think that what may be happening here—this is speculating—is that if you don’t have that anchor in your body, you have to continually remind yourself, ‘‘I’m here, I’m here,’’ and by moving back and forth, you can do that. Robert Kuhn: Our kinesthetic sense tells us where our arms and legs are at all times; we can close our eyes and we still know where our hands and legs are. But Tito may not know any of these kinds of things.

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Eric Courchesne: It’s as if each of the senses are coming into the brain separately and never connect up with one another. Portia Iversen:

That’s what he’s describing.

Eric Courchesne: That must mean that he experiences a great deal of sensory noise, a lot of variability, and he has no way of keeping consciously focused. Erin Schuman: So he increases his sensory sample rate by moving through the environment to increase the amount of sampling information that he gets. Eric Courchesne: above the noise.

To make at least one stimulus stronger and thus emerge

Robert Kuhn: Tito, everybody at this table is a writer. Each of us has written different kinds of things. You write poetry. I do not. Tito continues writing Soma Mukhopadhyay (reading what Tito wrote):

I write my experience.

Soma Mukhopadhyay: I do not have to wait long to see what Tito says, because he writes immediately, he doesn’t sit and think. It is as if his words have already been precomposed; he just gets up in the morning and then he just writes them as speech. Terry Sejnowski: That’s remarkable, almost as if it was composed while he was asleep. Soma Mukhopadhyay:

It’s just pre-thought.

Terry Sejnowski: His poems seem to occur to him in the morning. Now, why is that? This is something that I think all of us have experienced: we are struggling with a problem and we can’t get the answer, we go to sleep, wake up in the morning, and suddenly it’s a lot clearer. We either have the answer or we know how to get to the answer. Maybe there’s something going on during the period of sleep; we know a lot of activity is occurring in the brain during sleep; it’s quite different from the activity that occurs when we are awake, but maybe this is the period during which not only memories are consolidated but new ways of integrating together information you have are developed. Robert Kuhn:

Does Tito read?

Soma Mukhopadhyay: Yes; he never used to read, but I found that he can pinpoint words on a newspaper, but that I did not call reading. I do the reading with him, line by line. Robert Kuhn:

So you read to him.

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Soma Mukhopadhyay: Erin Schuman:

Do you read poetry to him?

Soma Mukhopadhyay: Robert Kuhn:

I usually read.

A lot.

Have you done that since Tito was a small child?

Soma Mukhopadhyay:

Every day.

Robert Kuhn: Do you see any correspondence between the poetry you’ve read over the years and what he writes, whether thematically or style? Soma Mukhopadhyay: Some things affect him, like while he was reading the book called Alchemist. It was after he had heard the whole book that he wrote his book, The Mind Tree. He gets inspiration like that. The style has a parallel feel; it’s just like his poem ‘‘This And That’’: ‘‘. . .there was a little desire and a little hopelessness; a little looking ahead and a little looking back; a little sunshine and a little shade; a little of this and a little of that.’’ Everything goes like ‘‘with a little of this and a little of that.’’ Every time he may have a new focus; for example, one day he wrote everything about orange, he got so obsessed with orange. He wrote: ‘‘On a hidden back with orange sparks on little dust grains, orange on this and that. Orange on hidden wild flower behind a hidden rock, gathering time with ages to stay, green with gathering moss. Orange on a peeping beam, through the canopy green.’’ Erin Schuman: So he is able to see orange, along with all these different things, so he is able to sort of synthesize things in a way in his poetry. Soma Mukhopadhyay:

Orange and blues and blacks.

Portia Iversen: If you read Tito’s poetry you’ll actually notice that there’s surprisingly little imagery. Normally in poetry, you often see a lot of visual descriptions. By the way, Tito has a mentor, Stephen Berke, the poet; Stephen lives in Philadelphia and they correspond by email. Stephen has been advising Tito to try to incorporate more visual components into his poetry, which for Tito is very hard. Robert Kuhn: write?

How does Tito commit word to paper, does he actually

Soma Mukhopadhyay: sometimes edits it. Robert Kuhn:

Yes, he usually writes it and then he types it. He

On the computer?

Soma Mukhopadhyay:

Yes.

Terry Sejnowski: How did he start using the computer? Was that something natural for him?

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Soma Mukhopadhyay: No. I gave him a computer a year before last. He is pretty fast in picking things up: he corrects himself, using backspace and delete functions; he opens and closes his files. Portia Iversen: In his book, Tito has some very interesting descriptions about early sensory experience. He does one description where he says that he’s looking out the window at a cloud, and somebody says a word like, say, ‘‘banana,’’ and then forever after cloud and banana go together. Tito can listen and not look, or look and not listen. It seems like these sensory systems diverged, kind of came apart, instead of further integrating as they would for the average developing kid. Eric Courchesne: Sensory instances, the cloud and the banana collide, interact, and become formed as a single memory; that’s really common in autism. And a major question is, why does that happen? One possibility is that in autism there was a proliferation of connectivity in the cerebral cortex early on in the patient’s early development where these connections were abnormally arranged almost randomly, allowing interconnections that ordinarily wouldn’t be there or meaningful. Portia Iversen: Dr. Mike Merzenich speculates that autism results from a kind of early overselectivity coming on too early in a child’s development. Normal people must make sensory selections because you can’t make sense of your universe if everything is going at once; normal people use their selective attention system to focus on one sense modality in order to just simply know things like, ‘‘this is a glass; this isn’t banana glass.’’ Perhaps in autism, brain circuits are laid in very early, too early, and as these circuits become the underpinnings of other learned behaviors, confusion arises. Erin Schuman: I think it is interesting that Tito forms immediate associations, banana and cloud. Not only does this reveal that he can form associations, but that he does it so quickly is revealing. Normal people would need many trials to make an association between cloud and banana, so Tito, as our window on autism, seems to have a hypersensitive ability to make associations. Robert Kuhn:

Tito, how do you see the door?

Tito writes Soma Mukhopadhyay (reading what Tito wrote): The shapes come first. . . Robert Kuhn:

The shapes come first, and what next?

Soma Mukhopadhyay (reading what Tito wrote):

The color.

Terry Sejnowski: Sensory inputs come in over time, you have to put the pieces together, and normal people do that without ever knowing that they are doing it; that’s something that we take for granted.

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Eric Courchesne: So, Tito, you’re saying that the larger an object is, the more difficult it is for you to perceive it. And you perceive it in parts or fragments, shape and then color. Tito writes on pad Soma Mukhopadhyay (reading what Tito wrote): I see the room only after I see the door. Terry Sejnowski: That’s almost poetical. It illustrates something that we’re beginning to understand about our own perception, which is that normally you see the whole before you see the parts. For Tito, it looks like it’s the opposite. Tito has a problem with putting the world together. Normally we don’t think about the fact that we can see someone and listen to them and touch things and it all comes together in our brain almost automatically. But, in some conditions, and apparently this is the case with Tito, those sensory inputs are disconnected and so it is not at all easy to put them together. To the autistic mind, the world must be a very frightening place when things are coming at you unexpectedly and things don’t connect. When we see malfunctions or brain breakdowns like autism, I think we can learn a great deal about how the brain works normally, things that aren’t apparent to us because our normal brains work so well. We don’t understand how difficult that is to put together all the different pieces of the world and make it a unified whole. Erin Schuman: Tito’s case is interesting, and rather hopeful, because it’s clear that working together with his mother and his team, Tito communicates his experiences. Tito has a great deal of first-person information that normal people would have noway of knowing or of getting it out. Using the computer and voice synthesizer it’s clear that Tito knows a lot more than would have been recognized if only conventional methods of probing what an individual knows were used. This suggests the possibility that there may be other cases like Tito where there is a lot of information locked up and a lot of synthesis going on internally, but where there is no output. Soma Mukhopadhyay (reading what Tito wrote): become bigger than the door, just a point.

I can see a point. . .It can

Soma Mukhopadhyay: Tito can just concentrate on that point and the other things get unnoticed. Portia Iversen: One day, Tito and I were looking at a door and (as he described it here) he said, ‘‘I see the shape, I see the color, I see the position.’’ I said, ‘‘What if I close it,’’ and he said, ‘‘I may have to start all over again.’’ In our average everyday world we’re confronted by thousands of kinds of images in any given second of time, some moving, some stationary, each with its own complex set of characteristics. When I ask Tito, ‘‘How do you see all this?’’ He answers all these things, ‘‘one by one.’’

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Eric Courchesne: It’s almost like autistic people can only focus in like a spotlight on just one solitary piece of the world around them, and in order to put it together, to make any sense of their environment, they have to shift around and around to slowly piece it all together. The separate strands of sensory input take over his consciousness. Terry Sejnowski: Maybe that indicates an overactive form of attention. Normally we can tune out other, irrelevant sights and sounds, and focus on the one critical object, but usually we’re continuing to be aware of the rest of the world. If you can focus on one object extremely well, you can imagine that there’s nothing else out there except that object and it becomes your whole world. Eric Courchesne: Not just overactive but almost active in a way that’s out of his control. This would mean that Tito is not able to easily and smoothly adjust his scope of attention to take in the whole scene, let alone a part of a scene. He would be reduced to just a single feature of a scene. Robert Kuhn: What are some of the modern theories on how attention works and how we bind things together? Terry Sejnowski: It’s really all taking place in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the part in the front of the brain that allows your mind to selectively attend to particular senses and particular features, and in fact switches between different objects. That is a mental function that we take for granted; we don’t think twice about switching very rapidly between discussions with different people, but for Tito this is very difficult. Eric Courchesne: The centers for attention in the brain are located not only in brain stem structures but also in the frontal and parietal cortex structures, as well as certain parts of the cerebellum. All these structures are involved in the dynamic regulation of attention and allow the rapid, smooth, and effective shifting of attention from one sensory percept, for instance ‘‘color,’’ to another, for instance ‘‘shape.’’ Or the sensory shift can be between sensory modalities, say between vision and audition. What we and others have found is that autistic individuals have a great deal of trouble doing this shifting, and they tend to get stuck on one thing as if their attention got locked in or became frozen, and this situation was out of the person’s control. So apparently systems that allow for the smooth modulation of sensory inputs are not effective. Robert Kuhn:

Let’s talk about memory. How does memory work?

Erin Schuman: How does an organism store information about its environment? That’s essentially what a memory is. What we know is that memories are stored at the interconnection between neurons (nerve cells), called the synapse, and it is likely that memories are mediated by changes in the

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strength of communication between the neurons, which is how one cell can have impact on other cells. Robert Kuhn: That’s done through chemicals, called neurotransmitters, which pass from one neuron to another neuron across the synapse, the presynaptic part of the first neuron influencing the post-synaptic part of the second neuron by these chemicals. Erin Schuman: Right. The first neuron releases a neurotransmitter that the second neuron detects, and the latter changes that chemical signal into an electrical signal. So, information can be stored by changing the strength of that electrical signal. And then, once you get past the synapse you get to the cell, and the cell has to integrate the information that it’s receiving from all of the cells that are talking to it, which could be hundreds or even thousands of other cells. Robert Kuhn: As for brain structures, the hippocampus is critical in forming memories. Erin Schuman: The brain has two halves, so each person has two hippocampi, one in each hemisphere. In the hippocampus, a huge number of those synapses come into a single cell. In the 1950s, one patient, called H.M., had both of his hippocampi removed due to extreme epilepsy, and what was noticed in H.M. was that he had profound amnesia following the surgery and was incapable of forming new memories. That was one of the first clues that the hippocampus is important for memory formation. Since then, animal studies have basically borne that out: for certain kinds of memories, animals that lack a hippocampus cannot form those memories. Robert Kuhn:

How about long-term memory?

Terry Sejnowski: We think that semantic memory, memory that is knowledge about the world, resides in the cerebral cortex, but there is an initial period during which you need to have a dialogue between the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex, back and forth, for that memory to be consolidated in the cortex. Portia Iversen: Tito is telling us that, ‘‘I have that better,’’ meaning that he has better memory than average. Terry Sejnowski: That could well be. If you can really focus your attention on something, you can really encode that in a way that it will remain there for a long time. Attention is clearly directed by these neuromodulatory systems, like those that use choline and serotonin as neurotransmitters. If you could really focus the way Tito does, you could make a very strong association. Portia Iversen: Tito says, ‘‘I have that better,’’ meaning long term memory, but he then adds, ‘‘but I forgot my breakfast menu,’’ and he really means it.

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If I were to ask Tito, ‘‘give me examples of breakfast food,’’ he’d probably give a longer list than we would, but if I said, ‘‘what did you have for breakfast,’’ he may absolutely not be able to tell us because of the way the information is stored in his brain. He needs a handle on memory or information to access and use it, he needs to get a hold of a tag, like a computer would. Tito’s mind works, I think, something akin to artificial intelligence. You couldn’t ask a computer, ‘‘what is this,’’ or ‘‘what did you do an hour ago’’; rather, you must give it some commands, and that’s similar to how Tito’s brain works. Robert Kuhn: On what level can autism be occurring at? We know that the brain works on multiple levels, from the neurons, the synapse between those neurons, to neural networks which are associations of neurons, to brain structures (like the hippocampus), and whole brain systems. Terry Sejnowski:

Why not all of them?

Erin Schuman: To the extent that autism has an underlying genetic or biological mechanism, it can be a quite fundamental mutation. One of the things that’s perhaps not intuitive is that the underlying biological mechanisms for these very complicated behavioral disorders can be something very simple, such as the way a synapse works. Robert Kuhn: In brain malfunctions, everything can be affected. But with autism, can we discern a primary cause? Eric Courchesne: Genetic factors must be very significant in autism because identical twins have a 60 percent likelihood that if one has it the second will also; whereas fraternal twins, in which the siblings are not genetically identical to each other, the likelihood is only three to six percent. So this disparity between the concordance of autism in the identical twin pair versus the discordance for autism in fraternal twin pair speak strongly to genetics. Most people believe that there’s probably two to four or five different genes that are involved in this disorder. Terry Sejnowski: But now here’s a challenge: identical twins have a concordance of 60 percent for autism, which means that if one of them has autism, there is a likelihood of 60 percent that the other one twin will also have autism. But it also means there’s a 40 percent probability that the other will not have autism; so what is missing here, in other words, is why is it that with precisely the same genes at birth, one identical twin can develop autism and the other doesn’t? That’s a mystery. Eric Courchesne: One or two genes do not make a person. We have tens of thousands of genes that are the blueprint for the biology of our bodies. And so it’s probably some complex interaction among other genes that may show slight variability even in identical twins.

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Terry Sejnowski:

What about the environment?

Erin Schuman: Genes have a whimsical nature, which we have seen in knockout studies where a single gene is mutated in a mouse. In some cases in a litter, you’ll find 30 percent of the mice lack a kidney, and since they are all genetically identical, there must be a whimsical or probabilistic nature to the way genes play out their program in the development of the organism that isn’t as hard wired as we would like to think. Terry Sejnowski: Some of that whimsy occurs in the womb. It turns out that the environment in which the fetus develops has a major impact on how the brain develops. Robert Kuhn: Let’s talk about the search for a cure for autism, not just alleviating symptoms, but a real cure. How is science progressing? Eric Courchesne: Science progresses by exploring possible biological mechanisms that lead to the phenomena of autism, both its behavioral and its brain phenomena. And some of these clues are going to lead us to possible biological interventions that can be very effective. The most remarkable story of this sort is a disorder called PKU, which, if not treated, will cause the child to become mentally retarded. From birth, the child’s chemistry is no longer protected by mother’s body and in those children who have the PKU disorder, the child’s chemistry is not able to control the use of an amino acid—phenylalanine, which is commonly available in foods—and as a result, toxic levels of this amino acid build up and produce brain damage. But knowing that allows a very simple and effective treatment: for a child that has the gene mutation, PAH, that prevents the normal metabolism of this amino acid, such a child is put on a diet that has low quantities of this amino acid. And almost magically, normal brain development follows. Something similar might be occuring with other developmental disorders. Portia Iversen: There’s a subset of children with PKU who have autisticlike symptoms. To demonstrate that a simple missing enzyme can cause a huge spectrum of complicated behavioral symptoms is remarkable. Terry Sejnowski: The key here is having knowledge that there’s a particular amino acid and a particular gene that’s gone wrong. If we knew what genes were involved, we might be able to catch them really early, before they even start manifesting themselves. Eric Courchesne: In autism there are two very interesting facts that may have something to do with each other and may eventually lead to this kind of intervention. One is the finding that, at birth, the brain of the autistic individual is normal in size, but by two years of age, it will have grown to be far larger than normal. So the question is, what’s causing the abnormal growth? It turns out that, at birth, there are elevated brain growth factors in children

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who later become autistic; apparently in autism these brain growth regulators are in too great abundance. The interesting point is that, for the first time, molecular factors that may influence brain outcome have been identified at birth and blood samples from autistic individuals. This gives hope that the pathways that lead into and out of that point may be investigated and perhaps modified, producing a far better outcome. Robert Kuhn: Do you have concerns about brain research in terms of how information we’re learning might in the future be misapplied? Terry Sejnowski: Tough question. There is danger. The knowledge that we’re going to have very soon with the techniques that we have developed for imaging and seeing into people’s brain could be used someday, perhaps in a society different from ours, to control human beings. Eric Courchesne: Sadly, just about every human technological development at some point or another has been used by someone for ill. Erin Schuman: Science at its core has a sort of blind, knowledge-is-good attitude. The conventional scientific ethic says that doing the experiment shouldn’t be questioned because it’s the sort of blind search for the truth. Eric Courchesne: There is no doubt that knowledge gleaned from brain science will be extraordinarily powerful, with much opportunity for malevolence. But at the same time technology has brought tremendous good for people. So the results of better technology is a balance between the two. Soma Mukhopadhyay (reading from Tito): better kinds of treatment.

I think that it will lead to the

Robert Kuhn End Commentary: Call the brain the most complex organization of matter in the cosmos. Just three-pounds of wet flesh can discern how the universe began while enjoying the music of Bach. Although we focused on the abnormal brains of the autistic, we learned a good deal about what it means to be ‘‘normal.’’ ‘‘Normal’’ brain function ‘‘feels’’ integrated and unified, but it’s the complex combination of deep process and systems working seamlessly together. It’s the architecture of brain structure, and the timing of brain function. It’s the signaling of numerous nerve cells, exotic fluxes of electrical fields, and flowing streams of countless chemicals. The microscopic choreography is a multi-level dance of exquisite intricacies and purposeful outputs. So what does all this mean? Understanding how the brain works explains what human beings are. . .and foretells what human beings may become.




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Interviews with Expert Participants Tito Mukhopadhyay Fourteen-year-old Tito Mukhopadhyay struggles daily with the challenges of severe autism. Though nearly non-verbal, Tito can communicate independently and is a prolific, talented, and published writer. For more information and writing samples, visit http://www.cureautismnow.org/tito/.

Terry Sejnowski What contact have you had with Tito? My encounter with Tito on Closer To Truth was the first time I had met him, and it really had an impact on my view of autism. Because although he had a very difficult time communicating with the world, and in staying fixed and focused, it was clear that through the work that his mother had done with him he had found a channel of communication that other autistic children do not have. And what made me change my mind about autism is the fact that I saw there may be locked behind this socially impenetrable wall a mind that is every bit the same as ours except that it just can’t get through. It can’t communicate, it has trouble focusing, it has trouble holding onto things. I’ve thought a good deal about what it was that Tito’s mother did for him, and how that impacted his brain so that he became as communicative as he is. Have you spoken with any colleagues about Tito? Recently, I had a conversation with Dr. Mike Merzenich from the University of California at San Francisco, and Mike has some very interesting ideas having to do with coherent activity in different parts of the brain and how plasticity—how changes in the organization of the brain—may be the underlying cause of conditions like autism. He’s also working on a way for these kids to interact with a computer in order for them to react to timing signals. He thinks it might be possible for these autistic children to create or improve their communications channels, starting first with the computer and then broadening that out to people. How do we represent information in the brain? Information can be represented in the brain in many different ways. For example, if a neuron fires several spikes of electrical activity, the information could be represented by the number of spikes within a period of time, but it also could be represented by the specific time at which each of the spikes actually occur. There is evidence that the timing might be important for

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things like attention and it may be the ability to pay attention and to focus on a single sensory stimulus that is really at the heart of autism. And if we understood more about the temporal coding part of the brain we might be able to perhaps come up with a cure for autism. In your opinion, is temporal coding the main way the brain works? It’s very unlikely that temporal encoding is the main way that the brain works because of the fact that we know that sometimes it is present and sometimes it isn’t. Temporal coding seems to vary with your mood. It depends on what you’re focusing on. So to the extent that temporal coding is important, it’s going to be important for the higher level of processing rather than the basics like recognizing an object or being able to throw a baseball. Those basic things are probably based on rate coding. But things that have to do with your ability to think, for example, and be able to focus your attention, might be related to the time that the spike occurs—not just how many spikes that occur. Describe further ‘‘the binding problem.’’ There’s a controversy having to do with how information that belongs together stays together. For example, if you have a red cup, how do the redness of the cup and the shape of the cup become bound together? That’s called the binding problem. And there have been different solutions that have been suggested for it. In my view, I don’t think it’s a real problem. I think that the brain is quite capable of representing those properties by different groups of neurons firing at roughly the same time, but they may not necessarily have to fire their spikes at exactly the same time. Binding the information together is needed, but equally important may be enhancing or amplifying the information. What kind of brain imaging techniques are available? Functional magnetic resonance imaging has really opened up a whole new era in the study of human brains. For the first time, it is possible to study— non-invasively—activity occurring in different parts of the brain during unique human mental activities like language that cannot be studied in any other animal because we are the only animal that has the ability to communicate with language. What are the key developments in the field right now? My field of integrating theoretical ideas and computational models to study the brain is one of the newest areas of neuroscience.

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Portia Iversen Portia, your son Dov is autistic, and you and your husband, Jon Shestack, first brought Tito and Soma to the U.S. What have you learned from them? Many families and autism professionals have written asking about Tito, his mother Soma, our son Dov, and the new teaching method Soma has pioneered. This method is called the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). We are working with Soma to produce a teaching manual for parents, teachers and professionals, which describes step-by-step how to implement this teaching method. And we very much agree with the basic assumption that how an autistic person acts on the outside is not necessarily a reflection of who they are and how they think on the inside. We would rather assume competence. The teaching method, which has met with some early success, and through which we now communicate with our son Dov, is not a cure for autism. That will require much more medical research, and we are working hard on that front every day. How can others learn Soma’s techniques? As parents we understand the sense of urgency that many of you feel in getting this method to your own child. Soma is working hard on getting a first draft of the RPM manual written, and we hope to have it available soon. See the Cure Autism Now (CAN) website for the latest information—http:// www.cureautismnow.org/index.jsp. Can this method be taught to teachers and used in classrooms? Yes. Do you think this could work for other autistic children? It is probable that many could learn to communicate better with this method. Can Soma work with my child? Not at this time, but the manual will help you get started. Are there any workshops available? Not yet, but there will be in the future. What kind of letter board does Soma use? She uses either an ABC or QWERTY (keyboard) configuration, depending on whether the child knows the alphabet or not. The letters are typed or

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written on a piece of paper or cardboard. Eventually, she trains the child to work on a portable keyboard such as the Alphasmart. My child can talk—could this method still help him? There are many people with autism who are verbal, but tend to use language more as a ‘‘stimulant’’ than for communication. Soma is testing the method with verbal children whose speech is of limited use for communication. More will be known about this in the next year. Is there any scientific research on RPM? The study of this method is part of CAN’s larger Neuroplasticity Initiative, which is being led by Dr. Michael Merzenich. Dr. Merzenich is an international authority in the field of neuroplasticity and has pioneered important technology to help people with dyslexia, including the computer teaching method Fast ForWord. As we search for effective biological treatments and a cure for autism, CAN is also always looking for ideas that can make an impact for people with autism today. Our goal is to bring the cutting edge of technology to bear upon the communication problems with autism. This initiative is actively creating a new hybrid field, bringing together the wizards of technology and neuroscience along with experts on autism, therapists and people with autism themselves. What are the recent key developments in finding a cure for autism? The most exciting news in neuroscience in the last five years is the idea of neuroplasticity—the concept that the brain continues to grow and change throughout life. There have been amazing breakthroughs in the treatment of stroke and dyslexia through neural retraining. Using specialized education techniques, the brain is able to rewire around damaged or undeveloped areas and re-regulate the way it deals with sensory input. CAN’s Neuroplasticity Initiative would compile an integrated team of scientific leaders to focus on bringing these techniques to bear on autism to find ways to retrain the brains of people with autism—from the very young to adults and even to those most affected who in many instances are not able to speak at all. What type of research does CAN fund? Cure Autism Now funds genetics, environmental co-factors in autism, neuroplasticity and a large portfolio of basic biological research in autism. CAN also works to increase federal funding of autism research and was responsible for the recent funding of eight centers of excellence in autism research by the National Institute of Mental Health.

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Where are CAN chapters located? Cure Autism Now has volunteer chapters in Los Angeles and Orange County, California, Northern California, New Jersey, Baltimore/Washington D.C., Seattle, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Please check the CAN website—http://www.cureautismnow.org/index.jsp—for information on local activities. Can Soma and Tito travel and give presentations? Through the CAN website, we can give Soma your request. It is difficult for Tito to fly, and therefore, he travels infrequently. We are helping Soma create a video of Tito and some the children she has taught, so that she may give presentations herself. She will respond to your request as soon as possible. You, Tito, and Mike Merzenich, Ph.D., were on ’’60 Minutes 2’’ and ‘‘Good Morning America’’ in February, 2003. Any way to see that? Tapes can be ordered from CBS News. Please visit www.cbsnews.com and click on ’’60 Minutes 2.’’ In the Closer To Truth program, ‘‘How Does the Autistic Brain Work?’’ Tito’s descriptions are disturbing. Have other autistics described the experience? Tito’s descriptions of sensory stimulation match those of other people with autism. Gail Gillingham Wylie, M.Sc., an autism consultant and workshop presenter, and her husband Clay Wylie, have made the effort to collect these descriptions from a variety of sources and used them to create an ’’autistic perception’’ experience for people to try out. You can contact them at [email protected]

Eric Courchesne What causes autism? There’s a wide range of speculations regarding what causes autism. But the huge difference between identical twins and fraternal twins in the likelihood that if one has autism so does the other—60 percent versus three to six percent— suggests a very strong influence of genetics. It also may well be that the genes that are involved in autism somehow place that individual at greater risk or more vulnerable to environmental events, like exposure to viruses or toxins. That’s a possibility that autism may be caused by a reaction to a virus or toxin.

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What developments would help us understand the causes of autism? Autism is a disorder in which children live a long, natural life. They don’t die, so you can’t look at the brain after they die. So how do you study it? More effective methods for neuroimaging are required, methods that allow imaging down to describing details of cortical areas and structure. That would be a key way to study the features in their brains when they are most flagrant—at the time the child is two or three. Whom do you most admire and why? Actually, right now the person I most admire is Terry Sejnowski. The reason is that he has a very positive, very proactive and energetic approach to science, his interests are wide-ranging, and he understands the excitement of many different areas of neuroscience. And it’s that emotional and psychological attitude, as well as that intellectual attitude, which allows him to integrate ideas across many domains; and that’s what’s needed when you study a developmental disorder like autism because developmental disorders are very complex.

Erin Schuman As someone who studies the brain in detail, what do you think, does the soul exist? I think differently from most of my scientific colleagues in that I save a place for the soul along with all things spiritual. So for me personally, not everything has to be explained by a molecule or an atom, and so I put the soul in the category of those mystical things that touch us in life that I do not think we have a molecular explanation for.


Chapter 5

Does Psychiatry Have a Split Personality?

The battle lines in modern psychiatry are drawn: Will biology replace psychology? Mental health is a significant international issue—increasing numbers of people have mental problems—yet psychiatry remains suspect as a science. On one side is the psychological approach: traditional psychiatrists and psychologists who use psychoanalysis, behavioral and cognitive therapies. On the other side is the biological approach: high-tech medical scientists, also called biomedical psychiatrists, who use mood-altering drugs, brain imaging, genetic testing. Psychiatry is said to have a ‘‘split personality.’’ But who defines mental illness? When and why do such definitions change? The treatment of mental illness has a long and unpleasant history, including looking for demons and relying on exorcisms, and the chaining and torturing of the mentally ill. Note psychiatry’s controversial history: beginning with hypnosis and Freud’s study of the unconscious, the development of psychoanalysis, and the various behavioral and cognitive therapies founded on psychological theories and confirmed by statistical data as well as anecdotal stories. Recently, psychiatry has become more integrated into the medical sciences, with the design and controlled studies of psychoactive drugs, CAT and PET imaging of brain diseases and abnormalities, and genetic studies of mental illness. Do these techniques take psychiatry out of the realm of philosophy and put it into the realm of science? And does this mean that traditional psychiatry will become progressively less important?

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Some approaches to psychiatry are clearly scientific, such as brain imaging and mood-improving drugs, and can be subjected to the scientific method of verification as are traditional medical procedures. Other approaches, such as behavioral and cognitive therapies, and even psychoanalysis, though less verifiable by the scientific method, seem essential in curing or ameliorating many mental problems. With cases of depression skyrocketing today in addition to the steady state of the more severe mental illnesses, both approaches seem critical for effective treatment. Nonetheless, from the standpoint of the scientific method, psychodynamic methods still require a higher standard of proof. In this chapter, a prominent biological psychiatrist and two psychologists debate the extent to which psychoanalysis, or ‘‘talk therapy,’’ has been supplanted by pharmaceutical solutions in treating most psychiatric problems, including depression and anxiety. All express concern about ignoring the benefits of talk therapy, especially at a time when depression is on the rise and has a 10 percent suicide rate. They also highlight the causes for this trend, from HMOs’ desire to keep treatment costs down to the pharmaceutical industry’s need to generate profits. The outlook is hopeful that new brain imaging techniques will lead to a greater understanding of mental illnesses, thus yielding more comprehensive, sophisticated, and effective therapies. Psychology Today’s Robert Epstein fears that treatments will descend into mere pill popping. Neuropsychiatrist/MacArthur fellow Dr. Nancy Andreasen, whose work centers around these new techniques (and whose seminal work on schizophrenia has redefined the field), is also one of the staunchest champions of traditional talk psychotherapy. ‘‘Young psychiatrists don’t learn how to interview and that is a real loss.’’ She recognizes that disorders of the human mind are not like diseases of the human kidney. Subtle physical variations—far below our detection capacity—can combine with intense psychological experiences to induce debilitating mental illnesses that can benefit from the insights and interventions of skilled clinicians as well as from drugs. And Peter Loewenberg, dean of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, argues that Freudian-type analysis, updated, continues to provide insights obtainable in no other way.

Expert Participants Nancy Andreasen Professor of Psychiatry, University of Iowa College of Medicine; editor-inchief, American Journal of Psychiatry; author, The Broken Brain, Brave New Brain; National Medal of Science

Robert Epstein Former editor-in-chief, now West Coast editor, Psychology Today magazine; University Research Professor, Alliant International University

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Peter Loewenberg Dean, Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute; Professor of History, University of California at Los Angeles


Nancy Andreasen: If we go back in history, people like Hippocrates conceptualized mental illnesses as physical in origin. The psychodynamic way of thinking is an add-on that only really began in the late 19th and early 20th century. Robert Kuhn: Let’s use, as a specific example, depression, a mental problem that affects millions. Peter Loewenberg: There isn’t a split today: the two approaches interact. Everyone knows what depression’s like: there are emotional causes and physical causes, and that big split, mind from body, originating 2,000 years ago with Plato, has now been closed. Robert Epstein: I don’t agree. You’re talking theory, but when it comes to treatment, there’s very definitely a split. For a while in America, after Freud, when psychologists and psychiatrists were the people you went to for depression, what you got was mainly talk. Now, for the same syndromes, you go to your HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) and you get a drug—no one talks to you. So, the psychological side of depression is very often ignored and, in fact, what you could call the biomedical side is all most professionals seem to care about. Nancy Andreasen: The picture is not as bad as you’re portraying it. For sure, people received psychological treatments before good drugs were available (beginning in the 1950s). In my training, I was taught to use psychotherapy for the more psychological or reactive depressions, and to use drugs for those more biologically based. Robert Kuhn: depression?

How could you distinguish a biological-based cause for

Nancy Andreasen: There are classic signs and symptoms that are more biologically based: loss of appetite, severe insomnia, variations in diurnal rhythm—in other words, fluctuations in mood according to time of day, which suggests that there’s something in the physical apparatus that isn’t working quite right, that is causing the mental problems. These kinds of depressions are the ones that tend to respond best to medications. Robert Epstein: I will insist that what people really have now is very limited benefits through an HMO, which might give them 10 psychotherapy

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sessions a year, with each lasting perhaps 15 minutes. With a mental health professional, there’s a bookkeeper somewhere in the background who says, ‘‘No, this person needs to be on Prozac.’’ The are about a 135 million Americans who now get their mental health services through HMOs. Nancy Andreasen: You’re talking about economics—that’s not what psychiatry is and that’s not what psychiatrists would like to do to take care of their patients. Robert Epstein: ideal.

You’re not talking about reality; you’re talking about the

Peter Loewenberg: You’re also right about the training. About 50% of psychiatry residency programs do not train in psychotherapy anymore. Nancy Andreasen: I don’t think the statistic is that high. You can’t get Board Certified in psychiatry without having demonstrated that you’ve had training in psychotherapy. Peter Loewenberg: Young psychiatrists do not know how to talk to people; one cynical psychiatrist calls it ‘‘cocktail mixing’’—you put in a little of something this week and, if it doesn’t work, you change the cocktail next week and put in a little of something else. When you talk depression, and people have had a loss—a bereavement, a martial breakup, or a defeat at work—they need someone to talk to, they need a human relationship to work out what’s going on, what they contributed to it, and how they’re going to cope with it and adapt to it and do better next time. Nancy Andreasen: This is ironic for me because I’m a psychiatrist who was actually involved in the criteria for defining mental illnesses that are now being used to train people. And when you say that young psychiatrists don’t learn how to interview, I’m afraid that I often agree with that. The diagnostic and statistical manual lays out a set of criteria for every mental illness and, when we put them down, we thought, well, this will help standardize things, clarify, create reliability, but what’s in fact happened is that they’ve become canonized over the course of the last 20 years, so that psychiatrists think these are absolutes handed down from God. And young psychiatrists, being tested by the Board Certification systems, are expected to have memorized all these silly criteria. The result is that, increasingly, their interviews are limited to asking about the signs and symptoms in those criteria, and they don’t ask about the people. Every very time I start interviewing a patient I always ask them as human beings—where did you grow up, what did you study in school, what do you enjoy, and so on, and then I go on and talk about signs and symptoms. But most of our young psychiatrists aren’t trained this way, which is a real loss.

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Robert Kuhn: When do mental problems pass from a quirk that all of us have to one degree or another to something that is a medical condition? Nancy Andreasen: When it gets to the place where the person has become extremely dysfunctional or is experiencing pain beyond what you would expect given the social setting, then it begins to move into a medical condition. And then we can move on to extreme examples, to severe psychotic depressions during which mothers, tragically, can kill their own children— one of the most horrible things one can imagine, a heartbreaking situation. Robert Kuhn: Is depression different when it is biologically based, such as a deficit in the brain’s chemical system, and when it is induced by some event, like the loss of a loved one or a problem at work? Robert Epstein: There are depressions we tend to call reactive depressions, which are clearly initiated by some incidents in one’s life. There are others that seem to come from nowhere; the latter are probably caused by something gone wrong in the brain. Robert Kuhn:

How widespread is depression today?

Robert Epstein: There are probably 20 million Americans who are clinically depressed. But only a small portion of these people are getting appropriate treatment; for men the situation is even worse because men tend not to seek treatment and tend to use destructive means for dealing with their depression. Nancy Andreasen: Even more frightening is that depression rates are increasing. If you track the rates of depression in younger people versus older people over time, the curves for people in the baby boom generation are going up so steeply that if you extrapolate them to the end, it looks as if everyone in that group is going to have a depression at some time in his or her life. It’s also important to realize that people think mental illnesses are not lethal, but, in fact, depression has a 10 percent suicide rate. Peter Loewenberg:

Adolescents are especially at risk for suicides.

Robert Kuhn: Why do we think that the baby boomer generation and younger people today have a greater incidence of depression? Nancy Andreasen: There are multiple explanations. For one, this group is not going to be able to achieve at the same level as their parents. There were so many of them that opportunities were limited. You get a Ph.D. and you won’t get a job because there are all those people who went before you who already filled all the jobs. Things are easing up now because the parent-level people have retired. Robert Kuhn: Tell us about the biomedical approach to depression, diagnostics, and treatment.

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Nancy Andreasen: If you’re just a very narrowly trained biomedical psychiatrist, often functioning within the context of an HMO, you won’t even get paid if you don’t prescribe a medication, and so the patient will be denied the right to psychological treatment. After a half-hour interview, the person is diagnosed with depression and a prescription is written. The patient might not be seen again for three weeks. That’s the bad parody of the biomedical model. Robert Epstein: I don’t think we should hide the fact that there are trends in mental health which are very dangerous. Take New Mexico, which became the first state in the country to give prescription privileges to psychologists who are not M.D.s. This is a trend that’s going to continue: in five to 10 years, psychologists are going to have prescription privileges, probably nationwide. Robert Kuhn: How do the numbers of psychologists in the United States compare with the number of psychiatrists? Robert Epstein: There are 150,000 psychologists, more than three times the number of psychiatrists (about 40,000). What’s happening is that drug companies are trying to expand their markets and they’re finding big ways to do it. We’re moving farther and farther away from social support and talking therapies, the people side of mental health, and more toward just giving someone a pill and hoping it will work. Robert Kuhn:

Should psychologists be allowed to prescribe drugs?

Peter Loewenberg: It depends how well trained they are, and do they know what they’re doing. Nancy Andreasen: I don’t agree. To prescribe drugs, a doctor must know much biochemistry, neuroanatomy, physiology, general medicine—so that it’s very risky for somebody who doesn’t have that extensive training to prescribe a drug that could interact with some other drug or that could affect some other illness that the person has. I train neuropsychologists and they don’t know biochemistry or pharmacology. Robert Epstein: The reality is that nothing is going to stop this trend. And that’s because of powerful economic forces, namely these multibillion dollar drug companies. Nancy Andreasen: There’s another force behind it, which is the pharmacists. The reason that bill passed in New Mexico was that the pharmacists got behind it. Robert Kuhn: Are we headed to a brave new world where everybody will be on drugs and perpetually euphoric?

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Nancy Andreasen: That’s a huge concern. I see us drifting away from the kind of world in which I grew up where the most important thing was values, relationships with other people, seeking some higher purpose. Robert Epstein:

And obligations to the community.

Peter Loewenberg:

And responsibility.

Robert Epstein: There is a myth that has been sold to us that a faulty brain is behind our problems and, therefore, if we can just go in and fix the brain, we’ll be fine. Robert Kuhn:

They used to blame your mother.

Robert Epstein: Exactly, it used to be your mother; now they blame the brain. I think it’s nonsense and I think it’s wrong. Nancy Andreasen: I teach a course on, specifically, brain/mind relationships and, well, you’re exhibiting dualism. We have a lot of terminology that assumes the brain and the mind are different things, when, in fact, I don’t think they are. The brain and the mind are the same thing; they are different words for the same thing. We are our brains, I am my brain, my brain is a composite of the experience I’ve had my entire life. My brain is different from your brain because I’ve had different experiences, as well as a different genetic endowment. Robert Kuhn: I don’t think you need to believe in dualism to agree with Dr. Epstein that ‘‘blaming the brain’’ in terms of physiological or biochemical rationale for every problem that we have is reductionistic, overly simplistic, and philosophically naive. Robert Epstein: The public can misinterpret the science and assume that ‘‘my problem is actually my brain’s problem.’’ Nancy Andreasen: That’s a very simpleminded way to think because you’re the carrier of your brain. Robert Epstein: I understand; what you’re saying is very reasonable, but it’s also sophisticated, and the fact is that’s not the message the public is getting, that’s not the way everyday people are looking at this, and it’s not the message that’s being sold by certain large industries. The message that is being sold, if you are depressed or you are anxious, is that there is something wrong with your brain and we will fix it by selling you some drugs. Nancy Andreasen: You’re saying that experience affects the brain and I totally agree. On the other hand, it’s the brain that experience effects and the brain interacts with the world. Now, if you want to complain that many people are either being taught to think in a simple-minded way or are doing it naturally, I would agree with that, too. We shouldn’t be saying that you

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have obsessive-compulsive disorder just because of a seratonin imbalance, or you have depression because of a norephinephrine imbalance. Robert Epstein: But that is the message that’s being sold! And people love that message because, and now we get to cultural values, in our culture, we want a quick fix, we want to pop a pill and we’re fine. I think this is wrong. I think we’re moving in the wrong direction when it comes to mental health. I was at the first-ever White House Conference on Mental Health, and during the entire conference only on one occasion did one speaker mention psychotherapy. The rest of it was all brain and drugs. The fact is that everything that happens to you changes your brain, including if you go through a year of psychotherapy. Robert Kuhn: Have there been any long-term studies comparing psychoanalytical, cognitive, or behavioral treatments to drug treatments? Robert Epstein: Some of the early studies seemed to indicate that various kinds of psychotherapy were not that effective, then we started finding some studies showing that psychotherapy is effective. We’re not very good yet at matching up particular clients or patients with particular therapists. If we could match better, we’d probably do much better in outcomes. Nancy Andreasen New studies using neuroimaging techniques show that placebos (inactive treatments that the patient thinks are real) have effects on the brain similar to those that are produced by real treatments such as drugs. Robert Kuhn: Placebos must trigger some kind of reaction that causes the brain, perhaps the hypothalamus, to secrete chemicals that are similar to those kinds of drugs. Nancy Andreasen: Most people would say placebos are inert substances, and so they will not have an effect on the brain. Placebos are inert substances, but because people have expectations as to what they’re going to do, their brains respond the same way as they would if they got an active substance. The fact that people are already doing those imaging studies of placebo effects shows that they’re thinking about the interactions between non-biological and biological interventions. Scientists are fascinated by this placebo reaction, and perhaps this means there is hope for getting more people to think in more sophisticated ways. Robert Kuhn: Could there come a time when sophisticated neuroimaging techniques would allow doctors to identify certain kinds of brains that would be more susceptible to different types of psychotherapeutic approaches? For example, if you had an obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorder, might advanced neuroimaging ever be able to suggest, say, cognitive therapy or behavioral therapy?

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Nancy Andreasen: It’s definitely possible, but farther down the road. It’s like working with cancer or heart disease: first these technologies study the most serious mental illnesses, like Alzheimer’s disease or schizophrenia, and then manic-depressive illness, and then they move on down to the less serious illnesses. And the emphasis is on what are the mechanisms of this illness so that we can produce better treatments and prevention, so it’s really a matter of priorities in the use of these imaging tools. If I wanted to design a study looking at the effects of psychotherapy on the brain, I could probably finish it in two or three years and probably show something fairly conclusive. The wonderful thing about imaging research is that it lets you ask all kinds of questions. I have a friend who is studying what happens in the brain during forgiveness. We have done neuroimaging studies of the effects of medication on the brain and how that relates to the change of symptoms. Neuroimaging isn’t a treatment, it’s a way of understanding how the brain works that then can help us understand how treatments work. My goal in life relates to the one disease I’ve worked on most of my life, schizophrenia —not just to understand mechanisms for better treatment, but to ultimately figure out how to prevent it, because schizophrenia is a disease of adolescence, and it’s the most tragic disease because it strikes young people and takes away their creativity and thoughtfulness. I want to figure out what the developmental mechanisms were in the brain that caused that illness and figure out how to intervene so it doesn’t happen. Peter Loewenberg: The Boston studies on schizophrenia show that when there’s a job, family, home, social support, there’s a 44 to 68 percent improvement. Nancy Andreasen: I can’t say anything except I agree. Good treatment should not be subdivided into psychological and biological domains, they should very much be integrated. Robert Kuhn: two domains?

What are some of the ideological disruptions between the

Nancy Andreasen: On the one side, some neurological biologists are simple-minded reductionists who don’t understand the human spirit, and on the other side, those psychoanalysts who make up a bunch of theories that can’t be tested and waste an awful lot of time talking to people who could be treated much more quickly and effectively with drugs.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary: Psychiatry does have a split personality, but psychiatry is not the problem. The problem is the human mind. Some mental illnesses are clearly biological: genetic testing can mark abnormalities, imaging can reveal brain lesions, and drugs can rebalance brain chemicals.

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But disorders of the human mind are not like diseases of the human kidney. Subtle physical variations—far below our detection capacity—can combine with intense psychological experiences to induce debilitating mental illnesses. Psychology and biology are both needed, each targeting its own kind of mental problems or, for some diseases, working together in synergy. The deep secret anguish of mental illness can often benefit from insights and interventions of trained clinicians (even if these therapies are not as verifiable as traditional medicine), and from the latest technologies such as brain imaging and tailored drugs. Ideally, biomedical and psychodynamic methods can combine to yield optimum benefits. Psychiatry remains an Art as it becomes a Science.


Interviews with Expert Participants Nancy C. Andreasen What are key developments in your field? As I look at things right now, there are two levels of knowledge that are building very rapidly. The first level, in which I primarily work, is the application of technology of imaging tools to map the brain and thus observe the mind in action. How does the human mind focus its attention? How does it remember? How does it experience emotions and so on? The second is at the level of the cell or the molecule, advances in our understanding that are coming from genetics, genomics, and proteomics. These two levels are happening at the same time, usually by people who don’t interact with one another. They are two quite different disciplines with different training and methods, but it’s evident that the power of combining these levels—the very fine cellular or molecular level with the brain systems level—is going to break open tremendous knowledge. We have an exciting century ahead of us. Why did you become a scientist? I began my career as an English professor. I have Ph.D. in English Literature and became pregnant and developed a disease. I was on intravenous antibiotics for a week before returning to teaching, and that pivotal experience changed my life. Because having the Renaissance as my field in English Literature, I knew if this had happened to me 100 years earlier, I probably would have been dead. I spent the next summer contemplating, had my first book on John Donne accepted for publication, but instead of feeling elated, I felt

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discouraged. And I said to myself, if I had taken the same amount of effort that I put into writing that book, and applied it a field like medicine, I might actually produce something that could benefit many people. So I decided to go to medical school and to have a career in research. And when I saw my first psychiatric patient, somebody with schizophrenia, the questions raised by what that person was experiencing were so intriguing that I was just hooked. What advice do you have for young people? Find something that you think is really important, that you care about passionately, and pursue that vigorously. It’s important to recognize that you’re going to have a lot of failures, and if you’re a gifted person you’re going to receive a lot of criticism. So you have to be willing to accept rejection over and over and to pick yourself up and persist even if people doubt you or turn down your papers. Persist and work hard.

Robert Epstein What are your feelings about drugs and mental illness? There is a lot of important research being done on the brain and on drugs, and that’s where a lot of the research money is going. But I am very concerned that what we’re learning in those areas is being misinterpreted and misapplied. The mental health field is moving in a very dangerous direction. How well do psychologists and psychiatrists work together? I don’t think there is unification. I don’t think that psychologists and psychotherapists—the non-medical mental health professionals—are working together well with the more medically-oriented psychiatrists. In fact, what I see is a slow but inexorable process of domination by the medical doctors over the more traditional mental health professionals. This is a very dangerous trend; it’s wrong, it’s hurting people, and it’s going to get worse.


Chapter 6

Who Gets to Validate Alternative Medicine?

Health care is a vexing issue of public policy, and a serious matter of personal concern. Costs are rising; quality of care is falling. Modern medicine has become a silted sea of specialists, endless tests, government regulations, and, worst of all, insurance forms. The major killers—like heart disease and cancer—demand complex medical procedures, which are often painful, debilitating, humiliating, expensive, and uncertain. Throughout history, human beings have sought to prevent disease, cure illness, reduce pain, and relieve suffering. In recent times, science has made medicine more predictable—increasing success rates and identifying side effects, bringing sense and order to the chaotic practices of the past. But now some challenge scientific medicine with ‘‘alternative medicine.’’ Certainly, alternative medicine makes remarkable claims. Certainly, billions of dollars are being spent in America alone. Certainly, millions of people are believers, and utilization of alternative medicine is growing. When we investigate, what do we find? Visionary horizons of healing? Or continuing approval of quackery? Some say that traditional scientific medicine has now become the new dogma, and the medical establishment has become the new priesthood. Do medical authorities deny different kinds of treatment to maintain their own control? Do high-cost, orthodox doctors thwart low-cost, innovative competitors? Are there alternative, non-traditional methods of curing and healing? On the other hand, is alternative medicine a colossal con game, a world of weirdos, charlatans, and quacks, out to separate us from our money, while providing little but false hope?

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How to define Alternative Medicine? Therapies, treatments, practices, and procedures which share three common features: 1) they have not been demonstrated within the United States that they are safe and effective against specific diseases and conditions; 2) they are not taught in medical schools; and 3) they are generally not reimbursable by insurance. The challenges to scientific medicine have accelerated in the past 30 years, and in this chapter, the challenged (the traditional medical doctors) give the challengers (the alternative medicine providers) one tough time. As two advocates for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) square off with two defending traditionally trained medical doctors, their stronglyfelt disagreements center on a question of proof: how do you tell what works and what does not? All bemoan the disturbing number of bogus therapies being peddled on the Internet to desperate people, the lack of safe manufacturing for many alternative medicines, and the instances where certain natural approaches cause real harm. Yet the two sides argue fiercely about the efficacy and dangers of CAM and remain adamantly opposed over whether or not CAM can ever do any good; even the issue of licensing for CAM practitioners becomes a point of contention as they debate what guidelines should be used to determine who would qualify. For CAM’s critics, most alternative medicine is at best ‘‘self-delusion’’ foisted on a gullible public with misleading advertising and misguided legislation by Congress. Three of the guests can see both sides of the issue to various degrees. Only retired physician Wallace Sampson, editor in chief, The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, sees the field in black and white—‘‘What we’re dealing with in most of alternative medicine is self-delusion.’’ His points are cogent: how can standardization occur when naturopathic remedies are effected by such things as growing conditions, time of harvest, and length of storage? Dan Labriola, a naturopathic physician who specializes in cancer and heart diseases actually concurs: what CAM company has ever publicized the proven fact that certain antioxidants prevent chemotherapy from killing tumor cells? For its advocates, CAM holds the key to a better understanding of the ‘‘mind-body continuum’’ and more effective treatment for a wide range of disorders. As alternative practitioner Hyla Cass—an M.D. who practices integrative medicine, which she calls the ‘‘best of both worlds’’—says, ‘‘12 medical schools, including Duke, Columbia, and Harvard, have incorporated CAM programs, and I want to see more of that.’’

Expert Participants Hyla Cass Psychiatrist; assistant clinical professor of psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine; author, Natural Highs, Kava, St. John’s Wort, All About Herbs

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William Jarvis Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, School of Medicine, Loma Linda University; past president, National Council Against Health Fraud; leading critic of alternative medicine; author, Reader’s Guide to ‘‘Alternative’’ Health Methods

Dan Labriola Naturopathic physician and researcher; author,Complementary Cancer Therapies. Combining Traditional and Alternative Approaches

Wallace Sampson Clinical professor of medicine (retired), Stanford University School of Medicine; editor in chief, The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine; Leading critic of alternative medicine


Robert Kuhn: Let’s begin with definition: what is alternative and complementary medicine? Dan Labriola: This is a subject of some debate, and there are a number of definitions. The one that seems to be accepted defines alternative medicine as everything that is not traditionally taught in conventional medical schools—which is, in my opinion, a very unfair definition because it includes well-trained, well regulated people like myself, naturopathic physicians in good regulatory districts like the state of Washington, and it also includes the people on the Internet who are making outrageous claims and doing a great deal of harm. Wallace Sampson: We use a different definition: Alternative medicine are methods and materials that do not work, methods and materials that are not likely to work, and methods and materials that already have been investigated and found to be debatable. William Jarvis: I go along with the NIH (National Institutes of Health) definition, which basically says everything outside of standard medicine— treatments, drugs, procedures that have not been shown to be safe and efficacious by modern medical standards. Hyla Cass: I’m rather surprised to hear your definition as everything that is not taught in medical school and is unproved. Wallace Sampson: No, I didn’t say not taught in medical schools; I said methods that are unproved or disproved. Hyla Cass: So are you saying that acupuncture would not be considered a complementary and alternative medicine?

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Wallace Sampson: disproved.

Acupuncture is unproved, and it probably is already

Hyla Cass: You are wrong. There is a very good body of research showing that acupuncture, homeopathy, and many other mind/body modalities have been shown to be very successful. Wallace Sampson: Well, we’re right into the heart of the argument then. What physicians do is that we take out appendices, we repair fractures, we cure some cancers. Naturopathy cannot do that. For instance in many people you can’t heal strep throat without treatment; what a physician can do is prescribe penicillin and keep nephritis and rheumatic fever from occurring. Now that’s what we do. Hyla Cass: I went to medical school, got my M.D. degree, and then spent four years in a psychiatric residency. I did a rotating internship where I delivered babies, did surgery, and did regular medicine. I was well prepared to look at the whole mind/body continuum. I practice integrative medicine; I use the best of both. If I have to write a prescription, I’ll write a prescription, no problem. But I’d much rather use something that, first of all, does no harm, that’s as natural as possible, and that it actually addresses the basic problem at the root of the superficial symptom. If the root of the problem is low blood sugar, let’s treat that; if it’s a B12 deficiency, let’s treat that. William Jarvis: I quibble with the definition of integrative medicine that Andrew Weil has put forth. He calls it the best from standard medicine and the best from alternative medicine. Well, how do you know what’s best until you have tested it, until you have put it through the rigor of science— then and only then do you know if it’s best or not. As a matter of fact, the, the product base from which alternative medical products come has poor manufacturing standards; half the time you don’t know what you’re even getting. So you find yourself in a situation, even if it is a product like acupuncture that has some real scientific progress, you really don’t know what it is—so how can you call it medicine? Hyla Cass: It’s very important to have standards, to have good manufacturing practices, and the industry is certainly trying to enforce that. The Natural Nutritional Food Association is trying to set up good manufacturing practices such as getting a certificate of analysis from every batch. William Jarvis: Dan Labriola:

They’ve been working on it for ten years! It’s a failure in government to protect the public interest.

Wallace Sampson: In science, such as physics and chemistry, if a particular method can’t be reproduced uniformly, then chances are that any positive results in experiments are wrong, because once something is shown to work

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in one laboratory, one of the hallmarks of science is that any laboratory should be able to reproduce that. Dan Labriola: Looking at my profession, naturopathic medicine, especially in the jurisdictions where we are not licensed, there is literally no governing body that is responsible for what is being done in alternative and complementary medicine. Any fool walking along the street can, for 65 dollars, call himself a naturopath and begin practicing on the public. The only public protection that occurs is when someone like Dr. Jarvis here says, wait a minute, maybe you shouldn’t be doing that, maybe that treatment is going to hurt you. We’ve had patients die in Washington State who were treated incorrectly with natural medicine. The failure is really in government for not doing what it should be doing. As Hyla said, the National Nutritional Food Association has worked very hard to put in some analysis criteria, so that what’s on the label is really in the bottle, and that the claims that are being made are fair and reasonable claims. We can debate these claims, but at least there’s some rationality going into it. Robert Kuhn:

What is integrative medicine?

Hyla Cass: By integrative medicine, I do good clinical medicine, and I look for actual physiological or chemical imbalances in people, based on their diet or lifestyle, for which I found that I could do some very simple interventions by using alternative medical techniques. What is important is the patient, and I know you can say that our success is anecdotal, but many of us practicing what I say is good integrative medicine have such success with our patients. Robert Kuhn:

What kind of patients are we talking about?

Hyla Cass: Some cases of Alzheimer’s are in fact people who are low in vitamin B12. I give them a simple blood test and find they have what is called macrocytic anemia, and I give them a B-12 shot along with folic acid because they are not absorbing B-12 properly, and their so-called Alzheimer’s or degenerative disease suddenly disappears. Robert Kuhn: Do we really know they really had Alzheimer’s, or just symptoms that seemed like Alzheimer’s? Hyla Cass:

Exactly; this is what I’m saying—mistaken diagnosis.

Wallace Sampson: What this comes down to is this: what is the definition of what you are talking about? In the first place, these people do not have Alzheimer’s disease; they have degenerative brain disease, combined with B12 deficiency. But this was discovered not by alternative medicine but by hematologists and neurologists doing appropriate research. This was discovered 30 or 40 years ago through scientific medicine; this is not alternative medicine.

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Hyla Cass:

It’s integrative medicine; that’s exactly what I’m telling you.

Wallace Sampson: If you’re going to call integrative medicine just using things that work like oil of cloves on your gum, or ear, or Peppermint, or whatever else that we’ve used for thousands of years, that’s fine. Hyla Cass:

We are not in disagreement.

Wallace Sampson: Oh yes we are! We are surely in disagreement because you have taken something that is scientific medicine and called it alternative medicine. Hyla Cass: Excuse me! I said I am practicing integrative medicine while I am practicing plain old good scientific medicine. Wallace Sampson: Integrative medicine implies that you’ve taken something from some other place and integrated it with scientific medicine, and I’m telling you that that is not what is going on. Dan Labriola: I think the problem is that Wallace has a unique definition of alternative medicine. In his view, if a treatment doesn’t work, it’s alternative medicine, but as soon as we discover that it does work, it’s his kind of medicine. The presumption is that everything that we do in complementary and alternative medicine doesn’t work; that’s the presumption of his definition. Wallace Sampson:

That is the correct definition.

Hyla Cass: If a six-year-old child comes to see me with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and he is already on Ritalin, Prozac, and other drugs, that’s terrible. I want to see what that child is eating, does he have any food allergies, does he have a high level of mercury or lead in his blood, and I do tests to make those assessments. Is that scientific? I’d say so. Did the regular doctors test for that? No, they didn’t. So I check for those heavy metals, and if present, I will use certain treatments, very safe treatments for getting rid of those heavy metals. I’ll put the child on a diet: instead of eating sugary sweets and soda pop, he is going to get a good diet that supplies enough protein and complex carbohydrates with fruits and vegetables and some vitamins to help reverse the ADD. William Jarvis: That’s right. When you get the mother to start preparing better foods, to start organizing better diets for the child, the mother stops blaming the child for everything it does and blames the previous bad diet, then there’s a whole release of tension between the mother and the child, there’s a whole new set of behaviors that take place in the home, and all of these build towards a more positive experience. Robert Kuhn:

That sounds good to me.

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William Jarvis: That’s right, it is a good thing. But when scientists want to tease out what are the factors that produce the positive results, they have to be careful in making claims since there are so many factors running loose here. Hyla Cass: I’ve had very good results with such children. Occasionally I will continue to use a low dose of the drugs along with the dietary changes, a much lower dose of the medication. So I am grateful to have medication when I need it. But what I do have a problem with is doctors prescribing drugs aggressively. This is a problem with medical education, it’s a problem with post-medical school education where the doctors are basically being manipulated by the pharmaceutical industry. The research is paid for by the pharmaceutical industry; the journals are supported by the pharmaceutical industry. There have been some problems with authors of papers not fully disclosing their financial connections with the pharmaceutical companies, that they were being paid a lot of money to write a particular research paper. A negative paper doesn’t get published, so if a researcher wants to get published, they better get positive results. Robert Kuhn: It’s an industry with economic power that’s highly politicized, affecting all aspects of health care. William Jarvis: But it also has a lot of popular support, and that’s ultimately what it comes down. When the 1994 Dietary Supplements Health & Education Act passed, which was a terrible setback for consumer protection, every United States senator voted for it; there was not one single dissenting vote. Robert Kuhn: People get very emotional about alternative medicine, because it’s your body. William Jarvis: This is where there’s a very powerful sort of self-care factor among the mass public, and the politicians have a hard time confronting that. Everyone wants labels to be accurate, advertising to be truthful, products to be safe and effective. All people will answer yes to those issues, but you can sell a cancer patient anything if they think it’s going to help. For example, there’s been tremendous promotion in the marketplace for antioxidants, and Dan was one of the first guys to point out that all these antioxidant supplements that people are buying may not be the best thing for certain cancer patients. Dan Labriola: I published a scientific paper in Oncology, which is a prestigious journal, where my co-author, Dr. Robert Livingston from the University of Washington, and I looked carefully at the existing human studies and determined that there is a very good possibility that if you combine antioxidants—Vitamin A, B6, C, E, zinc, selenium—with certain categories of chemotherapy, what you can do is actually prevent the chemotherapy from

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killing tumor cells. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a time and place for antioxidants. Bill Jarvis is right: there is a whole cottage industry out there saying, ‘‘use all these antioxidants during chemotherapy, you’ll have less side effects.’’ It’s true, you will feel better, because you are actually reducing the dosage of the drug, you are reducing the effectiveness of the chemotherapy in stopping the cancer. And so even though you may feel better, you may have a remarkably worse result and you’d never know it. Robert Kuhn: medicine? William Jarvis: Robert Kuhn:

How much money is estimated to be spent on alternative Tens of billions of dollars every year. This is a gigantic industry.

Wallace Sampson: In the United States, 60,000 chiropractors each make several hundred thousand dollars a year. Do the multiplication! William Jarvis: Congress has given the alternative medicine pill makers a license to steal, and now the pharmaceutical companies have joined them; they have their own supplement subdivisions—they are all in on the party making a fortune. We must force alternative medicine to meet the same standards that every other medication has to meet, get back to truth in advertising that doesn’t allow wild claims. Wallace Sampson: The problem is that alternative medicines are unpredictable; their quality depends on the time of harvest, the growing conditions, the length of storage, and so forth. These are uncontrollable, and almost every study that’s been done, except on purified materials such as glucosamine, have shown such wide variations of concentrations, you don’t know what you’re giving. William Jarvis: And every marketing survey shows that although there is a small cadre of people who are very health conscious (almost to the point of neurosis), 80 percent of the market out is purely pragmatic—they buy alternative medicines because they hear about it. It’s strictly a trial and error thing driven by the market claims that are usually exaggerated or outright wrong. Dan Labriola: There was a group of homeopaths who promoted the use of homeopathic immunization as opposed to conventional immunizations for childhood diseases and other things. I’m the principal author of the law in the State of Washington to bar such practices, because every study that’s ever been done has shown that homeopathic immunization simply don’t work. Robert Kuhn: But when any kind of vaccines, especially ‘‘alternative’’ ones, don’t work, we have an affirmative responsibility as a society to protect those children whose parents may think it works.

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Dan Labriola:

Precisely.

Robert Kuhn:

Dan, what are some other specific treatments that you do?

Dan Labriola: My practice is mainly cancer, heart disease, and neurological diseases. For cancer patients I have found that acupuncture is often useful for the control of nausea and vomiting resulting from chemotherapy. I think we need to look carefully at the criteria for repeatability that Dr. Sampson was talking about, but there’s a factor that we didn’t talk about, namely, who is doing the test? Oftentimes you have researchers who are investigating some of these treatments who really don’t know anything about them, and as a result some of the negative studies may be the result of poor investigational design. It’s interesting that Bastyr University just got a $1.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to train scientists in how to do rational investigations of complementary and alternative medicine therapies. William Jarvis: When I read the Chinese medicine literature, every study seems to come out positive. Could this be because these treatments are the only modality that they offer? I don’t think that acupuncture qualifies as alternative medicine because it is now found in so many pain control centers around the country. At Loma Linda, which is a very conservative Christian medical university, we’ve had acupuncture in our pain control clinic since the early 1970s. Robert Kuhn:

Do you agree with that?

William Jarvis: Sure. Even though I am a skeptic about alternative medicine in general, I think that in the control of pain, which is very subjective, very individualistic, what works should be used. If the pain control is a result of, say, operant conditioning in that person, or part of their belief system, as long as it works for them, it is fine. In a pain control setting, your goal as a physician is to help each individual patient; your goals are not scientific, your goals are clinical, so you do whatever works. Hyla Cass: When they do acupuncture on horses, it also works, and, in horses, I don’t think operant conditioning is the reason. If you take a horse that’s lame, put the needle in the right spot, that horse can begin to walk and run and do what horses do. Placebos don’t work in horses. William Jarvis: I have never seen a horse immediately able to run after such treatments. What I have seen is that human beings evaluate whether the horse is feeling better or not. And so the result may be in the observer not in the horse. There is a great deal of subjectivity going on when it comes to the evaluations of the outcomes of veterinary acupuncture. Wallace Sampson: This is a place where really honest disagreement can occur. I’m not two-sided about this because I don’t think there is a role for

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acupuncture in a medical clinic, although, frankly, at one time I did. I thought that acupuncture was in sort of a transition zone between scientific medicine, on the one hand and human subjectivity on the other, and that acupuncture might have some role. But now I don’t think that acupuncture works because there is so much myth about it, that even physicians, when they use it, misinform themselves about what they’re doing, and this is where I think the danger is. I don’t mind using placebos in some instances, but the physician must know that it’s a placebo and should not fool himself about what he is doing. Robert Kuhn:

Of course that would make it a better placebo!

Wallace Sampson: You are right, it would make it a better placebo, but the point I’m trying to make here is that there is danger when physicians and administrators in hospitals are so misinformed that they don’t know what they are doing, because medicine is built on objective results. Robert Kuhn: This brings up is the whole issue of what is scientific rigor in medicine? What are the standards by which new products or procedures are accepted into the medical community? Putting aside all definitions, if some alternative procedure to treat, say, prostate cancer can be proven to work, Wallace would be the first to accept that. If other research shows that antioxidants will diminish the effect of chemotherapy and therefore be detrimental, Wallace will also applaud that. So, how do we get everyone to work together in a scientific procedure, so that 20 years from today, we will have made progress? Dan Labriola: I think the first and most important thing is to provide licensing procedures for alternative medicine practitioners who are professionally trained in the use of these substances, like naturopathic physicians. William Jarvis: I’m concerned about the standards of conduct. Now I know Dan well and I trust Dan because he was a scientist before he was a naturopath. But I know a lot of naturopaths who are not scientists and never will be because they are ideologists: naturopathy is their religion, and Dan is not representative. Robert Kuhn:

Health can quickly become a religion.

Wallace Sampson: I have a simple answer for you. For the past 20 years, nothing has happened. And the reason is, as Bill Jarvis says, we are human beings, we’re faulty, we make mistakes, we believe in things that aren’t true, we fool ourselves, and each generation is going to do the same thing. And all I hope is that people can apply critical thinking in evaluating alternative medicine so that we can catch our own mistakes, our own errors, our own faulty way of thinking.

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Dan Labriola: If we want to look at bringing more of these alternative therapies to the forefront, I think the way to do it is, rather than saying, okay let’s just find medical doctors and we’ll give them a few more months of training and let them loose on the public, why not concentrate on the providers who are already trained to prescribe alternative medicine properly? If there’s something you don’t like about the way they’re regulated or trained, deal with it, there’s a whole process to deal with it, but do not just outlaw it. Wallace Sampson: fooling yourself. Hyla Cass:

Alternative medicine ‘‘works’’ only because you are

So are all of us idiots?

Wallace Sampson: Error is error. Delusion is delusion. And what we’re dealing with in alternative medicine is self-delusion, because an observer on the outside looking at what these people are doing can only conclude that it is error dominated. Hyla Cass: I am very proud to say, as a physician, that 12 medical schools, including Duke, Columbia, and Harvard, have incorporated complementary and alternative medicine programs, and I want to see more of it.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary: What’s the verdict on alternative medicine? Is alternative medicine science? It’s easy to ridicule alternative medicine . . .until you’re really sick. These unorthodox methods of treating disease carry astonishing claims of healing and prevention. But beware: weak science and big business make a treacherous combination. Many alternative medical practices are ineffective at best, dangerous at worst. Many, but not all. Some alternative methods may be effective and safe—e.g. stress management techniques, some dietary supplements, and acupuncture for certain problems. How to sift the wheat from the chaff ? I don’t like compromise, but with alternative medicine I’m conflicted. Anecdotal cases are intriguing, but only by conducting rigorous, doubleblind clinical trials—only by playing by the tough rules of scientific skepticism—can we discern truth. My advice? Don’t be an uncontrolled experiment. Never test the bizarre on your own body. The best cure is prevention—eat well, exercise, rest, be serene. What’s your report card? Here’s mine: good on the food, excellent on the exercise, mediocre on the rest. . .but lousy on the serenity—there’s lots of stress writing this book at night while being an investment banker during the day!




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Interviews With Expert Participants William Jarvis What does a consumer health specialist do? Health education is my specialty and we basically deal with health behavior: why people do what they do, and particularly, why people believe in things that science can’t verify. I look at consumer health from the viewpoint of the marketplace because, after all, most of our health behavior can be expressed by what we buy and what we don’t buy. Would you like to see standard and alternative medicine peacefully co-exist? Obviously, scientific, evidence-based medicine is the core of our modern healthcare system. The question is, should we also allow for traditional medicines like Chinese acupuncture, Ayurvedic cures, maybe American Indian medicine—something that has a long tradition of use, which people do because it’s part of their culture even though there is no science behind it. I say, ‘‘No!’’ but what we really should have, because we can do it, is the science of the possible. There ought to be a standard for evaluating new products and services. If something from alternative medicine can be proven safe and effective for a special purpose, it becomes part of standard medicine. I don’t think we really have room for pluralism in medicine like we have pluralism in religion and in politics. Religion and politics are arenas for opinions; medicine and healthcare are not. Claims of alternative medicine must be evaluated by the scientific method. To fail to do this is to fail to live up to the best human standards.

Wallace Sampson What’s your definition of alternative medicine? At Stanford, we’ve had a definition of alternative medicine for 20 years. We define alternative medicine as: 1) methods that are not likely to work; 2) methods that do not work; and 3) methods that are yet to be proved to work (methods that might work but we don’t yet know if they ever will). What’s the future of alternative medicine? I don’t use the term ‘‘alternative medicine’’ (unless I am answering a question) because these are collections of what I call ‘‘sectarian systems,’’ which are methods that are not scientific but have ideological or cultural bases. All so-called ‘‘alternative medicine’’ has not been proven to work or has already been proven not to work or is not likely to work. The future for these

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sectarian systems and anomalous methods is that most will eventually disappear, which will be a good thing for the public good. Alternative medicine consists of diverse and anomalous methods that people think up and invent for themselves and then try to impose on the public. Eventually most of them will be disproven, but many will still have a following because different kinds of people like to believe in different kinds of things.

Dan Labriola What are the key developments in your field? We are now giving more attention to the natural and traditional kinds of treatments that are available and have been known to work for many years, but they have never been given the opportunity to be tested under rigorous scientific criteria. That is a big change. And that’s how we discovered penicillin. Most of the major drugs that have been successfully developed over the last century were discovered as a result of anecdotal use that was repeated by providers who were competent and reliable. Does the public understand anecdotal methods of care? No, the public does not understand it at all. The definitions of what is scientific and what is not scientific are often mixed. Information on, and evidence of, treatment effectiveness is terribly variable and not presented properly to the public. We do not need to have an exhaustive scientific study to know that something works, but we do need to have accurate information and reliable evidence.


Chapter 7

Microbes—Friend or Foe?

Will we ever beat the microbes? Many people think we already have. They couldn’t be more wrong. But the dangers of infectious disease may be more widespread than ever imagined. And the supposed ‘‘cures’’ may actually make the problems worse. Many bacteria become resistant to our antibiotics. Viruses evolve with blinding speed. Prions may lurk in our meat. Anthrax is put into our mail. Healthcare today is better today than any time in history. We’ve had great successes; significantly against the smallpox virus, partially against the AIDS virus. But as diverse diseases (like tuberculosis) evolve resistance to treatment, as new diseases migrate out of the third-world countries and spread rapidly, and as terrorists begin biowarfare, we have to ask: will our precious health last? And what about the third world, where the scourge of disease exacts a terrible human toll? What’s the best way of fighting communicable disease in the long run? Will genetic engineering play a part? Are there any technological breakthroughs ahead? And can supposed ‘‘cures’’ actually can make the problem worse? Stranger yet, could microbes be causing other illnesses, like various cancers? We discuss radical ideas about microorganisms and human health. Disease-causing microbes are a serious issue, surely for human wellbeing and perhaps for our literal survival. There are dangers of inadvertently stimulating drug-resistant microbes and there are suspicions that microbes may cause a broader range of diseases. We should pay increased attention to microbiology and support an intense program of mapping and analyzing microbial genomes. In this chapter, four distinguished biologists examine the multitude of unseen bacteria and viruses that inhabit every part of the globe, as well as

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the distinct and fascinating differences between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ microbes. On one hand, microbes are essential to life—a crucial element of our digestive system—and in the future may be utilized to treat many diseases. On the other hand, the deadly power of microbes is made all too real with the frightening threat of biowarfare and, worse, bioterrorism. Our experts emphasize that the key to understanding microbes is their amazing evolutionary potential, which is expressed in their capacity to change properties quickly, particularly their building up immunities to antibiotics. Our expert biologists also describe how microbes can cause certain kinds of cancer and may even be the culprits behind a wide range of human afflictions from Alzheimer’s Disease to neurological disorders.

Expert Participants Agnes Day Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, College of Medicine, Howard University

Paul Ewald Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of Louisville; author, Evolution of Infectious Disease and Plague Time

Alice Huang Senior Councilor for External Relations, Associate in Biology, California Institute of Technology; former Dean of Science, New York University

Lucy Shapiro Professor of Developmental Biology and Genetics; Director, Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine


Lucy Shapiro: After World War II, when we built up our whole arsenal of incredible antibiotics, we also built up a sense of security that we were able to deal with all manner of infectious bacteria that were, heretofore, killing off lots of people. Suddenly, it seemed, we had a way of dealing with disease, and it was remarkable. And we didn’t pay attention to the fact that, even as early as the 1950s, antibiotic resistance was building and building and building, because we didn’t have the ability to understand how clever these bugs are. And now we’re in full trouble. There isn’t a single antibiotic now that some bug isn’t resistant to. Agnes Day: We’ve gotten our wake-up call: indiscriminate use of antibiotics has led to this situation.

Microbes—Friend or Foe?

Robert Kuhn:

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How come these bugs are so ‘‘smart’’?

Paul Ewald: They have a great evolutionary potential, they have very short generation time, they have high mutation rates, but most important is the vast number of these microbes. So, when you use an antibiotic you can knock down the microbe population by 99.99%. If you just have one in 10,000 or one in 100,000 microbes that’s a bit resistant, that becomes the microbe of the future. Agnes Day: Microbes reproduce in about 22 minutes, if you’re talking about E. coli. Microbe resistance is the recapitulation of Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest. If you have the capacity to be resistant, then you are going to be the population that survives, while all the sensitive ones die off. If you look at a single-celled microbe and its environment changes, it figuratively ‘‘knows’’ that it has 22 minutes to change or die. In a sense it’s a form of collective intelligence that they can mutate or change to protect the species and survive by giving rise to a whole new species. Robert Kuhn It sounds like we’ve gotten into an arms race that we cannot possibly get out of. Alice Huang: We are always discovering new antibiotics. Every time we go into the soil and isolate new bacteria that we haven’t seen before, we find that they make antibiotics against other bacteria. Lucy Shapiro: Through genetic engineering we can actually take these cells apart as though we are systems engineers, and we can design double-headed antibiotics, that not only knock out the target but knock out the mechanism for drug resistance. The additional knowledge we have now is allowing us to design things in such a way to keep up with the way these bugs can evolve and change. Alice Huang: Newer antibiotics, the peptide antibiotics, can drill through the membrane of the bacteria—this is a whole new class that offers us some hope. Paul Ewald: A more general way of approaching this problem is to change the environment so that you favor the milder organisms. You can make vaccines in ways that favor the mild organisms, by selectively knocking out the harmful organisms Robert Kuhn:

You’re artificially selecting for the less virulent strain.

Paul Ewald: Well, if you favor milder strains of organisms, let’s say, an organism like the one that causes cholera, this means that instead of having half or three-quarters of the people showing severe infection, you may have only one percent, of the people who are infected showing symptoms of disease.

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Lucy Shapiro: But anyone in the world can get on a plane and be in Chicago in 17 hours. And they can travel asymptomatically. When you’re taking pathogens and putting them in completely different environments than they’re used to, and then they very rapidly evolve, there is great potential for deadly trouble. Paul Ewald: Take a look at what happens when we get these nasty strains, for example, diarrheal diseases, imported in the United States. The studies suggest that, when these nasty strains get in the United States where we have protection against waterborne transmission, they can’t make it, they die out. So, for example, a horrible outbreak of dysentery occurred in the early 1970s in Latin America, killing thousands, but when it got into Los Angeles, where the water supplies were protected, the number of new infections was about one-half, which means it just died out on its own, even without any controlled measures. Even though we live in a global village, if we adjust the infrastructure so that we disfavor the harmful strains, that’s an extra layer of protection. Lucy Shapiro: But what happens with antibiotic resistance when we all get panicked, like what happened with the mailed anthrax attacks after 9/11? The worst outcome of this particular anthrax attack, which killed a very few people, was the enormous collateral damage. It disrupted our entire way of living and thinking; we had 24/7 barrage on TV. But the real villain was the indiscriminate use of the antibiotic drug Cipro, which caused an increase in resistance to the drug. Several years ago, there was a big chicken flu scare, and so much Cipro was used in zillions of chickens, that although it managed to bring down the chicken infection epidemic, the resistance to Cipro went from almost nothing to about 15%. We’re going to make Cipro useless, and that was the big danger of this very mild attack with anthrax. Agnes Day: Cipro is not only active against anthrax, but also about 30 or 40 different bacteria. Once you give Cipro prophylactically to people who may have been exposed to anthrax, you’re also killing off those friendly microbes and other microbes that are living in your gut that you wanted to keep. It’s called microbial antagonism, where you want to keep the good guys and the bad guys sort of equal. Lucy Shapiro: The same things that have to be done to protect our populations from infectious disease are going to help us understand how to deal with bioterrorist threats. It’s tremendously important that we understand how bacteria can evolve and change and, at the same time, the knowledge that we acquire can be applied to how to deal very rapidly with both natural infectious disease and bioterrorism. Alice Huang: When we study bacteria in the laboratory, we often look at them as single-cell animals, whereas in nature they actually exist in

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communities, in very complex communities. And there are rules in that community, so that no one organism takes over. In fact, they need each other; sometimes some bacteria will provide food for another organism and vice versa. As we understand these situations, we also begin to realize that there are many microbes that are very good, microbes that we actually need that are very useful. In our own gut, we find that there’s a nice mixture of microbes and generally, if we disturb them, if that balance is not correct, all sorts of terrible things happen. If you live on a farm, you know that cows are known to pass gas a great deal, and the reason that they do so is because they have a methane creating bacteria which does this. Now, one third of the human population has the same bacteria, predominantly in their gut. And so those are the friends that you sort of want to avoid. But two-thirds of humans have a different kind of bacteria, so each of our guts are actually quite different from the other. Lucy Shapiro: There’s an incredible story about a good bacterium that lives inside what’s called an eyespot on a squid that lives in very shallow waters off Hawaii, and this bacterium radiates photons, so it causes light to be generated. It radiates at night, and what it does is to protect this squid from predators because when there’s a full moon shining and you’ve got this squid in shallow water, the light turns on and obliterates the shadow, and so the squid becomes invisible to predators. And then in the morning, this particular population of light-generating bacteria goes away, and then it comes back again in the evening, cyclically. There are many examples of bacteria living symbiotically with other living organisms and providing critical functions. Robert Kuhn: How do different microbial strains work together, say beneficial ones versus harmful ones? Agnes Day: One way that microbial strains work together is by bringing about drug resistance in the sharing of extrachromosomal material that will carry the genes’ encoding for drug resistance. In the past, we thought that only like species could exchange this DNA (through conjugation where the cells come in contact with each other). Now scientists have discovered something called ‘‘promiscuous plasmids,’’ which will also affect other species. There are pieces of DNA called integrons that have sometimes up to six genes that are encoding for enzymes that will destroy six different drugs. With the rise of these types of resistance mechanisms in the bacteria, drug discovery is going to have to be more focused and more clever. Robert Kuhn: We’re going to go to our next topic—whether microbes can cause diseases beyond the traditional categories of infectious diseases. Most people don’t even realize that some cancers can be caused by external, infectious microbes.

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Paul Ewald: About 15% to 20% of all human cancers are known to be caused by infection, which is an astonishing number. If in 1975 you were to ask scientists what proportion of all human cancer is caused by infection, they would say perhaps one tenth of one percent. What has happened over the last 25 to 30 years is that every five years or so we’ve been discovering more and more cancers being caused by infection. Robert Kuhn: Is this a discovery of what always was and never known before or an increase due to changes in the human condition? Paul Ewald: A discovery of what always was. 25 years ago virtually 100% of cancers had causes that we didn’t understand well. Now we understand some of those causes better, enough to know, for example, that cervical cancer and liver cancers are caused by infectious agents. Agnes Day: And then there is the Helicobacter pylori bacteria, which has a strong association with gastric cancer. Paul Ewald: There is a great deal of interesting data that seems to show that stomach cancers can be cured with antibiotics that knock out Helicobacter. In a study from Japan, in which experimental and control groups were followed longitudinally in the population, there were 33 cases of stomach cancer in the control group, but in the experimental group, which had the Helicobacter bacteria knocked out, there were zero. Lucy Shapiro: To think critically here, the operational word is triggering ‘‘something’’ in the host. I do not think this is a simple chain of events that cancer is caused directly by a bacterial or viral infection. In most instances, a tissue in a person is attacked by an infection which then elicits a whole series of biochemical reactions that result in the cancer—everything in the cell is disrupted, especially in tissues that turn over rapidly. So it is not that the bug itself is causing the cancer; it is that our bodies are over-responding to the infection (especially in cells that keep recycling), trying to get rid of the infection, and as an unintended consequence of all the biochemical activity, you get mutations and when these mutations build up, you get an oncogenic response resulting in cancer. Paul Ewald: Sometimes yes; sometimes no. In other words, there are two ways in which infections can cause cancer: first is a sort of the irritation mechanism, which is what Lucy just described. But there is a second mechanism in which the pathogen directly causes the cancer by encoding a compound that knocks out one of the cancer-prevention genes or enzymes or proteins in the cells. So, for example, Human Papilloma viruses produce E6 protein, which knocks out p53, which is one of our barriers against cancer. The virus is doing this, evolutionary speaking, because it enables the virus to reproduce better by causing the host cell in which it is living to live a little bit more, and that enables the virus to avoid destruction by the

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immune system. But in the process of extending its reproduction time, the virus pushes the cell one step closer to cancer. Robert Kuhn: What is the percentage of cancers that are caused, in some way, by infection? Paul Ewald: Let me answer that question in reverse: In less than 5% of human cancers can we exclude a role for infection. For about 15 to 20% of human cancers, we say infections are playing a triggering or primary role. And in the other approximately 75–80% of human cancers we don’t know yet. Lucy Shapiro: The impact of infectious disease goes beyond cancers. These infectious agents can come in and cause some effect in the host and then our immune system overreacts, causing auto-immune diseases. Many of our modern diseases are auto-immune diseases that are triggered initially by either a viral or a bacterial infection. Alice Huang: A great example of this is when the Helicobacter pylori bacteria was discovered to be causing ulcers, which, prior to this discovery, everyone thought was caused by stress. (For discovering that bacteria caused ulcers, Dr. Barry Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.) On the other hand, for the inflammatory bowel diseases, doctors assume it must be caused by a bacteria, but when treatment with antibiotics didn’t work, we realized it was really the inflammatory response of the host. Lucy Shapiro: Good point. Antibiotics can be not only useless but also dangerous. Take E. coli 0157, in which you have the genes for a toxin that came from another kind of bacterium (called Shigella), and that Shigella is sitting within a piece of DNA that came from a bacteriophage (a bacterial virus). And so any treatment that a doctor gives a patient that affects E. coli 0157, which is harboring this latent virus in its chromosome, can cause the viral genes to turn on the toxin gene and then the toxin makes the patient very ill or even causes death. In this situation, if antibiotics are administered, you stimulate the production of the virus that turns on the genes for the toxin. So you can’t give antibiotics in this case. Robert Kuhn: Now to the good microbes. What is probiotics? Can microbes be utilized to make us better? Paul Ewald: One kind of research that has been going on since the 1960s (and perhaps the late 1950s) studies the possibility that if you have a nasty infection, let’s say staphylococcus, perhaps you could be given a milder staphylococcus so that the less toxic bacteria could interfere with the more toxic one.

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Agnes Day: The poster child for probiotics would be the lactobacillus or the active yogurt cultures that you see now in grocery stores, such as the Lactaid Milk for people who are lactose intolerant. This bacterium will break down the milk sugar so that you don’t get the stomach cramping. Paul Ewald: Vaccinations are probiotics in that they introduce into the human body milder strains of the disease so that the immune system is stimulated to develop antibodies that can fight the more virulent strains of the same disease. Thus the vaccines knock out the harmful strains and leaves the mild strains. The diphtheria vaccination program, which is the second most successful vaccination program in history (second only to the smallpox vaccination program), has used just this strategy (without really knowing it). Alice Huang: There is current research—probably least familiar to the general public—which puts anaerobic bacteria into tumors with the objective of destroying the inside of the tumor. That the bacteria are anaerobic is important, since once the bacteria gets into an oxygenated environment, it can no longer spread and grow uncontrollably. Dealing with bacteria is complex. Earlier we spoke about the water supply somewhat simplistically: if we seek to get rid of all the bad microbes just by cleaning up the water supply, we could cause other problems. Very often, when you treat one population of microbes and get the desired result, it doesn’t mean that other populations of microbes don’t change as well. In fact, the same treatment that eliminates one kind of bad microbe might cause good microbes to change into bad ones! So even though we all agree that having clean water is a good thing, in some instances where we have become more hygienic, we have become more susceptible as host to certain other agents. For example, the polio virus, which has been around since Egyptian days, became an epidemic because we developed much better water supplies. Paul Ewald: That’s right. We know that the success associated with cleaning up water supplies dwarfs most other success stories in medicine, but yet there can be potential problems in doing so. With polio, we had to come back with a good vaccine program and knock out this straggler virus that sort of got in the back door because it had some characteristics that made it unusual compared to other waterborne pathogens. We must take into account the whole balance sheet. The same kind of argument has been made for peptic ulcers. If we knock out Helicobacter pylori, we have this tremendously positive effect in reducing the frequencies of peptic ulcers and the frequencies of some stomach cancers. However, some people argue that it looks like this treatment might be associated with an increase in esophageal cancer—this may or may not be true; we have to look at those data. But even if true, the positive effect associated with knocking out Helicobacter pylori is so great that it dwarfs the potential negative effect.

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Robert Kuhn: consequences.

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We always have to be on the lookout for unintended

Agnes Day: Wouldn’t the cleaning up of water supplies with antibiotic chemicals generate a type of selective pressure so that the one percent of the bacteria that do survive might be even more detrimental? Paul Ewald: Let’s say the use of chlorine was going to be selecting for chlorine resistant organisms, which could mean trouble. Luckily, it turns out that there are only a very few organisms that can generate resistance to chlorine. Lucy Shapiro: That we know about. Paul Ewald: That we know about. But we do have some good evidence on this because we can observe whether we get infections caused by dangerous organisms in water supplies that are chlorinated. But the point is well taken: we have other methods for cleaning up water supplies, such as filtration. Lucy Shapiro: We have to continually remind ourselves that the water supply is just one way for epidemics to spread. There is also a great history of epidemics being spread just through the air. My feeling about bioterrorist attacks is that it would likely not be through the water, but through the air, with aerosols. Paul Ewald: Waterborne pathogens are lousy terrorist weapons. Lucy Shapiro: The bad news is that we can now genetically manipulate organisms to change their host range, to make them resistant to drugs, to make them into an aerosol, to make them more able to be transmitted from person to person. Robert Kuhn:

‘‘Weaponize,’’ as they say.

Lucy Shapiro: Weaponize. On the other hand, the good news is that we have learned so much about these bugs that now we can design detectors. We can now design ways of saying we know what that bug is and we know how to stop it now. Agnes Day: But there are also some bioweapons that utilize the toxins from the organism. And if terrorists acquire the gene sequence for these toxins, they can put these genes into bacteria that we would normally identify as being benign or nonpathogenic, and when that toxin gene is turned on, they have their warfare agent. Lucy Shapiro: Genetic engineering has pluses and minuses. Robert Kuhn: Bad human beings can use genetic engineering to create bioweapons and good human beings can use genetic engineering to design agents to stop them.

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Robert Kuhn End Commentary: Bugs are not all bad, and although we’ve won some battles against toxic microbes, vanquishing many diseases, the threats are very real and we are in danger of losing the war. We can lose by Evolution: Antibiotic drugs can spawn species of superbugs, when natural mutations select for resistance to overused drugs. We can lose by Surprise: Bacteria and viruses may cause a broad range of diseases, including some cancers, cardiovascular illnesses, and dementias. We can lose by Insanity: Biowarfare can deliberately spread lethal microorganisms that infect human beings and destroy human life. We have no choice: Science must continue the microscopic arms race, mapping microbial genomes, designing highly specific new drugs, and maintaining a microbial balance of power. It is not surprising that there is a common fallacy in our society: ‘‘we must beat the microbes!’’ Yet maintaining a microbial balance of power is the key to a sustainable world: without microbes in the soil there would be no agriculture; without microbes in our cells processing oxygen, we would not be able to breathe. And just as microbes naturally evolve to combat others, we can now engineer beneficial microbes to evolve to combat dangerous microbes. Furthermore, surprising strategies including the use of probiotics —the opposite of antibiotics—might shift the balance of power in our favor, plus dramatically improve health in third-world countries.


Interviews with Expert Participants Paul Ewald Can infectious agents trigger genetic diseases? Autism does have indications of being caused by infectious agents. We should be looking really hard to see what agents might be infecting the growing fetus during pregnancy. What are key developments in your field? The final synthesis of evolution with the health sciences is going to affect daily life in dramatic ways. I think that a lot of the diseases that we have had difficulty to control are because the microorganisms that cause them are so evolutionarily versatile. This means that when we try to use antibiotics against them, they evolve resistance to these antibiotics. What we need to do is recognize that this evolutionary versatility is their characteristic power,

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and we have to use this characteristic to our advantage as opposed to theirs. In other words, if a microorganism has strong evolutionary potential, we need to use that evolutionary potential to get the organism to evolve to become more benign.

Alice S. Huang Is cleanliness overly emphasized in modern society? Obviously it is important to be clean, but being too clean is not the very best thing either. Recent studies have shown that certain socioeconomic groups in which the children are playing on the streets in mud and with animals seem to be pretty well protected against certain diseases, and that it is the wealthier children who are ‘‘cleaner’’ who become infected with these diseases. Will we ever outgrow antibiotics? I don’t think so because we’re so dependent on them. Not many of us recognize what it was like in the pre-antibiotic days when so many women died in childbirth. We don’t see that very often now because of the widespread use of antibiotics. Why did you become a scientist? Ever since I was about seven years old, I’ve always wanted to be a physician. I think this is because my father, who was a bishop of the Anglican Episcopal Church in China, had often mused to himself that he would have perhaps preferred to have saved bodies rather than to have saved souls. When I got into medical school, I realized that saving bodies and preventing people from dying was only one aspect of medicine, and that there was so much more to it. I discovered that I loved doing research, which was fortunate because it turned out that I wasn’t very good at looking at sick bodies. The first time I saw a very elderly, very sick man in bed with lots of bedsores, I got pretty ill. After that I decided that perhaps practicing clinical medicine wasn’t the right goal for me. So research became my answer. Whom do you most admire, and why? As I get older, I realize that the person who has had the most impact on me professionally and whom I admire tremendously is Polly Bunting. She was a microbiologist who received her Ph.D. when she had two little children, and was very soon thereafter widowed. In her time, although times were difficult for female professionals, she had to go out and work and she became the president of Radcliffe College. She has given me tremendous advice over

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my career. She said to me early on, ‘‘Keep your eye on your goals. Don’t get sidetracked, don’t get on too many committees, and don’t get too involved in all these gender studies.’’ And then she said what was probably most important: ‘‘Get to a position where you can really do some good. As a young assistant professor, you’re not going to be able to have much power to do anything. But as you become a professor, you will be much better able to help people.’’ But, she continued, ‘‘Remember that when you get to that position of power, you are still a woman.’’ And I thought she was very wise because she realized that in order for me to succeed, it was very likely that I would have adapted myself to the assumptions and the behavior patterns that the people around me had, which would be mostly men. And that when I became a professor, I might really have forgotten that I was still a woman. What are the key developments in your field? It’s really been fun to be part of a discovery process that I now can see has major impact. In the 1970s, we were just beginning to purify viruses and discover that they contained genetic information of all different kinds. At that time we had all been taught that DNA contained genetic information in all of our cells and in living organisms. But with these viruses, we found that some of them had other kinds of nucleic acids and therefore we worked out how information was transferred between these different nucleic acids. Now we find that we can use what we know about the genetic information of viruses to incorporate other genes into them, and this gives us the technological capacity to enable these viruses to become carriers for inserting new information into cells. This remarkable technology is right now at the forefront of the development of antivirals, the possibility that we will be able to insert new genes into cells that would help change a diseased cell or reverse a cancerous cell. What advice do you have for young people? I think getting into research is one of the most exciting careers that one can have. It opens up so many doors. You not only have the possibility of discovering something that would really help mankind, but you also have the pleasure of interacting with young people, teaching them, and passing on to them new information. How would you like to be remembered? I don’t ever try to really guess how history is going to look to different individuals. I hope that those who are alive will remember me with love.

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Agnes Day How do disinfectants impact microbes? Interesting question. We’ve talked about antibiotic resistance, but there’s another corollary topic that needs to be discussed: resistance to the antiseptics and disinfectants that we use to keep hospitals and operating rooms sterile, and to clean our homes. There are many products on the shelves of grocery stores that say, ‘‘Antibacterial Action,’’ ‘‘Kills 99.9 percent of the germs.’’ And so I had a little seventh grader who did a science project testing these compounds. The directions said to dilute two capfuls in a gallon of water. When she tested these ‘‘antibacterial’’ cleaning compounds against bacteria that she had isolated from her own bathroom, she found that in two out of three cases, the disinfectant had to be used full strength in order to kill the bacteria, that once you diluted it in water as instructed on the bottle, it had absolutely no efficacy against home microorganisms! (One did work well when diluted one to ten.) Should we regulate disinfectants? I think the truth has to be told. If you’re buying an antibacterial solution, the directions should say, ‘‘Best when used undiluted.’’ Companies must tell the truth in advertisement. But of course it’s not only a health factor, it’s also an economic factor. If you think that the antibacterial cleanser is going to work if you dilute it one to one hundred (1:100), of course you’re going to dilute it to save money. Give some examples of successful gene therapy. They’ve made the greatest advances in gene therapy in the dental field. One example is for people with HIV. Usually their death certificates state that they died from candidiasis, which is a fungal disease caused by yeast that babies or women have in their urogenital tracts. But in an immunocompromised person (with HIV), this fungal disease will grow from the mouth all the way through the digestive system so that the people cannot absorb nutrients. And so what scientists have come up with is taking the cells that produce saliva, and taking a gene that encodes a peptide that they isolated that can kill these bacteria, and by putting that gene inside those saliva cells and then putting those cells back into the mouth, when the saliva cells replicate, you have these cells producing an antifungal agent (peptide) that the patient swallows along with his saliva, so that the antifungal agent is killing the organisms that are lining the gastrointestinal tract. This technique is not yet in wide use because there are some drawbacks of putting foreign DNA into human cells, but it shows great promise for alleviating some of the pain and suffering of people with immuno-compromised systems.

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Can microbes cause hereditary diseases? One example is the presence of chlamydial pneumonia, which are small, intracellular bacteria that cause upper respiratory tract infections. Scientists have now found this organism in the plaques of arteries. And so they’re looking at the cause and effect of chlamydial infections leading to arteriosclerosis. In the past, one thought that cardiovascular disease of this nature was not necessarily heritable, but it did run in families. Now they have shown that in this case there is a direct correlation between the presence of this organism and the causation of this disease early in life and with the later development of arteriosclerosis. So I believe that the more we look into this phenomenon, the more we’re going to find out that there are more diseases which are the direct results of bacterial and viral infections than we currently know about. What are human pathogens? Some viruses infect plants, others infect insect cells, and still others are strictly human pathogens. Many human pathogens have been found to be associated, with or to actually induce, certain types of cancer. We’ve found instances where viruses have exchanged genetic material with human cells and left a little surprise package behind – a protein that could enhance the carcinogenic activity of, say, an environmental insult to the body, thereby leading to cancer. These are called proto-oncogenes, and if these protooncogenes are turned on, they can bring about a cancerous state in the body. What are ‘‘promiscuous plasmids?’’ When we talk about promiscuous plasmids, we’re talking about the ‘host range’ of the plasmid. Some plasmids, like E. coli, have a very restrictive host range—they can only infect cells of their own kind. Promiscuous plasmids, on the other hand, can transfer their resistant genes not only to their own kind but also to other kinds of organisms—they don’t care who they infect, they’re going to infect whoever happens to be handy. So they can really cause a lot of trouble. Why did you become a scientist? I would always hang out with my older brother; he was actually was the youngest of six brothers, but he was older than I was. We would always go exploring together and catch various insects and animals in the woods; and I would ask him what were these critters were, and he would take me to the library and we’d figure out what was what. So at an early age I started asking ‘‘why’’ questions. And my interests developed to the point where when I was introduced to the hard sciences in high school and college, they were right up my alley. They brought back fond memories of walking through the woods and finding out things on my own.

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Whom do you most admire, and why? It is hard to pick one person, but one of the people who served as an excellent mentor was my third grade teacher, the Reverend Mrs. Rosemarie Bryant, who, as she put it, saw something in me that needed to be developed. I was the youngest of 13 children, and so she asked my mother if I could come and live with her, and she in turn would give me the opportunities that I wouldn’t normally have growing up in the housing projects of Daytona. She always pushed me to do the best that I could. She brought me up in a very Christian atmosphere, so I think I’m basically a good person. And she taught me a love of learning by her being my third grade teacher. So Mrs. Bryant is the role model that most comes to mind when I think of the one person who put me on the path of achieving and becoming more than I ever dreamed I could be. Does the general public properly appreciate science? The general public takes science for granted. Once they leave school, most people cease to think about science at all. But every discovery, every cloning, every creation of a new chemical or compound is going to in some way affect their lives. The public really notices when the new discovery is marketed, but not necessarily when it’s discovered. The expectations of the public are high. They expect, ‘‘Well, if you’re a scientist, then you should know this.’’ But they have to realize that just as when they go to a doctor and say they’re not feeling well, they need to have some basic understanding of what is wrong with them in order to work along with the doctor to get better. The same is true with scientists. You don’t see scientists like you see doctors, but they are behind the scenes making the discoveries that are then translated into improved health care, improving people’s lives. And so the public has to make sure that they keep abreast of new developments and actually ask questions, be aware, know what is going on, and know how new discoveries are going to impact them. Most of the research that’s being done in the United States and abroad is being supported with taxpayers’ money, and so everyone has a personal investment in scientific discoveries. The general public should really know how such discoveries are going to benefit you or hurt you. What advice do you have for young people? Be aware. Be aware of what is going on, not only in your local community, but also in the global community. You must keep abreast of current discoveries and where they are going to lead because it’s your future at stake. By keeping abreast, you can also determine what career choices you might have, and you can also have information that could help your parents and friends, so you have to be aware of what is going on. It’s not a ‘‘me generation’’ now. It’s a global generation.

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What advice do you have for young women? For young women who want to go into science, I say ‘‘Go for it.’’ Go for it with all of your heart. You can have a family life, you can have a social life, and you can still be a leading scientist. What you must get, though, is a role model, a mentor, who can help you—not by getting you a job, but by teaching you both the science of your job and the politics of your job. How would you like to be remembered? I would like to be remembered as a facilitator. I like to help people to get things done. I was raised with the idea that everyone has a responsibility to teach someone else. Today, most fields of science—such as microbiology, my field—have become so crowded in that one does not get that one-onone interaction and mentoring that we used to get. So now I’ve modified my theory so that each person must teach multiple people. So as a teacher, I’m doing the greatest good by bringing more young people into the disciplines of microbiology, molecular biology, and cancer research.


Chapter 8

Testing New Drugs—Are People Guinea Pigs?

When my father was diagnosed with terminal lymphoma, he was declared not eligible for a new class of drugs that target these life-ending tumors. How does society balance the need to do good science with the compassion to help sick people? What are the ethics of clinical trials? Instituted in the 1960s, clinical trials of new drugs, devices and procedures have become a vast and expensive enterprise in which drug companies can spend over $100 million to bring a new molecule to market. FDA procedures are complex and elaborate, as they should be to do good science and to protect the public from a drug’s potentially dangerous side effects. But how does the government balance statistical accuracy with the desire of all patients to get the best treatment as rapidly as possible? There is a natural and proper tension here. How is success defined for clinical trials? How are costs and benefits assessed? What are appropriate levels or toxicity of side effects that can be tolerated for given levels of cure, remissionn or alleviation of symptoms? And what about those not allowed to participate in the clinical trials of a needed drug, device, or procedure? How long must sick people wait to have a chance to be cured? What can be done about bringing new drugs to market quickly to help people in need? Once you delve into it, the entire arena of clinical drug trials is a tangle of hidden moral, ethical, legal, and philosophical complications. Say you want to enroll your seven year-old for an experimental HIV drug but the kid doesn’t know he or she has HIV and you don’t want to tell him or her because kids blab. If they talk about it, your family may be ostracized or

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thrown out of their neighborhood. What about the altruistic man in Philadelphia who had a non-life-threatening genetic disease, volunteered for a genetic therapy drug trial, was a borderline case for admission, and then died because of the treatment? Then there are the sensitive, awkward ethical issues of drug testing in third world countries. Are we exploiting the people by using them in trials, or are we helping them by bringing medical care they would never have had access to and then giving them training, organization, buildings, and equipment? In this chapter, experts wrestle with the ethics of clinical trials: a doctor specializing in HIV medicine, a distinguished lawyer and bioethicist, and an official from the Food & Drug Administration outline the complex issues surrounding the development and testing of new drugs. They explain the standards now in place for conducting clinical trials and the exceptionally difficult task of conducting placebo control trials that are fair to all the participants. The guests touch on the role of drug companies, consent issues, and the need for a rigorous accreditation program for institutions conducting the trials. There is also a spirited call for more scrutiny of drug testing in the less-developed world, and they suggest that drug companies have an obligation to educate local medical professionals about western practices and to leave behind a solid infrastructure of medical facilities and equipment.

Expert Participants Alexander Capron University Professor of Law, University of Southern California; Director, Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics; former chairman, Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee, U.S. Congress

Andrea Kovacs Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Pathology; Director, HIV Family Clinic, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California

Robert Temple Associate Director for Medical Policy; Chair, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Food and Drug Administration (FDA)


Alexander Capron: One thing we have to recognize in this country is that many people sign up for clinical trials because it is the only way they can get effective treatment of any kind. Clinical trials are now often run through private doctor’s offices on contract to drug companies, and many people who do not have the money to go into that doctor’s office and get the highest

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standard of care may see an ad in the paper saying, ‘‘If you have xyz disease, come in, we’ll treat you,’’ and so they go into that doctor’s office and do not comprehend that what they are doing is signing up as a guinea pig in a clinical trial. Robert Temple: We have clinical control trials largely because Congress, in its wisdom in 1962, said controlled trials are the only basis for proving a drug. So the drug industry, which are bottom-line oriented, complied. Within ten years, every new medicine, device, or procedure had become a clinical trial. Robert Kuhn:

What is ‘‘compassionate use’’?

Robert Temple: Compassionate use refers to use of a drug specifically directed at treatment of an individual person, not to learn something. Alexander Capron: use.

This would be a drug that isn’t yet approved for that

Robert Temple: Usually it involves a drug early in its clinical trials, before it has been approved for general use. The individuals who are permitted ‘‘compassionate use’’ appear to have exhausted available therapy. Used this way, you often know very little about the drug and you can be surprised by its toxicity. Andrea Kovacs: You could have the wrong dose, and with a disease like HIV, the wrong dose could be disastrous. Robert Temple: We had an advisory committee meeting on this very matter relating to cancer drugs, and many members of the patient advocacy community came to sound a note of caution. They said that it is not always a favor to people to use an untested drug. I was very impressed by the perspicacity and wisdom they brought to the whole discussion. Robert Kuhn: Andrea, tell us about your work on AIDS, and the issues that you have with clinical trials. Andrea Kovacs: I’m the director of the Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Program at the University of Southern California (USC), and we are following at the present time over 600 women, children, and adolescents, including about 20 or 30 pregnant women. Over the last 10 years, we have seen tremendous progress in terms of actual successes. When I started about one third of the babies born to HIV-infected women were born infected. Now the number is zero! We can actually prevent transmission of HIV to a fetus. This success is a direct result of clinical trials. Our children were dying and now, through clinical trials, we’ve been able to determine the optimal therapies so that no child in our clinic has died in three or four years. Robert Kuhn:

What are the issues with which you are now wrestling?

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Andrea Kovacs: How to enroll children in HIV clinical trials, children who are between the age of seven and 13, who basically do not know their own diagnosis, but whose parents want them in clinical trials because they cannot get the drugs through compassionate use. How do you enroll such children, who have to sign a written assent that has the HIV diagnosis stated in the assent. Robert Kuhn:

The children do not know that they have HIV.

Andrea Kovacs: The children do not know that they have HIV. We’ve had families thrown out of their neighborhoods, kids getting punched in the face, because their HIV diagnosis was disclosed. It’s a complicated moral dilemma because, given the kind of discrimination that surrounds HIV, disclosure is such a huge issue. Robert Kuhn:

What is the difference between consent and assent?

Alexander Capron: The assent was conceived as a recognition that for people who have not yet reached the age of consent—they are under 18—they still ought not to be involved in a clinical trial unless they agree, and this below-age-of-consent agreement has been labeled with the term ‘‘assent.’’ Robert Kuhn: Is it realistic to ask a seven-year-old to give an ‘‘assent’’ to participate in a clinical trial? Robert Temple: There are no absolute rules about this; people draw lines where they think they can, but I think that seven years old is an age where people believe that the child can make a reasonable decision. Younger than seven, they probably cannot. Alexander Capron: If my child says, I don’t want to have this or that procedure, and the doctor and I have concluded that the procedure is the right thing, I will try to persuade the child, be as comforting as I can, but in the end, I will say, ‘‘This is the treatment we’re going to do.’’ But if I am ‘‘volunteering my child,’’ as opposed to volunteering myself, to participate in research for the benefit of science, I will not do that without some level of the child affirming, ‘‘I’m willing to play this role, and I understand that it’s a role that goes beyond my own benefit.’’ Robert Temple: This is the easiest ethical principle for me to understand: people who volunteer to participate in research trials are supposed to know and appreciate what they are getting into. Well, it’s not easy for a physician to convey to non-medical people the complexities of a study. You have to tell them what the alternatives are, you have to tell them what the risks are, you have to take care not to over-promise on the benefits side, and you not only have to give a written document with all appropriate language, but you also have to be available for questions. The whole process is very hard to do, but you have to do your best.

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Alexander Capron: There is a real risk that people go into clinical trials thinking that they are going to benefit from participation, and physicians need to explain that what they are doing is research. You hear constantly from physicians in these situations that they explain to prospective participants that the process is randomized—they explain randomization, they explain that this is a trial—and then the physician will ask the prospect, ‘‘Are you comfortable?’’ and the person will answer, ‘‘Yes I am; I’ll sign,’’ but then they immediately say to the doctor, ‘‘But I know you’re going to give me the treatment that’s right for me.’’ Robert Kuhn: The situation is so unnatural: this is the person who is your doctor and he or she is in essence saying to you, ‘‘I don’t know if I’m giving you an inert substance or this drug that we hope will help make you better.’’ Alexander Capron: It’s cognitive dissonance. Prospects have told their doctors: ‘‘But you must be doing it for my good because you’re my doctor.’’ Robert Kuhn: Andrea, how do you handle clinical trials with adolescents, especially young people who have not the highest education? Andrea Kovacs: Young adults 13 to 18 years old who get HIV are not your routine 13- to 18-year-olds. Frequently they’re on the streets; frequently they come from broken homes. Since they are not legally emancipated, how do you enroll a 13- to 18-year-old pregnant adolescent? How do you enroll someone who is in and out of juvenile courts? These are complicated issues and a major challenge. Alexander Capron: I assume that in this group there is no question that they would all know that they have the HIV condition. Andrea Kovacs: Yes, of course; they all know their diagnosis, but I still cannot enroll the adolescent without a parent’s consent. Robert Kuhn: What is the governing rule here? Can you enroll these young people who desperately need to be in these trials without parental consent? It would seem that in some cases you would have difficulty in getting parental consent. Robert Temple:

A legal guardian can give consent.

Andrea Kovacs:

But you have to go to court.

Robert Temple:

I agree, and you have to find a legal guardian.

Andrea Kovacs: Right. So once we start doing these huge studies, which are going to be Phase III at some point, how do we do this? Robert Kuhn:

Let’s describe the key characteristics of clinical trials.

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Robert Temple: The simplest kind of clinical trial is to give the treatment being tested, say, the drug you are interested in, to one randomized group, and a placebo (an inert substance that looks the same) to a similarly randomized group. Alexander Capron: The usual design of research involves what we call ‘‘blinded’’ tests, which means that the subjects and the investigators do not know which participants are getting the active treatment and which are getting the placebo. The identity of the treatment is sufficiently disguised so that no one knows what they are really getting. Robert Kuhn: It is called ‘‘single blind’’ if only the patients do not know but the investigators do know whether they are getting the active treatment or the placebo, and ‘‘double blind’’ if neither the participants nor the investigators know. The gold standard for clinical trials is to conduct them ‘‘double blind.’’ Robert Kuhn:

What are the phases of clinical trials?

Robert Temple: Phase I trials are the first introduction of a drug into humans; these drugs have been studied in animals and shown to have some efficacy. Now you give it to a small number of people, sometimes normal people, sometimes people with the disease; you generally push the dose up until someone develops a side effect, gets nauseated or dizzy or something like that—this provides some idea of what doses will be tolerated. Phase II trials are the first control trials of the drug, which are usually conducted in a fairly narrow, well-described population. Here the investigators are looking to determine whether the drug really does what they hope it to do; for example, in an HIV trial the investigators might compare one regimen of drugs with another (different drug combinations, dosages, and/or timeframes) to compare the effects on the HIV virus by monitoring the number of viral particles per unit of blood. Phase III trials are more extensive control trials to better define the dose, look at the drug in various severities of the disease, look at different subsets of the population (e.g., men and women, black and white, old and young) and to generally get much more exposure so you can uncover the rarer side effects. After all, in a Phase II trial of say 200 people, you won’t find an occurrence that happens once in 500, but when you get into Phase III where you might have several thousand people enrolled, you have at least a chance of finding side effects that occur at the rate of one in 1000. Alexander Capron: This is where you get into the sticky issue of using a placebo (inert) control versus what they call the active control, which is the current standard of care. For example, if you’re developing an acne medicine or a hair-loss medicine or something cosmetic, you would of course include a placebo control (in addition to the active control) because by using a

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placebo control as part of the experimental design you are going to get results that are both more reliable and more rapid, and the fact that someone is going without any treatment for acne or hair loss for a brief period of time is not going to raise major problems. Robert Kuhn: However, in situations where the participants have serious medical conditions, which might be life threatening, how can you ethically allocate any of them to a placebo (no active treatment) group? Robert Temple: The basic rule is you cannot deny people a therapy that is available to them if harm might come to them by not having the therapy. ‘‘Harm’’ is usually defined to mean something that is irreversible: death is irreversible, a stroke is irreversible; everyone agrees that in these cases you cannot conduct a placebo control trial anymore. However, it is often not so clear cut. Consider depression: there are many new drugs for depression; they have already made a big difference in therapy and scientists are excited about their therapeutic potential. But it is a fact that only about half of the clinical trials of Prozac for depression can distinguish the drug from the placebo. Now, if you know this experimental fact, and you now do a clinical trial comparing a new drug with Prozac and the trial does not show any difference between them, well, what have you learned? Maybe this trial was one of those trials that couldn’t distinguish Prozac from placebo! And if you don’t have a placebo group running in parallel, there is no way to tell. So, in these cases, we ask for a placebo control trials. Now, some people are nervous about this kind of experimental design. After all, depression is not a benign illness, a few people commit suicide. Fortunately, in this case, there are several large assemblages of data, called meta-analyses, which have looked to see whether people in the placebo group are more likely to commit suicide, and since the clinical trials that have been conducted for depression were short term studies, four to six weeks, the placebo group was not more likely to commit suicide. So, as a result, we can comfortably say it is ethically permitted to conduct placebo control trials with properly informed patients, and it is essential to have the placebo group or we would be approving drugs that did not work and not approving drugs that did. Robert Kuhn:

Do you agree with that, Alex?

Alexander Capron: I don’t agree or disagree, because I think that there are certain things left out of that description. What is the type of depression? What are the circumstances of the subjects? We need to understand the participants’ personal capacity to consent so that we could build in appropriate safeguards. For example, if you are dealing with a relatively mild depression, where the likelihood of suicide or other harm is very small, it’s one thing; in more severe cases, the patients would have to be in circumstances both where their consent was very reliable and where they were going to be given protection of medical care. Only then would the investigators be ethically

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protected if the situation arose where a treatment that would be available to a certain group was not offered to them, whereas other people were getting it and it proved to be effective. Even so, I have to say that I would be bothered by the quality of the consent here. Robert Temple: We don’t disagree at all. Those are important issues. But the reality is that if we don’t have a placebo control trial for a new antidepressant, we are not going to be able to know whether it works, and if we don’t, we can’t approve it. Now, there are alternatives. If the new antidepressant is shown to be better than the available antidepressants in a direct comparison (without the placebo controls), then you can approve the new drug. That works when the new drug has clear superiority, but it will not discern drugs that work at lower levels of efficacy. Alexander Capron: The direct comparison to available treatment is called a ‘‘superiority trial,’’ as opposed to an ‘‘equivalency trial,’’ which has this ambiguity that Dr. Temple points out. Robert Kuhn: baseline.

Because there’s no placebo to provide a standardized

Robert Temple: The trouble is that in the hundreds of trials that have been conducted comparing one antidepressant with another, one has never been shown to be clearly superior. They are all more or less equally effective. This means that without a placebo control as part of the methodology of the trials, our capacity to judge effectiveness is substantially weakened. Robert Kuhn: Let’s look at the stakeholders in clinical trials. Who has interests here? Obviously, the patients who have the syndrome or the disease that is being investigated. Obviously, the government which is responsible for safety and efficacy. But the big elephants in this room are the drug companies; they invest an enormous amount of money in creating these new drugs. What’s the attitude and impact of the drug companies in the ethics of clinical trials? Robert Temple: Obviously, the drug companies have their own views on everything, but they come to us and they come to experts in the medical community for advice about how to do their trials. There are numerous important questions, of which the control group is only one. Another is defining what the endpoint of the study should be. We approve drugs because they lower cholesterol, but what we really want to know is whether they save lives. Finally, after many years, we now have several cholesterollowering drugs that save lives. Alexander Capron: A bigger issue is the so-called me-too drugs, where there are effective treatments already. And the next treatment coming along is not being offered because it is cheaper or even because it has fewer side

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effects, but simply because one drug company wants to have a drug on the market to compete with its rivals. There is no great benefit to the consumer. Robert Temple: However, the desire to find the place for your own proprietary product has been beneficial on some occasions. The most striking case was with what are called statins, the lipid-lowering drugs, where multiple drug companies competed to show the special effectiveness or comparative advantage of their own drug. One company did a large trial in Scandinavia showing that the drugs are good for people who had a heart attack and whose cholesterol is over 260. Then another company did a trial in Scotland showing that even if people didn’t have a heart attack and their cholesterol was over 260, the drug helped. To some extent, competition in this case did what it’s supposed to do. Alexander Capron: Competition developed more information than we would have had if we only had the first study. Robert Temple: In this case, we acquired unbelievably valuable information. Now many lipid-lowering drugs are known to save lives and there is general agreement that they are used too infrequently. So the multiple drugs doing the same thing encourages more people to take these drugs, which in general seems to be a good thing for the community. Robert Kuhn: Why is there so much criticism in the press about clinical trials and the government role in regulating them? Alexander Capron: There have been some trials which went very badly. One example was the death of an 18-year-old young man in a gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. The young man had a very rare liver disease (which mostly strikes very young children) and the procedure—placing healthy genes in his liver—was deemed to have minimal risk, so that even though the young man did not actually meet the enrollment criteria, he was enrolled. Within four days, he became very sick and died. His father said that the young man had volunteered for the study to help other sufferers. Robert Kuhn: Making the case more troublesome was the fact that the young man’s condition was mild, well under control, and certainly not life threatening. Alexander Capron: Correct; he had the version that was not as severe. Now, here is the underlying debate: would it have been better to conduct this research in people who were critically ill, namely the little babies who couldn’t, obviously, give their assent to participate, but where ethical tension would be balanced by the notion that they are already very sick, and if this worked, it would be a great benefit to them personally? Whereas the young man who volunteered for the procedure really wasn’t very sick and

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wasn’t going to benefit from it; he was doing it altruistically. The other issue in this case is the extent to which the researchers and, indeed, the entire research enterprise, was tied into an entrepreneurial interest in which the researcher and the university had invested in the development of that technique. Robert Kuhn: So the university and the researcher had a financial interest in the procedure? That could turn an unhappy situation into an ugly one. Alexander Capron: The investigator was a principal owner of the company that was sponsoring the research and the university had a financial interest in the procedure. If the research had been successful, both would have been in a position to benefit financially. Robert Temple: Who supports most clinical trials? Drug companies, obviously; they are interested parties. Yet it’s not always clear what their interest is. I think they really do want to find out whether a drug hurts people, because they wouldn’t want to market a drug with terrible side effects, which would be a disaster for them, so it is not in their interest to suppress bad news. Still, drug company motivation is complicated. The ordinary way trials are done is that a drug company, obviously an interested party, pays an independent investigator to conduct the trial. The axiomatic assumption is that investigator is really independent, which means that he or she has no stake in the outcome of the trial and that he or she will conduct it with high quality, monitoring the trials rigorously to make sure everything is done appropriately to the highest standards. That’s the usual model. Alexander Capron: I think that if we looked in detail at research done anywhere, we could find problems. We are coming to the point in this country where we recognize that we need a better system than we have now for knowing, on an ongoing basis, how well institutions that carry out clinical research are doing. I think the government is preparing to assert that clinical trial programs should be accredited. (This was a recommendation of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, on which I serve.) Such an accreditation procedure would start off as a voluntary activity, but it would mean that not just when a problem arises, but on a periodic basis, people familiar with the way research should be conducted would be coming in and taking an in-depth look at the procedures, at the consent process, at the reviews, and particularly at how good a job the universities were doing in monitoring the trials after they start. Robert Kuhn: Another area of ethical concern is clinical trials conducted by first-world drug companies in third-world countries. Cross-cultural sensitivities become especially acute when the specific clinical trial would not, at that point, have been allowed in the United States.

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Alexander Capron: At one extreme would be a drug or medical device company wanting to develop a product for the U.S. market but it doesn’t think it can do the trial here because there is an existing treatment that is already effective and established. And so they think, well, we could go to a country where no one gets any treatment for the particular problem and we could compare our new treatment to a placebo. And the incentive for people in the third-world country could be either that they are confused about what they are getting themselves into, or that the officials in the country have been offered something or paid something under the table. Robert Kuhn: However, the third-world people with the medical condition may well be better off than they would have been without the clinical trials, certainly those getting the active treatment. Alexander Capron: Yes, of course. But the people may think that they will be better off because of this treatment, yet the reality is that the research intervention is likely to be very limited in numbers and in time, and the product being developed is not for them and even if it were they couldn’t afford it. One feels compelled to argue that drug companies should not be allowed to conduct such research, that it is ethically wrong, and that the FDA shouldn’t even accept such data. At the other extreme is a country faced with a serious disease requiring first-world treatment that is much too expensive, and their response is to empower their own scientists to work with scientists from elsewhere to develop an alternative, costing, say, a tenth or a hundredth as much. The third-world officials know from the beginning that the cheaper treatment will not be as effective as the much more expensive treatment, but since they have nothing else to offer, the cheaper treatment would be extremely valuable and extremely appreciated. Andrea Kovacs: A classic case was the clinical trials of a drug regimen to prevent the perinatal transmission of HIV in South Africa and Thailand where there was a huge uproar over the fact that we have a standard in the United States—AZT to the mother during pregnancy and to the newborn for six weeks—that due to its cost cannot be applied anywhere in subSahara Africa and in many parts of the world. A trial was done testing a low dose of AZT given to the mother and to the baby versus a placebo control. Robert Kuhn: Here is the ethical dilemma. For this condition you know that there is a proven drug that can reduce the HIV transmission rate by two-thirds, and yet you are testing, in another part of the world, a modified version of that proven drug that you know from the start is going to be inferior. Andrea Kovacs: But they cannot afford the first-world treatment and they do not have the infrastructure and the systems to implement it.

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Robert Kuhn: Here is the ethical conundrum: Do you knowingly administer a lower standard of care because it is the only one that can be afforded and implemented? And do you use a placebo control study which by its nature will deny to needy, infected babies the medicine they need to survive? Andrea Kovacs:

Absolutely.

Robert Temple: The basic rule is you cannot deny people a therapy that is available to them. In this specific case, you could not do a placebo control trial anymore. The critics said that the only acceptable trial here would be to compare the low-dose AZT experimental regimen with the sophisticated U.S. standard of care regimen. Robert Kuhn: Which is expensive and complicated and could not be implemented in those third-world countries. Robert Temple: The question these countries needed answered was not whether the low-dose, short-course AZT treatment was as effective as the larger-dose, long course U.S. standard of care, but whether the low-dose, short course AZT treatment was effective at all. It didn’t have to be as good as the U.S. standard, it could be half as good, but if it worked at all, those countries needed to know it rapidly because such a treatment was doable and could make a huge difference. Alexander Capron: The presumption here is that the first-world drug is not going to become available, that the drug you are testing could be available, and that there is some commitment to making it available. I think that the drug company conducting the trials would have an affirmative obligation to contribute to building the scientific and ethical review capability of the country, so that they leave something positive behind to the third-world country, beyond just having used their population as subjects in the experiment. If you don’t have some kind of ethical presumptions and prescriptions in these cases, with substantial and concrete requirements, then you open to the door to ethical misbehaviors that really would be very bad. Robert Kuhn:

Such as?

Alexander Capron: Poor people who would sign up to do anything; motivated by either the therapeutic misconception or the desire for a little money or both, they would literally become guinea pigs. I don’t think this is something that most American companies would want to do, but the temptation is there. Substantial scientific and ethical reviews should be required both in the first-world country where the drug company is domiciled and in the third-world host country where the clinical trial is being conducted. Robert Temple: Many drug companies are now carrying out trials of antidepressants, antihistamines, and the like just like the trials they carried out in the U.S. These trials are being conducted in Eastern Europe and in South

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America. The companies may want to market their drugs sometime in those countries, but they will probably not be doing it any time soon because the countries would use a generic version of the same drug; they wouldn’t spend money on the original. Robert Kuhn:

Poorer people as guinea pigs?

Robert Temple: We use U.S. citizens in the same way, as guinea pigs. The antidepressant trials are conducted in America and Western Europe as well as in Eastern Europe and in Latin America. Robert Kuhn: Here is the difference, though. If a clinical trial is conducted in the United States, if the treatment works, at least the same population that participated in the clinical trials will benefit from its general usage. That is decidedly not the case when the clinical trial is carried out, say, in Africa. Robert Temple: Perhaps true. It is worth knowing, however, that as a consequence of doing trials in these poorer parts of the world, the drug companies leave behind an infrastructure that is capable of doing trials and they may also leave behind buildings suited for healthcare. The host counties get access to diagnostic and other methods, tools, and facilities that they would not have gotten otherwise. Robert Kuhn: So here is the summary question: are the first-world drug companies taking advantage of these third-world countries or are they providing something beneficial that these poor people would never have received in any other way? Alexander Capron: You can argue it in both directions, but does receiving something valuable for allowing clinical trials in their country constitute inappropriate inducement, or is it a just tradeoff that recognizes the cold imbalances in the world? Andrea Kovacs: I think it very important for the foreign, first-world pharmaceutical and healthcare companies to participate (by any means) in the healthcare systems of third-world countries, thus elevating the society locally. Robert Temple: resources.

The drug companies have the appropriate skills and

Andrea Kovacs: and then leave.

As long as the doctors don’t just go in, exploit the people,

Alexander Capron:

That is certainly the worst thing.

Andrea Kovacs: You educate the people; you train the local groups; you bring in resources; and then you teach them how to do the studies.

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Alexander Capron: But sometimes the people whom you are training and are benefiting are already the elite in the country; they are the scientists and the physicians and the people who are going to have access to the fancy equipment and buildings that you leave behind. And, yes, you may be indirectly helping the population by making them better off, but their agreement to participate personally in the clinical trial itself, with all the attendant risks, is not necessarily recompensed by donations to the country’s elite. On the other hand, there are things that a drug company can do beneficially for the entire community. Andrea Kovacs: I think we are making a real contribution to the treatment of HIV in the third world. Now we are going to start studying other diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria—we’re going to study the environment, the water, everything—and we’re going to have an incredible, positive impact on these societies ravaged by these terrible diseases. Robert Temple: Critics have complained with justification that commercial interests haven’t been as eager to study those diseases in the developing world as they should have been. Alexander Capron:

Because they weren’t diseases of our country.

Robert Temple: Right, and because there weren’t large amounts of money to be made from it. So I believe that when major drug companies get into those developing countries to do clinical trials the overall effect is usually beneficial.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary The ethics of clinical trials reflect the humanness of human beings. We seek the good of the group, but we respect the rights of the individual. We do take risks to discover new cures, but we do not dehumanize subjects to accelerate them. The ethical ideal, the parallel prescription, combines informed consent of patients and active monitoring of the data by investigators. When human lives are at stake, we can make compromises of compassion—clinical trials need not run their course, optimum statistics need not be achieved. How can we humanely accelerate the process of bringing valuable drugs to market? Most promising is ‘‘dry testing’’ of drugs by supercomputer simulations, a new field called computational biology. There are no ethical problems when messing around with silicon.




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Interviews with Expert Participants Alexander Capron From the point of view of a bioethicist, where are we heading in this century? I haven’t seen many indications of major developments in ethics. There are obviously enormous developments in science. Right now we’re debating what to do about stem cells, adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells; I think they hold enormous promise. There are complex issues about the use of the somatic nuclear transfer techniques—cloning—both to produce stem cells and, more radically, to produce people or parts of people. This technology, which is coming, will have a totally transformative effect—probably not for the good, potentially remaking the relationship of generations in ways for which we really have no analogies. Do you think humans need to be the subjects for drug tests? Anything that can reduce the use of living human beings as subjects, anything that offers the prospect of learning more about drugs with less human risk, will of course be advantageous. (For example, more sophisticated experiments that use animals which have been genetically engineered with functioning human genes that express the diseased condition being assessed.) However, for quite a while, maybe forever, scientists are going to conclude that the only experimental animal on which human beings can ultimately rely is human beings. We will still be required, in the end, to test drugs or the biologics with human subjects. But with computational biology, the use of embryonic stem cells, and other tissue-culture methods—as we learn more about these, they will offer great prospects for doing drug assessments with less risk to human beings.

Robert Temple How did you come to work at the FDA? I came to the agency in 1972. I had been at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a few years, and having actually thought of myself as a consumer advocate, I wanted to go to where the decisions about medicines are made. In those days, no one went to the FDA knowing what working there was going to be like, but it turned out to be just fascinating. I have been pleased with our work and have stayed ever since. My particular specialty has been how to design trials that give you the answers you want. There are many issues involved and these constitute most of my writings. Recently, I have become involved in some ethical issues that have arisen relating to the use of placebos in clinical trials, which is intimately connected with what

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kind of experimental design of clinical trials gives the optimum answers we need to introduce new, save, effective drugs.

Andrea Kovacs Your specialty is pediatric AIDS. Talk about your successes. The most significant development in the last five years in HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, is the prevention of perinatel transmission of HIV —meaning the passing of HIV from mother to baby during pregnancy or at time of birth. When I started in this field, about 28 percent of babies were infected. And through large-scale clinical trials we were able to demonstrate that we could prevent transmission from mother to baby almost completely. We are moving to transfer these techniques internationally, so that we can, hopefully, effect similar success around the world in eliminating HIV transmission to babies. Do you think the general public understands what’s going on in HIV these days? The general public is now beginning to understand the impact of research. Going back 10 years, up-to-date, unemotional information was that not accessible in the media. But we have made significant progress in presenting accurate information about current research, how it is conducted, and how it has really benefited the public. How would you like to be remembered? I have two kids and a husband. I would like to be remembered both as a good mother and a good wife, and as a good doctor and a good scientist. I would especially like to be remembered as someone who helped patients locally in our community.


Chapter 9

How Does Order Arise in the Universe?

Galaxies, stars, planets, molecules, living things, intelligence—how did all this develop from the simple soup of primordial particles swimming in the early universe? The answer may be Complexity and Emergence—just watch what these two powerful principles can do. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all closed systems tend towards disorder. Nonetheless, highly ordered pockets of matter and energy arise—just look at human beings and all that we encompass. How can order and structure develop spontaneously? By what mechanisms can seemingly random events lead to highly developed entities? How can simple rules governing the interaction between particles give rise to life and awareness? Theories of Complexity and Emergence are two of the most powerful principles that purport to explain just how billions of years of random history have produced ever more order and structure in the universe and in life. What is Complexity, and how has it generated the world around us? What is Emergence, and how does it explain the unpredictable properties of things from molecules to brains? This episode explores one of the greatest challenges facing science at the beginning of the twenty-first century: how do we account for the evolution of the universe, an evolution that includes the appearance of life on earth, even though we know that the universe relentlessly moves towards a state of disorder? Both guests, each a Nobel laureate, contend that with so much knowledge being uncovered today, we should be prepared to develop a new way to explore this crucial question. They suggest we unify the sciences through the creation of a new set of trans-disciplinary skills. A potential positive outcome of this integration could lead, they posit, to more practical problem solving, such as the search for a cure for AIDS.

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The second half of the twentieth century saw the explanatory explosion of molecular biology, the technique of studying the component parts of cells and biologically active molecules in order to discern their mechanisms. Yet the study of Complexity recognizes that only by studying the interactions between these elements and their environment can the true behavior of the system be seen, understood, and predicted. David Baltimore takes his prodigious knowledge of biology and details how the DNA molecule’s complexity is integral to producing and maintaining an ordered living organism. Murray Gell-Mann, whose distinguished career includes the theory of elementary particles and the discovery of the quark (both of which form the bedrock of fundamental physics), discusses Emergence with all the joy of a scientist making his first original discovery. ‘‘The wonderful thing about emergence,’’ Gell-Mann says with sparkle, ‘‘is you don’t need something new to get something new!’’ Get enough things interacting with each other and something new naturally emerges.

Expert Participants David Baltimore Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine; President, Professor of Biology, California Institute of Technology; Chairman, AIDS Vaccine Research Committee, NIH; founding director, Whitehead Institute for Biological Research, MIT.

Murray Gell-Mann Nobel Laureate in Physics; Distinguished Fellow and Co-Chairman of the Science Board, Santa Fe Institute; Emeritus Professor of Physics, California Institute of Technology; Author, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.


Robert Kuhn: The normal direction of explanation is to explain biology in terms of physics, but can we go in reverse? Can we discern principles of how the universe is structured by examining the principles of biology and then applying them to physics? David Baltimore: Scientists had hoped that there would be things in biology that were so surprising, so different than we had ever seen before that it would inform us about new laws. But the evidence does not support this. Murray Gell-Mann: There is a sense though in which something like that is happening: people sometimes say that the twentieth century was the century of physical science and the twenty-first century will be the century of life

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sciences. The progress in the life sciences is fantastically impressive and very important, both intellectually and practically. I think the next few decades would better be characterized as the decades of the unity of the sciences. Restoration of the unity of the sciences, that’s what’s really happening. At the Santa Fe Institute (in New Mexico), the research is now transdiciplinary, with mathematicians and physicists and computer scientists together with neurobiologists, evolutionary biologists, ecologists, and paleontologists, all working together without any regard at all for disciplinary boundaries. David Baltimore: When I characterize the human genome it is not a ‘‘result’’; it is just a series of questions—what does this do? What does that do? What does that other piece do? But, instead of having what we had before, which was 20 questions, we now have 30 or 40 thousand questions [the number of genes]. In fact, in a sense, we have three billion questions, which is the number of all the nucleotides in the genome. And to deal with this level of complication requires new techniques, new ways of handling data, new ways of gathering data, new ways of analyzing data, and biologists are not good at any of that. We’ve never had to deal with problems like that. But, astrophysicists have had to deal with these amounts of data, and computer scientists have, and so we’re bringing them in. The intellectual strength of all of these other areas of the physical and mathematical now becomes absolutely central to the progress of biology. Murray Gell-Mann: Until a few years ago, Harold Varmus was the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), operating out of Washington, and of course that’s the part of the scientific establishment for which it is easiest to get money from Congress because every person in the House or the Senate either has an illness or has a relative or a friend who has an illness. But Harold went around making speeches saying, don’t give me all the money allocated for science; sciences are a unity, they are all interdependent, and they all need support. I thought that was wonderful. David Baltimore: For biology to progress it is important that chemistry and physics and all of the other sciences also progress, particularly engineering, because they provide the new tools, the new ways of doing things. And that’s what’s happening; that’s where the unity extends from the ‘‘hard sciences’’ of physics and chemistry to the biological and social sciences. Murray Gell-Mann: Most real issues that we encounter in life involve all of these areas of knowledge. In any real situation, all come together, and yet the tendency is to divide things up between the humanities, say, and the sciences. David Baltimore: Of course, most science, historically, has not dealt with real issues and hasn’t even wanted to. Traditionally, science has concerned itself with artificial issues because they’re complicated enough, they’re hard

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enough to solve, never mind solving a real problem. I’ve been involved with the HIV virus now for some long time, and one is faced with a real problem like this, there’s no hiding from it—there is a virus and this virus is killing people, it’s spreading across the world, and you must deal with this realworld problem. I have gained tremendous respect for the difficulty of solving a practical problem. Whereas, historically, I was brought up in science to say the tough problems are the theoretical problems or the conceptual problems in science. And I still think they are tough but I’ve learned to have a lot of respect for practical problems. Robert Kuhn: The early universe swarmed with simple, chaotic particles, yet today we have complicated, orderly things like DNA molecules. How did that all happen? Murray Gell-Mann: There are several things that you have to talk about to illuminate that issue. One is the initial condition of the universe, and another is the way that complexity has arisen thereafter. Order in the early universe is the governing circumstance. And it’s that order that has been responsible for the gradually increasing average disorder. Robert Kuhn:

That sounds like a paradox.

Murray Gell-Mann: I think we can throw some light on it. The key principle is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which has been understood now for more than a century and states that in a closed system, such as the universe, the average disorder keeps increasing. David Baltimore: Life is a little bit of aggregated order in the midst of a continuing tendency to disorder. Our perception is of increasing order, because you look back not too long ago and there was no intelligent life on Earth. And so we’ve seen this highly ordered thing, the brain, evolve over a relatively short period of time to do remarkable things, and so our perception is of increasing order and yet, underlying it, there has to be, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, decreasing order. Murray Gell-Mann: But even though the average disorder in the universe has been increasing ever since its beginning, this increasing disorder is not occurring at every particular place in the universe. You can have local order created in certain locations at the expense of greater disorder somewhere else. Take your refrigerator as an example. You have ice cubes in the freezer that are certainly a manifestation of a great deal of order, but if you go around to the back of the refrigerator there’s a lot of hot air coming out indicating that the ‘‘cost’’ of the order of ice cubes is paid by a greater amount of disorder somewhere else. So that’s the way the creation of local order is perfectly compatible with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but there’s another process at work as well—we have to distinguish ‘‘complexity’’ from ‘‘order,’’ they’re not exactly the same thing.

How Does Order Arise in the Universe?

Robert Kuhn:

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Let’s define complexity, which is an important concept.

Murray Gell-Mann: Right. I work with something that I call ‘‘effective complexity,’’ which I think best captures what we mean by complexity when we talk about it in ordinary conversation or even in most scientific discourse. In popular terms, the idea is that ‘‘effective complexity’’ is the length of a very compressed, very concise description of the regularities of something, not the random aspects that are treated as random or incidental. In most circumstances, to determine effective complexity requires judgment of what’s important and what’s not important, but there has to be some test that discriminates the important from the not important. To take a practical example, the U.S. Tax Code is complex, it has lots and lots and lots and lots of rules, of regularities and it’s very complex. And every rule is a regularity. Even the exceptions are rules, too. Everything in there is a regularity, and it’s very complex. The classic case is signal and noise. In the 1930s scientists at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, were asked to study where static came from, and they found that it came from particular places in the sky, and that gave rise to radio astronomy. The static contained elements of regularity, but they also had to recognize that the static had this regularity. So you have to attribute anything that you see to a combination of regularity and randomness. Robert Kuhn: We all have the impression that in so many domains of experience, we’re seeing things of increasing complexity arising—it’s true of living things, it’s true of our daily lives, it’s true of computers, it’s true of all kinds of things. What’s the reason for that? Murray Gell-Mann: One can’t say, of course, that each individual thing has a tendency to get more complex. This isn’t true: people die, civilizations die, they become less complex. But what does seem to be true in a lot of places is that more and more complex things come into existence. And to seek the deep reason for why more complex things come into existence is to get into another very important property of the world, namely, the fundamental laws, which we believe to be very simple. The most important source of order is in the two fundamental laws of physics: the first is the Law of the Elementary Particles that describes how matter behaves, and the second is the initial condition of the universe, some 14 billion years ago. But these two fundamental laws, both of which we think may be simple, don’t determine the history of the universe. The fundamental laws are probabilistic. All they do is define probabilities for alternative possible histories of the universe, and then everything else that follows depends on an inconceivably long sequence of accidents, or chance events, that could go in any one of various ways, with the alternative histories of the universe forming a branching tree, with probabilities growing at all the branchings. The actual history of the universe, then, is codetermined by the fundamental law of the

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elementary particles and the initial condition of the universe as developed by this fantastically long sequence of probabilities. And this long sequence of probabilities of chance events means that the result is hugely dependent on those accidents. Most of the information content of the universe lies in those accidents. Robert Kuhn:

You’ve called them ‘‘frozen accidents.’’

Murray Gell-Mann: They give rise to very significant regularities. For example, our galaxy was probably formed by some tiny, little random fluctuation in the early universe, not of great cosmic importance, but to anything in this galaxy, like us, it’s pretty important that our galaxy came into existence. And that little fluctuation in the early universe is a very important regularity for all of us that are in this galaxy. Robert Kuhn:

With very long term consequences.

Murray Gell-Mann:

With very long term consequences, right.

Robert Kuhn: Then we go from complexity to ‘‘complex adaptive systems.’’ How do we make that transition? Murray Gell-Mann: They are two slightly different definitions of complex adaptive system—mine and my friend John Holland’s. Robert Kuhn:

We’ll take yours.

Murray Gell-Mann: The fact that we have different definitions just illustrates the famous principle that a scientist would rather use someone else’s toothbrush than someone else’s nomenclature. Robert Kuhn:

Define complex adaptive systems.

Murray Gell-Mann: For me, it’s a system that takes in certain kinds of information and finds certain kinds of regularities in that information, and then condenses or compresses the description of those regularities into what I call a ‘‘schema,’’ and in that schema, then, you have the possibility for the system to describe certain aspects of reality, including itself, and to predict certain things that will happen in the real world and to prescribe behavior for the system in the real world. And then the circumstances in the real world exert selection pressures back on that schema, to which the schema reacts and changes or adapts. This means that an individual organism is a complex adaptive system, and biological evolution as a whole is also a complex adaptive system. Robert Kuhn:

Is the brain an example of a complex adaptive system?

Murray Gell-Mann: David Baltimore:

Yes.

The immune system is a complex adaptive system.

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Murray Gell-Mann: The Santa Fe Institute, together with Los Alamos, is responsible for big advances in theoretical immunology. You’ve heard of the wonderful work of Dr. David Ho, for example; the theory was done in Santa Fe and Los Alamos David Baltimore: These principles are at work in virology. In HIV what happens in a single infected person is a whole evolutionary process that can be described using exactly the same principles that we use to describe the evolution of species. Robert Kuhn: Thus we need to integrates multiple disciplines, from fundamental to evolutionary levels in order to understand one disease, here HIV. David Baltimore: Right. HIV has actually spawned a tremendous amount of very interesting science. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet gotten what we need to gain control over the disease. Murray Gell-Mann: In the sciences of complexity, and in the study of chaos and related phenomena in nonlinear systems dynamics, we’re often looking at all sorts of actual situations intermediate in scale between the cosmology of the universe and the subatomic world of elementary particles: for example, the growth of real cities or the spread of real pediatric AIDS, the things with which we come into contact as human beings. Here, again, we find interesting regularities that transcend the disciplines. Robert Kuhn:

Is the DNA molecule a complex adaptive system?

Murray Gell-Mann: The DNA molecule is an examples of the schema type that I’m talking about. It reflects a huge amount of experience condensed into a very, very compressed description. David Baltimore: The DNA molecule is able to direct the development of a living organism: there’s information about where to make the proteins, how to make the proteins, how to modify the protein, the timing of events, the whole timing of development so that you start with a fertilized egg and end up with a human being or a frog or a plant. So the DNA molecule is enormously more complex in its representation of information than is usually appreciated. Basically, the universe evolved just like organisms evolved. Murray Gell-Mann: I don’t think so, because the whole point about biological evolution is that it is a complex adaptive system, and there’s a schema, and the schema compresses a lot of information about the outside world and about the system itself. And then that schema, together with a lot of other information, is used to predict or to prescribe behavior in the real world, and the outside world exerts selection pressures that favor certain schemas over others—and this is the way you get biological evolution. The same process is at work in cultural evolution. But in the physical universe, we don’t know that there is such a thing.

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David Baltimore: At the heart of selection is variation, because you can’t select unless you have variation. The variation, to a first approximation, is random. So, you have exactly the same sort of development of history within living organisms that you have in the universe. There could be any kind of organisms in the world. There is nothing about the laws of biology or physics, and nothing in the laws of biology, that require of necessity for us to be here today. We could be very different than we are. Murray Gell-Mann:

Yes.

David Baltimore: This means that the outcome is the same sort of question. How many different outcomes of life could there have been? If we could observe the evolution of life on another planet, we would see an entirely different outcome of this process of variation and selection. Evolution would generate something that looks so different that you probably couldn’t recognize it as life. Murray Gell-Mann: You are absolutely right, but my point is a slightly different one: not all types of evolution can be described in terms of a schema that evolves by variation and selection. For life, yes, of course, but for galactic evolution or for the evolution of a star or a planet, we don’t have any evidence that these same kind of things happens. We have no evidence that they occur as a complex adaptive system. Robert Kuhn: Let’s talk about the concept of emergence. Is the living cell an example of emergence? David Baltimore: As a living, independent entity, the cell depends on all sorts of complex interactions within itself so that the cell can build up and form many cells and ultimately form an organism and differentiate itself to form something as complex as human beings. And we call this process ‘‘emergence,’’ because it is something so new that it is entirely different than the sum of all of its little constituent parts. Murray Gell-Mann: The whole point of emergence is you don’t need something new to get something new. It is so much nicer to study each science at its own level and find the regularities that jump to your eye at that level. That’s what emergence is all about. Robert Kuhn: What will twenty-first century science be about? How do you see the next two decades? David Baltimore: I think it might not be a bad idea to develop secret antibiotics that we have in our arsenal which nobody except a select group knows how they work. In this way, terrorists can’t design resistance to them. Unfortunately we have to be thinking this way.

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Murray Gell-Mann: I think it’s not impossible that progress in fundamental physics will discern the basic laws and discover the unified theory of all the particles and all the interactions, including the initial condition of the universe. Robert Kuhn:

What about the ultimate stability of matter?

Murray Gell-Mann: That’s very exciting. Most of us theorists believe that the proton will eventually be found to decay, and at a level not very far from the existing limit. Robert Kuhn:

Is that bad news for us?

Murray Gell-Mann: It is bad news because it means that all the regularities regarding the existence of atoms and molecules, including our existence, will disappear. In addition, well before this ultimate disintegration, it may well be that the envelope of complexity will start shrinking instead of expanding. David Baltimore: Which will destroy us first, the second law of thermodynamics or proton decay? Murray Gell-Mann: In any case, the good news is that it will take something like 1035 years. So it’s not our most urgent problem. Robert Kuhn:

But it’s fundamentally, theoretically, important.

Murray Gell-Mann:

Yes.

Robert Kuhn: Let’s go back to the brain, which I call the most complex organization of matter in the universe. David Baltimore: The brain offers us a great many problems that we don’t know how to approach today but for which theory plays an important role. Murray Gell-Mann: The binding problem is an example of that. Take visual sensations: color, the direction of motion, the shape and so forth are all processed differently by different parts of the brain, and yet, somehow, we get the sensory impression that there is a unified thing there that has a certain color, is moving in a certain direction at a certain speed, has a certain shape and so forth. So that all these separate kinds of information, which are processed differently, are brought together and bound together. How is that done? David Baltimore: To make the problem even more complicated, and more fascinating, the different sensory modalities take different amounts of time to produce their images. I hit something and you hear the sound and you see it at exactly the same time, but they were processed over different periods of time in your brain and then bound together. So the binding problem is not just about different modalities, it’s actually taking different perceptions from different times and fitting them together so that they make cognitive unity.

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Robert Kuhn:

What questions do you think about at night?

David Baltimore: As a scientist, you are often thinking about very dull and mundane questions that come together to form something which you hope is larger than you expect. When I was an experimentalist in the laboratory, I’d go to sleep thinking about why the experiment that I did today didn’t work. Did I use the wrong reagent, perhaps even the wrong glassware? Was I using the wrong analytic method, or was I thinking about the problem in the wrong way? You never know at what level a problem exists, and so you’re thinking about all possible explanations at once, trying to figure out which one you can vary in the lab the next day to determine what is really happening in your experiment. You are always trying to find out whether you on are to something trivial or important. Murray Gell-Mann: It’s the same with theory. You worry about why your theory doesn’t seem to be working, doesn’t seem to be agreeing with the real world; you worry about which aspect of the theory you have to change. Sometimes, the critical breakthrough comes by finding some accepted principle that simply isn’t so, to go ‘‘outside the box’’ of traditional thinking, to go outside of regularly approved ideas in order to find that variant that will work. But you better make sure that there isn’t some very good reason for that box of traditional thinking. Mostly when you’re outside the traditional box of science, you’re doing ‘‘crank science,’’ but every once in a while you find that there is an accepted limitation that is not a real limitation. Einstein, for example, found that absolute space and absolute time were a nuisance and there was no reason to have them. When I thought of ‘‘quarks,’’1 they had fractional charge—well, scientists didn’t like fractional charge very much, but I figured that these fractionally charged quarks would be stuck permanently inside of the neutron and proton. At first it was not a popular idea, but I realized that there was no real reason for the accepted dogma. David Baltimore: I had to accept the reversal of the flow of information in biological systems in order to explain how viruses were able to integrate into cells. The central dogma of the time was that biological information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins, and what we showed was that it could go in reverse direction, back from RNA to DNA. That was revolutionary. But when you think about it, it was sort of trivial chemistry to imagine that that could occur. There was nothing particularly revolutionary about what I discovered except for the fact that nobody was thinking that way. They were not even thinking about whether or not it was possible. Murray Gell-Mann: Robert Kuhn: science.

It was like a superstition.

But such reversals of common wisdom is very rare in

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Murray Gell-Mann: You have to be careful: most of the time there are very good reasons why scientists don’t assume or consider certain things. But every once in a while, you come across an accepted idea that you mustn’t think about in a conventional way. It is just wrong, and when you look closely, you realize there’s no reason for it—and this is that rare kind of event that can be an opportunity to explain something that nobody could explain before.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary It seems like getting something for nothing, a free lunch. How can random movements, operating over time, yield highly developed things, like, say, planets and peanuts? We have looked at physics and biology together, and found two powerful principles that explain a good deal about how our world works. One is Complexity, which says that certain systems, as seemingly different as animal brains and stock markets, can never be understood by studying their individual elements in isolation—in this case, brain cells and stock traders. Only interactions can describe the entire system. The other is Emergence, which signifies an abrupt, unexpected change in the characteristics of systems, again like brains and markets, which are so startlingly different from the workings of their constituent elements, the innumerable brain cells and stock traders. Complexity and Emergence are overarching principles of how the world works, and although they can’t be classified in traditional areas of science, they engender what we call progress, whether in biological organisms or human culture. Why is there order in the universe? Complexity and Emergence, which 20 years ago sat on the periphery of scientific explanations, may now be the only way to explain the universe and all that is in it. Who knows what’s next: a new ice age? new mental capacities? a new stock market boom? As we understand more, maybe we can predict better.


Interviews with Expert Participants David Baltimore What’s going on in your field today? There is so much going on in biology today that is going to impact our future that I hardly know where to start. The development of drugs, the

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development of prosthetic devices, the development of new forms of imaging, the ability to diagnose disease at very early stages—all these are going to have a huge impact on health care. Over the next few decades, a combination of new diagnostic methods and new treatment methods will revolutionize our approach to cancer. We will not recognize the lives of people—say, 30 years from now—in terms of how they worry about diseases, because there will be therapies for diseases that are today scourges. What do you think will be the next big discovery? The big discovery that I see coming down the track is the unraveling of the brain and its mechanisms—the ability to understand what kinds of information are coursing around in the brain, how they are encoded, and how to tap into them. I believe that we will figure out how to listen to the brain. This, I think, will be transformational. Can the brain imprint information into DNA? The brain consists of neurons. Neurons are cells. Every cell in the body, no matter what kind of cell it is, has a nucleus and the nucleus has chromosomes. And the chromosomes encode all of the information that enables the organism and the cell to grow, divide and specialize. So the brain, like every other part of the body, is determined by DNA. And the issue that we still don’t have closure on is whether any of what we call the information in the brain—our knowledge of our past, our capacity to solve problems, our awareness of self—is encoded in DNA. Now when I started working in this business, I assumed that the knowledge in the brain was at least partly, maybe very largely, encoded in DNA. And the model that I worked on, and I wasn’t alone in this, was the immune system. This was because the knowledge that the immune system has of the outside world is encoded in DNA. So we had one system, a Darwinian system in fact, in which DNA encoded the answer. Our thinking was that if DNA information encoding can work in immunology, why couldn’t it also work in the brain? Yet, everything that has happened in modern brain research has denied that solution. All the evidence point to the synapse as the locus of memory. Now do I believe that that is going to be the last word on the subject? No, I don’t. I think that the synapse does hold memory and we’re going to have to understand how that happens. We’re just beginning to understand that today. But I still believe that sooner or later the DNA in the neuron is going to play a role. I do not believe that memory will ever be as simple as one level of organization of synapse. It will be many levels of organization that work together.

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Will humans evolve into an unrecognizable species? If you read human history, to the extent that we have knowledge that goes back a few millennia, you understand exactly what people were saying in ancient Greece. In fact, the myths of ancient Greece are the myths of today. The plays of ancient Greece are performed today. People haven’t changed that much, even though we have seen many transformational technologies develop since the days of ancient Greece that have been truly monumental. None of this, as far as I’m concerned, has transformed human beings at all. We work faster now, we work more efficiently now, we move around more, we do all sorts of things better. But we are essentially still the same people we always were, flaws and all. Will we ever understand the basic laws of biology? The basic laws and rules of biology are, I think, relatively simple. First of all, they are the laws of chemistry. One can make the argument that they are almost entirely the laws of chemistry. And so to the extent that we can understand how molecules interact with each other, how chemical reactions occur, we understand most of how life works. But there are other levels, particularly of interaction of different systems in living organisms, that require a different kind of analysis—they are not just one by one analysis, they are analysis of the activity of multiple inputs. So we need to layer on top of our chemistry an understanding of how systems work together, a kind of systems organizations. But I don’t think there is anything terribly profound in any of that. The remarkable thing about the structure of DNA is that it is simple chemistry. When Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, what they discovered was the structure of a chemical. And it was in a sense no different than the structure of any other chemical. It became vital only because it was the one molecule which evolution honed to play the central role in heredity. So what we learn when we go into biological systems is how powerful evolution is, how the inevitable generation of small variations and the natural selection of certain of those variations can lead to great tailoring of molecular behavior, to a particular end. But when you get down to analyzing how it works, it is never all that complex. Talk about heredity vs. environment. We know that no organism is born as a clean slate. All organisms have predispositions. But we also know that we learn a lot over our lifetimes, and that learning modifies the behavior of systems that we inherently have. In fact, the more we learn about how we visually process information, the more we realize that we are not simply looking at an image out in the world. We are taking all sorts of pieces, reconstructing the image, very much using our prior knowledge as a way of constructing the image that we are looking at. This means that prior knowledge, which we get from experience in our

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environment, is actually feeding into structure the way we deal with something as simple vision (it’s not simple, of course). We are learning more and more about these cognitive interactions, between the way the system is wired and built, and what it knows intrinsically, and what it learns. And there will be debate for a long time about what percentage is intrinsic (‘‘nature’’) and what percentage is acquired (‘‘nurture’’). A debate about simple numbers is probably not a meaningful one, because the nature of the issue doesn’t lend itself to simple numbers. But there’s no question that we have enormous capabilities built into us. They come, hardwired, out of our genes. Why did you become a scientist? I became a scientist because I discovered when I was a young kid that I did science well. And I was smart enough to figure out that the way to enjoy at least some success in life is take the easiest route, that is, to do what you do well and take advantage of whatever endowments you have.

Murray Gell-Mann Why did you become a scientist? I became a scientist out of curiosity about regularities in the world. What are the key developments in your field? I think the most important developments in science today, both for the future of applications to specific questions in science and for the future of science itself, have to do with the reunification of the sciences. Many centuries ago, science or natural philosophy was in a sense a unified enterprise. It hadn’t yet become so specialized that you needed very different people to work on its very different aspects. Today, of course, specialization has gone a very long way and overall that’s a good thing. There is so much information, so much knowledge, so much understanding available that it has to be parceled out into fields and subfields, but along with that specialization there has to be some scientific activity that is integrative. And such efforts at unification, of cross and trans-disciplinary thinking, is occurring more and more. Scientists are recognizing the interdependence of all the sciences and the need for some scientific activity, especially theoretical activity, which is integrative. We try to meet that need at the Santa Fe Institute, and I think that this partial reunification of the sciences is perhaps the most important phenomenon in science today.

Note 1. Fundamental components of atomic particles for which discovery Murray GellMann won the Nobel Prize.


Chapter 10

How Weird is the Cosmos?

Why is the cosmos shocking? Dark matter fills the universe, controlling gravitation forces. Dark energy confounds gravity, causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. And the laws of physics may not be forever. In recent years, waves of astonishing new discoveries have inundated cosmologists: a universe whose expansion is speeding up, not slowing down, contradicting all accepted theory; gravitational lenses revealing distant galaxies forming near the beginning of time; galactic jets shooting out thousands of light years; black holes with the mass of a billion suns lurking at the center of galaxies, swallowing entire stars in a single gravitational bite; a universe made more of dark matter than visible matter; dark matter candidates, strange and even stranger; dark energy, emerging from nothingness, controlling the destiny of the universe. And finally, even fundamental constants of nature, long thought stable, could possibly be changing. Cosmologists have been surprised by recent data. What does it all mean? Cosmology’s remarkable discoveries are revealing the deepest, most astonishing secrets of a luminous universe. The cosmos is indeed weirder that we think, even astronomers can hardly believe it! It’s so weird that four experts can only sit around and laugh as they outdo each other in trading stories about amazing findings and discoveries. Our group of distinguished physicists and astrophysicists outline the latest discoveries of how our universe began and continues to function, and marvel at how quickly the exotic and unusual can become commonplace. Not so long ago black holes were fantasy; now they are a given. They debate what could be behind the accelerating expansion of the universe: is there a new kind of energy, dubbed ‘‘dark energy,’’ that permeates empty space? They also explain current methods for measuring that expansion. The guests

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finish their discussion by contemplating how a new generation of powerful telescopes and a digitized mapping of the universe could potentially alter our theories about the universe’s fundamental laws and transform the future of cosmic exploration in surprising ways.

Expert Participants Roger Blandford Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics, Stanford University (formerly at the California Institute of Technology); interests: black holes, gravitation, high-energy bursts.

David Goodstein Vice Provost, Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, and Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor, California Institute of Technology.

Alan Guth Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; discoverer, inflation theory in cosmology; author, The Inflationary Universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Director, Hayden Planetarium; member, Department of Astrophysics, American Museum of Natural History; visiting research scientist, Department of Astrophysics, Princeton University.


Robert Kuhn: Every few months, it seems, some new discovery or revelation in astrophysics and cosmology shocks me. Are you guys, the top professionals, shocked? David Goodstein: It’s the most amazing thing that, just a few years ago, black holes were considered a mathematical fantasy; there was no proof that any such thing existed. Now it is generally accepted every galaxy is condensed on a black hole the way every rain drop is condensed on a particle of dust. This has become so ordinary that we don’t even mention or discuss it in any way. Neil deGrasse Tyson: I agree 100 percent. The new discoveries came on quickly; scientists were rightly skeptical, but as the observations kept rolling in, there was no doubt about it. Roger Blandford: Another big surprise that we’ve discovered is very high energy cosmic rays, which are subatomic particles that have the energy of a well hit baseball!

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Alan Guth: I was genuinely surprised with the results that came out a few years ago that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating. Robert Kuhn: expansion.

The universe is not just expanding but accelerating in its

Alan Guth: The expansion of the universe is speeding up, and the best candidate for driving it—really the only sensible explanation that is currently on the table—is an energy that permeates empty space. This is exactly the kind of energy that causes acceleration, and the amount of acceleration that it would cause is exactly what’s seen in supernova observations—and when I use this word ‘‘exact,’’ I mean to an accuracy of about 10 percent. David Goodstein: An accuracy of 10 percent is a big improvement in astrophysics. I can remember when they used to tell us that the most important equation in astrophysics is one is approximately equal to 10. Neil deGrasse Tyson: One of our biggest challenges in astrophysics is that, since we can’t take a tape measure and measure distances to stars and we can’t travel there and read our odometers, we need to be much more clever about measuring distances in the universe. One of the most successful ways that astronomers have developed is to look around the galaxy and find a stellar event, which every time it happens, every time you see it, it’s the same, whether it occurs in our galaxy or in another galaxy. Since you know the one up close very well, then you can judge how far away the other one is by how much dimmer it appears to be (compared with the one you know). Robert Kuhn: If their absolute level is the same, the event, a gigantic supernova explosion, would be what is called a ‘‘standard candle.’’ Neil deGrasse Tyson: Exactly. Assume that we know that the supernova in our galaxy gives off the light of a 100-watt light bulb; then if I were to find a similar 100-watt light bulb in another galaxy and I see how much dimmer it is, I know how far away it has to be to be that dim. Robert Kuhn: Supernovas are rather brighter than 100-watt light bulbs; in fact they are brighter, for a few moments, than the entire galaxy in which they explode. Neil deGrasse Tyson: This enables supernovas to become our best known standard candles, which can enable us to calculate accurate distances to the most distant galaxies. And by doing this, we can measure the expansion of the universe, and based on that model, my standard candle equations tell me how bright each supernova ought to be. Robert Kuhn: In recent years, some of the most distant supernovas were turning out to be dimmer than predicted by the standard models of universal expansion.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: The only way you can fit your curve through these dimmer standard candles is to be forced to the conclusion that we live in a universe whose expansion rate is accelerating. Alan Guth: This data is incredibly shocking, because from the point of view of fundamental physics, we just have no explanation of what this ‘‘dark energy,’’ the stuff that is causing the acceleration, might actually be. Robert Kuhn: Recent evidence suggests that dark energy makes up approximately 70 percent of the universe and dark matter makes up approximately 25 percent. This means that only about 4–5 percent of the universe is made of ordinary matter and energy, which includes all the atoms and radiations that comprise everything we see and know. Alan Guth: Dark energy is clearly the primary dominant component of the universe and we have no idea what it is. We don’t even understand ‘‘dark matter,’’ which is the second most dominant component. All we know things about is the third and smallest category of universal stuff—ordinary matter and energy. So there is a tremendous amount of mystery here. Roger Blandford: In cosmology, there’s a thrill a minute: we’re getting new discoveries all the time. We’re fortunate to be living at a time when these discoveries are being made at such a tremendous rate. This is a golden age of discovery in astronomy, driven largely driven by new technology being applied to observation. Neil deGrasse Tyson: The cosmos comes to us through telescopes and through particle accelerators, opening up vast new vistas of the universe that, prior to these instruments, our senses had no access to. For example, we discovered neutron stars and pulsars, which have the density equivalent of a herd of 50 million elephants crammed into a thimble. 50 million elephants are a thimble’s worth of neutron star. These are the kinds of ideas we have to contend with all the time. We have come to expect wild and crazy ideas emanating out of the cosmos; the threshold for what is ridiculous has to be quite high in the community of astrophysicists. Just look at how often we have been baffled and had to sort of grow out of our bafflement in order to get ready for the next set of discoveries. Robert Kuhn: All of the things we’re discussing regarding the expansion of the universe are building on a theory that Alan Guth came up with in the early 1980s and which revolutionized everyone’s understanding about how the universe began. Alan, please give us a brief summary of the ‘‘inflationary universe.’’ Alan Guth: The inflationary universe theory addresses the question that the conventional form of the Big Bang theory really just left out, which is the question of what caused the Bang, what started this enormous

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expansion. Inflation proposes that there would be a form of matter which would actually turn gravity on its head and make it repulsive, which is exactly what you need to start the universe expanding. Robert Kuhn:

When did inflation start and when did it end?

Alan Guth: Inflation lasted probably about 10-30 seconds, a number we’re not very certain about. 10-30, of course, is an almost infinitesimally small number, a decimal point and 29 zeros before you get to a one. Neil deGrasse Tyson: If you can’t imagine it, don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with you; you’re still an okay person. Robert Kuhn: During that fleetingly brief moment, space expanded faster than the speed of light. Alan Guth: That’s right. The speed of light is an absolute barrier for a race. If any object has a race with a light beam, the light beam always wins, which means that nothing can travel faster than light. Nonetheless, if you imagine space as a plastic medium that’s stretching, general relativity places no limit whatever to how fast space can stretch, so this stretching does occur far faster than light. During this brief time of inflation the region of the entire vast universe that we now observe, everything that we can see with our most powerful telescopes, expands from a size smaller than that of a single proton at the start of that time to about the size of a marble at the end of that time. After this period of inflation (10-30 seconds in duration) ends, the universe continues to expand in its normal, currently observed manner until the present day. Robert Kuhn: What is it about human beings that we can look back 13, 14 billion years and describe events that are a billionth the size of a proton and 10-30 the duration of a second? David Goodstein: We have a deep faith in physics. Roger Blandford: It’s a long, historical pattern of people asking these questions. In ancient Greece, there were analogous questions being asked and in some sense analogous tools being employed, albeit in an extremely primitive manner, to try and discern the answers to these questions. It’s something perhaps deep in the human spirit to make these enquiries. Neil is right in that we’re forever being shocked by the universe and what it throws in our faces, but we shouldn’t forget that when we’re thinking about theoretical speculation, we’re still doing science. And the hard test of these theories is always observational predictions that become confirmed with observational data. Robert Kuhn: Let’s look at dark matter. Of all the matter in the universe, 90 percent is now said to be ‘‘dark.’’ Tell me what that means.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: I’d rather word that slightly differently. To even assert that it is matter assumes that you know something about what it really is, and we don’t. Robert Kuhn: To be more precise, 90 percent of the gravity that we see at work in the universe—for example, in the rotational speed of stars around the centers of galaxies or the clustering of galaxies themselves—cannot be explained by aggregating all the normal matter that we can locate. Neil deGrasse Tyson: It is the case of ‘‘The Missing Matter’’—how do you know what’s missing if it’s not there? It’s a simple analysis, actually: there are two classic measurements that give rise to the missing matter. First, you measure how fast these galaxies are moving and that tells you how much mass is holding them together, because if there’s not enough mass, those speeds would have caused the galaxies to fly apart long ago. This means that you can calculate how much mass there must be from the speeds. Second, you just count up all the mass in the galaxies, stars and gasses, everything. Then you compare the two numbers: (i) the amount of mass that you calculated had to be there in order to keep the galaxies from flying apart, and (ii) the amount of mass that you can see. And what you find when you compare these two numbers is that the former, the amount of mass that is needed, is about a hundred times the size of the latter, the amount of mass that we can see. The only conclusion is that there is extra matter there that we can’t account for. This ‘‘dark matter’’ is not protons, neutrons, electrons—none of these classic particles you learn about in chemistry class. Alan Guth: Another important piece of evidence is from measurements of the non-uniformities in the cosmic background radiation, which we believe to be the afterglow of the heat of the original big bang by which the universe began. We can measure these non-uniformities at the level of one part in a hundred thousand, and because these have evolved as the universe has evolved, they have embedded in them many clues about the evolution and history of the universe. Neil deGrasse Tyson: The satellite Microwave Anisotropy Probe will map this cosmic microwave background with such precision that it’ll enable you to compare the pattern in one part of the sky with the pattern in another part. There is so much that we don’t know. For example, whether space is sort of ordinary, just continuing on, or whether it has multiple connections and folds to it, because if it is the latter, then the pattern over here will be exactly the pattern over there, which will tells us that the universe curves back in some loop, some donut or some sort of three dimensional Mo¨bius strip. This is the fanciful side of what that analysis might bring Alan Guth:

How about a pretzel universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

It’s just strange. And we like strange things.

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David Goodstein: Not stranger than any of the other things we’ve been discovering in the past decade. Neil deGrasse Tyson: I keep trying to think what discovery could ever be as astounding to us as the Hubble telescope’s discovery that we live in a universe whose expansion is accelerating. That was extraordinary, astonishing. David Goodstein: Just think of what happened. In 1916 Albert Einstein works a theory and equations, all by himself, which have a natural prediction that the universe is expanding. But he doesn’t believe it, because none of the observational data in astronomy suggested such a wild idea. So Einstein adds to his theory and equations an artificial term, something he called the cosmological constant, which was supposed to prevent the universe from expanding. Then the great astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered from his photographic plates, taken by his giant new telescope, that the universe was, in fact, expanding. So Einstein calls his cosmological constant the biggest mistake of his scientific career. And now we’ve got it back again to explain this acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Neil deGrasse Tyson: So Einstein’s biggest blunder was saying that it was his biggest blunder. Robert Kuhn: Clearly everything we’re talking about requires the set of fundamental laws of physics. Recent data seems to suggest that some of these fundamental laws, some of these constants of nature, may be changing over time? Roger Blandford: There have been reports that one of the famous constants of nature, which is called the fine structure constant, may be changing slightly over time. Robert Kuhn:

What is the fine structure constant?

Roger Blandford: It’s a combination of the speed of light and the charge on the electron; it’s a famous constant that every physicist knows. David Goodstein: If the fine structure constant is changing, it means that the charge on the electron is not constant, and then that means that chemistry is changing all the time. We tend to think that the laws of physics are eternal, and such stunning news would indicate that not even the laws of chemistry are eternal. What a shock that would be! Robert Kuhn:

What would be the implications?

David Goodstein: There has to be a fine balance among the constants of nature for lots of things, including for planets and people to even exist. If the fine structure constant were to change by very much, we would probably become impossible. And, of course, we would prefer that not to be the case.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: There’s an important point here. We’re talking about a difference in the fine structure constant from long ago. Whatever it is today, we’re here, so, we’re okay with its current value. If it had a different value back then, that would fly in the face of our expectations, but there’s nothing in principle that would prevent us from modeling the way in which it has changed over time and then reinterpret the statements we’ve made about the early universe. Just to put that in historical perspective, it’s important to realize science advances not by throwing a successful theory out the window, it advances by recognizing that successful theories are a subset of a larger, deeper understanding. People often erroneously refer to Einstein as he who threw Newton out the window so that now we have a new way of thinking about the universe. That imagery doesn’t quite capture the reality. If you look at Einstein’s equations of motion and of gravity, in low gravity and at low speeds, all of his equations look exactly like those of Newton. It is only under conditions of very high gravity and very high speeds that the differences surface. David Goodstein: That’s a very good point regarding both relativity and quantum mechanics—both are more fundamental descriptions of the universe that cover wider ranges of conditions. It’s not true that Einstein showed that Newton was wrong, instead it showed why he was right: Einstein showed that Newton’s laws arise out of even more fundamental laws that cover a wider range of experience. Robert Kuhn: Let’s look forward. We’ve been looking back to the beginning of the universe, some 13 or 14 billion years ago. How far can we look ahead? What are the kinds of predictions we can say about the future of the universe and, indeed, the end of the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson: First on our horizon is the colossal merger of our Milky Way galaxy with the Andromeda Galaxy; that will happen in five or six billion years. Watching that happen will be fun for our far-future ancestors (if they will exist), seeing the galaxies get closer and closer. What a collisional ballet that will be. After that the acceleration of the universe will increase to the point where all nearby galaxies that are currently undergoing the accelerating expansion will have disappeared beyond our visual horizon. At that point we will be sitting in a small collection of stars, or whatever they are at that time, and we’ll see nothing else in the universe, because everything else would have been accelerated beyond our horizon. And I wonder if that time were this time, how would those simple observational facts have influenced our theories of the universe. There would be no other galaxies; there would be nothing else to see other than our local system. Robert Kuhn: How do we know that in some sense such a circumstance hasn’t already happened? Perhaps many things that exist in vastness of all reality have already passed beyond our capacity to see or discern them

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: This is the scary part; this is the scary part. Perhaps the state we are in now is the consequence of some other catastrophic phenomenon that occurred long before we were around to see it. Alan Guth: Let me answer that wild question by also taking a jump of maybe 10 billion light years off to the side. One of the curious things about inflation is that once this inflationary process starts, it never really stops. There is this peculiar material or force or field that’s driving the universe’s exponential expansion, as a result of the repulsive gravity that it creates. What happens is the material that’s driving the expansion is unstable so in some places it decays and forms normal matter, and these regions become normal universes. But it decays like a radioactive substance with a half-life, so if you wait the half-life of this material, half of it will have decayed, in a sense it will become normal matter. But unlike normal radioactive material, this strange material is exponentially expanding at the same time, so in the same half-life, the half that remains (that did not decay into ordinary matter) grows to be much larger than what was there in the first place. The expanding material goes on literally producing new universes forever. So although our universe will very likely have the fate of ultimate emptiness, this emptiness will be only for our region of the universe, because meanwhile, elsewhere, in virtually an infinite number of places, new, young universes are sprouting up and developing. Robert Kuhn: You made a jump and I missed how you did it. We had inflation going—I followed that—then we had a myriad of new universes coming out of that. I was listening carefully but I missed how that happened. Alan Guth: During inflation, the universe is undergoing exponential expansion, which every so often is doubling. It just so happens that the doubling time is about 10-37 seconds or some ridiculously minuscule time like that. So, every 10-37 seconds, the universe doubles in size. Then, in a slightly longer time scale, 10-34, a piece of the universe breaks off and becomes a new universe while the rest of the old universe goes on exponentially expanding, and then another piece breaks off and becomes a new universe, and on and on. And because the universe continues to double and redouble, even though pieces of it are constantly breaking off, it continues to get bigger and bigger. This would be the very history of our universe during the inflationary period. Robert Kuhn: moment?

Is that happening now or only during the early inflationary

Alan Guth: Our universe is one of these pieces that split off; when it split off it was probably a large region, but, within that, there was something the size of a marble that became everything that we observe today. Once it splits off, it’s been expanding ever since, even if slowed after that by ordinary gravity.

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Robert Kuhn: We’re the original stuff that had this inflation; we’re the marble came out of it. Alan Guth:

Exactly right.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: This multiplicity of universes allows us to reemphasize the Copernican principle for our own existence. If you’re spawning universes like they are rabbits, most universes would be inhospitable to life, because carbon life as we know it could not exist; under different laws and conditions, chemistry would be completely different. So you can have a multitude of cosmoses, of universes, perhaps only one of which is suitable for life, which is the one we happen to be in. Robert Kuhn: This is not as surprising as it first may seem, since only in a universe where we do exist are we around to analyze the universe. (This is one formulation of what is called the Anthropic Principle.) David Goodstein: There may be life in many kinds of universes, based on different chemistries. There is no reason why life couldn’t be based, say, on silicon rather than on carbon. Alan Guth: It is likely that only a very small fraction of the universes would become suitable for life, but since there are an infinite number of universes, whatever that fraction is yields a very large number. Neil deGrasse Tyson: Every time we play around with the fundamental constants, we get something that we know wouldn’t reproduce life as we know it. Alan Guth:

It always bothers me tacking on that phrase ‘‘As We Know It.’’

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Why does that bother you?

Alan Guth: Because if we’re trying to ask why is the universe the way it is, some people say it has to be the way it is or else life, as we know it, would not exist. But if life of a different form existed—life as we don’t know it— that can still be part of a perfectly plausible universe. Roger Blandford: We’ve already demonstrated that, as far as inanimate things are concerned, our imagination has been rather limited, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be equally limited as far as animate things are concerned. Alan Guth: We have a strong tendency to define the word ‘‘universe’’ to mean anything that looks like everything else that we see. But the theory of cosmological inflation strongly suggests that everything we see and know is just a minuscule, fleetingly tiny fraction of everything that really exists. Robert Kuhn: How do you see the next 10 years in this time of dramatic new observations and new data in astronomy?

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Roger Blandford: There is still a tremendous amount of discovery to be made in astronomy and cosmology. One of the opportunities is in gravitational radiation. These are, if you like, waves, rather like light or radio waves, but they’re waves of gravity that have ripples in space and time. Gravity waves interact very weakly with matter but they can be detected by extremely delicate lasers and mirrors. At this moment, there are telescopes under construction on the ground and plans for putting similar telescopes in space, which we hope will soon measure this gravitational radiation. After that, perhaps a second or third generation gravitational telescope will be able to see gravitational radiation produced from the very earliest times of the big bang, perhaps even going back to the time of inflation. Neil deGrasse Tyson:

50 years, 100 years?

Roger Blandford: I wouldn’t dare put a date on it. It could be a lot sooner than that if we can find innovative new ways to look at these microwave background fluctuations from when the universe was about half a million years old, perhaps looking at them in a way that you might look at the sun through Polaroid sunglasses. This microwave radiation cold turn out to be a messenger from the very early universe, too. And if the right sort of patterns are seen in that polarization, that could also be confirmatory evidence for the stories that are told about the very early universe. Alan Guth: In terms of observations, there are two other exciting things going on now. One is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is a much more massive survey of galaxies and their positions than ever before available; this data will allow us to do a lot of statistical tests in terms of the distribution of matter in the universe. This distribution data is also a tool for finding exotic objects, which can be a lot of fun. For example, one type of exotic occurrence that they’re looking for is the presence of two quasars very nearby each other. If we find them, then what they allow you to do is to observe the light coming along the line of sight from these quasars and you can measure the absorption of light by atoms in between. And these observations give you not only the description of the matter everywhere along each line of sight, but they also allow you to see left to right; for example, if there’s a cloud of a certain type that you’re seeing in one beam, is it also seen in the other beam? And, statistically, then you can learn, in this example, how big these clouds are, which in turn allows you to discern a lot about where the clouds are. Furthermore, the apparent size of the clouds can give clues about the geometry of the universe as a whole. This is really very exciting stuff! Neil deGrasse Tyson: I liken the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to the old days of the classical explorers, when the Renaissance explorers were mapping the Earth’s surface, coming to some understanding of the nature of our home and backyard. I see this enterprise, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and those that came before it that were smaller in scope, as the inevitable extension

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of this mapping efforts. First we were mapping our own Earth; now we are mapping the cosmos. David Goodstein: With all of the astonishing things that we’ve talked about today, this is not the biggest revolution in the history of cosmology. There was a time when we believed that we were the center of the universe, that the universe existed entirely for us. And we had a set of laws of physics that made sense, but it only made sense so long as that our centrality in the universe was true. And then Copernicus came along and ripped us out of the center of the universe, destroying everything we understood. Suddenly, there was no basis for any physics of any kind. And in a very short period of time, about 150 years, which is only five or six generations of scientists, we had put it all back together again. But we were no longer the center of the universe; we were living on a speck of dust in an undistinguished galaxy somewhere in some corner of one of the inestimable and unfathomable number of universes. Neil deGrasse Tyson: There might be some theory yet to emerge that will give us an understanding of dark matter, dark energy, Alan Guth’s ‘‘rabbit’’ universes, some theory that might come forth that connects all of this together. We will then be looking back on these times, laughing at how quaint our ignorance was. Robert Kuhn: Don’t we yet feel grand by being able to exalt in our understanding? Even though we’re not in the center, we are part of such enormity. Neil deGrasse Tyson: I feel grand. I do because I don’t feel smaller, I feel bigger, because it’s the collective minds of all of us, the human species, that figured this stuff out, and that’s extraordinary. For me, the unheralded discovery of the twentieth century, which I carry with me every waking moment, is the recognition that the very chemistry of our bodies were forged in the centers of supernovae, stars that exploded, that gave their lives to the enrichment of the galaxy, out of which formed new stars and planets and people. So, it’s not so much that we’re in the universe, the universe is in us.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary Dark matter, dark energy, black holes, an expanding universe that’s accelerating—these are astounding discoveries of a radically new reality. But I’m intrigued by something more: Human beings, though limited by a modest home planet and barely 500 years of serious science, have crafted an elegant timeline of the cosmos, exploring back billions of years with startling detail and forecasting ahead trillions of years with breath-taking perspective. Einstein said, ‘‘The eternal mystery about the world is its comprehensibility.’’ As the prescient biologist J.B.S. Haldane remarked, ’’The universe is

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not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine.’’ As a species, human beings have achieved scientific critical mass, and who knows where this knowledge explosion will take us?


Interviews with Expert Participants Alan Guth Talk about the advances in your field. Cosmology has made tremendous progress in the past 15 years. People don’t have the opportunity to appreciate the level of detail that cosmologists think they have in understanding the universe and the ways we have of testing our theories. For example, we have the Big Bang theory, which says the universe started as a hot, expanding ball. That means much more to theoretical physicists who can actually calculate how fast the universe was expanding at any time, what the temperature would have been at any given time, what the density of matter would have been at any time. It’s a really quantitative theory. And we physicists know enough about nuclear physics to actually calculate what the rates of the different reactions would have been under the conditions we’ve calculated for the early universe. With all those independent strands of knowledge put together, we can accurately predict the abundances of about four or five of the lightest chemical elements around today, and our prediction agrees with what the astronomers predict, even though the calculations we do are based on nuclear physics experiments and theirs are based on astronomical measurements. But the theory and the measurements nonetheless agree! I find that astounding and I think it really means that we two groups are on to something here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Will we ever look back to the Big Bang? We’re getting closer and closer to understanding what was going on right at the Big Bang. We have laws of physics that get us pretty close to the beginning, but not all the way to the beginning, and certainly not before the beginning. There are frontiers right now that offer tantalizing clues that perhaps we live in just one cosmic bubble of an infinite number of bubbles. We’re coming close to being able to ask and answer those questions theoretically and observationally, and I look forward to defining conclusions the next 20 to 50 years, as the string theorists come forth with more clever statements

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about what went on right at the first singularity, right at that first moment of the big bang. When we find gravity waves, what will they tell us? The Big Bang is currently our most verified and supported theory for the origin of the cosmos, but there are several barriers to looking all the way back to the start of the clock. One of them is an optical barrier, and that’s seen in the famous cosmic microwave background. Right now, there is a wall of microwaves that emanates from everywhere in the cosmos that’s a leftover light signal from the original explosion. But that light hails from about 300,000 years after the moment of the initial explosion, so using ordinary telescopes we have no hope of seeing any earlier than that. There is no way we can penetrate that wall anymore than you have any hope of looking through a smoked, opaque glass and describing details happening on the other side. The optical boundary is impassable, but all hope is not lost. There are other kinds of telescopes; for example, one that detects neutrinos. Neutrinos don’t have that wall problem. They emanate from an early time in the cosmos, so if we perfect neutrino detectors, we in principle will be able to see much farther back in time than this optical wall created so soon after the Big Bang (a mere 300,000 years after). There is also something else that comes from the early universe and these are gravity waves, ripples in the fabric of space and time predicted by Einstein but still not observed. We’ve got good people working on the problem; they’re in the process of building sensitive enough telescopes to detect them. I have no doubt that we’ll detect them, and when we do, then we’ll be able to see even farther back—back to the earliest moments where the actual fabric of space and time sprung from what might have been this cosmic meta-soup, which we think gave birth to universes left and right! Now a lot of that is fantasy at this point, but it’s not complete fantasy, it’s consistent with modern thinking of what the behavior of quantum mechanics would be under those circumstances. Quantum mechanics is the study of matter on its smallest scale, whereas Einstein’s general relativity is the behavior of matter on its largest scale. Once you have the Big Bang and you have all that matter compressed down into a tiny volume, these two theories, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, have to come together somehow . But they don’t, or we don’t yet see how they marry each other. We think we need a third thing to harmonize them, something more fundamental, something that gives rise to both. Herein is the limit of our theoretical understanding of the cosmos. Once that’s formulated, then we may be able to describe what kind of gravitational signature we think was made from the actual Big Bang explosion itself, and tune our gravity wave telescopes to see that.

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Whom do you most admire, and why? This sounds like a cliche´, but it is true: the people I most admire are my parents. Right now, they’re celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. I admire them for many reasons, but foremost is for the way in which they guided me through my interests. They didn’t lead me, because if you’re led by someone you might think that you’re being taken somewhere that is not genuine expression of what’s within your own heart. How many people do we all know who became doctors because their parents were doctors? Neither of my parents were scientists, but they saw my interest in the universe from very early, and saw that it was something to be nurtured, and it was through their initiative that I took as many trips to the Hayden Planetarium as I did as a child. By the way, I didn’t only go to places of science. We also went to art museums and the like. I believe that if my interests were in art, I’d be making this same testimonial in their honor as people who have nurtured my interest in art. So my parents are the people whom I admire the most, and that hasn’t changed since my earliest memories. Does the general public properly appreciate science? The public has a love/hate relationship with the progress of science. Not a week goes by where you don’t find people complaining that there’s some genetically engineered food that they might be eating, or that technology has made their lives harder instead of easier, or they have less free time then they once did. What we have to consider is the very people who are making those statements, if they had lived 100 years ago, might have died in child birth because medicine wasn’t advanced enough to have kept them alive. They might have died of tuberculosis or polio or smallpox, so what a luxury it is to sit here in modern times and say you don’t want to eat the bell pepper because it might have been genetically engineered. So, yes, I don’t mind if people take technology for granted, but at the end of the day, sit back and ask yourself, how has technology enhanced your life, in fact, made you healthier, made you dream about what the next wave of technology might bring your way. What advice do you have for young people? In order to make informed decisions, decisions that can affect your life, your health, your wealth, your well-being, it’s important to be scientifically literate. That being said, beyond that it doesn’t matter what you major in in college. Go follow your heart, just don’t do so without knowing how this world works. Science literacy is empowering. However challenging it is to do well or to read through some of the material, the fact is technology drives our modern society, and it’s possible to move backwards just by standing still. It’s important to stay current, to stay up-to-date on things. So my advice is I’d love it if everybody majored in science, but that would be a boring

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world because I want artists out there as well. But whatever you do, keep an eye on the science pages of the newspaper. How would you like to be remembered? If I’m remembered for anything, I want to be remembered for having brought down to earth the cosmos for all people to enjoy in the way others had brought the cosmos down to earth for me.

Roger Blandford What’s the current thinking about gamma ray bursts? The story about gamma ray bursts is that they were thought to be very powerful explosions that created lots of intense gamma rays from distant sources. What now seems to be the case is that they’re not quite as powerful as we once thought. We’re not absolutely sure, but it looks like they’re only as powerful as a typical supernova explosion—not as powerful as a 100 or 1,000 supernova explosions, as we were thinking. The way that we have come to this conclusion is that there is now fairly good evidence that the bursts themselves are not spherical explosions, radiating energy in all directions, but in fact almost one-dimensional explosions, like jets. And if that’s true, we only see the gamma ray bursts when the jets are pointed directly in our direction. And so if the energy is only focused in this beam, then we can say that it’s only about one percent or so of what we originally thought it might be. In addition, there is pretty good evidence now that although we aren’t sure what the cause of the gamma ray burst is, it does appear to be associated with young and massive stars, which is evidence that points the finger at supernovae. We’re not absolutely sure, but it’s looking like a stronger and stronger possibility. What’s the cosmological constant? The cosmological constant is essentially a mathematical term that Albert Einstein introduced into his general theory of relativity. It’s the possibility that there was something in addition to regular gravity that holds the systems of galaxies and stars and planets together. Dark energy in some sense is a more modern version of the cosmological constant. It’s basically the same idea, and there is now observational evidence—which of course there wasn’t for Einstein—that it really is present in the universe. Why did you become a scientist? I was very fortunate to go to a challenging high school, and had very good teachers. And I found science the most interesting subject, which kept my interesting going.

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Does the general public properly appreciate science? One of the ways of improving everybody’s life is for people to have an understanding not just of how to work your VCR, but to actually understand more of the principles that led to that VCR being designed and constructed in the first place, and to understand the connection that has to the fundamental ideas of condensed matter theory, electromagnetic theory, and so on. More people should appreciate without necessarily understanding the details that there is a very large world of science and technology that is very strongly interconnected—this is one of the lessons that we should be trying to give to the next generation. How would you like to be remembered? I’d like to be remembered as someone who was interested and fortunate to participate at some minor level in a lot of exciting scientific discovery. And I would like to be remembered through my students.


Chapter 11

Is the Universe Full of Life?

Will we find life elsewhere in the universe? As a child, I was scared that aliens might invade my nighttime bedroom. As an adult, I almost wish they would. Humans have long wondered whether life exists beyond our home planet. There have been endless speculations, including a good deal of science fiction writing. Finally, the search gets scientific. In recent years, a host of new technologies are turning speculation into science. We now have the ability to discern increasing numbers of earth-like planets circling faraway suns and even investigate the composition of their atmospheres; and we have discovered life in environments on Earth so extreme it’s not unreasonable to imagine that microbes—or more—may flourish elsewhere in the universe. Over the last decade, biologists have discovered microbial life in a dazzling array of hostile environments—mineral-rich hydrothermal vents at the bottom of oceans, buried thousands of meters beneath the Earth’s surface in solid bedrock, encased deep within the Antarctic ice sheet, and even in the cooling water of nuclear reactors! These organisms are called ‘‘extremeophiles’’—lovers of extreme environments. Given the ingenuity of life here on Earth, is it so unreasonable to imagine that microbes might flourish elsewhere in the universe? Or perhaps even elsewhere in our own solar system? Might they be able to survive an accidental journey through space on an asteroid, and thus even colonize new worlds on which they did not originally arise? A new hybrid field is now emerging; it is called astrobiology, a combination of astronomy and biology, and we will explore it. We will also ponder its potential meaning: what will be the philosophical and theological implications of astrobiology? Two planetary scientists and an astrophysicist make the case that the search for life in other parts of our universe has been made all the more valid

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by two recent discoveries, one taking place at the bottom of our oceans and the other in the stars surrounding our galaxy. As it turns out, life thrives without benefit of any sunlight along mid-ocean ridges, one of earth’s most inhospitable places. And, improvements in telescope technology have revealed the presence of innumerable new planets circling stars similar to our own sun. The discussion then turns to the feasibility and value of finding proof that extraterrestrial life exists. All predict our inherent inquisitiveness and daring will lead to such expeditions into space. Batter up in the new game of astrobiology. Mars, then Europa. Astronomer/ planetary geologist Bruce Murray has worked on missions to Mars even before his tenure as head of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. If anyone wants to get our instruments to Mars, it’s Murray. But as for drilling for life on Mars, he knows the difficulty. Astrophysicist and director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium Neil deGrasse Tyson says he doesn’t care how big our shovel will have to be to find it, if that’s what we need technology to do, we’ll invent it. Shri Kulkarni, who observed and correctly assessed what turned out to be the first known pulsar, has what may be the key piece of data: ‘‘we now know that star formation is accompanied by planet formation.’’ ‘‘Are the stars out tonight?’’ Now we know that not only are they there, so are their planets. Multiply the stars times the planets they have all formed and your number is unimaginably gigantic. Astronomy is divided into those who say, just on statistics alone, there has to be life beyond Earth, and those who refute it by saying that those statistics don’t include a myriad of factors inhibiting the development of life, and that life on Earth and human-like intelligence in particular are chance accidents of the most remote kind.

Expert Participants Shri Kulkarni Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science, California Institute of Technology; leader in the search for extra-solar planets

Bruce Murray Professor Emeritus, Planetary Science and Geology, California Institute of Technology; former director, NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory; co-founder (with Carl Sagan) and chairman, The Planetary Society

Neil deGrasse Tyson Director, Hayden Planetarium; member, Department of Astrophysics, American Museum of Natural History; visiting research scientist, Department of Astrophysics, Princeton University




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Robert Kuhn: The universe is a pretty unfriendly place for life. What about all the catastrophes, the giant stellar explosions emitting jets of severe radiation, comets and asteroids flying all around all the time? Talk about a hostile environment! Neil deGrasse Tyson: Before we wax poetic about how bad the universe is, consider that the last major extinction, the one that took out the dinosaurs, enabled the tree shrew to evolve to something more ambitious than a rodent so that we were enabled to become what we are today. So these impacts are givers as well as takers away to the diversity of life. Robert Kuhn:

Much of the radiation is intensely destructive.

Shri Kulkarni: Some stars die benignly like our own sun, so in another 5 billion years. . . Robert Kuhn:

Not benign to us.

Shri Kulkarni: That’s true, which goes to show my orientation as an astronomer. The sun will just expand very gently. Neil deGrasse Tyson: surface.

We’ll be a cinder orbiting deep within the sun’s

Shri Kulkarni: But that will be over 5 billion years from now so we shouldn’t be too worried. But other stars, the more massive stars, do die catastrophically as supernovae, which is not uncommon. At some point, they run out of fuel and, no longer able to counterbalance the inexorable force of gravity, undergo sudden and violent collapse because gravity is the ultimate winner in this game. The collapse process itself releases what we call gravitational binding energy, some of which now comes off in a flash and in gas hurtling out at very high speeds. And these supernovae are not uncommon—there is one superova in our own galaxy every hundred years or so. So if you’re close to one when it erupts, that could be pretty bad. Robert Kuhn:

What do you call ‘‘close’’?

Shri Kulkarni: Certainly a thousand light years would ‘‘close’’ by anyone’s theory of what a supernova would do. Even more exotic, more catastrophic things are lurking out in the universe, such as gamma ray bursts. Gamma ray bursts are rare, but their sphere of influence is tremendous Robert Kuhn: Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosive energy in the universe. Shri Kulkarni: Yes, they are the most powerful directed explosive energy in the universe. They are shot forth as basically beams of light and radiation, and although we don’t understand them very well, we do know that their sphere of death reaches out many, many thousands of light years.

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Robert Kuhn: Why is now such an exciting time in the search for life elsewhere in the universe? Bruce Murray: One reason is discoveries here on earth, in mid ocean ridges, in groundwater very deep, of living systems, organisms, microorganisms, that survive in environments we never believed possible. Neil deGrasse Tyson: Why didn’t we know about these ‘‘extremeophiles’’ before? They are just on the bottom of the ocean, why not 50 years ago? Bruce Murray: The bottom of the ocean is not easily accessible. Such organisms weren’t on the radar screen, so no one thought about the possibility or looked for them. Robert Kuhn: To have life at the bottom of the ocean means that you have life without need of sunlight as a direct source of its energy. Bruce Murray: Incredibly, these extremeophiles use chemical processes for energy, they don’t need photosynthesis, they don’t need sunlight to live. This is why I am optimistic, or at least less pessimistic, about finding life on Mars or finding it in another planet around another star. Neil deGrasse Tyson: Once you remove the sun as a requirement, it allows you to think of other ways you might generate energy to sustain life. When you teach Introductory Astronomy you talk about a ‘‘habitable zone’’ around a star. Let’s take our own sun. Life as we know it requires liquid water. If there is a planet a little too close to the host star, the water would evaporate, like on Venus; a little too far away, it’s frozen (like on Mars and beyond), so there is this sort of Goldilocks interval, a relatively small band where you can have liquid water (like on Earth). For quite a long time this concept dominated our thinking about how and where we might look for life in another star system. Robert Kuhn:

What are some of the conditions for life beyond Earth?

Shri Kulkarni: You need energy, that’s the ultimate requirement to get life going; it can be tidal, it can be solar, and so on. Robert Kuhn:

What about extreme cold?

Bruce Murray: That’s interesting because the satellite of Jupiter called Europa has an icy crust, probably not terribly thin, but below that is probably saltwater, perhaps like the Arctic or Antarctic Oceans. We can now detected organisms that really do seem to be able to live in the ice. It’s -20 degrees Centigrade, way below the freezing point of water, but the organisms not only survive, but they prosper. Neil deGrasse Tyson: But the fluid within these organisms is still liquid, so they’re not in a frozen state, not like a brick of ice.

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Bruce Murray: It’s tougher than that because it’s hard to determine if something is alive or not. The usual test is to assess its metabolism and reproductive capabilities. But in extreme environments, how do you culture those organisms? It’s not that simple; for example, how do you know the organisms weren’t a contaminant from the collection or storage equipment from the lab, or hadn’t floated in from the air? Neil deGrasse Tyson: So now because of these extremophiles, when we think about life elsewhere in the galaxy, we no longer restrict ourselves to this Goldilocks habitable zone—they have broadened our thinking. Robert Kuhn: Why is now such an exciting time in the search for life elsewhere in the universe? Shri Kulkarni: There are two reasons: one is the new technologies that for the first time enable us to address meaningfully the question of planets elsewhere, and perhaps even say something about the existence of large-scale life, by which I mean organisms and trees and so on. The second reason is just as important and a bit more subtle: astronomers can now say, more or less with confidence, that every time a star has formed, then planet formation is a necessary byproduct. So we know through observations that star formation is accompanied by planet formation, and we know that we have the technology to actually go look for them. So this is pretty much the start of a golden era in the search for life in the universe. Neil deGrasse Tyson: I agree, especially in the last 10 years, ever since the first discovery of a planet around a star other than the sun. I remember distinctly the day that that planetary count outside our solar system exceeded the number of planets in our solar system. So today’s children will only know a time when we have in our log books far more planets outside of our solar system than within. Bruce Murray: Ask somebody who is 30 or older, how many planets there are and they all say, ‘‘nine.’’ Say, no, I’m sorry, it’s now more than 200 (and growing, it seems, almost every week). Robert Kuhn:

How can we confirm the existence of extra-solar planets?

Shri Kulkarni: There are basically three techniques, each in various phases of sophistication. The simplest one is where the light from the host or central star communicates information Robert Kuhn: As the planet revolves around the star, the gravitational field of the planet causes a small but perceptible wobble in the star. Shri Kulkarni: The gentle tugging of the planet on the star is small but nonetheless measurable. So what astronomers see is that the star undergoes a sort of a motion, which astronomers detect in two different ways. One is

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something called radial velocity, which is how fast the star moves toward us and away from us as influenced by the gravitational field of the planet. Currently, this technique is producing this abundance of planets. Robert Kuhn:

How large is that radial velocity?

Shri Kulkarni: We are talking of tens of meters per second. Robert Kuhn: distances.

That is an incredibly small number considering the vast

Neil deGrasse Tyson: the past 10 years.

That’s part of the technologically enabling factors of

Shri Kulkarni: We can discern one part in 100 million! Astronomers can do this quite reliably; it took awhile to develop the technologies but we are there now. Neil deGrasse Tyson: Logically, since gravitation is key, the first planets we are seeing are large, they are Jupiter-sized planets. Furthermore, they are all close to their host stars, because close stars execute one period of revolution around the star quickly, which means that astronomers can get that signature in your data quickly. Therefore, all of the first waves of extra-solar planets are large planets close to their host stars. We need a much longer baseline of time to find a planet far away. Robert Kuhn: For example, an extra-solar planet in an orbit similar to our Earth’s—in the habitable zone—would take about a year, since data needs to be collected from all positions to give a conclusive reading. Neil deGrasse Tyson: An extra-solar planet with an earth-like orbit would take a year; an extra-solar planet with a Jupiter-like orbit would take almost 12 years. We’ve barely been taking this kind of data for 12 years, and so we would not have even seen a full orbit of Jupiter by now. When people hear we are discovering extra-solar planets by the gravitational affect that planet has on its host star, they say, ‘‘you mean you don’t actually see the planet?’’ And I say, no, we measure the effects of its gravity. And people get worried, and say, ‘‘Well, if you can’t see it, how do you know it’s there?’’ And I simply say that gravity is as much a signature of something’s existence as a direct photograph of it; we have many ways we can measure something is there. Just as you do if you live in a cabin in the woods, you come to learn what a bear footprint looks like very quickly, and if you see such a footprint outside one morning, you’ll start looking for the bear that was once there. You’re not going to say, ‘‘Oh, I didn’t see the bear, therefore it couldn’t have existed.’’ These are the kinds of inferences we make in astronomy, which have been very powerful methods throughout the history of astronomy. It’s how we first even predicted the existence of the planet Neptune; it was from its gravitational effect on the planet Uranus, which astronomers measured

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but did not know what was causing it. Gravity tells us there is an object out there. Shri Kulkarni: The other technique for finding extra-solar planets that’s been in development for some time and is now coming of age (particularly with the huge ground-based Keck Telescopes in Hawaii) is called interferometry. Interferometry works when you have more than one telescope and you can combine the light coming in from both or all them, and by combining the light electronically you get synergism. Robert Kuhn:

It’s as if the telescope has just grown enormously in size.

Shri Kulkarni: Absolutely. With this technique—which will also be the next mission that NASA has already funded—called the Space Interferometry Mission, astronomers will be able to go looking for smaller, more distant planets around more normal stars. Robert Kuhn: A second technique for discovering extra-solar planets is by measuring the changes in the host star’s light as the planet passes across the face of the star as seen by our Earth-based telescopes. Shri Kulkarni: Right. This is when the planet occults the star, eclipsing it. Most of the time, when there is no planet eclipsing the star, you get one reading for the luminosity of the star. But when the planet does pass in front of the star, you get a little less light. We’ve proven that the occulting signature of a planet works by confirming it through the more standard radial velocity technique that assured the presence of the planet. Robert Kuhn: Let’s talk about Europa and Mars, because they are close and we are sending our probes there. Neil deGrasse Tyson: They are in our backyard. Mars we know had running water; there are dried river beds that meandered, floodplains, river deltas, all this tantalizing evidence that it was once an oasis and, at least on earth, wherever we find an oasis, we find life. So if life ever existed on Mars, it’s in our backyard and we should seek it. Bruce Murray: There’s a problem, which neither astronomers nor biologists appreciate—the surface of Mars is self-sterilizing; the ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface would kill all life. Maybe down a meter, shielded from the radiation, we can find life, maybe 10 meters, we don’t know. Neil deGrasse Tyson: But the sterilization is on today’s Mars; past eras could have been different. Bruce Murray: Today, you’re right. But the likely location of life on Mars is underground: whatever life might have formed on Mars was probably subterranean life, like in the groundwater of the earth.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: So you go out digging, and if you find it, it becomes one of the greatest discoveries of all time! Bruce Murray: You’re glossing over the engineering problem: how deep do we have to dig? It’s a much more difficult task than commonly thought; it could require the equivalent of a human expedition with huge, mining-like drills. Neil deGrasse Tyson: I’m not worried about how big our shovel must be when we get there; if it’s got life, it’s got life. Bruce Murray: Europa has a different kind of problem. Europa is not self sterilizing, but it is in the field of Jupiter’s radiation belts, so it is lethal for our normal instruments. To investigate Europa, we have to build the same kind of technologies used in nuclear weapons or reactors—hardened electronics. So again, it’s not easy. If these alien extremophiles exist on Europa, they are in an environment that not just humans can’t take, but not even normal robots can survive. It’s a challenge; but we’ll do it. Both Mars and Europa are good targets. Robert Kuhn: Let me ask an earth-centered, solar-centered question, which is philosophical, almost religious in its nature. Are we something special here on this earth in this solar system? Or is life really rather common throughout the galaxy? Bruce Murray: That’s about as important a question as we know how to ask, which could be answered with science. Is an Earth the norm or the freak in the universe? As I observe the results coming in, my hunch is that when you find Jupiter-like planets orbiting at the distance of Mercury, which is what we are finding, if that’s the typical alignment, then we on Earth are the exception, which has profound negative implications about the abundance of life in the universe, especially the abundance of human-like or intelligent life. Neil deGrasse Tyson: I’m quite confident that life is not only hardy, given how many environments we find it on Earth, it’s also easier to form than we realize. First, even if Earth, at our distance from the sun, is rare, a Jupiter-like planet close to the sun might have 40 moons or 50 moons, some of which could possibly harbor life. So it doesn’t scare me that perhaps Earth at the Goldilocks distance is somehow rare. Robert Kuhn:

What about the time it takes for life to form?

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Typically when people ask how soon did life appear on earth, they take the age of the earth and subtract the age of the oldest fossil—4.6 billion years minus 3.8 billion years, which brings you to 800 million years. Knowing what evolution requires that seems pretty quick, but it’s even faster than that because earth spent about 600 million years in a

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period of heavy bombardment with asteroids and meteors, as Earth vacuumed up the remains of the developing solar system. This meant that the earth’s surface, because of the deposited energy and the heat, was basically molten and sterilized for about 600 million years. It’s not fair to start your life-forming stopwatch at the beginning of that period because complex molecules can’t survive in that inhospitable environment. We must wait until the Earth cooled down, then start your stopwatch. So, 200 million years? That’s nothing, almost immediately, on a cosmic time scale. It seems to me that if life were something hard to form, it would have taken earth longer than 200 million years to do it, maybe several billion years. Furthermore, the elements of life are hydrogen and oxygen (which compose water), carbon, and nitrogen, that’s what we’re made of, the chemistry of life. And look out in the universe, all those same elements are present, even in the same order (helium in the universe is inert). If life were made of some rare isotope of, say, plutonium, you could argue that we were rare. So I have high confidence that life is abundant in the universe. Shri Kulkarni: Empirically, planet formation is just very common in the universe, and we only know our own planetary system. We know nothing about the virtually limitless number of other planetary systems, which is why we need these new missions and new technologies. Robert Kuhn: How many years will it take to get sufficient information to make an informed opinion about life in the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson: It’s just money at this point: we are now smart enough to ask the right questions and we have the right techniques to find the answers. Just as a caveat here, but the answers we’ll be finding may be as a result of looking for our car keys under the lamppost because that’s where the light is shining. There may be planetary systems that are unlike earth but that are just perfectly happy making a different kind of life that we have yet to think of. Science is full of cases like this. But it’s just a matter of funding, funding the Kepler mission, the Space Interferometry Mission. As for putting a time to it, I’d guess 10 to 20 years. Shri Kulkarni: The main technology, the third technique for discovering and assessing extra-solar planets, the one that will really fill this gap between the radial velocity and the occultation techniques (which have similar sort of biases), is the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) and interferometry in general. So I would target around 2015, because SIM will get launched in 2009, and by 2015 we’ll have a fairly good inventory of planetary systems. Neil deGrasse Tyson: gen, for one.

What will you be looking for in those systems? Oxy-

Shri Kulkarni: The next step is how to do more detailed analysis. Occultation is a relatively inexpensive, but it requires very favorable orientations.

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Let’s say Alpha Centauri (our closest star) has planets; you can’t expect them to be all nicely lined up for you. Furthermore, we are not sure how to orient our detection equipment; for example, whether in the infrared or optical. Robert Kuhn: What about putting telescopes at opposite ends of the solar system? Now that would really be an interferometer! Neil deGrasse Tyson:

People dream that.

Shri Kulkarni: The first generation of space interferometers will be tens of meters to perhaps hundreds of meters apart, depending on final design and particularly which wavelengths we’ll operate. This sort of a mission, which is called Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), will be expensive. In my guess, we’ll be operating about 2015. Bruce Murray: Let me give you a different point of view. We are in a very early process of discovery in exploration, and it sounds very organized, almost like laboratory science. It is not. We are exploring new territory. You look and you find and the trick is to look properly and broadly. We could find something next year where one of these occultations shows evidence of carbon dioxide gas, which is strongly represented in our atmosphere, and also methane gas, which is strongly apparent in Jupiter’s atmosphere. What would be significant is that these two gases are incompatible together: one is an oxidized gas, carbon dioxide; one is a reduced gas, methane. They are made of very common elements, so if we got lucky and if we find both gases at the same time, the overpowering conclusion is that there must be some kind of a disequilibrium going on, and the most likely candidate creating the disequilibrium would be life, because that’s why we have exactly this situation on Earth. Neil deGrasse Tyson: Cow flatulence gives us methane in the atmosphere. Bruce Murray: And plants give us carbon dioxide. Let’s face reality: We could get lucky but the likelihood is that it’s going to be very hard to prove life, or even have a high suspicion of life’s presence. Considering the cumulative probabilities of all our approaches and technologies, I think it could take up to 30 years. Robert Kuhn:

That’s still within the lifetime of, hopefully, all of us.

Bruce Murray: I will be disappointed personally if, within my lifetime, we don’t have a strong indication that there is life elsewhere in the universe. And if, during this time, we do not find evidence, then my tentative conclusion would be that maybe it isn’t there, maybe in fact there’s something special about our planet. Neil deGrasse Tyson: That would be in violation of the Copernican Principle, which suggests that nothing we’ve ever measured about our circumstances has ever been special.

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Robert Kuhn: Either answer to the question, whether life exists or does not exist beyond earth, is overwhelming. A new term has developed, ‘‘astrobiology’’—are you comfortable with it? Neil deGrasse Tyson: Astronomers cannot do it alone. Certain questions we know how to ask, but others only biologists would ask. The same is true of geologists. Better yet, especially for a mission to Mars, a paleontologist: if there is some history of life buried within the soils, you need somebody who has experience rummaging through cross sections of a planet. So there has been a realignment of effort by multiple disciplines all asking the same question—the chemists, the biologists, the astronomers—we all want to know about life elsewhere in the cosmos. And astrobiology is a nice umbrella term, although keep in mind that it’s an entirely new field with no data right now. We have not one example of life beyond earth. We are all anxiously awaiting the first sample for the lab. Shri Kulkarni: What about the extremeophiles? Bruce Murray: derful field.

That’s not astrobiology, that’s geobiology, which is a won-

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Extremeophiles are starter data. Practice data.

Shri Kulkarni: What really missing here is a theoretical basis for astrobiology. Astronomy has a theoretical basis, certainly physics does—it’s the granddaddy of scientific theory. It took a long time for the chemists to get a theoretical basis of their chemical bonds. The problem is that biology has no overarching theory to guide us. Robert Kuhn: You can’t develop a theoretical basis for astrobiology unless you have more than one data point, and so far, we only have one data point: life on Earth. Shri Kulkarni: Historically, this has always been the case. Chemistry wasn’t a discipline until you could see patterns. You must see patterns; you have to classify data; you must do all the ‘‘butterfly collecting’’ (taxonomies) first. Unfortunately, astrobiology is a difficult subject because you can’t do this collection in the field, because the field is a bit far away. Robert Kuhn: I am moved because astrobiology is a unifying human quest. All peoples, all societies, all groups have a common interest in learning deeply about the universe in which we all live. Astrobiology carries the same meaning for all peoples at all times. Bruce Murray: Call it a quest, not a field, because it’s not a field yet. You can’t have a field without a single example, life elsewhere, so it’s a quest, but a noble one.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: As alchemy was a quest. People ridicule alchemy, but turning lead into gold was at least an experimental subject and it was conducted in laboratories. There were important foundations from alchemy that led to chemistry. And so you have to begin somewhere: alchemy had no theoretical foundation, but it enabled the development of chemistry.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary Such breathtaking elegance! To discern the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet so distant we can’t even see it. To describe the conditions for life, even in extreme environments. To send our silicon-based offspring to Mars and beyond, as if seeking long-lost organic relatives. The search alone enriches our species and nourishes our spirits. What could be more important than knowing that we are not alone. . .or very alone?


Interviews with Expert Participants Bruce Murray Mars is your passion. What one question would you like answered? I’ve spent 40 years pursuing the mystery of what Mars’s surface is like, and most importantly, what is the history that is represented by it. And I’ve been defeated again and again by Mars, even though there are much more powerful tools, much better spacecraft, more data, better instruments. All this technology provides new insights, but they end up breaking the unifying idea we had before, which is called a paradigm—like continental drift was when it was first proposed about 1960 for the earth and revolutionized the fields of geology and geophysics (and continues to do so). We lack that kind of organizing framework, that kind of paradigm, for Mars. To find that paradigm is, for me, the most exciting thing. How should we define life? The best example I know was for the Viking mission to Mars, which arrived there in 1976, whose main purpose was to search for microbial life in the soil of Mars—even though we knew nothing about such possible life, whether it’s there, what it would be like. And so we had to decide, well, how do we search for it? And the idea that won favor among the biologists then— I think it’s still the most powerful one—is that a characteristic of life is that it metabolizes. It interacts with its environment. It grows. So for life, you have to see growth. So I think that’s one definition, sort of a laboratory definition,

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which still makes sense to me. If we can’t culture it, if we can’t grow it, it’s going to be very hard to prove it’s alive. Will we ever discover intelligent life? I think that eventually humans are going to discover intelligent life, but we or our distant descendants will find it remotely through radio signals or laser beams or other techniques of communication. I find it very difficult to imagine ‘‘Star Trek’’-type aliens coming to different stars; interstellar distances are just too large, way beyond any non-science-fiction method of navigation. I think there are aliens; I’d be astounded if there were not. But the idea of them zooming around the galaxy or the universe in ships, I think, is unlikely. So unless there’s some new physics, and there might be, I don’t see interstellar travel ever happening. They will, however, be able to communicate with us and we with them, simply with what we already have, with radio telescopes and radar, as well as more powerful kinds of remote communication.

Shri Kulkarni Do you believe in life elsewhere? Absolutely, and I hope we’ll find life elsewhere. I hope we’ll get dethroned as the only life in the universe. And I fear for those guys who will see their cozy, special world disappear. That’s one of the reasons why I like being in this field because this is the ultimate argument against parochial ideas like religion. How will it affect us when we find it? Oh, I think it’ll affect us in the most profound way because a large part of our energy right now, and perhaps historically, goes into one group of human beings differentiating ourselves from other groups—whether by nationality or religion or race or what have you. You open the newspaper, and you look at how much energy is going into various conflicts and military expenditures. And the energy there and the money that society puts into either immediate or perceived conflicts is enormous. Part of that comes from a very parochial view that if I dominate locally, then I’m the big boss. But you take this assumption away, and suddenly, the earth is very different. I think this will be the ultimate completion of what people are calling the Copernican revolution. Finding life elsewhere in the universe will dethrone our parochial sense of importance. And whether you like it or not, I think that is what’s going to happen when we find evidence of other life elsewhere.

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Why haven’t we been visited before? The simplest answer is that it’s very difficult to travel between stars; that’s why we haven’t seen anyone and they haven’t seen us. Even if an alien civilization is a billion years older than we are, the speed of light is the law that everyone must obey. The other reason we haven’t been visited is that maybe civilizations don’t have long lives, which basically means they never get to the point where they can muster whatever sophisticated technology they need to make this happen. Our own history, too, is so young. Who knows whether we will make it, or even survive. Has the Hubble telescope been useful in finding planets? In order to search for extra-solar planets, the Hubble Space Telescope has reinstalled an instrument called NICMOS, Near Infrared Camera Multiple Object Spectrograph. While much of the Hubble’s instruments have the same range as our own eye—that is, they can see what we call visible rays—the NICMOS can actually see the heat rays from the infrared rays, which is an excellent vehicle for studying how stars are born and for looking for very young planets.


Chapter 12

Will Computers Take a Quantum Leap?

Will quantum physics revolutionize computing, spawning radical computers with vast new powers? As quantum engineer Seth Lloyd blithely states, ‘‘a quantum computer is to a computer what a laser is to a light bulb.’’ How quantum computers work is akin to a famous cat that, no joke, may be dead and alive at the same time. A radical breakthrough is occurring in computing power. The term ‘‘quantum computer’’ has been in the lingo of science for some years now, but it is just making its way into the public consciousness. Quantum computers will not make regular computers obsolete, just as lasers have not replaced light bulbs. The excitement about quantum computers pertains to what tasks they will do which have previously only been imagined. What was seemingly impossible a few years ago now seems tantalizingly achievable. Take a complex numerical problem, such as breaking a very large number, say one with 400 digits, into its component parts (without a remainder); called ‘‘factoring,’’1 it is one of the hardest problems for a traditional computer to solve and a critical problem for the encryption of communication data. Currently, it would take our fastest supercomputer billions of years to factor a number of this size, more time in fact than the age of the Universe. Yet quantum physicists believe that a quantum computer could do the same computation in only minutes. How would this work? Is this for real? If so, how will it change computing? What, actually, is quantum computing? It is the ability to store, retrieve, and manipulate data on atoms and sub-atomic particles instead of on silicon, plus the ability to have a ‘‘bit’’ of information be in more than one position at the same time (superposition; not off or on, but off and on), a state achievable due to the quantum mechanical nature of our universe. We

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discuss the mysteries of the quantum world—superposition, entanglement, and the many-worlds (or multiverse) theory of quantum mechanics. How might quantum computing affect our daily lives? In this chapter, three accomplished scientists who research the peculiar and tantalizing world of quantum computing speculate about how the fundamentals of quantum mechanics will revolutionize computing and thereby transform our lives. Take areas like the design of sophisticated new drugs, the breaking of codes to eavesdrop on private communications, creating new global positioning systems with a degree of precision once unthinkable, incredibly precise atomic clocks, the scheduling, planning, and recognition of orderly patterns in highly complex data like making the electronic transference of money super-secure, and an opportunity to understand more fully the physics or chemistry of complex systems. While quantum computing may revolutionize computing, giving vastly new powers, it also exemplifies how highly theoretical physics can suddenly and shockingly have immense practical use. Angels on the head of a pin? Now they dance inside an atom—and we’re making them work for us.

Expert Participants David DiVincenzo Senior Scientist, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corporation; visiting staff, Physics Department, California Institute of Technology

Seth Lloyd Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; leader in quantum information, computing, and control

Birgitta Whaley Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of California (Berkeley); leader in nanoscience and quantum information and computation


Seth Lloyd: The world is in the midst of an information revolution. As computers become progressively more important, people see the world in terms of information. At a larger level, we are trying to construct a way of seeing the world in terms of quantum information because the world, at its core, is quantum mechanical, and all of these quantum systems can process information. A great example of a quantum technology that’s in common use is the laser. The laser works by taking ordinary light, which ordinarily just comes in bursts of photons all wiggling up and down randomly at different wavelengths, and putting the light into the same quantum mechanical state so that all the photons are wiggling at the same wavelength.

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The laser is coherent light.

Seth Lloyd: Coherent, yes; this is a very good way to understand quantum computation. The light from an ordinary light bulb is incoherent; all the photons are coming out wiggling at all different wavelengths with no coherence among them. In contrast, the light from a laser is coherent; all the photons are all wiggling at the same wavelength in a coherent manner, so that the laser is organizing light waves in nice orderly ways. Quantum computation exploits this coherent nature of quantum mechanics, the wave nature of quantum mechanics, so that a quantum computer is to a regular computer what a laser is to a light bulb. Robert Kuhn:

What is quantum computing and why is it important?

David DiVincenzo: Quantum computing is a natural outgrowth of our progress in ordinary computers. Birgitta Whaley: People started to think about quantum computers in the early 1980s. Then, in the mid 1990s, some important theoretical results demonstrated that one can solve some important problems with quantum computers. And ever since, there has been increasing activity in trying to build and implement these devices. David DiVincenzo: We’ve been representing computer information (‘‘bits’’) with smaller and smaller circuitry over the years. At some point soon that ends, because we hit the atomic world, we hit the quantum world, and so something has to give. Seth Lloyd: The first problem was just conceiving of the notion of storing a bit of information on a single atom. A quantum of light is a little chunk of light, and a bit is a little chunk of information—the original meaning of quantum is ‘‘how much.’’ Quantum computing works essentially by mapping little chunks of information or bits onto little chunks of elementary particles or quanta. Quantum computers are not merely computers whose components are very, very small. Quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t. In the quantum world, it is totally fine for an electron to be both here and there at the same time; an electron behaves almost like a wave of light so that it can be in two places at once. So if I map a quantum bit of information—or qubit—onto electron, then I could have an electron over here representing a ‘‘zero,’’ and the same electron over there representing a ‘‘one,’’ because in quantum mechanics it is entirely permissible, it is okay, to have an electron that’s here and there at the same time. Robert Kuhn: So, theoretically, the electron can hold both pieces of information at the same time. Seth Lloyd: Yes, in some funny, quantum sense—which nobody really understands very well—the particle can read zero and one at the same time.

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David DiVincenzo:

We have a special word for that—superposition.

Robert Kuhn: How does such superposition, the particle reading zero and one simultaneously, generate the astounding capabilities of quantum computing? Seth Lloyd: A normal computer bit can only store one bit’s worth of information and a quantum bit can only store one qubit’s worth of information. Quantum computation works because a bit can be used, not merely to store information, but also as an instruction for a computer. This means that ‘‘zero’’ could mean telling the computer do this operation, and ‘‘one’’ can mean telling the computer do that operation. And so, if you have a quantum computer and you put in a qubit—remember, a qubit holds ‘‘zero’’ and ‘‘one’’ at the same time—it is instructing the computer to both do this operation and that operation and to do them at the same time. Quantum computation acquires its astonishing advantage over classical computation by its capacity, in some funny quantum sense, to do two things at once. Robert Kuhn: What are some of the problems that have been intractable to solution, virtually unsolvable by ordinary computers, problems that can only be solved, at least theoretically, by quantum computers? Seth Lloyd: There are a variety of such problems, such as the searching of vast databases, the factoring of extraordinarily large numbers, and the simulating of quantum systems in scientific analysis. In these areas, it is not just that quantum computers would have a very considerable advantage over classical computers, it is that these kinds of problems cannot be solved at all other than with quantum computers. David DiVincenzo: When it was discovered that quantum computers are very good at factoring, IBM became very interested. The reason is that in the world of computing, in the digital world, factoring is a key element in our current mechanisms for making data secure during electronic transmission over the internet. For example, making the codes on credit cards or other internet transmissions secure. So when it was shown by Peter Shor at MIT that quantum computers could, in a relatively small number of steps, compute factors much more rapidly than any known methods, far faster than ordinary computers, this suddenly jeopardized much of what we do currently in electronic commerce. Robert Kuhn:

Do quantum computers open the door for hackers?

David DiVincenzo: Potentially, but far in the future. Nobody is worried today or next year or probably not even in 10 years. But, eventually, quantum computers will give hackers opportunity. Birgitta Whaley: You would need to be able to build a large-scale quantum computer to engage in such activities.

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Robert Kuhn: What is a large scale? How many qubits would you need to be able to factor the kind of large numbers used in electronic transmission of data? Birgitta Whaley:

A few thousand.

Robert Kuhn: Compare a quantum computer with ‘‘a few thousand’’ qubits to an Intel Core 2 Duo chip with about 291 million transistors. For problems like factoring numbers, the quantum computer would vastly outperform the traditional chip or, for that matter, any classical computer of virtually any conceivable size. David DiVincenzo: Right; not even the largest supercomputers can compete with ‘‘small’’ quantum computers to solve these specific kinds of problems. Birgitta Whaley: Even given the current rapid rate of increase in classical computing technology, not even in 50 years. Seth Lloyd: Another fun problem that can be solved only with quantum computers is trying to understand what’s going on in the universe. If you have a system that has, say, one atom, it will take a few bits of information to describe that atom, and if you have a second atom, it will take another few bits to describe that second atom; this means that if you have, say, a hundred atoms all interacting with one another, a classical computer would require 10100 bits of information to completely describe the system. To put this number, 10100 bits, into perspective, there are only about 1090 elementary particles in the entire universe! You could solve that same problem on a quantum computer with just a few hundred bits. Birgitta Whaley: Quantum computing would be a wonderful tool for studying the physics and chemistry of complex systems; down the road, it could become useful for studying biological systems. Robert Kuhn:

How would quantum computing solve biological problems?

Birgitta Whaley: In the same way it solves complex chemical problems: in order to be able to investigate the one particular property that you’re interested in, you have to simulate a huge number of interactions together. It’s true of chemical reactions and it’s equally true of a small group of molecules acting in a cell. Robert Kuhn: In describing the strange world of quantum physics, one must understand the nature of ‘‘entanglement?’’ David DiVincenzo: Entanglement is both a real manifestation of what makes quantum mechanics weird, and lies at the heart of what makes quantum computing powerful. Edwin Schro¨dinger was the one who introduced this notion of entanglement at the very same time that he introduced the

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notion of his dead-and-alive cat because in that famous scenario what is going on is that whether the radioactive atom decays or not is getting entangled with the life-or-death state of the cat.2 Two quantum bits get into a state where they are powerfully correlated; whether two photons or an atom and a cat, they are strongly correlated in ways that are far tighter than they can be in any classical physics situation. Entanglement is one of the strangest things about quantum physics, even to professionals. It’s a place where the mathematical laws are very strange. But this entanglement has tremendous implications, not only for solving the kind of computing problems that we’ve been discussing, but it also has implications for privacy, because if I have an atom as a qubit and it’s completely entangled with your atom as a qubit, then we know that there are such strong correlations between them that cannot be shared with anyone else in the world. This means that if we have managed to have two objects that are completely entangled, then we have a secret key with which we can share any information and keep it absolutely secret, protected, from all others. Robert Kuhn:

No one can break in, not even theoretically?

David DiVincenzo: No; according the laws of quantum physics, no one else can enter our entangled system, not even in principle. Robert Kuhn: That’s certainly good if you and I have a secret to keep, but suppose you and I are terrorists, then what? David DiVincenzo: Then we may win also; quantum physics does not guarantee a stable world. What quantum mechanics and particularly entanglement does do is to change the rules of the game of secrecy and privacy. And it gives us new tools for doing cryptography, us and for the terrorists too. Birgitta Whaley: This sharing of secret keys through applying the laws of quantum mechanics has been implemented over distances of kilometers and has been proven to achieve sufficiently high accuracy or fidelity to be commercially viable. Scientists are now exploring how to communicate with satellites in this completely secure quantum fashion. Institutions, like the Bank of England, are interested in using such a quantum scheme with complete security guaranteed to verify bank transactions. And this particular example is all done with exchange of photons. Robert Kuhn: And although it might be easy for anyone to physically interrupt this stream of photons, they would not be able to decipher it. Hackers couldn’t read the signal; they would only get a so-called ‘‘denial of service.’’ Birgitta Whaley: There is a second aspect of quantum mechanics that is beneficial to security. If someone does try to interrupt a quantum transmission, say by attempting to absorb and read and then retransmit a stream of

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photons, the person at the other end could detect what had happened and would know that he had been eavesdropped upon. So quantum mechanics is a very powerful approach to cryptography. Robert Kuhn: mechanics?

Are there other potential practical applications of quantum

David DiVincenzo: One area that looks promising is making higher precision clocks. The very same laboratory devices that are being explored as quantum computers are also being explored as next generation atomic clock. They would be fabulously accurate; 1,000 times more accurate. Seth Lloyd: An application that I’ve been involved in creates entangled light—this is not merely laser light—where all the photons are in this funky entangled state. When I send this entangled light from me to you and you measure when it arrives, then you can tell when it arrives to a much higher degree of accuracy than you can with ordinary light. This means that if you combine this timing precision with super accurate atomic clocks, you can imagine, for instance, quantum global positioning system (GPS) satellites orbiting the Earth providing extraordinarily accurate positioning to below a centimeter! One application would be to construct a telescope with a virtual aperture the size of the whole Earth. That would be quite an instrument to look up at the heavens. Robert Kuhn:

How would such a ‘‘telescope’’ work?

Seth Lloyd: If I take two telescopic mirrors, like the twin Keck telescopes on top of the volcano in Mona Kea, Hawaii, and if I know how far apart they are within the accuracy of the wavelength of light that I’m going to use, then I can use the distance between both telescopes as if it was a single aperture, a single mirror. Now imagine that your mirrors are up on satellites and they are separated by the distance of the Earth. Here the accuracy is determined by the size of the aperture (the size of the mirror) and the wavelength of light that you’re using. And the only way you can do this is if you can position these mirrors within the accuracy of the wavelength of light. Robert Kuhn: Let me summarize this remarkable flow of applications of quantum mechanics: (i) quantum technologies enable us to conceive how to build quantum computers; (ii) by thinking about quantum computers we develop quantum information theory through which we develop new applications like quantum clocks; (iii) we then apply quantum clocks to create new systems of GPS with degrees of precision previously unimaginable; and (iv) we use these super-accurate GPS systems to build telescopes of astonishing effective size. Seth Lloyd: Having said all this, the reality is that building quantum computers is going to be extremely difficult to do. Atoms are very sensitive things

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and quantum information easily evaporates. Remember, if something in the environment looks at your quantum information, it tends to go away. The same characteristics that give quantum information its unprecedented power also gives it unprecedented delicacy. Who would have thought that by using Schro¨ dinger’s thought experiment about torturing cats that you could actually make clocks run more accurately. Robert Kuhn:

Or build a telescope the size of the Earth.

Seth Lloyd: Or build a quantum computer faster than a mythical classical computer that employs all the elementary particles in the universe. Who could have thought all this? And the reason that we are able to think about such things now is that we’ve developed a common language about quantum information that allows solid state physicists, mechanical engineers, theoretical chemists, mathematicians and computer scientists to talk to each other and leverage their complementary knowledge. Robert Kuhn: Birgitta, might the use of quantum computers in chemistry reveal problems that you never would have thought of before? Birgitta Whaley: In the past, chemistry used to be done by mixing things in test tubes. Nowadays much of our work is done with lasers (coherent light pulses), which bring forth a good deal of information. To make a quantum operation on, say, 10 coupled qubits would have an immediate impact of chemistry; for example, one molecule can be transformed into another molecule. Robert Kuhn: Quantum computing, in a kind of self reflective way, can literally help us understand the quantum world. Birgitta Whaley: Robert Kuhn:

Right.

But can we actually build quantum computers?

David DiVincenzo: I’m an optimistic because it seems like there are many possible routes for building a quantum computer, including ones that emerge directly from our current silicon technology. Of course it may be that some very different kind of system will emerge as the right way to do quantum computing. In fact, there already are functioning quantum computers, but they are still quite rudimentary. Robert Kuhn: The reason why most scientists are not so optimistic about building quantum computers whose operations consist of more than a handful of qubits is that the complexity of isolating the system (e.g., from external heat or motion) and preventing the disintegration of the super-fragile quantum states (decoherence) increases geometrically with the number of qubits.

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David DiVincenzo: It’s seems easy to assume that if we have 10 qubits functioning, why not 20, why not 100? In building real-world quantum computers, adding qubits is not a linear process. If we could get a quantum computing manipulating 1,000 qubits, then we would have opened up a huge space of possible problems to solve. But the physical systems that have been looked at so far for actually building quantum computers are not so scalable. Adding components has made ordinary computing so powerful; we have to find techniques to do the same with quantum computers. Seth Lloyd: We don’t even know what our quantum computers are going to look like. Classical computer bits are ubiquitous; we can store a bit in any number of ways—saying yes or no, thumbs up or thumbs down, capacitor charged or uncharged, or writing a zero or one on a piece of paper. In the same way, quantum bits (qubits) are also ubiquitous; we can map a bit onto, essentially, any quantum system. David DiVincenzo: We actually know of special kinds of systems where you can have a collection of 1,000 atoms or 10,000 atoms in a superconductor (special kinds of material, usually at low temperatures, in which all electrical resistance disappears) that can exhibit quantum effects. As such, it may be possible to make a qubit in a structure that looks exactly like what you would see if you looked in a microscope at an ordinary integrated circuit. The metallic metal lines, about one micrometer wide and all connected together in various ways, could possibly embody a qubit. Seth Lloyd: I was actually lucky enough to participate an experiment that was run by Hans Mooij at the Technical University of Delft in which they built a superconducting qubit. Hans made a little superconducting loop— actually it’s quite macroscopic by the standards of our world, 1/100 of a millimeter, much closer to us in size than it is to an individual atom. Robert Kuhn:

And it acted as if it were a single qubit?

Seth Lloyd: By managing them carefully, we were able to create a state in which we called a current going around in the loop in one direction (counterclockwise) a ‘‘zero,’’ and a current going around in the other direction (clockwise) a ‘‘one,’’ and we were able to create this funny state of zero and one at the same time. Robert Kuhn:

How did you know that was occurring?

Seth Lloyd: We were able to measure the current when it was going around one way and going around the other way. Robert Kuhn:

Doesn’t measuring the system destroy the system?

Seth Lloyd: Absolutely. So you’ve been studying quantum mechanics, haven’t you? Quantum computers and quantum bits—quantum systems in

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general—are very sensitive systems. What really messes up a quantum system is being looked at, and the destruction doesn’t have to be caused by a deliberate measurement that you make, it can be caused by any observation, even an accidental one like some little electron that’s floating by the environment and happens to take a peek at your quantum bit and, poof, your quantum bit is history. If you actually want to make a measurement and get information, then you have to be willing to destroy the state of our quantum bit in order to get that information. We have statistics that show that we have a state where a billion electrons are going both this way and that way at the same time. Robert Kuhn: Seth Lloyd:

The statistics are probabilistic.

Right, the investigation is probabilistic.

Robert Kuhn: How about the input and output? Since in a quantum computer a qubit is coded on an individual atom, which is extraordinarily minuscule, how do you embed the information and then how do you read it? Seth Lloyd: It depends on the system, of course. I can make an easy difference with any atom just by knocking it around. Anybody can talk to an atom, right? The key is to get it to talk back to you. There are a variety of ways to do this; one of the most straightforward is to take advantage of how light interacts with matter. If I think of my qubit as a spin, and if spinning up is ‘‘zero’’ and spinning down is ‘‘one,’’ and I shine a laser on that spin, since light is a wave it kind of tickles the spin as it comes through, and if the light has just the right frequency, the spin likes the light and will flip for the light. The field in which this flipping occurs is called electromagnetic resonance, or in this case, nuclear magnetic resonance, and thus the flipping of the spin can be read by the appropriate instruments. It is as if the spin is listening to a particular radio station, and because it likes the station it will flip for the station. So scientists can actually flip the spin from up to down, or down to up, just by shining light of the right frequency on the targeted spin. As small as the spin may be, the reason it can absorb this light is the same reason why a radio tuned to 89.7 will pick up only that station. Robert Kuhn:

You encode and read information in the same way?

Seth Lloyd: An antenna can both absorb and radiate electronic waves; just consider your cell phone. So, if I take a single spin, and I flip it, then it will emit a photon, a single particle of light. Robert Kuhn:

And you can measure that?

Seth Lloyd: A single photon emitted by a nuclear spin is very hard to measure; no one has actually ever done that except in certain optical contexts. But if you get a bunch of photons together, then they can make a signal that is strong enough to see.

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Robert Kuhn: So we have an intractable problem, whether in analyzing chemical structures or factoring numbers in electronic commerce; then that problem needs to be encoded within a quantum mechanical computer, which we still have to build, and if that process works, then the quantum computer can be used to analyze that problem. Seth Lloyd: You got it. Simple quantum computers have been built, the first optical quantum logic gates were built back in the mid-1990s, and that was followed by nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computers, the kind of work that Birgitta has brought to a high pitch. Robert Kuhn:

Where will all this take us in 100 years?

David DiVincenzo: I’ll stick my neck out. Within 100 years, quantum computing will have become rather ordinary; we will have many kinds of quantum computers and they will be engaged in diverse applications. For one, the world of cryptography and privacy will have been revolutionized. There will still be other applications, perhaps like synchronizing satellites circling the solar system, that will still be just a dream, but we will understand that they are possible. Quantum computers will be real, but they will not be complete because technology is never finished. Birgitta Whaley:

Do you think they’ll be on your desk and in your home?

David DiVincenzo: Yes. Quantum bits will be flowing in and out of your house permitting you to do things securely on whatever the internet is at that time. There’s my speculation; it’s safe because it’s 100 years from now. Birgitta Whaley:

None of us will be around.

David DiVincenzo:

My grandchildren will have to answer for me.

Birgitta Whaley: I agree that there will be quantum computers, though it’s difficult to say just what they will be doing. In cryptography, they will probably change things a great deal and they will probably be used in communication relatively soon. But whether they’ll replace the general purpose PC in your home, I’m not sure. Seth Lloyd: It is probably neither necessary nor desirable to have a quantum computer as your personal computer. Remember, a quantum computer is to a regular computer what a laser is to a light bulb. But we haven’t taken all our light bulbs and replaced them by lasers. Even so, lasers are ubiquitous now, whereas 40 years ago when they were first invented, they were very rare and used only for very special purposes. I think that we are likely to have, as David says, quantum computers that are performing special purpose tasks like quantum communication systems—I hope not breaking internet security codes on a regular basis. I suspect we will be sending quantum bits from place to place and share their entanglements in secure ways to solve problems that we couldn’t otherwise solve.

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Seth Lloyd: The other thing to remember about the laser metaphor is that, if you look at the mathematics of the laser as compared with the light bulb, many lasers are still much less powerful in terms of their actual wattage than light bulbs are. You don’t see many 100-watt lasers sitting around. Similarly, to compare quantum computers with classical computers in terms of their absolute computing power is to make an improper comparison. The real question is what can quantum computers do for you, and here we’re only just beginning to discover the possibilities (even with the relatively simple quantum computers we’ve constructed so far). Robert Kuhn: Seth Lloyd:

How do you guys communicate?

By e-mail.

David DiVincenzo:

Web sites

Birgitta Whaley: At meetings; our meetings are so wonderful because they’re so interdisciplinary. Robert Kuhn:

What do you learn from each other?

David DiVincenzo:

That quantum computing is going to take awhile.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary Quantum physics is a very weird world where intuition deceives and common sense fails. It’s rather fun watching the wild idea of quantum computing progress rapidly from ridiculous to theoretical to possible to protecting your credit cards from hackers. What about the far future? Could quantum computers become the brains of intergalactic space probes sent forth from planet Earth to explore the cosmos? We can only be sure of this: our descendents, like us, will continue humanity’s irresistible quest to delve deeper into the shadowy depths of reality.


Interviews with Expert Participants Birgitta Whaley What are key developments in your field? At whichever stage mankind has been, the ability to solve large, complex problems always has an impact on our future. In a sense, that ability involves

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us in the happenings in the world around us. It is like peeking into the future because with an understanding of the world, we can learn how to control it, for better or for worse. The development of quantum computers, in particular, opens up new vistas to control our physical world because we know that we will be able to use the computational capacity for simulating very large, complex physical systems, and exceedingly complex biological systems, which we cannot now simulate. And if we can’t simulate them, we can’t understand them. Quantum computing may eventually lead to deep understanding of the most complex object we know, the human brain, which would really revolutionize our appreciation of ourselves as human beings. How soon will we have nanomachines? There is much work being done in nanofabrication towards building nanoscale molecular machines, which is unrelated to trying to control quantum behavior of systems at the nanoscale. There is much work being done in building molecular computers, which are the direct analog of the computers we use today, just scaled down to atoms and molecules—these molecular computers, which would become general purpose computers, are likely be built before quantum computers are. There is always a desire to make everything smaller and smaller, partly to save space and partly, I think, because it’s cute. There will be a gradual increase in devices that operate at the nanoscale, both classical and quantum.

David DiVincenzo ¨dinger’s cat? What is Schro The concept of Schro¨dinger’s cat, as introduced by Edwin Schro¨dinger in the 1930s, was an attempt to illustrate how, if not why, quantum mechanics actually gives alternative views of history. We humans like to play little ‘‘what if’’ games. We say, ‘‘What if Hitler had been killed in World War I?’’ And then we imagine in our fantasies the things that might have happened as a result of that ‘‘what if.’’ Quantum mechanics plays a different kind of ‘‘what if’’ game. It says that these vast numbers of alternative histories or branchings in history that may have happened are actually almost objective. They are in a funny sense actually ‘‘real,’’ and to illustrate this counterintuitive notion, Schro¨dinger introduced a little ‘‘thought experiment.’’ In his imaginary experiment, Schro¨dinger used an atom, which quantum mechanically can be in a superposition of two different states and thereby gets entangled. He specifically used a radioactive atom, which can be in a superposition of either having decayed or having not decayed. He

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invented a game in which the decay or not decay of the radioactive atom resulted in a cat being killed or not killed. By this progression of events, the cat itself came to be in this odd special state of being alive and not alive, not being alive or dead with human uncertainty of which one was the actuality, but being literally in the superposition state of both alive and dead at the same time. In this manner, real historical events can be placed into this funny superposition state because quantum mechanics asserts that, in some sense, all versions of history get played out all at once. Talk about factoring. We in the quantum community are still working on the question of what kinds of problems are solvable, with high efficiency, on quantum computers. The famous one is that of factoring, extracting prime factors in large numbers. For a simple integer like 15, finding its prime factors of three and five is a simple computation. But to find the prime factors of a 100-digit number is an extremely protracted computation. On quantum computers, there are procedures that are vastly more efficient than on any conventional computer for solving that problem. We are also finding that there are a whole host of other problems in number theory for which quantum computing provides elegant and efficient theoretical solutions. Many of these problems, which are rather abstract, are in some way related to factoring. I suspect that new discoveries of problems that seem tailored to solution by quantum computing will continue to be made. In conducting science, what are differences between industry and academia? They are very different of course and it is valuable for each society to pursue its own methodology. I’m in a unique position because even though I’ve been at Caltech for the last half year, I actually work for IBM research (I’m on sabbatical leave). In the corporate world, the constraints are different; typically you must be much more aware of potential applications or potential implications of the work that you do. The corporation is constantly asking you, politely but consistently and at times insistently, What is this good for? Why is this good for us? Fortunately a company like IBM is willing for that answer to be couched in a setting of 20 years or so into the future. So when they want to know why my work in quantum computing will be good for them in 20 years, I have plenty of answers to give them. Unfortunately in many other companies the question is: why is this good for us in three months? If a question of that timeframe were put to me about quantum computing, I would not have a satisfactory answer. Sensitivity to yearly or quarterly profits skews much of the research that goes on in industry. Being at a university, there is a greater sense of freedom (it may be a bit illusory but it is certainly my feeling).

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Seth Lloyd How do we know that quantum mechanics is real? Einstein and other famous physicists have objected to it. At a gut level, they feel that it is aesthetically wrong for the world to be founded on probabilities; it just doesn’t fit with their intuition of beauty. They don’t want it to be the case. And yet quantum mechanics is without a doubt the most heavily, frequently, and completely confirmed physical theory that has ever been created in terms of being verified by experiment—verified time and time and time again. This is strong evidence in its favor because if there were some way that quantum mechanics could be shown to be wrong, people would have loved to have falsified it. Quantum mechanics is both so counterintuitive and so successful; to me, this combination is one of the strongest recommendations for confirming a theory. What do you think will be the greatest advancement quantum mechanics will allow us to make? Quantum mechanics and quantum information theory will enable us to construct a new way of thinking about the nature of reality, how the world works, a quantum digital way of thinking about how the world works because at its most fundamental level the world is quantum mechanical and operates by representing and processing quantum information. The quantum revolution in perception and thought and more recently in information will continue to exert major influence.

Notes 1. Factoring: The process in which you take any given whole number and find other whole numbers that when multiplied together yield that original whole number. For example, if 12 is the given number, then its factors are 1 and 12, 2 and 6, and 3 and 4. When the given number gets very large, factoring becomes extraordinarily difficult. 2. See the question on Schro¨dinger’s Cat later in this chapter.


Chapter 13

How Does Basic Science Support National Security?

Lasers that destroy missiles, computers that break terrorist codes, genetic identification of anthrax strains—when enemies pursue destructive technologies, we have no choice but to keep ahead. What does it take? We hear much about technologies that support national security, but what about the basic sciences that underlie them? For lasers that defend or attack, it’s solid-state physics; for biowarfare identification and antidotes, molecular biology; for cryptology, number theory; for computers and communication, information theory. Science has always been divided between basic science, which may or may not have application to the world, and applied science, which directly feeds us useful products and services. But with the scientific spirit of discovery tempered by recent practicalities, we’ve increasingly had to justify expenditures on basic science, whether by the need for national defense or other ‘‘useful’’ scientific endeavors. The great pure mathematician G.H. Hardy said proudly, ‘‘I have never done anything ‘useful.’ No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. . .Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil.’’ As it turns out, Hardy was wrong: pure math has come to have many real-world applications, cryptology and electronic security among them. Yet notwithstanding the frequent contributions of basic science, it has become increasingly difficult to find funding. Should basic science funding be cut just because it doesn’t lead to anything ‘‘practical?’’ The issue must be joined: can we afford to fund research only if it has ‘‘value’’? While

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supporting basic science is indeed essential for protecting national security, can military pragmatism be our sole primary motivation for pursuing knowledge of the natural world? In this chapter, three experts from different areas in the national defense establishment—a physicist, a defense contractor, and an air force general— link laboratories and battlefields, taking turns offering perspectives on the importance of basic science for safeguarding our nation, especially in the absence of a large standing army. People need to be trained, especially for operating complex systems, and the technology has to be practical in warfare. They worry that an ‘‘anti-science’’ culture in the form of religious fundamentalism and a growing misunderstanding about science threatens the goodwill that has existed between the American public and the scientific community since World War II. They enthusiastically endorse greater funding for scientific research and proclaim America’s open, democratic society as our greatest defense of all.

Expert Participants Llewellyn ‘‘Doc’’ Dougherty Director of Technology, Raytheon Electronic Systems

David Herrelko Brigadier General (retired); former vice commander, Aeronautical Systems Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; former commander, Joint Logistics Systems Center

Steven Koonin Former Provost and Professor of Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology; adviser to the federal government on civilian biodefense (Currently on leave as Chief Scientist, British Petroleum)


Robert Kuhn: security?

Must we justify basic science with its support for national

Steve Koonin: No. Science is about one’s curiosity of the world. People observe the world and they tell a story about it, and that’s what science is. It is a basic human drive. It turns out that we are able to use a good deal of the discoveries of science to do technology, whether for economic benefit or for national security or for both. But the science itself is something that is so beautiful and is such an intrinsic part of being a human being that you want to support it. Robert Kuhn:

Basic science is a central part of the human quest.

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Steve Koonin: Look at the spectacular pictures from other planets that we now have; that’s the meaning of science. Doc Dougherty: Only a very small fraction of all basic science research impacts national defense in any specific sense; the vastly larger fraction makes its broad impact on society. Take the biomedical sciences. Steve Koonin: security.

But even biomedical research brings benefits to national

Robert Kuhn: What are some examples of weapons systems that have been based on basic technologies? David Herrelko: All of them. Go back to the 1920s and 1930s and the purest of pure basic science, quantum theory, led to the first transistor, integrated circuits, lasers, everything in electronic warfare that followed. To oversimplify a bit, the basic military research in the 1960s lead to development and testing of new weapon systems in the 1970s, to the production of these systems in the 1980s, to their first real applications in the 1990s that made the precision guided weapons possible in Desert Storm (the first Iraq war). Military scientists had waited 30 years for the maturing of these technologies. Steve Koonin: So the pipeline can be 30 years. David Herrelko:

Sometimes even longer.

Steve Koonin: Sometimes very short. Doc Dougherty: It is a question of what we define as the beginning of the pipeline. If it’s basic science, if it’s the R and D phase, if it’s a directly related discovery—each defines its own period. In military systems, I would define the beginning as when someone has demonstrated technology that has the potential to be applied to a defense problem; in this case we have pretty concrete evidence that the pipeline is probably in the 30-year category. Steve Koonin: There are outstanding examples contrary to that. Nuclear fission is probably the most outstanding example: it was discovered in 1939 and first applied in warfare in 1945. David Herrelko: And I know generals who will say, ‘‘Now, do that every time. I want deterministic predictability; I want to see the result on time, so schedule it!’’ Steve Koonin: Obviously you can’t make science work that like that, not basic science, not applied science. David Herrelko: ‘‘If you can’t, I’ll find somebody who will. I’ll give him the money.’’ That’s what these generals say.

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Steve Koonin: As long as the technology is not a disruptive one, you know the path and it’s more or less a simple extrapolation from where you are now. David Herrelko:

Our war fighters don’t welcome disruptive technologies.

Steve Koonin: I understand. Robert Kuhn:

Why?

David Herrelko: Military people, by definition, have to be conservative within their given framework. We have to train our people to use the weapons they have, and if we give them a Mark IV this week and a Mark V next week, we don’t have a good, trained unit that can use any of them. No one wants to send our soldiers into battle with a disruptive technology that we’re not ready for. A simple example was when the Brits were fighting the Africans in the late nineteenth century and they used a new technology to fasten their boxes that held their bullets. It was screws, which certainly seemed stronger and better until a problem arose when the Brits were retreating and had to open their boxes—it took too long to unscrew the boxes. The military is rightly very cautious about new stuff. Steve Koonin: There are also social reasons for the military’s reticence to introduce new technologies. Unmanned aerial vehicles, such as the Predator and Global Hawk, are a good current example because no one gets medals for flying unmanned aerial vehicles. Air Force tradition really wants somebody in the plane. As another example, why do we still have four people in a tank? We don’t need four people in a motorized combat system. If you ask the tankers themselves, there is an extra man there because when the tank breaks down you need someone to help pull the others out. These are social issues, vested interests, a that’s-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it mentality. Robert Kuhn: Who are the principle players in the basic science/national defense nexus? Doc Daughterty: stakeholder. Robert Kuhn:

The national defense laboratories are a major

Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia.

Steve Koonin: The major research universities are an important element, but some parts of this pipeline are not well done in academic settings. Once it gets to the point of designing systems, the national laboratories are better. Only the really basic science and the very beginning of technology development belong in the universities. Robert Kuhn: How does the academic community interact with the U.S. Defense Department (DOD)?

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Steve Koonin: There are two ways: first is through grants from the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Office of Naval Research, and other parts of the DOD that fund basic research; these grants fund graduate students, post docs, professors, equipment, and so on. Second is through universities that manage laboratories: Lincoln Laboratories at MIT is a good example of a defense-oriented laboratory embedded in a university. Doc Daughterty: There are other stakeholders as well. Industry, obviously, lives off DOD contracts, both in the development phase and in the competition to manufacture the selected weapon system. In the production phase, management, costs, schedule, and control become the issues—delivering weapon systems reliably, on time, in proper quantities, yet always under the pressure of changing threats and varying budgets. David Herrelko: Industry as stakeholder, yes; but we can’t ask them to do the basic research—we really can’t. Steve Koonin: I agree. Nor can you ask the universities to do this kind of mission-driven, on time, on schedule, on budget sorts of activities—that’s just not what universities do well. Robert Kuhn:

Can basic science be held to a specific time line?

Steve Koonin: Basic science, no, not at all. Basic science is a hit-and-miss endeavor; striking out 60, 70, 80 percent of the time is normal. Hitting the ball 30 percent of the time makes it all worth it. Robert Kuhn:

And you can’t predict how or when.

Steve Koonin: You can’t. You can’t legislate creativity. Basic science is a creative enterprise, like composing a great symphony. Robert Kuhn:

Brahms took a long time to write his first symphony.

David Herrelko: Science does something wonderful that very few other organizations do: blind, peer reviews of papers, projects, and proposals. Researchers undergo really rigorous reviews—brutal intellectual beatings— before they can get initial funding or later publish their works. Men and women of science care enough to perform this great public service. Steve Koonin: Parts of the defense establishment would do well with a similar kind of peer review; in government it does not take place as often as you would like. Robert Kuhn:

General Herrelko, do you agree with that?

David Herrelko: I think so, but it’s very difficult in a military hierarchy to communicate honestly when every third word of a subordinate is ‘‘sir.’’

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Steve Koonin: Classification (secrecy) is also a problem: it’s hard to have a peer review process when papers and projects are classified at various levels. I will say unabashedly that I am one of those people who has the academic credentials and experience and credentials but who has also invested time and effort to get to know the national security system and problems. It is useful to have people at that gray area. Robert Kuhn: How do you target specific basic sciences to be part of a weapons system program that industry might develop over 20 years? Doc Dougherty: It takes on average over 15 years from the time a program is conceived until the time that program puts its first operational system in the field. If you are considering a new system, you can look at what you have in the laboratory and you can sort of predict what’s going to be available 15 years into the future. The real question is: what will the customer, in this case the military, buy? There is a natural evolutionary tension between the technology and engineering community which is predicting what you could make, and the operational military commanders who are asking, what do I need, and what would I do with it. We are actually shifting today from a period where the military describes specific requirements and then systems are built to those specific requirements to a period where the systems are conceptualized as capabilities to be able to do a spectrum of things. David Herrelko: We don’t need war fighters telling us what angle that a particular thing underneath an aircraft must have. Nor should they be telling us what metals should be used to mount a bracket on a plane. Steve Koonin: Right. Their directive should be to deliver ordnance on target with specified precision. David Herrelko: Even better, I’d like their directives to be more function oriented or effect based, saying something like: ‘‘I want that target to be disabled for at least a day.’’ Steve Koonin: Even better, right. David Herrelko: Because if the directive is function oriented, the mechanism to achieve results may not be ordinance at all; it may be directed energy. Military leaders may not like our answers but if we are given broad guidelines, we can generate an incredible wealth of technology. There’s basic science again; it creates many options, so when they say, ‘‘I need this effectbased capability,’’ we can say, ‘‘Well, you can do it with boron or titanium.’’ Robert Kuhn: We have the military, the national laboratories, the defense industries, the academic communities—who is defining needs? Steve Koonin: That sort of brainstorming probably takes place more often in the national laboratories. The B2 bomber, which is a wonderful system, is

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a great example of how the basic science gets built up to provide a truly revolutionary capability. To give the B2 its stealthy capabilities you had to understand electromagnetic scattering as well as aerodynamics. You also had to understand propulsion: how the engines could work with a reduced radar signature as well as provide sufficient power to fly the airplane to design specifications. Doc Dougherty: One of the major differences between the B2 and first Stealth aircraft, the F-117, was driven by the basic science of computational electromagnetics to reduce the radar signature. We had difficulty in computing a closed form solution, or even a good numerical solution, to curved body refraction, reflection, and conductivity. We were able to compute the solution to the faceted design—the F-117 is built of flat plates. David Herrelko:

The F-117 looks like a gemstone.

Doc Dougherty: It’s got flat plates and edges everywhere; this design solution was achieved from a computational perspective. People at that time understood that curved surfaces were probably better to disperse radar, but they could not predict the performance accurately enough to have confidence for the aircraft to be able to fly to specifications. Steve Koonin: Those equations that you were solving, Maxwell’s equations, were discovered 120 years ago; at the time it was basic science. Robert Kuhn:

Very basic science with seemingly no practical application.

David Herrelko: You can’t vector basic research scientists to a goal 30 years in the future. If you told the inventors of the laser that the chief reason that they should go into the lab was so that their grandchildren could listen to music on CDs, it would never have happened (and they would have thought you crazy). Robert Kuhn: it broader?

Is national security synonymous with weapons systems, or is

David Herrelko:

Broader for sure.

Steve Koonin: With terrorism an ever-present threat, national security embeds defensive measures like detecting explosives, the biometrics of personal identification (knowing who is who), monitoring ports of entry, scanning cargo containers. These have nothing to do with weapons systems, but are extremely important elements of a more broadly conceived national defense posture. America does not mount a very large standing army, and consequently we rely on technology, particularly standoff technologies that can mount attacks from distant locations as we go into combat situations. Robert Kuhn: All of which makes national defense, broadly conceived, increasingly dependent on science and technology.

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Doc Dougherty: There’s a whole spectrum of conflict to which science and technology applies. At the one end you have global nuclear war, at the other end petty theft, and in the middle there are religious and ethnic wars, which are often internal. Where does the American public focus in terms of their concerns, and what are the relative consequences of damages compared to risks of occurrence? Our investments as a nation should stress applications of science and technology to the places that have both high damages and high risks. Perhaps detection of explosives is our highest priority and if so we should direct basic research there. We need multiple technologies—we have five or six major methodolgies that come out of science and are being applied to explosives detection. Nuclear Quadrapole Resonance, for example, is a bulk explosive detector that doesn’t work for explosives enclosed in steel. Steve Koonin: You can’t see the radio waves inside. Doc Dougherty: But using neutron excitation, you can characterize it reasonably well. We’re using x-rays in many different forms for imaging, and using mathematics as the underlying basic technology. David Herrelko:

Which came from where?

Doc Dougherty:

Which came out of basic research.

David Herrelko: Absolutely, whether it was to take the twinkle out of the stars with adaptive optics so that we could figure out the difference between a real cosmic body and space dust, or whether it was to penetrate a fogged jungle and see a tank, there is a great deal of spin-off to basic science. Furthermore, we can then export the products and strengthen our economy. I think we’re always going to be an open society where our basic research is almost always available to everyone. Robert Kuhn: People criticize American freedoms, but by having an open society, we attract more of the world’s most promising young scientists, which (if we solve our problem with visas!) gives us the critical mass of scientists to lead the world. Steve Koonin: And you make the science go faster because there’s this great exchange among the disciplines. You know, one thing that people don’t appreciate is the fact that these very transformative systems that we have—for example, the global positioning system that is now used by everyone—are a direct product of basic research. This was the result of a 30- or 40-year poll starting from basic science, and then going through to this very tangible system. So these things don’t happen by accident, they start with the basic science. Robert Kuhn: Let’s talk about the internet and cybersecurity, which is central to our new sense of national security.

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David Herrelko: I had my first email address while I was an undergraduate at MIT. In those ancient days very few people had email and there was very limited communication—nobody had the slightest idea that the killer app of all killer apps would be email for pedestrians. Steve Koonin: The web browser, which enabled the internet to become a global communication medium, came out of basic science. Timothy Berners-Lee was trying to orchestrate data among high-energy physicists at multiple sites around the world and he built the browser. David Herrelko: What is wonderful is that the worldwide web was built by loyally disobedient people. If a typical old-school military thinker had planned this, and poured ten times the money into it, we would now be stuck with a structured, unscalable system, where each person, when they signed in, would be required to identify by name every person with whom they might want to communicate. But instead we have this wonderful chaotic system that has changed the world. Steve Koonin: But that makes security very difficult to manage. David Herrelko:

I’m glad to have that problem.

Steve Koonin: Another interesting mode of interaction between science and national security is the stimulation of discovery about our planetary environment. For example, when submarines began to have broad reach through the oceans, in the late 1940s and 1950s, we began to get much more interested in the science of oceanography, and we discovered currents, thermoclines, and the like—the deep characteristics of oceans. Similarly, when military aircraft could reach the jet stream, scientists discovered the jet stream. Understanding the natural world because of military operational capabilities is another way in which national security has fed back into science. Robert Kuhn:

Not deliberately, but as spin-off.

Steve Koonin: True. We also have a great deal of environmental data from classified military satellite systems that have been doing surveillance of the earth since the early 1960s Robert Kuhn: The environment data was picked up accidentally, serendipitously, along with the military data, and now provides scientists with longitudinal data so they can trace environmental change over time. Doc Dougherty: Naval acoustic data from offshore sonar is now being used by marine scientists to investigate ocean characteristics. Robert Kuhn: Some say that Naval sonar is contaminating the ocean environment and harming whales.

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Steve Koonin: There is little objective evidence. Rather, sonar data provides wonderful insights into how the oceans are changing. David Herrelko: Anecdotal stories of beneficial spin-offs of defense and aerospace technologies are loved by the military and NASA. Everyone wants to claim that their algorithm is the one generating higher resolution in mammograms. Success has a thousand fathers. Doc Dougherty:

Scientists are very narrow, and appropriately so.

Steve Koonin: Matt Kabrisky said that you really have only one great choice in life: you can either be narrow or you can be shallow. Robert Kuhn: ‘‘Shallow’’ in the sense of breadth, with sufficient knowledge and understanding of diverse areas so that one can facilitate communications between these areas and envision new connections. Doc Dougherty: We need breadth as well as depth. We need some people to be a little less narrow and a little more ‘‘shallow.’’ (Some in the military joke that rank times IQ equals a constant.) David Herrelko:

I’m shallow and proud of it.

Steve Koonin: Shallow is okay. My choice was to be shallow, but also to be able to grab onto a source of narrowness—a scientific specialty—that has the depth of substance to discern deep structural relationships that could be integrated into new concepts. The management of science and technology is about making connections between the right kinds of ‘‘narrow people’’ in order to create new and interesting things. Doc Dougherty: That’s the vital ‘‘middle level’’; there really aren’t very many people who do that well. David Herrelko: I’m worried about a ‘‘cargo cult’’ behavior that I see among some of our scientists. Let me explain. When I ask how can we champion better science and win the funding that’s needed, the answer that comes back is always anecdotal and rarely replicable. Why do I call this behavior ‘‘cargo cult’’? After World War II on an island just south of Fiji, the people took straw and bamboo to recreate air fields and recreate little airplanes with propellers and at night they would light up their mock airport. Why did they do this? They were hoping that the great metal birds would come back with the ice cream and the Hershey bars, thinking that if they set the right stage, the magic would happen. If the airport were built, perhaps the airplanes would come. They had made a cult out of the cargo. Robert Kuhn: So your ‘‘cargo cult’’ analogy suggests that some scientists look to ancillary activities that were temporally associated with successful past projects, but in fact were not causally related to them, as prescriptive mechanisms to develop future projects. And just like those great metal birds

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would not be returning with ice cream, such ways of thinking are doomed to failure. David Herrelko: Right. Another concern is that the contract between the American public and basic science is fundamentally changing. From the end of World War II, when we were infatuated with technology, and then got a kick in the butt with Sputnik (the first Russian satellite), we knew that science was good for the country, that an investment in science would pay off. Our national belief was that scientists were wise and made great contributions. I don’t think that same contract is true any more. Robert Kuhn: To what do you attribute this shift away from science? Cynicism? Academic deconstruction? Religious fundamentalism? David Herrelko: Not cynicism. The academics have little impact. It’s fundamentalism, take your pick of any religious stripe you like. Many people are worse than not scientific; they are anti-scientific. Steve Koonin: The irony is that this negative anti-scientific bias is increasing at a time when the positive impact that science and technology has on everyday life is also increasing. What the ‘‘cargo cult’’ needs, to pick up your metaphor, is a priest who understands what is really going on and so he is in the back room on the radio calling the guys with the airplanes, even while allowing his flock to continue building those mock airfields. David Herrelko: In fact the stakes are higher. The pace of technology and innovation continues to quicken. If we have citizens who are sufficiently sophisticated to engage these issues, if we don’t raise our children to excel in math and science, we are going to lose out. Steve Koonin: Often the political structure doesn’t want to hear about the science at all. There are many examples currently, such as stem cells, global climate change, and levels of toxicity. People just don’t want to hear about these science-based issues, never mind the facts. David Herrelko: I praise industry, which is trying hard to help improve schools in their local areas. Many companies are allocating a good deal of money to these programs, plus management time, but I’m afraid it’s like sticking fingers in the dyke. Steve Koonin: It’s not that everyone has to grow up to be a scientist; it’s just that people should have some appreciation for these issues of national importance. Robert Kuhn: In today’s world, one cannot be an informed citizen without significant understanding of science. Steve Koonin: That’s because many of the issues that impact contemporary society are based on science.

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David Herrelko: And the more fourth graders whom we carry through eighth grade enhancing their interest in science, the more effective our basic science will become in the future. Doc Dougherty: Anti-science sentiment in America has done so much to damage the educational environment, poisoning the capacity of young people who might otherwise be interested in science. Robert Kuhn:

Thus diminishing the pool of potential scientists.

Steve Koonin: Anti-science attitudes pervading society are, sadly, a uniquely U.S. phenomenon. There is nothing of the sort in Western or Eastern Europe or anywhere in Asia. David Herrelko: Student enrollment in science is down at all levels, especially at the graduate level where it really counts. Doc Dougherty: In addition, the good economy in recent years has been sucking graduate students out into industry, which is also diminishing the new generation of scientific professionals. Steve Koonin: What’s most important is to have a vital scientific base that continues to discover new phenomena, and maybe even more importantly to train those new generations of scientists on whom we can generate future technologies that will be needed in the future. If we’re going to continue to have a secure nation, given our social, economic and political situation, we must have that technology base. Robert Kuhn: The world situation changes as does our domestic environment. The nation’s military-industrial-academic complex, which started seriously in World War II, probably reached its peak during the Cold War. But now we are in a different era. Do these institutions have to change, structurally and/or functionally? Steve Koonin: Of course they do; circumstances are changing. Homeland defense is now a major issue on everyone’s agenda. Defense technologies are not only about the military—the military never operates within the U.S. —but now also about law enforcement. For example, intelligence agencies whose main charter is overseas operations now must be concerned about domestic intelligence and operations. And these new challenges mean that we must have new organizations, in both government and business. The way business operates has changed. It used to be that the only players in the defense establishment were the multinational giants—General Electric, Boeing, General Motors, IBM, and so on. Now we have a whole host of smaller companies developing new technologies. David Herrelko: Let’s go beyond military contributions. To me basic science has made possible all kinds of wonderful things, like inexpensive digital

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photography and satellite dishes. So when there is a trouble spot in the world, if atrocities are alleged, why don’t we just airdrop in cameras and small dishes and let the people there show the world? Robert Kuhn:

What about America’s investment in basic science?

David Herrelko: We invest a tremendous amount in basic science, and we must with confidence keep investing in basic science. This is true even if other nations harvest from our investments because we are all agile and adaptive and tremendously aggressive in commercializing basic science and taking it to market. And only in an open society where the basic science is freely available can we continue to live and work that way. Robert Kuhn: The American ideal is to maintain a critical mass of talented scientists and engineers from all over the world, substantial capital and intellectual resources, and a host of world-class institutions in business and academia. Steve Koonin: That’s why it’s so important to have students coming from abroad to study in America. The population of the United States is only 300 million people on a globe that holds six billion. If we can attract the smartest half of one percent of people from around the world, educate them here, and enable them to understand American values and society, that would be such a great thing. Doc Dougherty: long.

There is much work to be done; happily the future is

Robert Kuhn End Commentary Supporting basic science is essential for protecting national security. Core competencies in the physical, biological, and mathematical sciences provide critical mass of resources, capabilities, and experiences—but our primary motivation should be that understanding our world, irrespective of practical application, is a hallmark of our species and a beacon of our society. Robert Wilson, the founding director of Fermilab (the expensive atomic accelerator), captured the matter in his 1969 testimony before Congress on the appropriation of the considerable sums that made Fermilab possible. When asked whether the laboratory would contribute to the national defense, Wilson replied that its contribution would be ‘‘not to the defense of the nation but rather to what made the nation worth defending.’’ Sure, basic science shields our national body; more important, it enriches our national soul.




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Interviews with Expert Participants Steve Koonin What big discoveries might we see in this century? I’d start the list with information. We’ve seen in the last two decades an exponentially expanding capacity to store information, to process it, to transmit it, to visualize it. These capabilities are going to accelerate even further in the next several decades. We’ll transform the way that we deal with the world around us, with the way that we deal with ourselves. I’d put also on the list a growing appreciation to design and fabricate materials—materials that will be stronger, lighter, more durable, more flexible, whatever properties one wants. We will even be mimicking the way living things fabricate materials. New materials will have a big impact on the world. I think that another transforming discovery will be that we will very likely find evidence for life beyond our own planet, whether it will be life in existence now or life that was once in existence on Mars or under the ice on Europa, perhaps a planet around some other star. I think it will happen. Those environments are too rich, too active, not to have something like life arise. And I think when that happens, when we find life, the discovery will fundamentally transform the way we think about life and the way we think about ourselves. As provost at Caltech, it is part of my responsibility to understand how all the fields of science fit together and play against and enhance one another. As we look forward over the next several decades, a major focal point of discovery is certainly biology, appreciating how living things work. One fundamental area is the brain, understanding how three pounds of cells and chemicals can generate thought, memories, reasoning, and emotions. In the physical sciences, I think the practical manipulation and application of quantum phenomena are going to have a profound effect on the way we live. I also think a better understanding of the earth, its climate and its geology, is going to bring practical benefits to people’s lives over the next 20 years or so. Are universities destined to become more commercial? One of the things that has become more interesting and exciting in the last 20 or 30 years is the way in which universities have had an influence on commercial activities. It has been a good thing to get the ideas that we produce in the laboratories out into the commercial sector, and there have been some important changes in society that have come about from technology that universities have produced. Also the people that universities produce with an entrepreneurial spirit have gone out and founded important commercial organizations. But one can go too far. If we go to the limit, if we allow

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universities to become for-profit entities, then we will have lost something very special. Much of the beauty of scientific research is being able to follow your nose, to allow free reign to your instincts and intuition, independent of what the short-term profitability or non-profitability might be. On occasion, scientists’ instincts and intuitions can lead to very beautiful discoveries, very surprising discoveries, and even very profitable discoveries. The short-term work we need to leave to commercial entities; but the long-term work needs to be done in an environment of unfettered inquiry, and that’s what the universities have to retain. What about quantum teleportation? Among those technologies that are going to transform human society in the next several decades, one will surely be the practical manipulation of quantum systems, using them to store, process, and transmit information. Quantum teleportation is a phenomena that is, in fact, much discussed at the present time. Actually, the term is something of a misnomer. We all think about the teleportation machines that we remember watching (or see) on ‘‘Star Trek.’’ Quantum teleportation is not like that at all. It is the ability to take the state of a simple quantum system and move it from one place to another without physically moving the system. So in some sense you’re transporting the information in the state and not physically transporting the state itself. Do we fully understand the laws of nature? The answer is yes and no. Yes, in the sense that we understand laws within each domain of applicability. For example, we know that Newton’s laws of motion work when the velocities do not get too close to the speed of light, and within that domain, we can certainly and fully understand the laws themselves. We do have a problem sometimes understanding their implications in very complicated situations. So you often need a computer to try to assess the workings of those laws, but we understand the laws themselves. If the particles get to be too fast or they get to be too small, then either relativity or quantum mechanics supercedes Newton. But again, within each domain of applicability, we understand those laws very well. The excitement comes when one ventures forth into new domains. We more or less understand quantum mechanics, but then we start to mix in gravity. The interrelation between quantum mechanics and gravity seems to be our most fundamental missing piece of knowledge. Some scientists, but certainly not all, believe that sometime in the next several decades, we will likely see the theoretical unity between quantum mechanics on submicroscopic levels and relativity and gravity on planetary and cosmic scales. But such understanding is for the future.

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David Herrelko What technologies has basic science spawned that have trickled down to the public? Key developments probably were the fax machine and the xerox. More than any other commercialized technology, they may have contributed most to bringing down the Soviet Union. In this country, we cherish loyal disobedience, and as long as we have an open and free society, the future looks good to me. Talk about other speculative areas in which you’ve been involved. It is as tough speculating on developments in basic science as it is raising children—all one’s careful plans can be overthrown instantaneously. How do we improve the general appreciation of science? The numbers are devastating: how many potentially brilliant kids fall away from math and science so that by the eighth grade they’re out of the game entirely. Females compose half of the geniuses in this country, but they are underrepresented in math and science—and if you can’t play, you’re disenfranchised and you’re angry. We need to build up a solid base of people who can use the power tools of the next generation, math and science, or America is going to be left in the dust.

Doc Dougherty Does the general public properly appreciate science? I think the public sees different implications of science in their life. They definitely see it in their consumer electronics; they definitely see it in their national defense. However, much of science they do not understand, and because the press for the most part doesn’t pay attention, the people do not get an opportunity to appreciate science well enough to make the connection to everyday life. Will our basic security improve quickly enough? I have to differentiate between two types of security: technologies for the electronic entertainment industry and direct national security. The security associated with the electronic entertainment industry—such as the economic aspect of the entertainment industry, including encryption, copy protection, patents, copyright rights, payment for services, payment for use—is in a category by itself. Current law and current technology are mismatched. The other type of basic security is for the direct support of national security. The data glut is not a data glut per se: it is a mismatch between the ability to collect and the ability to analyze. With smarter computers, even if not with smarter people, this mismatch will evolve and improve over time.


Chapter 14

Can Religion Withstand Technology?

What fosters fundamentalism? It is an intriguing paradox: as the world becomes more scientific, it is also becoming more religious. Along with science, religious fundamentalism of all varieties is also gaining momentum. Worship comes in many flavors—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and new religions, too. In an age of ever-increasing scientific knowledge more people than ever before are devout, as measured by attendance at a house of worship. In the U.S. alone, three times more people attend a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque than did when the nation was founded (on a percentage basis). Something serious is going on here. Is it a coincidence, or has science and technology’s ideological ascendancy finally started to work against it? What is it about human nature that rebels against the dominance of material progress? Also, as technology proliferates, and solitary individuals have new capacities to wield power, the opportunities for fundamentalist agents to perpetrate technological catastrophes multiply. Also, spinning the question in reverse, how do religious groups use the technology they claim to despise for the purpose of proselytizing their parochial (even megalomaniacal) beliefs and fostering their own potentially dangerous ambitions? What is it about technological progress that fundamentalists do not like? What is it about technological progress that intensifies religious responses? What is the mindset of fundamentalists, the ‘‘deep structural’’ characteristics that are common to all fundamentalists and almost unify them irrespective of specific religion? In this chapter, a social scientist (an expert in the sociology of religion), a devout Muslim scientist (an expert on science and Islam), and a card-

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carrying skeptic discuss how the clash between technology and religion reshapes our search for meaning. They discuss how technology, versus science, may drive this trend. From the alarm clock to 24-hour news, technology constantly disrupts us and, as a result, makes the inner contemplation necessary for a full spiritual life difficult if not impossible. The guests delve into the rise of fundamentalism—a reaction to modernity in general but also perhaps to Western rationalism—and agree that religion answers a deep human need for ritual, connection, and inspiration. Islamic scientist Muzaffar Iqbal laments the intrusion of the cell phone in the mosque, while skeptic Michael Shermer retorts that you can just turn it off. But Iqbal is talking about something bigger here, ‘‘a natural result of 8 or 10 hours of work-a-day routine with all these gadgets leads to a total disintegration of the inner concentration of our personality.’’ Christian sociologist Don Miller dots the ‘‘i’’ in this argument as he talks about technology, efficiency, and its ultimate lack of capacity to give our deeper selves meaning, a quest that unfailingly appears to be a universal need for all human beings. The conversation moves to the difference between ’’fundamentalism’’ and ‘‘extremism.’’ Fundamentalists in all religions have received a tremendous amount of media time in recent years. Iqbal stresses that extremism is different from fundamentalism, a term that means returning to the basics or fundamentals of a belief. Is this just a semantic argument or does he make a meaningful distinction? Says Iqbal, ‘‘Extremists are people who have gone out. They have left the path. You cannot blame religion for that.’’ Religion answers a deep human need for ritual, connection, and inspiration. The Skeptics Society holds their meetings at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Shermer: ‘‘If ever there was a Mecca of science, it’s Caltech, right?’’ As Shermer points out, Stephen Hawking deals with the deepest questions in the universe: why is there a universe at all, what was there before time began? ‘‘These are really traditional theological-type questions.’’

Expert Participants Muzaffar Iqbal Founder and President, Center for Islam and Science; Regional Director for the Muslim World, Center for Theology and Natural Science; editor Kalam newsletter on Islam and Science

Donald Miller Professor of Religion and Executive Director, Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California

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Michael Shermer President, Skeptics Society; Publisher, Skeptics magazine; author, How We Believe and Why People Believe Weird Things; Columnist, Scientific American magazine


Robert Kuhn: In an age of increasing knowledge in science and technology, it seems paradoxical that traditional religious views are also on the ascendancy. Is this true? Michael Schermer: It has nothing to do with God or religion; it’s just a sense of humility in the face of the size and scope of the cosmos. Don Miller: There are even more people going to church, temple, or synagogue now than in the early years of the American republic. We tend to romanticize the past and think that back then people were so much more religious. But as a matter of fact, as measured by church attendance, we are three times more religious now than we were 200 years ago, with about 40 percent of the population in a typical weak attending a church, temple, or synagogue. Robert Kuhn: I find it fascinating that in an age of science we have this increase in traditional or fundamentalist views. Michael Schermer: Let’s not let this point go; this is very interesting. Conservative pundits argue that America is going to ‘‘hell in a handbasket’’ and that we are less moral than we’ve ever been and that we have to get America back to the Christian nation it used to be. They have it all backwards: as a nation America has never been as religious as it is now, and if this is the case—which it is—maybe there is some correlation between us being so religious and America going to ‘‘hell in a hand-basket.’’ Muzaffar Iqbal: We need to distinguish between science and technology. Science itself does not have significant impact on everyday life, certainly not directly on church or mosque attendance. But technology does. Technology is the application of science that defines the way human beings live, and because modern technology is threatening the traditional way of life, people, as a reaction, feel the need to express their religious convictions by going to churches or mosques. Each new device that comes into existence intrudes into our lives in a way. Take cell phones. What have cell phones done to us? The least we can say is that they have become an additional element of intrusion. I am thinking of the annual pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca that has been happening for 1,400 years or more; this pilgrimage is when you leave the world behind for at least three days and you are totally devoted to a set

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of rituals, you are totally there physically, mentally, intellectually, spiritually, and you are not supposed to be involved and tangled with the life of the world—and then suddenly this machine starts ringing. Michael Schermer:

Well, you turn it off.

Muzaffar Iqbal: The point is that I don’t have this machine, you have this machine. Suddenly your cell phone rings; I can’t turn off your cell phone— it breaks into my privacy, breaks into my connection with God, breaks into my rituals. This thing is there, it was not there before, and it won’t be going away. Don Miller: The cell phone, while it may make us more efficient, doesn’t necessarily make our lives more meaningful. There is a deep inner need that all of us have to pursue. It is profoundly meaningful and goes beyond the superficiality of technology. Muzaffar Iqbal: I was using the cell phone as but one example to illustrate technology’s intrusion; there are hundreds of other things of a similar nature that technology has produced over the last hundred years. These inventions or gadgets have totally rearranged our social and personal life, restructured our social and personal space, so that this deep inner need, our relationship with God, becomes frustrated. There is surely something inside us, in the very nature of our beings, that yearns to connect with something higher and larger than ourselves. Robert Kuhn:

Is part of that yearning a reaction against the technology?

Muzaffar Iqbal: I think it’s an accumulation, perhaps at a subconscious level, of numerous intrusions. There are so many technological devices, these little things, right from the moment you wake up with an alarm clock, the radio, the news on all the time. With everything that is coming into our lives, there are so many things to which we react. Modern technology is having a cumulative effect on our mental and spiritual lives. Michael Schermer: Wait! Don, you’re a social scientist. This is a hypothesis, a testable hypothesis: Does the increase in technology cause an increase in religiosity? We are assuming a ‘‘just-so story.’’ No one has ever tested this. How would you test this? Don Miller: I am intrigued; I’m not sure that there is a contradiction between technology and religion. Many individuals are using technology in their worship. For example, some of the Pentecostal groups I’ve been studying—you can’t find a better sound system than in a Pentecostal church. One of the liabilities of being a researcher in these studies is sitting too close to those booming speakers. Pentecostals are not fleeing from technology; they’re actually appropriating technology and utilizing it for their own purposes. Another phenomenon is what’s happening with the so-called

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millennial generation of kids. Their parents, the baby boomer generation, in general rejected religion, at least in terms of traditional forms of worship; they started worshipping in mega churches that were bland, rather warehouse oriented. But their sons and daughters are now using technology to bring the visual dimension back into their worshipping experience. Robert Kuhn: If it’s not a reaction to technology, if it’s not a response to science, how do you explain the increase in religious belief ? Michael Schermer: Churches are like corporations competing for customers, and like good corporations they just have to offer better products and services. Robert Kuhn: world?

How do you explain the religious energy in the Islamic

Muzaffar Iqbal: I’m glad you brought up that point because your theory only holds for the United States of America. Michael Schermer: It’s just social momentum, historical traditions— whether it’s animism, polytheism, monotheism, or whatever. Human beings are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals who construct narratives and myths about their world, trying to make sense of it. Whether the narratives or myths are true or not is irrelevant. Robert Kuhn: Michael, how do you see technological trends affecting people’s belief systems over time? Michael Schermer: We will eventually implant a cell phone in your ear and a keypad on your palm. More and better technology is the future. Robert Kuhn:

What will that do to our belief systems?

Michael Schermer: It will just enhance them; it won’t hurt them. I want to see more scientism—science as a worldview, as a complete worldview. People really do not need religion. I think religion should and can be replaced. Muzaffar Iqbal: Consider what would happen if people have cell phones implanted in their ears. Not only cell phones: there could be many more gadgets implanted within the human body, so that while you are, say, driving you could be doing 10 different things at the same time. The natural result of 8 or 10 hours of work-a-day routine with all these gadgets would be a total disintegration of the inner concentration of being; your personality would disintegrate into smaller and smaller pieces. Michael Schermer: We’ve gone down this anti-technology road a long time ago. You flew here from Canada; you drove your car from the airport; you’re already using all this technology. You can’t just draw the line and say, okay, we’re going to stop now.

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Muzaffar Iqbal: No, I am not saying ‘‘stop now.’’ I am saying that the impact of all these new inventions and technological devices will be a further disintegration of the inner center of being, so that we will require a reconcentration of our inner life at the end of the day, or during the day. That is precisely the purpose of religious rituals. Robert Kuhn: This sounds serious: increasing and continuous technological intrusions are going to have a significantly greater degrading effect on human sense and sensitivities. Muzaffar Iqbal: I am talking to you with my full concentration and you are holding your attention towards me. Assume a metaphor that the energy exchange between us is like 10 volts of electricity. What happens when suddenly a phone call comes in, or if I’m doing 10 different things at the same time? I have the same 10 volts of electricity but now they are divided into smaller parts, maybe a dozen parts, and my being is shattered and you are not listening to me any more. Michael Schermer: I can turn my cell phone off. You can pick and choose. We already do this. Muzaffar Iqbal: No, you are wrong; you cannot. Once you have created technology you cannot control it. It’s the airplane and the car that brought me here: I cannot control them anymore; I cannot travel on a camel to go to the hajj as my grandfathers used to do. Michael Schermer:

It would take longer.

Muzaffar Iqbal: No, you cannot choose anymore. I would love to go back; my grandfather and all previous generations took six months to go to Mecca and every step of the way they were thinking about their pilgrimage, every step was bringing them closer to God. But I cannot do this. I cannot go back. Humanity cannot go back. Robert Kuhn: Muzaffar is saying that not being able to go back, not being able to control the intrusion of technology, has its consequences. Michael Schermer: Of course. 50,000 years ago, we were living in caves. So we can’t have that experience anymore. So what! Muzaffar Iqbal: The news of somebody dying in Jerusalem would not have traveled around the world without the technology we have now. The impact of that news would not have reached millions of people. So don’t say that you can just turn off technology; you cannot turn it off. Don Miller: One of my fears about technology is that it may lead us to think that we can be self-sufficient, that we can control our universe, and that we need not be dependent or humble. One of the most fundamental things about people who are religious is they do not see themselves as being

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their own master; they have a sense that they are dependent upon something other than themselves. And while there are many abuses to religion, one of the qualities of religion that I really appreciate is this feeling of humility, that I’m not so independent, that I belong to a higher power, whatever that higher power may be. I fear that technology may tempt us to think that we can be independent and self-sufficient, to our detriment. Michael Schermer: But we have technological failures, like the Titanic disaster or the space shuttle disaster, which slap us back down—and that’s good; that’s how we learn and get better. Why not have a sense of humbleness and mutual dependency in the face of just the cosmos itself ? The universe alone is so huge, so grand, so vacuous that we should feel small and unimportant; we shouldn’t feel self-empowered. Don Miller:

I would affirm that grand vision.

Muzaffar Iqbal: The point Don is making is very important: technology breeds a false sense of empowerment, as if we can do everything. We cannot do everything. One need look no further than death. No amount of technology is going to eliminate death from human existence. Death is such an overwhelming, humbling experience. We all experience death: we see people dying. Death is the ultimately frontier where technology must remain totally humble; no amount of technology is going to keep the human body working forever and ever. Michael Schermer: It might. Give us another 10,000 years at the current pace of Moore’s Law (computing power doubling every 18 months or so). We might live 200 years, 500 years, 1000 years, 10,000 years. Then download our neurons into silicon chips, or the information from our neurons into software on chips. Silicon lasts a lot longer than protein meat—it’s just meat in your brain—so exchange brain meat for brain metal; this is possible. Muzaffar Iqbal: No, Michael, you are wrong. As you know yourself as a self-aware human person, this person cannot live forever, is not designed to live forever; that’s when I’m talking about. Michael Schermer: Wait a minute! You people believe in God, you think that we are going to live forever, just in some other state—you’re contradicting yourself. Robert Kuhn:

Muzzffar, let’s go back to the. . .

Michael Schermer:

Don’t let him off the hook here. We got him!

Robert Kuhn: The eternal life of the religious vision is imagined to be a totally different plane of existence, involving some nonphysical existence, which is fundamentally distinct from an enhanced physical existence. This means, at least from a test of internal consistency, that the same self-aware

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human person would be easier to reconstruct or sustain in this putative nonphysical existence than in some kind of a futuristic superchip-supersoftware Matrix. Muzaffar Iqbal: The point I was making was that, in reference to what Don said, technology does breed a sense of empowerment. Michael Schermer: I say that empowerment is a good thing. You say it’s a bad thing. Muzaffar Iqbal: Again you are wrong. I’m not saying that empowerment by technology is a bad thing; I am saying that ultimately that sense of empowerment fails at the critical point of death, death of a human person, which no amount of technology can stop. Robert Kuhn: Is there anything about modern society that causes people to have need for religious experiences? Muzaffar called our attention to the ‘‘intrusions’’ or disruptions or technologies. How does it affect the psychology of the individual or the sociology of the group? Don Miller: Harvey Cox at Harvard Divinity School says religious revival is in response to an ‘‘ecstasy deficit’’ in Western, rational, enlightenment culture. So if you ask me from where does this increase in religious interest come, I would say that there is a kind of switch in worldviews that is starting to occur, and the new worldview is bringing back the whole experience of religion. In a sense, the widespread increase in religion signals a kind of crack in Western rationalism. Robert Kuhn: This is a pivotal point in understanding both individual psychology and world sociology. Don Miller: This is why I actually think Pentecostalism is fascinating, even though many people say that it’s nothing but some kind of primitivism. Analyze the trends on a generational level: younger people tend to be more open to the supernatural today than their parents and grandparents were decades ago. Robert Kuhn:

And they are more educated; how do you explain that?

Don Miller: Because people are tired with pure, analytic, rational, enlightenment Western thought. Muzaffar Iqbal: I agree with you. This is the same kind of education that is being spread all over the world, because even in the Muslim world, certainly in China and India, the kind of education which is being given is basically Westerm, modern, secular education. It’s the same there as it is here. Although there is a parallel system within the Islamic world—the Madrasa system which provides religious education—the divergences are causing a cultural divide. These two systems have created two parallel generations in

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the Muslim world: one class of people who go to the Madrasa system and do not have any knowledge of modern, Westerm, secular science, which also comes with its own worldview; and another class of people who do not go with the Madrasa system and who have no sense of Islamic tradition and no participation in its routines. This dichotomy is resulting in cultural schizophrenia in the Muslim world. Robert Kuhn:

What has been the impact on the Madrasas?

Muzaffar Iqbal: The impact on the Madrasas has been to retreat further into their religious core, because they feel there is great need to protect their belief and tradition in the face of this assault of Westerm thinking, which they view as an outright attack. Robert Kuhn: That’s the whole point here, that’s what technology does: it forces a religious group to move more deeply into their own traditions and become more isolated from other groups. These are significant trends. What are the implications? In the Jewish community, for example, there are large groups who are returning to the tradition with more ritualism even while the majority is becoming more secular. The trend seems to be increasing fragmentation, not only between different religions but within same religions. Don Miller: Precisely. While there may be this sort of movement toward more fundamentalist absolutism, at the same time there are many people who feel free to make independent choices about their life philosophies, people who in previous generations did not have this same availability of choice, people who could only inherit what was passed down to them. And these new choices are being accepted guiltlessly, that’s the difference from the past. In previous generations, if you left your father or mother’s inherited religion, you felt guilt about your ‘‘desertion.’’ Now, at least in the U.S., there is an almost moral obligation to make up your own mind, to construct your own recipe for your own belief system. Michael Schermer: Don, do you therefore think that this impulse, the religious impulse, or the impulse to adhere to customs and perform rituals, is part of human nature? If humanity started all over again, say on Mars, would religion evolve again? Don Miller: Absolutely. I think there is some deep human need to have meaning and to pursue ultimate significance. Muzaffar Iqbal:

I agree with you.

Don Miller: And every religious tradition is going to have some embodiment of their belief system, including the skeptics. Michael Schermer: This is why we hold our Skeptic meetings on Sundays at Caltech (joke!), which is sort of the church of science; I mean if ever there

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was a Mecca of science, it’s Cal Tech, right? In my view, religion is a social institution that reinforces the rules of cooperation and punishes excessive deviance or greed and thereby helps hold our social primate species together. It’s a way of living with large numbers without killing each other all the time. Muzaffar Iqbal: Yes, but I think that the biggest danger comes from the new religion that you just named—scientism. Your new religion basically denies the fundamental aspects of humanity that are unique, deeper aspects of our psyche that are not measurable by scientific instruments. Anything that is not quantifiable is beyond the limits of that new religion called scientism; therefore no matter how powerful scientism becomes, it will forever leave humanity in need of something higher. Therefore, even people who believe in this new religion of scientism would always be craving to see beyond it. Robert Kuhn: Because of scientism, people will crave what they feel they’ve lost even more, so scientism will create even greater tensions and fissions in world societies. Michael, are these stresses what you want to cause? Michael Schermer: No, we Skeptics are just building a home for people whose spiritual needs are not being met by religion and who find a kind of intellectual and emotional salvation in the modern scientific worldview. I just wrote a column for Scientific American called ‘‘The Scientific Shaman’’; it’s about Stephen Hawking, who just turned 60. And my question is, why is he so popular? Part of Hawking’s popularity is because of his nerve disease; it’s incredible that he has survived at all and his courage of handling life in his extremely debilitating condition is amazing. But another part of his wide popular recognition is that he is dealing with the biggest, deepest, most ultimate questions of existence. Hawking is daring to ask, and trying to answer, ‘‘Why does the universe bother to exist at all?’’ ‘‘Why should there be something instead of nothing?’’ ‘‘What existed before the Big Bang?’’ ‘‘What was there before time began?’’ These are really theological-type questions, or at least traditionally they were theological-type questions. So there is a hunger for ultimate answers to ultimate questions, and millions of people have bought his books. There is a very large group of people, larger than most people realize, who have a hunger to ask the big questions but who do not believe in a traditional religious way of answering them. They are looking for answers, and in my opinion there is only one answer, and that is science. Robert Kuhn: Let’s discuss religious fundamentalism. What does it mean in America and in other cultures? Don Miller: Fundamentalism has many different definitions. The classical sociological view is that fundamentalism is some kind of reaction against modernity, a kind of modernity that is perceived as something that is not

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moral or is amoral. In this sense, fundamentalism is an attempt to get back to a time when there were absolutes. Robert Kuhn:

Religious absolutes, moral absolutes.

Don Miller: Yes, a mindset which has less ambiguity. In addition, typically there is also something rather mythological about fundamentalism because its adherents are trying to recapture a time when that was more pure than the present. Michael Schermer:

Back to the fundamentals of that belief system.

Don Miller: I use the word ‘‘mythological’’ intentionally because many of these visions of the past are, in fact, extremely inaccurate. Now, I do not want to think of fundamentalism as necessarily negative, because I’ve studied a good number of fundamentalist groups, particularly Pentecostal and evangelical groups, which are often times very warm, nurturing environments. They are wholesome environments in which to raise children. Personally I do not see many of the so-called fundamentalist religions they way many critics do—as cults in which people’s minds have been removed. Actually I grew up in a fundamentalist home, and right now I’m a very liberal Episcopalian; I look back at my early years with a great deal of fondness and wonder whether my children are missing something by growing up in this my modern, pluralistic, open-minded household. Robert Kuhn:

Is there a tradition of fundamentalism in Islam?

Muzaffar Iqbal: The whole concept of fundamentalism, as we are using the term here, is totally foreign to Islam, because the definition that Don just gave has so many elements that simply do not exist in Islam. Islam calls itself the ‘‘middle way.’’ And even in terms of worship, in terms of rituals, there are specific instructions to be moderate. For example, even for fasting, which is a virtue, Islam instructs us not to be extreme, because you will get tired by being extreme—in your fasting, in your worship, in your prayers. The Prophet of Islam says that believers should do a little bit of good things, but do them consistently over a long period of time, rather than doing something big and intensely but for a short period of time. Michael Schermer:

There are extremists in Islam.

Muzaffar Iqbal: There are people who call themselves Muslims but who are extremists. We have to distinguish between true Islam and the Muslims who say that they are practicing Islam in this extreme way. Extremism in Islam is a foreign element. We don’t call them fundamentalists, we call them by a special Arabic term that came into the Islamic court centuries ago. The term means somebody who has left the root and has ‘‘gone out.’’ So in Islam, as soon as you become extreme, you have automatically gone out from the ‘‘middle way,’’ which is Islam.

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Michael Schermer: But the question on the table is not the ‘‘middle way’’ people, it’s the people who fly planes into buildings, where do they come from? And why is religion particularly good at driving people to do things like that? Robert Kuhn:

Any religion.

Michael Schermer: Any religion. And even non-religions, too. Marxist ideologies can get people to commit horrendous acts which they see as courageous acts of violence. Muzaffar Iqbal: You have already decided that a particular act is a direct result of religious teachings; we haven’t established that yet. Michael Schermer: Not the teachings; it’s the commitment to a philosophy, an ideology or religious belief. I just think that religion is particularly good at driving people to do violent, terrible things because it’s good at getting people to believe fanatical, extreme things. Most of the acts of these kinds of destructive acts in today’s world are committed in the name of God; not all of them, granted, but most of them. Don Miller: That’s such a gross generalization. I have to break in here because we are devolving into very simplistic thinking if we say ‘‘religion is particularly good at inciting violence.‘‘ They are so many non-religious ideologies that have been good at purges and violence. Muzaffar Iqbal: Nationalism is one of them. Look at the Second World War. Were the killings motivated by religious extremism or by nationalism? Michael Schermer:

More nationalism, sure.

Muzaffar Iqbal: So nationalism can be bad. Any belief can be bad. Perhaps skepticism can be bad? Michael Schermer: I agree. It’s the point you brought up initially: the problem is extremism, not fundamentalism per se. When fundamentalism expresses itself in some extreme way, then it can cause a problem.

Robert Kuhn End Commentary I’m fascinated by the rise of religion in an age of science. As globalization continues to feed on knowledge, increasing technology will accelerate personal intrusions and religious reactions so that the sociological consequences will produce an inevitable counterforce, when some people feel alienated or empty and others feel left behind or oppressed. This inevitable counterforce will often be expressed in the language of religion. (I find it ironic how fundamentalists use modern, Western technology, such as websites, to further their anti-modern, anti-Western agendas.)

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This may displease some, but I do not see much difference among fundamentalists of all beliefs—a common mindset unites them all. And of this I am sure: group exclusivity breeds antagonisms. I’d be surprised if any of today’s religions turns out to be uniquely true— and in the remote chance that one is, I’d also be mighty disappointed. But religion will not go away. There is something sitting at the center of human nature that yearns to soar far beyond our feeble bodies and extend far beyond our passing lives, something that demands our continuing attention. That’s real religion. We can’t ignore religion to get Closer To Truth.


Interviews with Expert Participants Muzaffar Iqbal Does public opinion confuse religious extremism with political extremism? We’re not talking about a purely religious war in the sense of having no connection with politics, with social oppression. The people who are fighting—for example, in the Middle East—they are not fighting on the basis of what Islam tells them. They are fighting on the basis of other things. If I am a 13-year-old boy living in Jerusalem, and my father and mother have been killed by a bomb, and I see no other future and no hope, and I only have my own body and a few little nails and some explosives, and I have no other means of doing anything, then that’s what I have and that’s what I will use. We are dealing with a broad social and political problem, we are not just dealing with a religious phenomenon. Talk about ritual in modern society It is part of human construction that we require ritual. When we perform religious rituals, they are a helpful orientation or means to find and feel something deeper. For example, prayer by itself is a ritual that involves stating certain sentences, making certain movements. But that’s only the outward, painted aspect of prayer. The inner aspect of prayer is that it makes us ready for something deeper than itself, something deeper than we can ever sense in our normal lives. In a certain sense, everything is ritual. When you turn on your computer, the computer goes through some rituals, it tests the memory, it tests the RAM, it goes through the kinds of the video cards, it displays all that. This is a ritual of technology. Little in our lives is not ritual.

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How would you like to be remembered? My biggest desire is to see a revival of the Islamic tradition of learning. And the way I see the Islamic tradition of learning is that it was deeply rooted in the two primary sources of Islam—worship and inquiry—and it produced a holistic approach to everything. So that’s my desire; that’s how I would like to be remembered—as someone who pursued the process of revival of their Islamic tradition of learning, which is holistic.

Donald Miller Do you think the general public properly appreciates science? There is certainly awareness that technological breakthroughs are creating strong challenges to traditional notions of religion. And so technology in some ways is polarizing the religious audience into people who want to keep it the way it used to be or return it to the way it was before technology, and people who are saying we definitely need to reconceptualize our religious beliefs in order to account for and accommodate these technological changes. Whom do you most admire and why? In terms of my own field of study, I go back to the classic theorists, scholars who were writing around the turn of the last century, such as Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Emil Durkheim, a French sociologist. Going back further, I’ve been influenced by Karl Marx. Interestingly enough, all of these pioneering scholars were strong critics of religion, and they actually influenced me in seeing the potentially negative and even the pathological side of religion. I think the reason I admire them is that they had a certain intellectual honesty to the way that they approached religion. At the same time, my personal criticism of them is that in many ways they always saw a limited slice of religion, and with the exception of people like William James, another one of my heroes, they had it wrong about religion. But just because I disagree with their conclusions about religion doesn’t mean that I don’t read them, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the brilliance of their insight. Even today, we’re still looking at religion through their intellectual lenses. What are the key developments in your field? The major development in the sociology of religion is that the classical theorists who were almost unanimously convinced that religion was going to decline and disappear were proven wrong. Sometime about 15 years ago, when religion was supposed to have already been dead or dying, it became obvious that the classical theorists were wrong, that religion is in

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fact in an ascendancy in many cultures, so that contemporary scholars were going to have to reevaluate their assessment of those classical theories. The major switch that has happened in the last decade or two is really from an abundance of theories about the secularization of religion to new theories about the reemergence of religion and the desecularization of society. Some of these trends related to religion were predicted, such as increasing privatization of beliefs (and other things), a primary trend in which people, particularly young people, are now making choices about their religion or belief system rather than simply adopting an inherited religious tradition. It’s particularly true of Generation Xers, who differ from their grandparents, who were much more likely, if they were born a Catholic, to remain a Catholic, or if born a Methodist to be remain a Methodist. Right now, a large percentage of people, irrespective of what they were born, decide to make their own choices and switch religions. Are there ‘‘good’’ and ’’bad’’ religions? We can’t just dichotomize religion in two categories. On the one hand, imagining religion as something, as Freud would say, that is infantile, or something, as Marx would say, that is an opiate of the people. And then, on the other hand, asserting that can also be ‘‘good religion,’’ which is religion that is challenging us rather than comforting us. I disagree with such radical dichotomies, because I think it is often possible that religion can be comforting, can be a compensation for the stresses and strains of life, and yet at the same time, actually empower people to try to go beyond their own individual self-interests and try to pursue higher goals. My own sense is while we like to dichotomize and label things, I’m not convinced that such characterizations are true to most people’s experience. What is your concept of God? I think that the moment we name who God is we’re involved in some act of idolatry. I definitely do not see God as someone who is out there riding the clouds. I don’t see God literally up there somewhere. I tend to have more of a notion of God as someone who is deep within us. I also have something of a pantheistic view that God is somehow everywhere, the source of energy, the source of life. I also think, however, that God is a concept that we invent. This does not necessarily suggest a negative, because we need to acknowledge that we have dependencies and that we are not self-sufficient. Why do you think people are religious? It probably doesn’t have that much to do with abstract notions of truth. It probably has a lot more to do with the fact that religious communities are places where people can gather, where they can socialize with each other,

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where they can feel affirmed, where they can share their needs and burdens. I’m not trying to downplay the issue of truth, but I don’t think most people come to religion out of some kind of abstract speculation about whether God is real. I think that religious belief and associations are typically more often born out of people’s personal experiences. Considering my own beliefs, I tend to take a more experiential approach to religion and my analysis of religion.

Michael Shermer Will technology become increasingly disruptive? I don’t think technology is fundamentally destructive. All virtually embrace technology; even the technophobes who lambast it in op-ed pieces in the New York Times are themselves writing and speaking under the very blanket of freedom that technology provides—I think they are terribly hypocritical. Medical technologies have allowed these anti-technology critics to live long enough to write op-ed pieces against technology. Everybody uses technology. The problem is simply that anything that is new and novel is foreign and scary to people—this will always be the case—but it’s just a question of getting used to it. Take human cloning, for example. It is going to happen. It doesn’t matter whether Congress bans it or not, it is going to happen. It’s going to happen somewhere outside of America first and it will happen in America in stealth. It is going to happen—and then everyone will get used to it, then it’ll be no big deal. But then there will be some other new technology to rail against. Would you welcome cybernetic implants? Of course I would. Who wouldn’t? It’s just what you get used to. Some people say, ‘‘I wouldn’t want to live past my natural age, it just wouldn’t be right.’’ Oh really? Well, let’s say you’re 70 now; okay, tomorrow your time is up. ‘‘Oh, no, wait a minute,’’ they will say, ‘‘I’ll go another year.’’ Then at the end of the additional year, someone will say, ‘‘Tomorrow we pull the plug,’’ and they again say, ‘‘Oh no, no, no, give me yet another year.’’ And of course there is no point, as long as you are reasonably healthy, that anyone wants to die. (However, if you are in an absolutely miserable physical state, in constant pain and suffering, and if you want to die, that’s understandable.) I just can’t imagine anyone who is healthy not agreeing to do whatever is necessary to continue to live, and to live with maximum facilities, even if this means using whatever technologies are available, implants or explants or drugs or whatever.


Chapter 15

Can We Believe in Both Science and Religion?

They are age-old antagonists, science and religion. But if we seek ultimate meaning in our fleeting and ephemeral lives, and ultimate purpose in our persisting and ineffable universe, there is an irrepressible yearning to harmonize science and religion. But is harmonizing science and religion wishful thinking? Long considered adversaries on the battlefield of grand worldviews because at their most fundamental level both claim to do much the same thing, science and religion each claim privilege to access ultimate truth, to provide deep insight into the nature of the world around us, and to give a profound sense of our place or purpose in the Universe. Science is founded on empiricism and analysis; religion on revelation and faith. Given their different foundations, can they ever be harmonized? Should they? Or do science and religion simply inhabit divergent, nonoverlapping spheres of influence—’’Magesteria’’ in Stephen J. Gould’s term —with no real meaning ever able to pass between the two? In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the relationship between science and religion. Why is this happening, and why now? This is a topic with strong views. On the one hand, some claim that religion is nonsense and that a dialogue between science and religion is a waste of time because at best it would give false hope to religion and at worst sustain mental oppression. On the other hand, other people believe that true science must be guided by religious understanding, that wherever science is shown to conflict with religion that science should be re-evaluated.

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Closer To Truth: Science, Meaning, and the Future

Approached rationally, here are some questions to ask. How does scientific knowledge alter our perception of religion? In fact, is there any such a thing as ‘‘religious knowledge’’ or is it only religious belief ? And is it possible for science to bring deeper meaning to religion, instead of undermining and eroding its basic tenets? But if so, should science have such a supporting role, sustaining the vision of religion? Or should science offer a new and more honest moral and ethical structure, replacing in the future what religion has dominated in the past? In this chapter, a skeptic takes on a Christian theologian and a scientist who is a devout Muslim. The issues are nothing but the biggest—whether or not belief in an all-powerful, eternal deity is truly compatible with scientific principles and discoveries. For the theologian and the Islamic scientist, the antipathy between science and religion has been overplayed. They make the case that science and religion can coexist peacefully, even productively. The skeptic counters that conflict is inevitable in the face of our growing knowledge base and the total absence of any kind of rational proof of a deity’s existence. They all agree that recent discoveries in cosmology and neuroscience have cast doubt on beliefs central to most of the world’s major religions, such as a deity creating the universe and the belief that humans possess an immortal soul.

Expert Participants Muzaffar Iqbal Founder and President, Center for Islam and Science; Regional Director for the Muslim World, Center for Theology and Natural Science; editor, Kalam newsletter on Islam and Science

Nancey Murphy Professor of Christian Philosophy, Fuller Theological Seminary; Director, Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences; author, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning

Michael Shermer President, Skeptics Society; Publisher, Skeptics magazine; author, How We Believe, Why People Believe Weird Things, and Why Darwin Matters; Columnist, Scientific American magazine


Muzaffar Iqbal: I did science for most of my life, and for me, science and religion are just one thing. One single thing. It is not that one has a scientific worldview and a religious worldview, that you have God and you have science. No, it’s just one single thing. The Islamic religious tradition doesn’t

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deal with how things work; it just states why. It was left to the scientists and the philosophers to deal with the question of how. These are two very, very clearly distinguishable questions, why and how? Michael Schermer: But aren’t you curious? If you say that God started the universe, aren’t you curious how he did it? Muzaffar Iqbal:

Exactly.

Michael Schermer: Don’t you want to know what forces God used? Did He use all four forces combined, and how did He do that? Well, that’s just science. Muzaffar Iqbal: Exactly; that is the domain of the intellectual tradition, and that’s what the philosophers and the scientists have been working on. But the why question is outside the domain of science. Why did God create it as He did? The faith tradition tells you that God created it and at the same time it also tells you that God says to go out and find out how He created it. Go and study oceans, look at mountains, investigate camels—all these created things are signs for humanity. The Koran gives the example of the honey bee and says at the end of the refrain, at the end of many verses, that this is a sign for people who think, for people who ponder, for people who reflect. This is a constant refrain in the Koran and this is the guiding principal for the Islamic scientific tradition—to go out and find. Robert Kuhn:

The same is true in the Old and New Testament as well.

Michael Schermer: I disagree with your distinction between how and why questions, that only the former can be answered by science. Evolutionary biologists ask ultimate why questions; for example, why do we like sweet fatty foods? We haven’t answered that. Nancey Murphy:

That’s the ultimate why question in your life?

Michael Schermer: weight. Muzaffar Iqbal:

Well if that’s your ultimate question. . .

Michael Schermer: Robert Kuhn: questions?

At the moment it is because I’m trying to lose some

I’m a basic kind of guy, you know, I like my food.

The point is a serious one. Can science answer ultimate why

Michael Schermer: Science can answer why as well as how questions. On sweet fatty foods, the how is the physiology of taste. But when we want to know why, we must explore our evolutionary history. Here is one kind of why answer from evolution: foods that are high in energy value (calories) and therefore vital for sustaining life are at once sweet tasting and high in fat content. Assume that these foods are somewhat rare and hard to get, so

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that in an evolutionary environment where there are long periods of drought, our ancestors would have had trouble getting these kinds of highly nutritious foods, and since one would want to store them up as much as possible, one would eat as much as one can of them. There is almost no satiation point on these kinds of foods. Hence, those of our ancestors who had developed an affinity for sweet fatty foods would have had an advantage in surviving the droughts, which would mean that over many generations, a taste affinity for sweet fatty foods would be selected for. This becomes obvious since those with the affinity for these foods would survive better than those who did not—and therefore those who like sweet fatty foods would be more likely to procreate than those who did not. So that’s kind of a why answer from science. Nancey Murphy: You are correct to say that you can’t make a neat distinction and say that science deals with the how and theology deals with the why, because science does deal with some of the whys as well as all of the how’s. But these still leaves open the kinds of why questions that Muzaffar and I believe exist. Michael Schermer: moral questions.

Moral questions; science isn’t so good at answering

Nancey Murphy: Morality is one area, but the most important question is, why is there anything rather than nothing? Robert Kuhn: This is the singularly most fundamental question that human minds can ask, and it is a why question not only unanswerable by science, but not even addressable by science. Michael Schermer:

I have the answer right here (joke!)

Muzaffar Iqbal: I would like to distinguish between two kinds of why questions. First is the why question of science: why is there hydrogen bonding, why this 104.5 degree angle between hydrogen atoms; why do all honey bees all over the world have always made hexagonal honey cells? Michael Schermer: Because they tried lots of different shapes and sizes and the best one that evolved. Muzaffar Iqbal: These why questions are in the domain of science; these are one kind of why question. The other kind of why question reaches up and out to ultimate things: Why does the universe exist? This is another kind of why question. So there are two kinds of why questions. Nancey Murphy: Michael is right that current scientific work in cosmology and cosmic origins have really muddied the theological water a bit. The distinction between science and theology is not as clear as it would have been 100 years ago where it seemed absolutely certain that science could

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never begin to touch the question of where did the universe come from, why is it here, why is it the way it is? Muzaffar Iqbal: But that is the same kind of why as why is there hydrogen bonding, just a more sophisticated version. Michael Schermer: How about, why should there be something instead of nothing? As we’ve said, you cannot get any bigger than that. That’s about as deep as it goes. Muzaffar Iqbal: Even in cosmology, we’re still dealing with—after the beginning of the universe—the existence of physical laws. Michael Schermer:

What would be before that?

Nancey Murphy: Boundaries have become so much messier because although we used to be inclined to say that there could not have been anything prior to the beginning of the universe, now we are not so sure Robert Kuhn: We have universe models of expansion and collapse, perhaps in endless cycles. We have multi-universe models, built on inflation theory, where baby universes keep splitting off and forming new universes, also perhaps endlessly. And we have multiverse models where different universes exist in different dimensions or on different ‘‘branes’’ (in different dimensions). Nancey Murphy: So now it is meaningful to ask what was there before the Big Bang in our universe. Robert Kuhn:

But you always need the laws of physics.

Michael Schermer: They may not be ours though; the laws of physics may be different in these different universes. Nancey Murphy: But it is legitimate to ask the question, why are the laws of physics just right for us to be here? One might say that that this is the ultimate design question and only a religious answer can be provided. But you can also hypothesize that this universe, the one in which we live, is just one of innumerable other universes, so that no special answer is needed. Robert Kuhn: This is part of a line of reasoning called the Anthropic Principle and it has fascinated and infuriated many scientists and theologians. In simple terms, the anthropic principle states that the reason that we human beings just happen to be in a universe where all the laws are just perfect for our existence, however improbable such an extraordinary coincidence at first may seem, is that if this were not so, if our universe did not meet all these stringent requirements, we would not be here to make the observation. In other words, only in a perfect universe can we be wondering why our universe is so perfect. (As stated, this is the Weak anthropic principle. The

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Strong anthropic principle dips further into the murky depths of universal uniqueness by claiming that our universe must have those properties which allow sentient life to develop within it.) Nancey Murphy: So theology’s unique claim to answer ultimate why questions is muddied up. Michael Schermer: Nancey, you know everything I know about all this stuff. So why do you believe and why don’t I? Nancey Murphy: It really comes down to my own personal experience: growing up in a Christian home, praying and finding that there really seemed to be somebody at the other end listening and responding and talking. Basically it comes down to a matter of religious experience. But as you are pointing out, if you hold to a belief position and you set out to make it rational— that is, you set out to find logical, analytically defensible reasons for your belief—you will have difficulty. So the reason why my basic motivation is looking for reasons why God exists rather for reasons why God does not exist really comes down to my personal history. Muzaffar Iqbal: Within Islamic intellectual religion the word ‘‘nufs’’ is associated with soul. Now nufs is physical, or a combination of physical and nonphysical elements. When I say nonphysical I mean the ideas and thoughts that run through your mind, not the neurons that are in your mind, but the thoughts that neurons supposedly are carrying (as neuroscience would tell us). Some element of physicality is also involved; so nufs is one thing and ruah is another thing—ruah is also in Hebrew. Robert Kuhn: Ruah in Hebrew can mean spirit or soul, whose ambiguous essence can be either physical or nonphysical, or it can mean unambiguously physical things like wind or breath. Muzaffar Iqbal: So in Islam nufs and ruah are clearly distinguished. And the Koran talks about these two as totally separate and distinct entities. I think what neuroscience is doing is talking about nufs. Michael Schermer: But neuroscience knows how thoughts are generated: we have the little synapses between two neurons across which chemical transmitters pass signals. If there are no synapses, there are no thoughts. So how can thoughts get carried on into eternity? Muzaffar Iqbal: I have a very clear picture of this. Neurons are carriers of thought; they are not thought themselves. Neurons are one thing and thought is another thing. Michael Schermer: Muzaffar Iqbal:

No.

To me they are.

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Michael Schermer: To you they are because that’s what you want to believe. You’re not making any sense. Muzaffar Iqbal: What neuroscientists are measuring through their instruments are neurons; they are not measuring thought. Robert Kuhn: Nancey, when you say you believe in a physicalist explanation of the soul, you also say that this explanation is non-reductive, which means you do not believe we can ever ‘‘reduce’’ this physical description of the soul to the basic laws of physics and chemistry alone. Isn’t Muzaffar also arguing for a non-reductive explanation for the soul? Nancey Murphy: What he was saying about neurons and thoughts being different is a good example of a non-reductive approach. The firing of a neuron is that which enables there to be a thought—there would be no thoughts without the firing of neurons—but we still have to make a conceptual distinction between a neuron firing and thinking. Muzaffar Iqbal: Are we talking on the same wavelength? I’m talking about nufs and ruah and that there are two separate entities. Nancey Murphy: No. I am committed to saying that everything mental, all we speak about when we say ‘‘mind,’’ is physically constructed without need of a nonphysical addition of any kind. Robert Kuhn: Yet you do also believe that God designed, in one way or another, the physical human brain and human mind to have spiritual as well as mental capacities. Nancey Murphy: Yes. I don’t talk about spirit or soul as an entity or substance, but I do believe spiritual capacities emerge from our complex neural equipment in a social/cultural context. Robert Kuhn: Back to Michael’s question about the resurrection, in which, Nancey, you do believe. How would that occur? Nancey Murphy: The resurrection is the part of Christian theology that we can say least about. One underlying motivation why we believe it is going to happen is a moral argument that there seems to need to be some life after death if there is going to be justice in the universe. That argument has led to the invention both of the concept of resurrection of the body and also the concept of an immortal soul that lives on after death. But the only reason Christians have for believing that the resurrection is literally going to happen is the model of Jesus being raised from the dead, and the only clue that we have about what that is supposed to be like is a set of strangely conflicting stories about what the resurrected person of Jesus was like. Michael Schermer: What if Jesus was in sort of a comatose state for three days due to an epileptic seizure or some such thing?

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Nancey Murphy: That would be comparable to the resuscitation of an apparent corpse, who appears to be dead but is in fact alive—that is obviously not what is meant. The resurrection body is not material in the same way at all; the resurrection body is not composed of the same kind of material that we know. Robert Kuhn: Nancey, you certainly believe that all people who have died are totally dead and completely devoid of consciousness or awareness of any kind. Even those people who died as committed Christians are at this point just as dead—unconscious, non-conscious—they literally do not exist. The hope of the dead, in your belief, lies entirely in a resurrection, a re-creation of their lives in a different substance, sometime in the indefinite future. Nancey Murphy: death.

Right; there is no part of us that continues to exist after

Robert Kuhn: And to regain consciousness God would have to resurrect the body and recreate your thought patterns. Nancey Murphy: Basically, yes; re-create us in a different form, composed of a wholly different substance, because otherwise we would be equally subject to corruption and decay as we are in this life. Muzaffar Iqbal: There are so many interesting points that you made. I focus on your first point that the subject of the resurrection is the one area of the Christian tradition about which we are least sure. So it is with the Islamic tradition: this is an area about which we can hardly say anything except in metaphors, which won’t make any sense to you. Michael Schermer: something.

I like metaphors, but they have to be backed by

Muzaffar Iqbal: But here are also the areas in which Islamic and contemporary Christianity are worlds apart. In the very fundamentals in the concept of Jesus, for example, the Islamic belief is that he didn’t die, he was raised. Nancey Murphy: So you and Michael, our friendly skeptic, agree on the idea that Jesus didn’t die? Muzaffar Iqbal: Not quite. Michael doesn’t believe in Jesus being raised by God. The Islamic belief is that Jesus was not crucified and he was raised by God, and he will come back towards the end of history to restore things. Robert Kuhn:

You differ there, I’m sure.

Muzaffar Iqbal: That is a statement that comes right from the Koran and that is a statement of faith.

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Robert Kuhn: How do you see the relationship between science and theology, say 100 years from now? Michael Schermer: We would be having the same general discussion, but we would be using different examples. Instead of talking about God’s providence in this area or that area dealing with some conundrums of science today that we can’t explain, we will have explained all these and God won’t be involved in them anymore. Muzaffar Iqbal: I disagree with you. As a scientist I know that our means of investigation has been sharpening as we progress; science will surely bring us closer to reality, closer to understanding the nature of God than we are now, closer to truth. 100 years from we’ll be still closer to truth. Just consider the one domain of neuroscience, which is so fascinating and opening up so many new ways of thinking. If we had been sitting here having this debate 100 years ago, we would have had a very different discussion. We would have focused on the ‘‘clockwork universe’’ founded on the Newtonian physical concept of nature; we wouldn’t have had any concept of quantum physics. Nancey Murphy: When you look at the history of Christianity you can see that it has taken centuries for the Christian faith to be re-embodied, almost reincarnated, in the different cultures through which it has passed. Christianity is still, in many circles, struggling to come to terms with the scientific worldview, despite the fact that the scientific worldview is now 300 years old. For example, many people I know still envision history in terms of an imagined initial ‘‘golden age,’’ a catastrophic fall, and then basically no progress until the end. Whereas the evolutionary worldview (especially when you anchor it with Big Bang cosmology) gives us history that is pretty much an amorphous nothing in the beginning, and then a slow ascent of more and more complex forms, that ultimately results, whether by accident or by design, in human beings. So Christianity is yet fully to take on board that different, evolutionary sense of the timeline of universal history. It may take another 100 years or more for Christianity in general to absorb and internalize the very scientific issues that we are talking about today. Robert Kuhn: To take a specific example, do you think that in 100 years most Christians would not believe in the immortality of the soul? Nancey Murphy: take place.

I think that it might take 100 years for that change to

Michael Schermer: To retreat a tiny bit from my own position, I sometimes wonder if my preference for a scientific worldview, or even for a scientism worldview is just a personality preference. Maybe I am just the kind of person who doesn’t need the religious answers: I don’t get anything out of theology, in fact I find it kind of unfulfilling. But I like science, I am a science

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fanatic. I just like the scientific approach, its openendedness, the uncertainty of the process, the challenge of participation. But all this personal preference, of course, makes me wonder: well, maybe my reactions are the same as yours. You just have a personality preference for the religious worldview in the same way that I have a personality preference for the science worldview. I wonder whether each of us comes to our own conclusions because of our backgrounds. Robert Kuhn: I’m not sure where, in Michael’s opinion, that would leave objective reality, but I suspect that he would come down quickly on the side of science. Muzaffar Iqbal: Michael, I was intrigued by the way you phrased it. I appreciate your love for science, but you seemed to say that to have a scientific worldview means that one cannot also have a religious worldview. Nancey Murphy: I don’t think that psychological or sociological explanations of our personal preferences are incompatible with epistemological explanations of the nature of reality. I too love the scientific worldview; I see its appeals equally, at least I think I do. So, for me, it’s a matter of. . . Michael Schermer: Nancey Murphy:

. . ..making that one little step. That’s right.

Robert Kuhn: That ‘‘step’’ is not so little. Admitting even the possibility of the viability of a theological worldview is a massive leap. Muzaffar Iqbal: Granted that one’s worldview, one’s belief system, is socially construed, but I submit there is more to it than just that. Social existence is not the only determinant of what we believe; there is something more. True belief supersedes, or should supersede, one’s personal life experiences. Michael Schermer:

Maybe; maybe not.

Muzaffar Iqbal: It also depends on how much you know yourself, how much intimate contact you have with your own being? Michael Schermer:

What does that mean?

Muzaffar Iqbal: When Dikhr sat in his room and said I’m going to disbelieve every single thing that has been given to me, and he went step-by-step through his beliefs, he could not dismiss his own being as part of the process because he knew that he was there. Michael Schermer:

Let’s cut all the verbiage: why do you believe in God?

Muzaffar Iqbal: Because I know He exists. As Nancey said, He answers prayers; when you talk to Him, He answers.

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ROBERT KUHN END COMMENTARY Science and religion claim to do much the same thing: provide deep insight into the nature of the cosmos and our place or purpose in it. Science is founded on fact and analysis; religion on faith and revelation. This epistemological gap, this methodological chasm between empiricism and scripture for accessing truth, has meant that science, by requiring fact and rejecting faith, has been considered an adversary or even a mortal enemy of religion. Yet scholarly and popular interest in the relationship between science and religion is accelerating, a trend that reflects an irrepressible human yearning to discern the essence of reality and the meaning of human awareness. As the evidence of history shows, it is a trend that will likely continue. The relationship between science and religion, however complex, is not symmetrical. Good religion cannot avoid science, since religion must deal with physical things. But good science should not involve religion, since science has no business with spiritual things. Can they be harmonized, these two worldviews? It is polite to say ‘‘Yes,’’ more honest, perhaps, to say ‘‘No’’ or at best ‘‘Not yet.’’ Should we seek the unseekable, plumb the unfathomable? As human beings, we cannot do otherwise.


Interviews with Expert Participants Muzaffar Iqbal Does the general public properly appreciate science? My answer is yes. The general public sees the conveniences of modern life that science produced, such as the enormous improvement in health care systems. The general public also appreciates advances in communications, travel, agriculture, and in so many other areas. In Islam, is there a difference between science and religion? In Islam, the scientific tradition came into existence before the sixteenth century from the same worldview and from the same sources from which the religious tradition had come into existence earlier. Therefore, there was no such thing as ‘‘Islam and science.’’ And we find no one in the Islamic intellectual traditions before the sixteenth century writing about Islam and science. The idea that segregates these two entities, science and religion, as two separate entities did not exist in Islam. Both science and religion grew out of the same thing; they came from the same root. Islam does not construe the study of the natural world as a separate entity apart from religion.

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Why did you become a scientist? I remember very clearly the beginning of my intellectually conscious life. I had this huge restlessness inside myself to ask both the how and the why questions. Why are we here? What are we doing? How does the universe function? And most of all, how does my own body function? These were fundamental questions, and I remember walking for hours and thinking all these things. And I caught an answer; at one point I felt directed towards chemistry; to understand chemistry would be a key to both the physical and biological worlds. Everything in the body is construed chemically. The deeper I went into chemistry, the more intriguing it became. What other subjects besides science have contributed to your development? Along with my interest in science came my interest in literature. I was fascinated by a construction of reality that exists through literature outside the real world, through fiction. I read all the classics. I was fascinated by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Herman Melville, who still remains my favorite—people who have struggled with the turmoil in the human spirit, people who have written about the inner struggle that takes place in the soul. Faulkner is one of my favorites, too. So science and literature went hand in hand in my life for several years. And so as I studied chemistry I also wrote novels. Why did you become disillusioned with science? By the time I finished my Ph.D., it was very clear to me that the answers that I’m seeking do not lie in science. My Ph.D. work was in the synthesis of new chemicals, which turned out to be a disenchanting experience, because at the end of the day, I was standing in front of a machine counting the number of drops coming down. I was looking into these NMR—nuclear magnetic resonance—spectras coming out and trying to make sense of the behavior of these molecules. In science, I found none of those idealistic things that you do in order to understand how nature works. Contemporary science is controlled and construed by the market economy. At least 90 percent of the scientific research we do is to solve certain problems, problems that are connected with doing our daily business—the market and what we want to sell. So we are not really seeking scientific truth at a fundamental level. Sure, some scientists are discovering hidden secrets of nature, but only a small fraction of real-world science is doing that. The science I did wasn’t part of that exploration. Most large-scale science requires huge amounts of funding, and that funding comes from government agencies or large commercial organizations (like pharmaceutical companies), which carry political baggage. So I got disenchanted with practical science.

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What advice do you have for young people? Because of the power of science and all the derivative technologies that are dominating our lives, I think it’s very important to be aware of the fact that there are numerous things in human existence that are beyond the realm of science. Science, to a great extent, has an effect on the way we think, the way we talk, the way we behave, the way we live. We need to be consciously clear that science is not the totality of reality.

Michael Shermer How did you become a card-carrying skeptic? I got into skepticism after I had completed my doctorate in the history of science. I also have a master’s degree in experimental psychology, and I was always interested in the paranormal, pseudoscience, and all kinds of fringe groups—ESP, UFOs, aliens, all that stuff. You have to be made of wood not to be interested. It’s fascinating. But what I discovered in science is there is actually a method for discerning truth, a way of getting answers to these questions, where you can find out if they are really true or not. So, while I was teaching, I founded a public science lecture series at Caltech, and I started to publish a magazine. But then Skeptic magazine, the lecture series, Skeptic Society, and so forth, became so big that I quit teaching to do all this full time. I then took this same genre of material and wrote some books, which have done well. It’s become something of a living. Whom do you most admire and why? My first two books—Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe—were each dedicated, the first to Carl Sagan and the second to Stephen J. Gould. These are my two intellectual mentors and heroes, as it were, mainly because of their passionate love of science and their embracing of science as a comprehensive worldview. I admire their ability to communicate science to the general public in a way that is both stimulating and fulfilling. I think they make science almost spiritual. What do you think are recent key scientific advancements? In terms of the biggest questions of all—dealing with who we are, where we came from, where we’re going, how the universe started and where it’s going—the biggest areas in contemporary science are cosmology and evolutionary biology. These fields deal with the large, almost theological-type questions that science is now daring to ask and trying to answer. In terms of understanding how we know these things—how our thoughts are formed, where we get belief systems like religious belief systems or even scientific

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belief systems—I think the action is in psychology, particularly the cognitive sciences. What is the general public’s opinion about science these days? We used to talk about the ‘‘two cultures,’’ the science culture of the physical and biological sciences and the non-science culture including the arts and humanities—with a large chasm in between. That gap has largely been filled in recent years with popular science books that are read by the general population. If you want to feel like part of the literati, you must have some knowledge beyond pop culture and you really need to read Stephen Hawking, Stephen J. Gould, Carl Sagan, and so forth. These scientists are now a core of the body of general literature, and as a result science is trickling down to the general public. Most educated people, non-scientists, now know things like the Big Bang, black holes, wormholes, and punctuated equilibrium. You see these things on The Simpsons. When you’re on The Simpsons, you’ve made it into popular culture. Can science inform morality? In terms of what is moral or immoral, that is a much more difficult question for science to answer. I think that at the moment the best science can do is to provide data to inform moral choices. This is not dispositive, but it is important. Whether you can get scientific consensus on, say, whether abortion is moral or amoral, is problematic. But you can certainly inform your own personal choice by studying when the neural template is complete and when thought can actually happen. If a being can’t generate thought at all, then we should be able to agree that the being is hardly human. Not everyone would agree with that conclusion, of course, but at least everyone should inform his or her personal choice with scientific data. Beyond that, I’m not sure. What are the origins of morality? The naturalistic fallacy that you can’t go from what is to what ought to be is largely true. But the old barriers are breaking down in the sense that science is attempting to shed light on issues related to morality and ethics, at least in terms of their origins. Why are we moral? This is the topic of my forthcoming book, Why We Are Moral. What are the origins of morality? Why are we the moral species? Are chimpanzees moral or immoral? What about orangutans, gorillas, dogs? Arguably animals exhibit a modicum of a moral sense: elephants seem to grieve when they lose one of their loved ones. You see emotional components there. But in no species, other than ours, do you see moral content. Why is that? Well, science is starting to answer these kinds of questions.

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Nancey Murphy Why did you become a scientist? I started out as a psychology major, and when I was in college I was dismayed by the form that psychology took—behaviorism. That realization launched me into philosophy. I studied the philosophy of science, but toward the end of my doctoral program, I realized that I had two reasons for wanting to change. One was that to do philosophy of science really well, you needed to know physics, and I don’t. But also I was exposed to an atheistic environment for the first time in my life. And the questions about the rationality of religious belief were much more pressing for me personally— and also a whole lot harder to answer—than the questions about the rationality of science. So I decided to switch to the philosophy of religion, and whereas I was unwilling to try to go back and learn physics, I was willing to take another degree and learn theology in order that I would know something about the content about which I was philosophizing. What are the key developments in your field? The key contemporary excitement is in the philosophy of mind. This is the field that traditionally examines the nature of the human person. For decades, or even centuries, it was the sort of field that would just drive you crazy with frustration because the arguments for dualism and against dualism, for materialism and against materialism, were just cyclical if not repetitive. But in recent years, with developments in the neural sciences, there have been tremendous advances in the philosophy of mind. The primary result is that very few philosophers now are body-soul or body-mind dualists [editor’s note: literally believing in two radically different kinds of substances]. Instead, philosophers now understand our higher human capacities as a product of our hyper-complex nervous systems and our culture. This means that most philosophers now are physicalists or materialists [editor’s note: meaning that only the physical or material is real and that the physical brain is all the material one needs to construct the human mind]. But, at the same time, most of the people in our culture are still dualists—or even ‘‘tricotomists,’’ who believe that humans essence is comprised of three parts: a body, a soul, and a spirit. So as the word leaks out, this switch to physicalism or materialism is going to have a major cultural impact. What is the philosophical method? Philosophy is pretty much pure thinking. However, styles of thought have changed quite a good deal from one era to another. I teach a course for doctoral students in which I look at the history of the development of the idea of what is the philosophical method? And 10 weeks is not enough to cover it all! There have also been major changes in theology. Some theologians

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would say that the purpose of theology is merely to interpret the content of the scriptures, others would say that theology is a discipline that reflects on human religious awareness, and still others would assert that you should be doing both all the time. My own entree into theology was taken from my perspective in the philosophy of science, and I was asking, ‘‘What are the parallels in theology?’’ And of course the data for theology differs from the data for philosophy, just as the data for biology differs from the data for physics. But what I was able to argue is that the structure of reasoning is the same between theology and philosophy, or at least could be the same in those two radically different kinds of disciplines. Your goal in both cases is to form hypotheses that attempt to explain the data in the most coherent and parsimonious way. Are philosophy and science converging? Anglo-American philosophy went through a period in the twentieth century where it called itself ‘‘analytic philosophy’’ and it made a very sharp distinction between what philosophers do, which is to study conceptual issues, and what scientists do, which is study to empirical issues. But in the last generation or so, it has become clear that it is not really possible to make that sharp of a distinction. Our concepts evolve in light of new knowledge. And so the most exciting work that is being done in philosophy right now is by philosophers who are conscientiously taking on more scientific advancement and asking: should not these new discoveries, new ways of thinking, make a difference to the way that we philosophers have traditionally been talking about things? For example, in considering the nature of the human person, the old mind-body problem, philosophers are embracing the latest discoveries and theories of neuroscience. In our cultural heritage we have a strong tradition that human beings are comprised of a body and a soul, but science shows us that we don’t need a soul to explain all of the things that human beings do. And so all of us, including in my opinion theologians, simply have to change our traditional conceptual resources for talking about human nature. What is the basic assumption of theology as it relates to science? The basic organizing assumption is the notion that the universe is regular enough and predictable enough so that science becomes worthwhile. Supposedly, this idea came from the Judeo-Christian view of God. From this perspective, God was not constrained by the laws of logic, so you wouldn’t be able to know what God had done in His creation simply by sitting in your study and indulging in pure thinking. But if God is faithful and regular, as we believe Him to be, the universe should therefore be regular enough and predictable enough to make it worth studying. This is an important place where the scientific traditions and Western theological traditions come

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together. Of course, the major underlying assumption for the monotheistic religions—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—is that God exists, that God is in some sense personal, and God has personal interest in communicating with us. Can science replace religion? Science could never replace religion because it has no capacity to do so. Science simply describes what happens in naturalistic terms. What causes what? Science seeks theoretical generalizations that can unify specific observations. This means that by nature science can never involve itself with anything beyond the physical and can never approach ultimate reality, unless of course the atheists are right and the universe itself is ultimate reality. Then science is talking about ultimate reality. But science can never prove that the universe itself is ultimate reality. So we will always need to answer the question, what is ultimate reality? And while religions cannot answer this question definitively, science by nature is blind to the issue of ultimate reality [editor’s note: as long as the issue of ultimate reality is defined as admitting the possibility of there being a nonphysical component or aspect of ultimate reality]. Does God act through the laws of natural science? By definition, all of the natural processes that we see appear to us as natural processes, so that as religious believers we have to infer that God is acting through them. So even if we could be sent back in time, even if we could watch the Big Bang happen at the most microscopic level, we still wouldn’t see the hand of God. We would simply see the Big Bang happening. If God is involved in the affairs of the world—and I believe that He is—He must operate on a different plane.


Why Ultimate Reality Works for Us: Toward a Taxonomy of Possible Explanations

When I was 12, in the summer between seventh and eighth grade, a sudden realization struck such fright that I strove desperately to blot it out, to eradicate the disruptive idea as if it were a lethal mental virus. My body shuddered with dread; an abyss had yawned open. Five decades later I feel its frigid blast still. Why not Nothing?1 What if everything had always been Nothing? Not just emptiness, not just blankness, and not just emptiness and blankness forever, but not even the existence of emptiness, not even the meaning of blankness, and no forever. Wouldn’t it have been easier, simpler, more logical, to have Nothing rather than something?2 The question would become my life partner, and even as I learned the rich philosophical legacy of Nothing,3 I do not pass a day without its disquieting presence. I am haunted. Here we are, human beings, conscious and abruptly self-aware, with lives fleetingly short, engulfed by a vast, seemingly oblivious cosmos of unimaginable enormity.4 While ‘‘Why Not Nothing?’’ may seem impenetrable, ‘‘Why This Universe?’’ revivified by remarkable advances in cosmology, may be accessible. While they are not at all the same question, perhaps if we can begin to decipher the latter, we can begin to decrypt the former. ‘‘Why This Universe?’’ assumes there is Something, and seeks the root reason why it works for us. I am the creator and host of the PBS television series Closer To Truth, and for the past several years I have been bringing together scientists and scholars to examine the meaning and implications of state-of-the-art science. The next Closer To Truth series, now in production, focuses on cosmology and fundamental physics, the philosophy of cosmology, and the philosophy of religion, and thus I have been interviewing cosmologists, physicists, philosophers, and theologians, asking them, among other questions, ‘‘Why This Universe?’’ From their many answers, and from my own night musings, I

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have constructed a taxonomy5 that I present here as a heuristic to help get our minds around this ultimate and perennial question.

The Problem to be Solved In recent years, the search for scientific explanations of reality has been energized by increasing recognition that the laws of physics and the constants that are embedded in these laws all seem exquisitely ‘‘fine tuned’’ to allow, or to enable, the existence of stars and planets and the emergence of life and mind. If the laws of physics had much differed, if the values of their constants had much changed, or if the initial conditions of the universe had much varied, what we know to exist would not exist, since all things of size and substance would not have formed. Stephen Hawking presented the problem this way: Why is the universe so close to the dividing line between collapsing again and expanding indefinitely? In order to be as close as we are now, the rate of expansion early on had to be chosen fantastically accurately. If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been less by one part in 1010, the universe would have collapsed after a few million years. If it had been greater by one part in 1010, the universe would have been essentially empty after a few million years. In neither case would it have lasted long enough for life to develop. Thus one either has to appeal to the anthropic principle or find some physical explanation of why the universe is the way it is.6

To Roger Penrose, the ‘‘extraordinary degree of precision (or ‘fine tuning’) that seems to be required for the Big Bang of the nature that we appear to 123 observe. . .in phase-space-volume terms, is one part in 1010 at least.’’ Penrose sees ‘‘two possible routes to addressing this question. . .We might take the position that the initial condition was an ‘act of God’. . .or we might seek some scientific/mathematical theory.’’ His strong inclination, he says, ‘‘is certainly to try to see how far we can get with the second possibility.’’7 To Steven Weinberg, it is ‘‘peculiar’’ that the calculated value of the vacuum energy of empty space (due to quantum fluctuations in known fields at well-understood energies) is ‘‘larger than observationally allowed by 1056,’’ and if this were to be cancelled ‘‘by simply including a suitable cosmological constant in the Einstein field equations [General Relativity], the cancellation would have to be exact to 56 decimal places.’’ Weinberg states that ‘‘No symmetry argument or adjustment mechanism could be found that would explain such a cancellation.’’8 To Leonard Susskind, ‘‘the best efforts of the best physicists, using our best theories, predict Einstein’s cosmological constant incorrectly by 120 orders of magnitude!’’ ‘‘That’s so bad,’’ he says, ‘‘it’s funny.’’ He adds that ‘‘for a bunch of numbers, none of them particularly small, to cancel one another to such precision would be a numerical coincidence so incredibly absurd that there must be some other answer.’’9

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The problem to be solved is even broader than this. Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, presents ‘‘just six numbers’’ that he argues are necessary for our emergence from the Big Bang. A minuscule change in any one of these numbers would have made the universe and life, as we know them, impossible.10 What to make of our astonishingly good fortune? In 1938, Paul Dirac saw coincidences in cosmic and atomic physics;11 in 1961, Robert Dicke noted that the age of the universe ‘‘now’’ is conditioned by biological factors;12 and in 1973, Brandon Carter used the phrase ‘‘Anthropic Principle,’’ which in his original formulation simply draws attention to such uncontroversial truths as that the universe must be such as to admit, at some stage, the appearance of observers within it.13 Others then took up this oddly evocative idea, calling what seems to be a tautological statement the ‘‘Weak Anthropic Principle,’’ as distinguished from what they defined as the ‘‘Strong Anthropic Principle,’’ which makes the teleological claim that the universe must have those properties that allow or require intelligent life to develop.14 Steven Weinberg used anthropic reasoning more rigorously to provide an upper bound on the vacuum energy (cosmological constant) and to give some idea of its expected value. He argued that ‘‘it is natural for scientists to find themselves in a subuniverse in which the vacuum energy takes a value suitable for the appearance of scientists.’’15 Although the Anthropic Principle (Weak) appears perfectly obvious— some say that a logical tautology cannot be an informative statement about the universe—inverting its orientation may elicit explanatory surprise: What we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers. Such expectations then suggest, perhaps inevitably, the startling insight that there could be infinite numbers of separate regions, domains, or ‘‘universes,’’ each immense in its own right, each with different laws and values—and because the overwhelming majority of these regions, domains, or universes would be non-life-permitting, it would be hardly remarkable that we are not in them and do not observe them. One could conclude, therefore, that while our universe seems to be so incredibly fine-tuned for the purpose of producing human beings, and therefore so specially designed for us, it is in fact neither. Since the 1970s, theists have come to use the fine-tuning argument as empirical evidence of a creator, assuming that there are only two explanations: God and chance. But posing such a stark choice between God and chance is to construct a false and misleading dichotomy. Since the Anthropic Principle leads to multiple universes, a ‘‘multiverse,’’ other possible explanations are made manifest. I have documented 27 such explanations, a constellation of what I’ll call ‘‘ultimate reality generators,’’ in a kind of typology of cosmological conjecture. I’m sure there are more, or some could be subdivided, but generally the taxonomy can be structured with four overarching categories: One Universe Models, Multiple Universe Models, Nonphysical

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Causes, and Illusions. My claim is that the set of these four categories is universally exhaustive, meaning that whatever the true explanation of ‘‘Why This Universe?’’, it would have to be classified into one (or more) of these categories (irrespective of whether we ever discover or discern that true explanation).16 Yet the set of the 27 possible explanations which compose the categories is not universally exhaustive, nor is there practical hope of making it so: always, unless we can ever answer the ‘‘Why This Universe?’’ question with certainty and finality (a dubious prospect), there will be other explanations out there that cannot be logically excluded. Furthermore, while it might seem tidy for these explanations to be mutually exclusive—meaning that no two can both be right—this simplicity cannot be achieved. The explanations, and their categories, can be combined in any number of ways—in series, in parallel, and/or nested. The 27 possible explanations that follow, these ultimate reality generators, are based on criteria that are logically permissible, a logic that for some may seem lenient. I do not, however, confuse speculation with science. Logical possibilities should not be mistaken for scientific theories or even scientific possibilities. 17 A physicist’s speculations do not morph, as if by cosmological alchemy or professional courtesy, from metaphysics into established physics. That said, some of the more intriguing metaphysical possibilities are being proffered by physicists.18 I provide no critique of the explanations; all are subject to withering attacks from experts, as well they should be. And to the objection that the lines of the taxonomy are drawn too sharply, or that the explanations overlap, I can only empathize and encourage the objector to offer a more refined version.

1. One Universe Models We begin with traditional nontheist explanations (traditionally, one recalls, there was only one universe), which also include a radically nontraditional explanation, and the philosophical positions that the question makes no sense, and that even if it did, it still has no answer. 1.1 Meaningless Question. Big ‘‘Why’’ questions like ‘‘Why This Universe?’’ are words without meaning and sounds without sense; this content emptiness is epitomized by the ultimate ‘‘Why’’ question, ‘‘Why Not Nothing?’’19 As a matter of language, to ask for the ultimate explanation of existence is to ask a question that has no meaning. Human semantics and syntax, and perhaps the human mind itself, are utterly incapable of attaching intelligibility to this concept. Words transcend boundaries of ordinary usage so as to lose their grounding.20 The deep incoherence here is confirmed by the fact that only two kinds of possible answers are permissible—an infinite regress

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of causation or something that is inherently self-existing—neither of which is confirmable or even cogent. Any apparent answers, when unpacked properly, are but tautological restatements of the original question. 1.2 Brute Fact. The question makes sense but no answer is possible, even in principle. There has been and is only one universe and its laws seem fine-tuned to human existence just because this is the way it is; the universe and all its workings stand as a ‘‘brute fact’’21 of existence, a terminus of a series of explanations that can brook no further explanation.22 All things just happen to be, and ‘‘there is no hint of necessity to reduce this arbitrariness.’’23 1.3 Necessary/Only Way. There has been and is only one universe and its laws seem fine-tuned to human existence because, due to the deep essence of these laws, they must take the form that they do, and the values of their constants must be the only quantities they could have. It could never be the case that these laws or values could have any other form or quantity. Finding this ‘‘deep essence’’ is the hope of Grand Unification Theory or Theory of Everything; in technical terms, there would be no free parameters in the mathematical equations, all would be determined, derived, or deduced from fundamental principles.24 As for the existence of life and mind in this onlyway explanation, the laws of biology must be embedded within the laws of physics, either inextricably or by happenstance (and we are fortunate, wildly fortunate, I guess). 1.4 Almost Necessary/Limited Ways. Physical laws have only a small range in which they can vary, such that the number of possible universes is highly constrained. This means that what would appear on the surface to be most improbable, i.e., a universe that just happens to be hospitable for life and mind, is in its deep structure most probable. (As with 1.3, of which this is a variant, the presence of life and mind cries out for explanation.) 1.5 Temporal Selection. Even though physical laws or the values of their constants may change, regularly or arbitrarily, we have been living during (or at the end of) an extended period of time when these laws and values happen to have been, for some reason or for no reason, within a range consistent with the existence of stars and planets and the emergence of life and mind. This temporal selection can operate during periods of time following one Big Bang in a single universe, or during vastly more periods of time following sequential Big Bangs in an oscillating single universe of endless expansions and contractions. 1.6 Self-Explaining. The universe is self-creating and self-directing, and therefore self-explaining. In Paul Davies’ formulation, the emergence of consciousness (human and perhaps other) somehow animates a kind of backward causation to select from among the untold laws and countless values that seem possible at the beginning of the universe to actualize those that would prove consistent with the later evolution of life and mind. In this teleological schema, the universe and mind would eventually meld and become

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One, so that it could be the case that the purpose of the universe is for the universe to engineer its own self-awareness.25 Note: Quentin Smith theorizes that the ‘‘universe caused itself to begin to exist,’’ by which he means that the universe is a succession of states, each state caused by earlier states, and that the Big Bang singularity prevents there from being a first instant, such that in the earliest hour, there are infinitely many zero-duration instantaneous states of the universe, each caused by earlier states, but with no earliest state.26 This model, like other atheistic mechanisms that obviate the need for a First Cause or preclude the possibility that God exists, could empower any of these One Universe Models. Similarly, if information is somehow fundamental to reality (as opposed to it being a human construct to represent reality), an idea defended by Seth Lloyd (‘‘It from Bit’’), information per se would undergird or endow these One Universe models (and, for that matter, Multiverse Models as well).27 Independently, should limitless domains of our possibly infinite universe exist beyond our visible horizon,28 these domains would still be included in One Universe Models—we would have an inestimably larger universe to be sure, but we would still have only one universe to explain.

2. Multiple Universe Models (Multiverse Models) There are innumerable universes (and/or, depending on one’s definition of ‘‘universe,’’ causally disconnected domains within one spatiotemporal setting), each bringing forth new universes ceaselessly, boundlessly, in a multiverse.29 What’s more, there are perhaps immeasurable extra dimensions, with all universes and dimensions possessing different sets of laws and values in capricious combinations and yet all somehow coexisting in the unending, unrolling fabric of the totality of reality. Our reality is the only reality, but there is a whole lot more of it than ever imagined. This means that, in the context of this multi-universe, multi-dimensional amalgam, the meaningful fine-tuning of our universe is a mirage. The fine-tuning itself is real, but it is not the product of purpose. It is instead a statistical surety that is predicted by force, since only in a universe in which observers exist could observers observe (the Weak Anthropic Principle).30 Thus, the laws and values engendering sentient life in our universe are not a ‘‘fortuitous coincidence,’’ but rather a guaranteed certainty that are entirely explained by physical principles and natural law. 2.1 Multiverse by Disconnected Regions (Spatial). Generated by fundamental properties of spacetime that induce mechanisms to spawn multiple universes—for example, eternal chaotic inflation (i.e., unceasing phase transitions and bubble nucleations of spacetime) which causes spatial domains to erupt, squeeze off in some way, expand (perhaps), and separate themselves forever without possibility of causal contact (Alan Guth,31 Andre Linde,32 Alex Vilenkin).33

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2.2 Multiverse by Cycles (Temporal). Generated by an endless sequence of cosmic epochs, each of which begins with a ‘‘bang’’ and ends with a ‘‘crunch.’’ In the Steinhardt-Turok model, it involves cycles of slow accelerated expansions followed by contractions that produce the homogeneity, flatness, and energy needed to begin the next cycle (with each cycle lasting perhaps a trillion years).34 Roger Penrose postulates a ‘‘conformal cyclic cosmology,’’ where an initial space-time singularity can be represented as a smooth past boundary to the conformal geometry of space-time. With conformal invariance both in the remote future and at the Big-Bang origin, he argues, the two situations are physically identical, so that the remote future of one phase of the universe becomes the Big Bang of the next. He calls his suggestion ‘‘outrageous.’’35 2.3 Multiverse by Sequential Selection (Temporal). Generated by fertile black holes out of which new universes are created continuously by ‘‘bouncing’’ into new Big Bangs (instead of collapsing into stagnant singularities). Applying principles of biological evolution to universal development, and assuming that the constants of physics could change in each new universe, Lee Smolin hypothesized a cosmic natural selection that would favor black holes in sequential (‘‘offspring’’) universes, thus increasing over time the number of black holes in sequential universes, because the more black holes there are, the more universes they generate.36 A multiverse generating system that favors black holes might also favor galaxies and stars (rather than amorphous hydrogen gas), but jumping all the way to favor life and mind is a leap of larger magnitude. 2.4 Multiverse by String Theory (with Minuscule Extra Dimensions). String theory postulates a vast ‘‘landscape’’ of different ‘‘false vacua,’’ with each such ‘‘ground state’’ harboring different values of the constants of physics (such that, on occasion, some are consistent with the emergence of life). Structured with six, seven, or more extra dimensions of subatomic size, string theory thus generates its own kind of multiple universes.37 2.5 Multiverse by Large Extra Dimensions. Generated by large, macroscopic extra dimensions which exist in reality (not just in mathematics), perhaps in infinite numbers, forms, and structures, yet which cannot be seen or apprehended (except perhaps by the ‘‘leakage’’ of gravity).38 Multiple universes generated by extra dimensions may also be cyclical.39 2.6 Multiverse by Quantum Branching or Selection. Generated by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory as formulated by Hugh Everett and John Wheeler, in which the world forks at every instant so that different and parallel ‘‘histories’’ are forming continuously and exponentially, with all of them existing in some meta-reality.40 This means that whenever any quantum object is in any quantum state, a new universe will form so that in this perpetual process an incalculable number of parallel universes come to be, with each universe representing each unique possible state of every possible object. Stephen Hawking has conceptualized this

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staggering cascade of ‘‘branching universes’’ as a kind of retro-selection, in which current decisions or observations in some sense select from immense numbers of possible universal histories, which exist simultaneously, represent every state of every object, and which the universe has somehow already lived.41 2.7 Multiverse by Mathematics. Generated by Max Tegmark’s hypothesis that every conceivable mathematical form or structure corresponds to a physical parallel universe which actually exists.42 2.8 Multiverse by All Possibilities. Generated by the hypothesis that every logically possible mode of existence is a real thing and really exists, that possible worlds are as real as the actual world, and that being merely possible rather than actual just means existing somewhere else (David Lewis’s ‘‘modal realism’’;43 Robert Nozick’s ‘‘principle of fecundity’’).44 Note: To Paul Davies, ‘‘The multiverse does not provide a complete account of existence, because it still requires a lot of unexplained and very ‘convenient’ physics to make it work.’’ There has to be, he says, a ‘‘universe-generating mechanism,’’ and ‘‘some sort of ingenious selection still has to be made,’’ and that unless all possible worlds really exist (2.7 and 2.8), ‘‘a multiverse which contains less than everything implies a rule that separates what exists from what is possible but does not exist,’’ a rule that ‘‘remains unexplained.’’ And regarding all possible worlds really existing, Davies states, ‘‘A theory which can explain anything at all really explains nothing.’’45 To Quentin Smith, it cannot yet be determined if a multiverse, which he says is speculation not science, is even logically possible.46

3. Nonphysical Causes This universe, however unfathomable, is fine-tuned to human existence because a nonphysical Cause made it this way. The Cause may be a Person, Being, Mind, Force, Power, Entity, Unity, Presence, Principle, Law, ProtoLaw, Stuff, or Feature. It is likely transcendent and surely irreducible; it exists beyond the boundaries and constraints of physical law, matter, energy, space, and time; and while it is the Cause, it does not itself have or need a Cause. There is blur and overlap among these explanations, yet each is sufficiently different in how it claims to generate ultimate reality, and sufficiently opposed to the claims of its competitors, as to warrant distinction. 3.1 Theistic Person. A Supreme Being who in Christian philosophy is portrayed as incorporeal, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free, perfectly good, necessarily existent, and the creator of all things, and who is also a ‘‘person’’ with person-like characteristics such as beliefs, intents, and purposes; a ‘‘divine being’’ (as defined by Richard Swinburne)47, a theistic God (as defended by Alvin Plantinga) 48 with a ‘‘nature.’’ 49 In JudeoChristian tradition, the existence-as-essence Name offered to Moses—‘‘I am that I am.’’50 In Islamic philosophy, the concepts of Unity, the Absolute,

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and Beyond-Being.51 In modern thought, God as underlying fundamental reality, entailing the meaning of universe and life;52 God as working through special divine action, interventionist or noninterventionist.53 The affirmative creative act of this theistic God may bring the universe into being by a creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo),54 or may be a continuing creative sustenance of the universe (creatio continua), or both. A theistic explanation of ultimate reality is logically compatible with both One Universe and Multiverse Models.55 3.2 Ultimate Mind. A Supreme Consciousness that hovers between a personal theistic God and an impersonal deistic first cause; a nonpareil artist who contemplates limitless possibilities; a quasi Being with real thoughts who determines to actualize certain worlds.56 Understanding this kind of God does not begin with an all-powerful ‘‘person,’’ but rather with an unfathomable reservoir of potentialities as expressed in all possible universes, for which Ultimate Mind is the only and necessary basis. 3.3. Deistic First Cause. An impersonal Primal Force, Power, or Law that set the universe in motion but is neither aware of its existence nor involved with its activity. The idea requires initializing powers but rejects beliefs, intents and purposes, active consciousness, self-awareness, or even passive awareness. There is no interaction with creatures (humans).57 3.4 Pantheistic Substance. Pantheism equates God with nature in that God is all and all is God.58 The universe (all matter, energy, forces, and laws) is identical with a ubiquitous metaphysical entity or stuff, which to Baruch Spinoza possessed unlimited attributes and was the uncaused ‘‘substance’’ of all that exists. The pantheistic ‘‘God,’’ nonthesitic and impersonal, is the paragon of immanence in that it is neither external to the world nor transcendent of it. In diverse forms, pantheism appears in Western philosophy (Plotinus’s ‘‘One,’’ Hegel’s Absolute), process theology, and some Eastern religions (Taoism; later Buddhism; and Hinduism, where Brahman is all of existence).59 Pantheism finds a unity in everything that exists, and in this unity, a sense of the divine.60 3.5 Spirit Realms. Planes, orbs, levels, domains, and dimensions of spirit existence as the true, most basic form of reality. Described by mystics, mediums, and occult practitioners, and exemplified by mystic, polytheistic, and animistic religions, these spirit realms are populated by the presence of sundry spirit beings, and laced with complex spiritual rituals and schemas (some good, some evil).61 3.6 Consciousness as Cause. Pure Consciousness as the fundamental stuff of reality, out of which the physical world is generated or expressed.62 It is the explanation claimed or typified by certain philosophical and quasitheological systems, Eastern religions, mystic religions, and cosmic consciousness devotees, and by some who accept the actuality of paranormal phenomena.63 For example, Buddhism64 and Rigpa in Tibetan Buddhism

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(omniscience or enlightenment without limit).65 Even some physicists ponder the pre-existence of mind.66 3.7 Being and Non-Being as Cause. Being and Non-Being as ineffable dyadic states that have such maximal inherent potency that they (either one) can somehow bring all things into existence. In Taoism, the invisible Tao (Way) gives rise to the universe; all is the product of Being and Being is the product of Not-being.67 In Hinduism, the Brahman (unchanging, infinite, immanent, transcendent).68 The Ground of All Being; Great Chain of Being; Great Nest of Spirit.69 3.8 Abstract Objects/Platonic Forms as Cause. Although philosophers deny that abstract objects can have causal effects on concrete objects (abstract objects are often defined as causally inert), their potential, say as a collective, to be an explanatory source of ultimate reality cannot be logically excluded. (This assumes that abstract objects, like mathematics, universals, and logic, manifest real existence on some plane of existence not in spacetime.) Platonic Forms, abstract entities that are perfect and immutable and exist independently of the world of perceptions, are occasionally suspected of possessing some kind of causal or quasi-casual powers.70 3.9 Principle or Feature of Sufficient Power. An all-embracing cosmic principle beyond being and existence, such as Plato’s ‘‘the Good,’’ John Leslie’s ‘‘ethical requiredness,’’ 71 Nicholas Rescher’s ‘‘cosmic values,’’72 or some defining characteristic so central to ultimate reality and so supremely profound that it has both creative imperative and causative potency to bring about being and existence. Derek Parfit says it would be no coincidence if, ‘‘Of the countless cosmic possibilities, one both has a very special feature, and is the possibility that obtains.’’ He calls this special feature the ‘‘Selector,’’ and two candidates he considers are ‘‘being law-governed and having simple laws.’’73 Note: Cyclical universes of Eastern religious traditions can be consistent with all of these nonphysical ultimate reality generators,74 although the Western Theistic Person (3.1) would normally be excluded.

4. Illusions This universe, everything we think we know, is not real. Facts are fiction; nothing is fundamental; all is veneer, through and through. 4.1 Idealism. As argued by generations of idealistic philosophers, all material things are manifestations of consciousness or assemblies of mind, so that while the physical world appears to be composed of non-mental stuff, it is not.75 4.2 Simulation in Actual Reality. We exist merely or marginally in someone’s or something’s simulation, in an artificial world that actually exists in terms of having physical particles and forces and galaxies and stars, but whose entirety is not what it seems because it is derivative, not original.

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Andre Linde analyzes ‘‘baby universe formation’’ and then asks, ‘‘Does this mean that our universe was created not by a divine design but by a physicist hacker?’’76 Paul Davies speaks of ‘‘fake universes,’’ and of those beings who created them as ‘‘false gods’’; he ponders that if multiple universes really exist, the great majority of them may be fakes because some of them (there are so many) would have spawned, at some time or another, unthinkably superior beings who would have had the capacity to create these fake universes—and once they could have done so they would have done so, creating immensely many fake universes and thereby swamping the real ones.77 4.3 Simulation in Virtual Reality. We exist merely or marginally in someone’s or something’s simulation, in an artificial sensory construction that is an imitation of what reality might be but is not; for example, a Matrix-like world in which all perceptions are fed directly into the human nervous system (‘‘brains in vats’’) or into our disembodied consciousness. Alternatively, we exist as processes generated by pure software running inside cosmic quantum supercomputers.78 4.4 Solipsism. The universe is wholly the creation of one’s own mind and thereby exists entirely in and for that mind.79

A Work in Process If it seems improbable that human thought can make distinguishing progress among these categories and explanations, consider the formulating progress already made. Two centuries ago, the available options were largely Nonphysical Causes (category 3), structured simplistically. A century ago, scientists assumed that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire universe. Today we grasp the monumental immensity of the cosmos. Why Not Nothing? A taxonomy of ultimate reality generators for ‘‘Why This Universe?’’ starts explorations.80 Nonetheless, there remains a great gulf between the two questions: even if we eventually nail the actual explanation of this universe, we may still have made no progress on why there is something rather than nothing.81 Cosmological visions are overwhelming, but I am oddly preoccupied with something else. How is it that we humans have such farsighted understanding after only a few thousand years of historical consciousness, only a few hundred years of effective science, and only a few decades of cosmological observations? Maybe it’s still too early in the game. Maybe answers have been with us all along. This is a work in process, and diverse contributions are needed.82 The author thanks John Leslie, Michael Shermer, Quentin Smith, and Keith Ward for their comments and suggestions, and Skeptic Magazine in which this essay appears.

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Notes 1. Quentin Smith would reformulate my awestruck ‘‘Why not Nothing?’’ so as to satisfy an analytical philosopher. He points out (in a personal communication) that it is a logical fallacy to talk about ‘‘nothing,’’ to treat ‘‘nothing’’ as if it were ‘‘something’’ (with properties). To say ‘‘there might have been nothing’’ implies ‘‘it is possible that there is nothing.’’ ‘‘There is’’ means ‘‘something is.’’ So ‘‘there is nothing’’ means ‘‘something is nothing,’’ which is a logical contradiction. His suggestion is to remove ‘‘nothing’’ and replace it by ‘‘not something’’ or ‘‘not anything,’’ since one can talk about what we mean by ‘‘nothing’’ by referring to something or anything, of which there are no instances (i.e., the concept of ‘‘something’’ has the property of not being instantiated). The commonsense way to talk about nothing is to talk about something and negate it, to deny that there is something. Smith would rewrite my lines like this: ‘‘There is something. But why? There might not ever have been anything at all. Why are there existents rather than no existents? As for Nothing being ‘‘easier,’’ Smith says that the word connotes that it would have been easier for ‘‘God,’’ and God he does not like at all. So my passage becomes, ‘‘Wouldn’t it have been easier if there were not even one thing, in the sense that there is no causal activity, whereas things require causes to bring them into existence? Wouldn’t it have been simpler in the sense that there are zero things if there are no things, and that as a number zero is simpler than one, two, three, or any other number? Wouldn’t it have been more logical in the sense that the laws of logic do not imply there are things, and if there are things, that fact is inexplicable in terms of the laws of logic? (For euphony, as well as simplicity, I will continue to use ‘‘Nothing’’—Quentin, my apologies.) 2. No argument, only the fact of the matter, dissuades me from continuing to sense, following Leibniz, that Nothing, no universe, is simpler and easier, the least arbitrary and most logical descriptor of ultimate reality (Gottfried Leibniz, The Principles of Nature and Grace, 1714). An empty world, Nothing, would then be followed by, in order of increasing complexity, illogic, and oddity: infinite numbers of universes (for parsimony, ‘‘all’’ is second only to ‘‘none’’), one universe (it’s all we know but inconceivable to explain), few-but-not-many universes (maybe there’s some simple generating principle at work), innumerable-but-finite numbers of universes, and many-but-not-innumerable universes. Peter van Inwagen argues that since there can be infinitely many non-empty worlds (populated by things, any things at all), but only one empty world (‘‘Nothing’’), the likelihood that any given world is non-empty (not Nothing) is maximally probable (i.e., the probability of Nothing is zero). Peter van Inwagen, ’’Why Is There Anything at All?’’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1996): 95–110. The argument is fascinating and hinges on two assumptions: (i) all possible populated worlds have the same probability and (ii) the probability of the empty world (Nothing) is no different than that of any of the infinite number of possible populated worlds. While recognizing that the empty world is vastly, even infinitely, easier to describe, van Inwagen reasons that this should not increase its relative probability unless ‘‘one is covertly thinking that there is something that is outside the ‘Reality’. . .[like] a ‘pre-cosmic selection machine’, not a part of Reality’’ (for Leibniz this was God). . .or ‘‘something that determines that there being nothing is the ‘default setting’ on the control-board of Reality.’’ ‘‘But there could be no such thing,’’ van Inwagen argues, ‘‘for nothing is outside Reality,’’ and

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he concludes, tentatively, that ‘‘the simplicity of the empty world provides us with no reason to regard it as more probable than any other possible world.’’ Yet I find it hard to get out of my head the sense that the a priori probability of an empty world (Nothing) is equal to that of any possible populated world (Something), in that to have Something seems to require a second step (and likely many more), a process or rule or capricious happening that generates whatever is populating whatever world. If so, any given possible world (Something) would be less parsimonious than the empty world (Nothing), which would mean that the probability of the empty world (Nothing) would be greater than zero. 3. Martin Heidegger famously called ‘‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’’ the fundamental question of metaphysics. Martin Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959); Leibniz, 1714; Derek Parfit, ‘‘Why Anything? Why This?’’ London Review of Books. January 22, 1998, 24–7 and February 5, 22–5; van Inwagen, 1996 (van Inwagen says ‘‘we can make some progress. . .if we do not panic’’); John Leslie, Modern Cosmology and Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998); Bede Rundle, Why is there Something Rather than Nothing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004) (Rundle seeks ‘‘what might be possible in areas where it is so easy to think that we have come to a dead end’’); John Leslie, Review of Why is there Something Rather than Nothing by Bede Rundle, MIND, January 2005; Thomas Nagel, Review of Why is there Something Rather than Nothing by Bede Rundle, Times Literary Supplement, May 7, 2005; ‘‘Nothing,’’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford. edu/entries/nothingness/; Erik Carlson and Erik J. Olsson, ‘‘The Presumption of Nothingness,’’ Ratio (XIV, 2001): 203–221; Robert Nozick, 1981. ‘‘Why is there Something Rather than Nothing,’’ Ch. 2 in Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Nozick’s aim is ‘‘to loosen our feeling of being trapped by a question with no possible answer.’’ He says that ‘‘the question cuts so deep, however, that any approach that stands a chance of yielding an answer will look extremely weird. Someone who proposes a non-strange answer shows he didn’t understand the question.’’ ‘‘Only one thing,’’ he says, ‘‘could leave nothing at all unexplained: a fact that explains itself.’’ He calls this ‘‘explanatory self-subsumption.’’ 4. To Quentin Smith, grasping the universe as a world-whole and asking ‘‘Why?’’ engenders global awe, feeling-sensations that tower and swell over us in response to the stunning immensity of it all. The more we consider this ultimate question of existence, he believes, the more our socio-culture would improve. (Personal communication and Quentin Smith, The Felt Meanings of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling. (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1986).) Arthur Witherall argues that ‘‘a feeling of awe [wonder, astonishment, and various other affective states] at the existence of something rather than nothing is appropriate and desirable,’’ perhaps because ‘‘there is a fact-transcendent meaning to the existence of the world.’’ (Arthur Witherall, Forthcoming, Journal of Philosophical Research—http:// www.hedweb.com/witherall/existence.htm, 2006). Santayana describes existence as ‘‘logically inane and morally comic’’ and ‘‘a truly monstrous excrescence and superfluity.’’ (George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 48). 5. This is new territory, and the first step in methodical exploration is often to construct a taxonomy. How could we (i) discern and describe all possible

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explanations of ultimate reality (devised by human intelligence or imagined by human speculation), and then (ii) classify and array these possible explanations into categories so that we might assess and compare their essence, efficacy, explanatory potency, and interrelationships? 6. Stephen Hawking, ‘‘Quantum Cosmology,’’ in The Nature of Space and Time, ed Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 89–90. 7. Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (New York: Knopf, 2005), 726–32, 762–65. Penrose’s analysis of the ‘‘extraordinary ‘specialness’ of the Big Bang’’ is based on the Second Law of thermodynamics and the ‘‘absurdly low entropy’’ (i.e. highly organized) state of the very early universe. 8. Steven Weinberg, ‘‘Living in the Multiverse,’’ in Universe or Multiverse, ed. Bernard Carr (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 9. Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (Boston MA: Little, Brown, 2005), 66, 78–82. 10. Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Following are Rees’s six numbers. N = 1036, the ratio of the strength of electric forces that hold atoms together to the force of gravity between them, such that if N had just a few less zeros, only a shortlived and miniature universe could exist, which would have been too young and too small for life to evolve. E (epsilon) = .007, a definition of how firmly atomic nuclei bind together, such that if E were .006 or .008, matter could not exist as it does. Ω (omega) ~ 1, the amount of matter in the universe, such that if Ω were too high the universe would have collapsed long ago, and if Ω were too low no galaxies would have formed. Λ (lambda) ~ 0.7, the cosmological constant, the positive energy of empty space, an ‘‘antigravity’’ force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate, such that if Λ were much larger the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and galaxies to have formed. Q, = 1/100,000, a description of how the fabric of the universe depends on the ratio of two fundamental energies, such that if Q were smaller the universe would be inert and featureless, and if Q were much larger the universe would be violent and dominated by giant black holes. D = 3, the number of dimensions in which we live, such that if D were 2 or 4 life could not exist. 11. P.A.M. Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Society A165, 1938, 199–208. Dirac noted that for some unexplained reason, the ratio of the electrostatic force to the gravitational force between an electron and a proton is roughly equal to the age of the universe divided by an elementary time constant, which suggested to him that the expansion rate of the macroscopic universe was somehow linked to the microscopic sub-atomic world (and that gravity varied with time). Although his inference was in error, Dirac’s observation enabled a novel way of thinking about the universe. 12. Robert H. Dicke, ‘‘Dirac’s cosmology and Mach’s principle,’’ Nature 192 (1961): 440. In order for the universe to host biological observers, it has to be sufficiently old so that carbon would already have been synthesized in stars, and sufficiently young so that main sequence stars and stable planetary systems would still

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continue to exist (‘‘golden age’’). Robert H. Dicke, Gravitation and the Universe (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1970). 13. Brandon Carter, ‘‘Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology,’’ reprinted in Modern Philosophy and Cosmology, John Leslie (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999). 14. John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 15. Weinberg, ‘‘Living in the Multiverse’’; Steven Weinberg, ‘‘Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant,’’ Physical Review Letters 59, 22 (1987): 2607–10. 16. Methodologically, I first try to expand the possible explanations and their categories, striving to be universally exhaustive—my objective here—and only later try, in some way, to cull them by data, analysis, or reasoning. (Falsification for most of these is unrealistic.) After Paul Davies presents the pros and cons of the various main positions he examines to answer the ultimate questions of existence, he asks a droll but deeply profound question, ‘‘Did I leave any out?’’ Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2006), 302. 17. ‘‘Modal logic’’ allows an infinite number of logical possibilities that are (or seem) scientifically impossible. Quentin Smith, personal communication. 18. That the explanation for the universe may be hard to understand is no surprise to Derek Parfit. ‘‘If there is some explanation of the whole of reality, we should not expect this explanation to fit neatly into some familiar category. This extraordinary question may have an extra-ordinary answer.’’ Parfit, January 22, 1998. 19. Those who contend that ‘‘Why Not Nothing?’’ is a Meaningless Question (1.1) often rely on what they believe to be logical contradictions in the concepts ‘‘Nothing’’ and ‘‘Something.’’ For example, they argue that the statement ‘‘There is Nothing’’ has no referent and makes no legitimate claim; something more, such as a location of the Nothing, must be specified to complete it and make it meaningful, but any such addition contradicts itself in that by specifying Something it destroys Nothing (as it were). Rundle, 2004; Erik J. Olsson, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. March 3, 2005, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=2081. See endnote 1 above. In like manner, the question ‘‘Why is there Something?’’ makes a simple logical mistake in that it presupposes an antecedent condition that can explain that Something, but there can be no such antecedent condition because it too must be subsumed in the Something which must be explained. Paul Edwards, ‘‘Why,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 8, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 300–1. Witherall, 2006. 20. Nagel, 1981. As John Leslie puts this view, ‘‘Metaphysical efforts to explain the cosmos offend against grammar in Wittgenstein’s sense.’’ Leslie, 1995. 21. To be a brute fact, a universe does not depend on any particular universegenerating mechanism—Big Bang, steady state, complex cyclicals can all fit the brute fact framework. Even a multiverse or a God can be a brute fact. The point is that there is a terminus of explanations: a brute fact is as far as you can ever get, even in principle. 22. Bertrand Russell said ‘‘. . .The universe is just there, and that’s all.’’ Bertrand Russell and F.C. Copleston, ‘‘The Existence of God,’’ in Problems of Philosophy Series, ed. John Hick (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1964), 175. Parfit states, ‘‘If it is random what reality is like, the Universe not only has no cause. It has no

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explanation of any kind.’’ Of the explanatory possibilities, he later notes that brute fact ‘‘seems to describe the simplest, since its claim is only that reality has no explanation.’’ Parfit, February 5, 1998; Quentin Smith, ‘‘Simplicity and Why the Universe Exists,’’ Philosophy71 (1997): 125–32. 23. Nozick, 1981. 24. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Edward Witten, ‘‘Universe on a String,’’ Astronomy magazine, June 2002; Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1994); Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, reissue edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). 25. Davies, 2006; Davies, The Mind of God (London: Penguin, 1993); personal communication; Davies, in Spiritual Information: 100 Perspectives on Science and Religion., ed. Charles L. Harper, Jr. (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005). 26. Quentin Smith, ‘‘Kalam Cosmological Arguments for Atheism,’’ in The Cambridge Companion for Atheism, ed. Michael Martin; Quentin Smith, ‘‘The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist,’’ Philosophy, Volume 74 (1999): 136–46; personal communication. 27. Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos (New York: Knopf, 2006). 28. To any observers, the visible horizon of the universe that they see, the farthest they can ever see, is bounded by the speed of light multiplied by the age of the universe, such that light could have traveled only so far in so long. (In special relativity, a ‘‘light cone’’ is the geometric pattern describing the temporal evolution of a flash of light in Minkowski spacetime. Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone.) 29. Martin J. Rees, Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others (New York: Perseus Books, 1998); Martin J. Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Martin J. Rees, ;‘‘Exploring Our Universe and Others,’’ Scientific American, December 1999; John Leslie, Universes (London: Routledge, 1989); Davies, 2006, p. 299; personal communication. 30. Weinberg, 1987; Weinberg, 2007; personal communication. There is hardly unanimity about the Anthropic Principle among physicists, some of whom characterize it as betraying the quest to find fundamental first principles that can explain the universe and predict its constituents. David Gross ‘‘hates’’ it, comparing it to a virus—‘‘Once you get the bug, you can’t get rid of it.’’ Dennis Overbye, ‘‘Zillions of Universes? Or Did Ours Get Lucky,’’ New York Times, October 28, 2003; personal communication. 31. Alan Guth, ‘‘The Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problems,’’ Phys. Rev. D 23, 347 (1981); Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Boston: AddisonWesley, 1997). 32. Andrei Linde, 1982. ‘‘A New Inflationary Universe Scenario: A Possible Solution of the Horizon, Flatness, Homogeneity, Isotropy and Primordial Monopole Problems,’’ Phys. Lett. B 108, 389 (1982); Andrei Linde, Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1990); Andrei Linde, ‘‘Inflation and String Cosmology,’’ J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 24 ( 2005): 151–60; Andrei Linde, ‘‘The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,’’ Scientific American, November

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1991, 48–55; Andrei Linde, ‘‘Current understanding of inflation,’’ New Astron.Rev. 49 (2005): 35–41; Linde, ‘‘Choose Your Own Universe,’’ in Harper, 2005. 33. Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 34. Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, ‘‘A Cyclic Model of the Universe,’’ Science, May 2002: Vol. 296, no. 5572, 1436–9. The authors claim that a cyclical model may solve the cosmological constant problem—why it is so vanishingly small and yet not zero—by ‘‘relaxing’’ it naturally over vast numbers of cycles and periods of time exponentially older than the Big Bang estimate. Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, ‘‘Why the Cosmological Constant is Small and Positive,’’ Science 26 May 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5777, 1180–3. The oscillating universe hypothesis was earlier suggested by John Wheeler, who in the 1960s posited this scenario in connection with standard recontracting Friedman cosmological models (I thank Paul Davies for the reference). 35. Roger Penrose, ‘‘Before the Big Bang: An Outrageous New Perspective and Its Implications for Particle Physics,’’ Proceedings of the EPAC 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland. 36. Lee Smolin, ‘‘Did the universe evolve?’’ Classical and Quantum Gravity 9 (1992): 173–191; Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Since a black hole is said to have at its center a ‘‘singularity,’’ a point at which infinitely strong gravity causes matter to have infinite density and zero volume, and at which the curvature of spacetime is infinite and ceases to exist as we know it, and since the Big Bang is said to begin under similar conditions, the idea that the latter is engendered by the former seems less farfetched. In 1990, Quentin Smith proposed that our Big Bang is a black hole in another universe, but said that it could not be a genuine scientific theory unless a new solution to Einstein’s 10 field equations of general relativity could be developed. Smith, ‘‘A Natural Explanation of the Existence and Laws of Our Universe,’’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 68 (1990): 22–43. It is a theory that Smith has since given up (personal communication). Smolin called his theory a ‘‘fantasy.’’ 37. Leonard Susskind, ‘‘The anthropic landscape of string theory,’’ http://arXiv. org/abs/hep-th/0302219; Susskind, 2005. The string theory landscape is said to have ~10500 expressions. 38. Lisa Randall, Warped Passage: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006); Lawrence Krauss, Hidden in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond (New York: Viking, 2005). 39. An ‘‘ekpyrotic’’ mechanism for generating universes postulates immeasurable three-dimensional ‘‘branes’’ (within one of which our universe exists) moving through higher-dimensional space, such that when one brane in some way collides with another, a contracting, empty universe is energized to expand and form matter in a hot Big Bang. Justin Khoury, Burt A. Ovrut, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Neil Turok, ‘‘Density Perturbations in the Ekpyrotic Scenario.’’ Phys. Rev. D66 046005, 2002; Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Paul Steinhardt, ‘‘The Quintessential Universe,’’ Scientific American, January 2001, 46–53. 40. Hugh Everett, ‘‘Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,’’ in The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics., eds. B.S. De Witt and N. Graham (1957; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 141–9; John

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Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 268–70; David Deustch, The Fabric of Reality (London: Penguin Books, 1997). 41. Amanda Getler, ‘‘Exploring Stephen Hawking’s Flexiverse,’’ New Scientist, April 2006. 42. Max Tegmark, ‘‘Parallel Universes,’’ Scientific American, May 2003, 41–51. 43. David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 2. Lewis writes, ‘‘I advocate a thesis of plurality of worlds, or modal realism, which holds that our world is but one world among many. There are countless other worlds. . .so many other worlds, in fact, that absolutely every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is.’’ 44. Nozick, 1981. Nozick seeks to ‘‘dissolve the inegalitarian class distinction between nothing and something, treating them on a par. . .not treating nonexisting or nonobtaining as more natural or privileged. . .’’ One way to do this, he proposes, ‘‘is to say that all possibilities are realized.’’ He thus defines the ‘‘principle of fecundity’’ as, ‘‘All possible worlds obtain.’’ (127–8, 131). 45. Davies, 2006, 298–9. 46. Personal communication. 47. Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 2004); Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, revised edition (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1993); Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1994); Swinburne, Is There a God (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1996). In his influential book, The Existence of God, Swinburne builds a ‘‘cumulative case’’ of inductive arguments to assert (not prove) the claim that the proposition ‘‘God exists’’ is more probable than not. He begins with a description of what he means by God: ‘‘In understanding God as a person, while being fair to the Judaic and Islamic view of God, I am oversimplifying the Christian view.’’ Swinburne states: ‘‘I take the proposition ‘God exists’ (and the equivalent proposition ‘There is a God’) to be logically equivalent to ‘there exists necessarily a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who necessarily is eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things’. I use ‘God’ as the name of the person picked out by this description.’’ Swinburne then defines each of his terms. By God being a person, Swinburne means ‘‘an individual with basic powers (to act internationally), purposes, and beliefs.’’ By God’s being eternal, he understands that ‘‘he always has existed and always will exist.’’ By God’s being perfectly free, he understands that ‘‘no object of event or state (including past states of himself) in any way causally influences him to do the action that he does—his own choice at the moment of action alone determines what he does.’’ By God’s being omnipotent, he understands that ‘‘he is able to do whatever it is logically possible (i.e., coherent to suppose) that he can do.’’ By God’s being omniscient, he understands that ‘‘he knows whatever it is logically possible that he know.’’ By God’s being perfectly good, he understands that ‘‘he always does a morally best action (when there is one), and does no morally bad action.’’ By his being the creator of all things, he understands that ‘‘everything that exists at each moment of time (apart from himself) exists because, at that moment of time, he makes it exist, or permits it to exists.’’ The claim that there is a God, Swinburne states, is called theism.

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48. Alvin Plantinga, ‘‘Reason and Belief in God,’’ in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, eds. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). Plantinga argues famously that theistic belief does not, in general, need argument or evidence to be rational and justified; belief in God, in Plantinga’s well-known terminology, is ‘‘properly basic.’’ This means that belief in God is such that one may properly accept it without evidence, that is, without the evidential support of other beliefs. ‘‘Perhaps the theist,’’ Plantinga asserts, ‘‘is entirely within his epistemic rights in starting from belief in God [even if he has no argument or evidence at all], taking that proposition to be one of the ones probability with respect to which determines the rational propriety of other beliefs he holds.’’ Notwithstanding this position, Plantinga presents his own arguments for God’s existence: Alvin Plantinga, ‘‘Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments,’’ lecture notes, http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/articles/ plantinga_alvin/two_dozen_or_so_theistic_arguments.pdf. 49. Philosophical discussions of God’s Nature, which much occupied medieval theologians (Scholastics), seem arcane and irrelevant today, but may probe the structure and meaning of a theistic God, and as such may help advise whether such a Being really exists. Take the traditional doctrine of ‘‘Divine Simplicity’’ (which is anything but simple): God is utterly devoid of complexity; no distinctions can be made in God; God has no ‘‘parts.’’ Plantinga describes the doctrine: ‘‘We cannot distinguish him from his nature, or his nature from his existence, or his existence from his other properties; he is the very same thing as his nature, existence, goodness, wisdom, power, and the like. And this is a dark saying indeed.’’ Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature?(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980). 50. In the Bible, names are often declarations of the essence of things. ‘‘Adam’’ means earth, soil, or reddish-brownish stuff, from which, as the story goes, God made Adam—‘‘Adam’’ the stuff was what Adam the man literally was. The Hebrew underlying ‘‘I am that I am’’—first person singular imperfect form of the verb ‘‘To Be’’—is perhaps more accurately but less euphonically translated ’’I continue to be which I continue to be.’’ Hence, since name is essence, and here the Name means existence, God’s existence is his essence. A God of this Name can claim to be without need of further explanation, not in the sense that a further explanation cannot be known, but in the sense that it cannot exist. 51. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Pholosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Pholosophy in the Land of Prophecy, Suny Series in Islam (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006); Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Randall E. Auxier, and Luican W. Stone, eds., The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Library of Living Philosophers Series (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 2000). 52. George F.R. Ellis, ‘‘Natures of Existence (Temporal and Eternal),’’ in The Far-Future Universe: Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective, ed. George F.R. Ellis (Philadelphia , PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2002). 53. Robert John Russell, ‘‘Eschatology and Physical Cosmology—A Preliminary Reflection,’’ in The Far-Future Universe, 2002; Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and Arthur Peacocke, eds., Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications, 1997). 54. William Lane Craig, ‘‘The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe,’’ Truth: A Journal of Modern Thought 3 (1991): 85–96; Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical and Scientific

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Exploration (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004). William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 55. Theists debate among themselves whether the Judeo-Christian God is theologically compatible with a multiverse. While many theists denounce multiple universes as a naturalistic substitute for God—they argue that accepting a God is far simpler than postulating a multiverse—some theists now break tradition by claiming that a multiverse reveals an even grander grandeur of the Creator. Robin Collins, ‘‘A Theistic Perspective on the Multiverse Hypothesis,’’ in Carr, 2007; Robin Collins, ‘‘Design and the Designer: New Concepts, New Challenges,’’ in Harper, 2005. 56. Keith Ward, Pascal’s Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006). Personal communication. Ward’s blurring of personal/impersonal models of God, he says, is influenced by the Brahman/Isvara distinction in Indian philosophy, with resonances in Eastern Orthodox theology (the distinction between ousia and economia). 57. ‘‘Deism,’’ Dictionary of the History of Ideas,http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv1-77. Deist website: http://www.deism.com/. 58. Michael Levine, ‘‘Pantheism,’’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2006/entries/pantheism/. H.P. Owen proposes a more formal definition: ‘‘‘Pantheism’. . .signifies the belief that every existing entity is only one Being; and that all other forms of reality are either modes (or appearances) of it or identical with it.’’ H. P. Owen, Concepts of Deity (London: Macmillan, 1971). Pantheism is distinguished from Deism in that, while both sport nontheistic, impersonal Gods, the former allows no separation between God and the world, while the later revels in it. Pantheism’s many variations take contrasting positions on metaphysical issues: its fundamental substance can be real or unreal, changing or changeless, etc. 59. Panentheism, a word that is a manufactured cognate of pantheism, is the doctrine that the universe is in God but God is more than the universe—i.e., it combines the robust immanence of pantheism (God is truly ‘‘in’’ the world) with the ultimate transcendence of theism (God exceeds the world in His ontological ‘‘otherness’’). More formally, panentheism is ‘‘The belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in Him, but (against pantheism) that His Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the universe.’’ F.L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 1027. Panentheism, a recent formulation, is the guiding philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, process theologians, and some who seek harmony between science and religion. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds., In Whom We live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004). Acosmic pantheism considers the world merely an appearance and fundamentally unreal (it is more characteristic of some Hindu and Buddhist traditions). Panpsychism, the belief that every entity in the universe is to some extent sentient, amalgamates Pantheism (3.4) with Consciousness as Cause (3.6). 60. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘‘Pantheism,’’ in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967). John Leslie derives pantheism from his thesis that ‘‘ethical requiredness’’ (see below) is the ultimate reality

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generator. John Leslie, 2002, Infinite Minds: A Philosophical Cosmology. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 39–41, 126–30, 215–16. 61. A wide range of conflating examples include Spiritualism, Spiritism, Animism, Occultism, New Age religions of all kinds, Edgar Cayce and those like him, Theosophy and its sort, forms of Gnosticism—the list is as tedious as it is endless. 62. According to Amit Goswami, a quantum physicist inspired by Hindu philosophy, ‘‘everything starts with consciousness. That is, consciousness is the ground of all being’’ which imposes ‘‘downward causation’’ on everything else. Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Tarcher, 1995). 63. There are copious, fanciful schemes that attempt to make consciousness fundamental; many disparate philosophies and world systems take ‘‘cosmic mind’’ as the source of all reality (e.g., http://primordality.com/). 64. To the Dalai Lama, consciousness (in its subtle form), which has no beginning, explains the world. Although he rejects any commencement of creation (‘‘Creation is therefore not possible’’), he asserts that the ‘‘creator of the world’’ in Buddhism is ‘‘the mind’’ and ‘‘collective karmic impressions, accumulated individually, are at the origin of the creation of a world.’’ Dalai Lama XIV, Marianne Dresser, and Alison Anderson, Beyond Dogma: Dialogues & Discourses (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1996). 65. Rigpa is considered to be a truth so universal, so primordial, that it goes beyond all limits, and beyond even religion itself (http://www.rigpa.org/). 66. Vilenkin, 2006, 205. 67. Taoism, an indigenous religion of China, is centered on ‘‘The Way,’’ the path to understanding of the foundations and true nature of heaven and earth. Its scriptures are the relatively short (81 chapters, 5000 Chinese characters) Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), its essence signaled by its famous first verse: ‘‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao’’ (chapter 1; translation, Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English, 1972). ‘‘For though all creatures under heaven are the products of Being, Being itself is the product of Not-being’’ (chapter 40; translation, Arthur Waley). 68. Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman. Robert Nozick, in his exploration of ‘‘Why is there Something Rather Than Nothing,’’ quotes the beginning of the Hindu Vedas’ Hymn of Creation, ‘‘Nonbeing then existed not nor being,’’ and then shows how Being and Nonbeing do not exhaust all possibilities—outside a certain domain, he says, a thing may be neither. Nozick thus suggests that ‘‘It is plausible that whatever every existent thing comes from, their source, falls outside the categories of existence and nonexistence’’ (1981, 150, 152). 69. Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1995). William Irwin Thompson, Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 70. Roger Penrose, ‘‘The Big Questions: What is Reality?’’ New Scientist, November 18, 2006. 71. John Leslie, 2002; John Leslie, Value and Existence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979); personal communication. Leslie states, ‘‘A force of creative ethical requirement or. . .a principle that consistent groups of ethical requirements, ethical demands for the actual presence of this or that situation, can sometimes bring about their own

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fulfillment. The cosmos might exist because its existence was ethically necessary, without the aid of an omnipotent being who chose to do something about this.’’ Although Leslie surmises, ‘‘a divine person might well head the list of the things that the creative force would have created,’’ his preferred position is ‘‘a cosmos of infinitely many unified realms of consciousness, each of them infinitely rich. . .a picture of infinitely many minds, each one worth calling ‘divine’’ and each one ‘‘expected to include knowledge of absolutely everything worth knowing’’ (2002, v–vi). 72. Nicholas Rescher, The Riddle of Existence: An Essay in Idealistic Metaphysics (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984). Rescher’s ‘‘cosmic values’’ are simplicity, economy, elegance, harmony, and the like, which are maximized by what he calls ‘‘proto-laws’’ as they bring about the existence of the spatiotemporal laws and concrete objects of the actual universe. Witherall, 2006. 73. Parfit, January 22, 1998, and February 5, 1998. Parfit suggests that if reality were as full as it could be (‘‘All Worlds Hypothesis’’), that would not be a coincidence. ‘‘We can reasonably assume that, if this possibility obtains, that is because it is maximal, or at this extreme. On this Maximalist View, it is a fundamental truth that being possible, and part of the fullest way that reality could be, is sufficient for being actual. That is the highest law governing reality.’’ It does not stop there. Parfit conceptualizes the ‘‘Selector’’ as some special feature that actualizes a real world from among countless cosmic possibilities. ‘‘It would determine, not that reality be a certain way, but that it be determined in a certain way how reality is to be.’’ Then, to the extent that there are competing credible Selectors, rules would be needed to select among them, which may be followed by higher level Selectors and rules. Can it ever stop? Parfit concludes by stating that ‘‘just as the simplest cosmic possibility is that nothing ever exists, the simplest explanatory possibility is that there is no Selector. So we should not expect simplicity at both the factual and explanatory levels. If there is no Selector, we should not expect that there would also be no Universe.’’ It seems that we arrive back at Brute Fact, which radiates a bit more color now, and we are enlightened by the journey. 74. In Tao, the only motion is returning. Dao De Jing, chapter 6; translation, Arthur Waley 75. ‘‘Idealism’’ Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism; Goswami, 1995. 76. Andrei Linde, ‘‘Hard Art of the Universe Creation,’’ Nucl. Phys. B372 (1992): 421–42. Using a stochastic approach to quantum tunneling, Linde develops a method to create ‘‘the universe in a laboratory.’’ He concludes by observing that this would be ‘‘a very difficult job,’’ but if it is true, ‘‘Hopefully, he [the other-worldly physicist hacker] did not make too many mistakes. . .’’ 77. Davies, 2006. 78. Nick Bostrom, ‘‘Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?’’ Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 211, 2003: 243–55; Nick Bostrom, ‘‘Why Make a Matrix? And Why You Might Be In One,’’ in More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded., ed. William Irwin (Chicago: IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 2005); ‘‘Life’s a Sim and Then You’re Deleted,’’ New Scientist, 27 July 2002. Another kind of Simulation in Virtual Reality (4.3) is Frank Tipler’s notion of a general resurrection just before a Big Crunch at what he calls the ‘‘Omega Point,’’ which would be brought about by an almost infinite amount of computational power generated by a universe whose inward gravitational rush is accelerating

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exponentially. Frank Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York: Anchor Books, 1997). 79. ‘‘Solipsism’’ Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism. 80. If the problem is turned from explaining the fine-tuning of this universe to the more profound problem of explaining the fundamental essence or existence of ultimate reality (defined physically)—Why Not Nothing?—the categories and explanations shift. The new taxonomy would ask two overarching questions: (i) ‘‘Of What does Ultimate Reality Consist?’’ and (ii) ‘‘By What (If Anything) is Ultimate Reality Caused?’’ or ‘‘For What Reason (If Any) Does Ultimate Reality Exist?’’ Under the ‘‘Consist’’ question, we have categories of One Universe and Multiple Universes (exhaustively cataloguing every kind of possible multiple universe). Under the ‘‘Cause’’ or ‘‘Reason’’ question, we take all the explanations listed under ‘‘One Universe Models’’ in the text, but here label the category ‘‘Natural Explanations,’’ to distinguish it from the ‘‘Nonphysical Causes’’ and ‘‘Illusions’’ categories (the subcategory explanations of these remaining largely the same). 81. Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics, second edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), 132. See also endnotes 2 and 73 above. Derek Parfit states: ‘‘Reality might be some way because that way is the best, or the simplest, or the least arbitrary, or because its obtaining makes reality as full and varied as it could be, or because its fundamental laws are, in some way, as elegant as they could be’’ (February 5, 1998). 82. That the universe may have popped into existence via some sort of cosmic spontaneous combustion, emerging from the ‘‘nothing’’ of empty space (i.e., vacuum energy generated by quantum fluctuations in the ‘‘quantum foam,’’ unstable high energy ‘‘false vacua’’) or from ‘‘quantum tunneling’’ (Vilenkin, 2006) may be the proximal cause of why we have a universe in the first place, but cannot itself be the reason why the universe we have works so well for us. Universe-generating mechanisms of themselves, such as unprompted eternal chaotic inflation or uncaused nucleations in spacetime, do not address, much less solve, the fine-tuning problem. Nor can vacuum energy, quantum tunneling, or anything of the like be the ultimate cause of the universe, because, however hackneyed, the still-standing, still-unanswered question remains ‘‘from where did those laws come?’’


Glossary of Key Terms

Chapter 1: Is Science Fiction Science? SCENARIO FORECASTING Alternative ways for future events to unfold, which enhance readiness for any eventuality.

XENOGENESIS Octavia Butler: Xenogenesis is a generation that is wholly and permanently unlike the parent generation. We can create such a generation now with genetic engineering, and in my books, my characters actually do it.

Chapter 2: Why is Music So Significant? MIDI Jeanne Bamberger: MIDI instruments can play any instrument you want and make it sound any way that you want, and with this synthesizing technique, everybody can make music. But I’m not sure that that’s so wonderful because I’m looking for ways of getting people to inquire and reflect and question what they’re doing when they’re making music.

NEUROBIOLOGY A branch of the life sciences that deals with the anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the nervous system.

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Chapter 3: Is Consciousness an Illusion? CONSCIOUSNESS Christof Koch: It’s a bit difficult to rigorously define consciousness. Right now I’m conscious. You’re conscious. You’re looking at me. You can attend to my voice. I assume you’re conscious. But to really define consciousness in very formal ways is always impossible. There are always exceptions involving, for example, sleep walking and dreaming and near-death experiences and all those things. Right now it’s not terribly fruitful to try to define consciousness in a more rigorous way. When you take an awake subject and the subject behaves appropriately, unless there’s some reason to suspect that the patient is in some special state, it’s reasonable to assume that the patient, or the subject, is conscious. Stuart Hameroff: I think consciousness is a specific, physical process, a particular type of collapse of the quantum wave function that gives rise to experience, perception, and choice—our inner life of experience. So I think consciousness is a real process. It’s impossible to observe. I can’t really tell that you’re conscious, that you’re not a zombie, just like I can’t absolutely tell that my patients are unconscious during anesthesia. I assume they are, and everything tells me that they are, but there’s no real way to tell because I couldn’t tell that they were conscious in the first place. Consciousness is unobservable, and it’s very much like a quantum system, which is unobservable, because if you interact with it, it changes it. So I think consciousness is an isolated set of quantum state collapses going on in the brain. Leslie Brothers: How can you tell the difference between believing that you’re conscious and really being conscious? Now, if I believe I’m playing the game of Monopoly, and I’m playing it, I’m playing it. There’s no difference between believing that you are and being it. And I say if there’s no way to tell the difference between believing that you’re conscious and really being conscious, then what is being conscious? It might just be believing that you’re conscious. It’s an illusion that creates its own reality. Joe Bogen: When we say we want to try to explain consciousness, we mean in terms of the kind of stuff that you can see, wires and juices and stuff like that. If you want to explain consciousness the way a lot of people talk about it, which involves all kinds of cognitive stuff and how you generate abstract ideas, you’re just creating a much bigger problem. What we want to explain is that little crucial core of what almost everybody is talking about. No matter how complicated their concept of consciousness is, they almost always include aspects of an inner life, the essence of subjectivity.

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PERCEPTION Joe Bogen: A percept is a neuronal representation in the brain of some outside information gathered by a sensory organ, like your eye or your ear. So what happens when there’s a scene out there, you’re going to have in your head a whole bunch of nerve cell activity that corresponds to that scene. Much of this is not conscious. I make myself deliberately conscious of this lampshade at the edge of my vision, which I was not conscious of until I started to talk about it. I think that I have perceptions of which I am not conscious.

QUALIA Sensations, flavors, emotions, feelings as perceived privately in one’s consciousness. A property (like redness) as it is experienced as distinct from any source it might have in the physical world.

DREAMING Joe Bogen: Dreaming is a kind of consciousness during sleep that is a stream of qualia, thoughts, perceptions and so on, which are not accompanied by movement. Activity has been somehow cut off. The nerve impulses to do the action are probably coming down out of your head, but there’s something in the brainstem that inhibits them. Occasionally, the inhibition fails, which can result in walking around. In dreaming you have a stream of consciousness that doesn’t depend on what’s going on around you, although we know that what people dream about seems to depend some on external inputs, such as whether they are cold or there’s water dripping. But the main thing about dreaming is that it is consciousness without the usual output or input.

FUNCTIONAL BRAIN IMAGING Christof Koch: Using functional brain imaging, I can now take any subject, put them in a normal scanner, ask her or him to do something and note the activity in different parts of the brain. For example, I can show the subject the same picture, first in color and then in black and white, and I can observe the differences in the brain states when a human sees in color versus when he sees in black and white. In this way, I can discern which parts of the brain are active when the person perceives color.

Chapter 4: How Does the Autistic Brain Work? AUTISM Eric Courchesne: A neurobiological disorder manifesting itself in profound sensory disregulation that affects the development of a variety of brain

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behaviors. It affects brain development in the cerebral cortex and cerebella cortex, and the limbic system. Typically, parents come to physicians when the child is about 16, 18 months of age and they’re worried that their child isn’t progressing normally. They’re first concerned about the development of speech, about social communication, and that their child isn’t showing normal interest in interacting with other people. Finally, they become worried because their child seems to be lost in a world of doing things repetitively. In summary, areas of concern suggesting autism: speech and language development, social communication, and ritualistic and repetitive behaviors.

THE BINDING PROBLEM Terry Sejnowski: There’s a controversy having to do with how information that belongs together stays together. For example, if you have a red cup, how do the redness of the cup and the shape of the cup become bound together as a unified mental whole? That’s called the binding problem. And there have been different solutions that have been suggested for it. In my view, I don’t think it’s a real problem. I think that the brain is quite capable of representing those properties by different groups of neurons firing at roughly the same time, but they may not necessarily have to fire their spikes at exactly the same time.

CURE AUTISM NOW (CAN) Cure Autism Now (CAN) is an organization of parents, physicians, and researchers dedicated to promoting and funding research with direct clinical implications for treatment and a cure for autism. The largest private funder of autism research since its founding in 1995, CAN has directed over $5 million to support research projects and a crucial scientific resource—the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE). AGRE is the world’s first collaborative gene bank that contains information on families with more than one child with autism.

RAPID PROMPTING METHOD (RPM) A teaching method for autistic children invented by Soma Mukhopadhyay for her son Tito, which both flies in the face of common lore for how to work with autistics, and is profoundly successful in liberating autistics to be able to communicate clearly and directly. See CAN website for more information.

TEMPORAL CODING Terry Sejnowski: When we look at the brain we look at the final frontier of human understanding, since the brain is the most complex device in the

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universe. Space travel is not the final frontier, it’s time. How does the brain represent time and how do signals in different parts of the brain that occur at different moments in time come together and integrate all that information together? We’re beginning to appreciate that internal time in the brain can be used for mental functions like attention—such as your expectation of where a signal is coming from in space, or what form it’s going to take. This type of attention and expectation may actually happen through temporal synchrony, the firing of neurons together at the same time. And if these theoretical ideas are true, and we’re in the process right now of making predictions and trying to test them, then it means that some diseases like autism may be diseases of timing of signals in the brain. Also: A way of representing information in the brain that depends on the exact time when a spike occurs.

Chapter 5: Does Psychiatry Have a Split Personality? BIOMEDICINE Medicine based on the application of the principles of the natural sciences, especially biology and biochemistry.

DEPRESSION Robert Epstein: Depression is an abnormal mood state that has many elements to it. One of the obvious ones is that you feel kind of down and you feel sad, but there are other possible elements. For example, you could have a problem with your appetite, either eating very little or maybe overeating. You might have a problem sleeping. There are many different possible elements to depression, but fundamentally, it’s a lower mood state; it’s a state of real sadness.

PSYCHIATRIST/PSYCHOLOGIST Robert Epstein: Psychiatrists are medical doctors (MDs) who then go on and specialize in psychology. Psychologists are professionals who have extensive training in psychology and have virtually no training in medicine.

Chapter 6: Who Gets to Validate Alternative Medicine? ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE Therapies, treatments, practices, and procedures which share three common features: 1) they have not been demonstrated within the United States that they are safe and effective against specific diseases and

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conditions; 2) they are not taught in medical schools; and 3) they are generally not reimbursable by insurance. Hyla Cass: Alternative medicine has been defined as those modalities that are outside of the purview of conventional medicine. So acupuncture, homeopathy, guided imagery, mind-body medicine—these are all considered alternative. In my opinion, I think it’s just part of medicine; what we really need to practice is everything. And that doesn’t mean that everybody should do everything. I don’t do acupuncture. I don’t do homeopathy, but I want to have access to those practitioners who do, so I can refer my patients and feel comfortable sending them to people whom I know are practicing a high standard in those areas. Wallace Sampson: Alternative medicine are methods and materials that do not work, methods and materials that are not likely to work, and methods and materials that already have been investigated and found to be debatable. William Jarvis: I go along with the NIH definition, which basically says everything outside of standard medicine—treatments, drugs, procedures that have not been shown to be safe and efficacious by modern medical standards.

CAM PROCEDURES Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). The official term used by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to describe everything that’s outside of standard medicine.

INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE Popular term denoting the kind of medicine practiced by a physician who uses the best from standard medicine and the best from alternative medicine. The controversial aspect of this nomenclature is that how does the practitioner know what’s ’’best’’ if not all treatments have been scientifically tested?

NATUROPATHIC MEDICINE Dan Labriola: Naturopathic medicine is a primary healthcare provider profession whose motto is Vis Medicatrix Naturae, which is ‘‘helping nature heal.’’ Our underlying fundamental approach to healthcare is to support and provide for the body’s natural healing power rather than trying to simply do interventions.

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE William Jarvis: Anecdotal evidence is anything based on personal experience, regardless of how convincing it is. Scientific evidence is something that

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has an objective basis that can be repeated again and again under the same circumstances, versus the subjective experience that felt good at the time, seemed to be okay, but for some reason, it just doesn’t seem to happen again.

Chapter 7: Microbes—Friend or Foe? AMINO ACIDS Alice Huang: Amino acids are the constituent building blocks of proteins, and proteins are the machinery that does all the work in our cells. There are eight essential amino acids, those which cannot be synthesized by the body.

ANTIVIRALS Alice Huang: Antivirals are anything that would inhibit the growth of virus or prevent the disease that a virus causes.

MICROBIAL ANTAGONISM Agnes Day: Microbial antagonism is similar to the Crips and the Bloods— two gangs that used to operate in Los Angeles. What they’re doing is they’re trying to make sure that nobody gets the upper hand. For instance, in the lower gastrointestinal tract, in the large intestine and the colon, you have at least 30 different types of enteric bacteria or bacteria that grow in the gut. So, if you have all of these bacteria in you, some of which are known to cause disease, why is it that you are not always ill? It is because certain bacteria will produce agents, sort of like peptide antibiotics that will keep the numbers of other bacteria low. For example, E. coli produces a peptide called a colicin that makes other bacteria sick so they don’t grow as well. So there’s this balance that is maintained between these various organisms living in the same environment.

HELICOBACTER PYLORI Agnes Day: Helicobacter pylori is a bacterium that lives in the stomach and it produces, through its metabolism, clouds of carbon dioxide. The organism attaches to the gastric lining and has been associated with ulcers in the stomach as well as gastric cancer. People who have this organism will, in most cases, progress to the point of gastric cancer. It is one of the few bacteria that science has shown to have a strong association with cancer.

PATHOGEN A pathogen is an agent that causes disease.

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PEPTIDE A peptide is a group of amino acids.

PLASMIDS Agnes Day: Plasmids are small circular DNA molecules that don’t belong in the bacterial cell. They arise from other small pieces of DNA that join together and say, ‘‘Look. We can cause more damage if we work together than if we try to go in individually.’’ These plasmids are notorious for carrying genes that encode for the destruction of antibiotics.

SYMBIOSIS Alice Huang: Symbiosis is the ability of organisms to live together. In general, one does something to the other or provides something to the other and vice versa so that they live happily together.

Chapter 8: Testing New Drugs: Are People Guinea Pigs? INFORMED CONSENT Alexander Capron: The original way informed consent arose was as an obligation of disclosure on physicians. In a second view, informed consent doesn’t refer to the obligation of the researcher but rather sort of a more subjective state of mind of the subject or the patient, that they have an understanding that they have become informed before they consent. The emphasis is on the obligation, the duty, of the researcher or physician, to make a disclosure which is understandable by the patient. The latter may be realized or may not be, and it would obviously vary person to person. The emphasis should not be on a signed piece of paper, a form that says ‘‘Informed Consent’’ at the top with a signature at the bottom. That is not informed consent by itself; informed consent is a serious process of real understanding, of which this piece of paper is only one part.

BIOETHICS A discipline dealing with the ethical implications of biological research and applications, especially in medicine.

COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY The use or operation of a computer in simulating theoretical or existing conditions. For example, ‘‘dry testing’’ of drugs by supercomputer simulations, or simulating the human brain to run experiments that can’t be tried on a human being.

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PERINATEL Refers to the time period after the 28th week of gestation and ending the first week after birth. Some sources extend the perinatal period until the fourth week after birth.

MORBIDITY Robert Temple: Morbidity is an illness or disease of some kind. The term we use in our ethical discussion is ‘‘irreversible morbidity.’’ You go blind, you have a stroke, you have an amputation—these are morbidities that do not away. They do not kill you—mortality would kill you. There are other kinds of morbidities as well; being depressed is a morbidity, but one that hopefully goes away.

Chapter 9: How Does Order Arise in the Universe? SIMPLICITY AND COMPLEXITY Murray Gell-mann: I like to use neckties as an example of simplicity and complexity. A regimental stripe, for example, would be simple. You just have to describe the colors and the widths and then this pattern is repeated —it’s a rather simple kind of pattern for a tie. If you look at a hand painted tie or a tie that was designed by Jerry Garcia, you will find in many cases that it takes a very long time to describe the regularities of the pattern—that’s a complex tie, but notice we’re still talking only about pattern. We’re not talking about soup stains or wine stains or baby stains, which we consider as incidental or random. But suppose you are a dry cleaner, then the soupwine-baby stains may be the important regularities and the stripes maybe irrelevant, so you can treat the stripes as incidental. So the evaluation of regularities must be viewed from the perspective of human beings and different kinds of human beings will have different evaluations. One person (a television anchor) is concerned with the pattern of the tie, another (the dry cleaner) is one concerned with the stains on the tie. One can be more abstract as well: there are rules of some kinds that describe what’s important and what’s unimportant and these rules do not have to pertain to a human judge.

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM Murray Gell-Mann: The complex adaptive system takes in certain kinds of information about the world around it and about itself and compresses those kinds of information into very brief, very compact messages, which I call schema. The schema, along with a lot of other information, is then used to predict the behavior of things in the real world, including the system itself,

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and also to prescribe behavior for the system in the real world. Those predictions and those prescriptions have real world consequences and the real world consequences feed back to exert selection pressure on the competition among the different possible schemata. In this way the schemata evolve. All of the complex adaptive systems with which we are familiar on Earth are related in one way or another to life, including biological evolution itself, which in my sense is a complex adaptive system. All the various organisms are complex adaptive systems. The immune system and the brain are also complex adaptive systems. When something is described as a complex adaptive system that doesn’t describe all its properties, it only describes its informational aspects. Living things also process energy, for example, and other things besides information. The term complex adaptive system refers just to their informational properties.

CHROMOSOME A rod-shaped structure, usually found in pairs in a cell nucleus, that carries the genes that determine sex and the characteristics an organism inherits from its parents; a human body cell usually contains 46 chromosomes arranged in 23 pairs. David Baltimore: A gene is a little region on a chromosome, and a chromosome is a collection of genes. A chromosome is more, too, because it has to be able to duplicate itself, so it needs signals for duplication. It has to be able to segregate itself and send signals for segregation. Fundamentally, a chromosome is a way of carrying genes in bite-sized pieces. Is there any significance to chromosomes? Probably not in the sense that we could have 22 chromosomes or we could have 46 chromosomes or we could have 85 chromosomes and it probably wouldn’t make us any different than we are now. Different organisms have different numbers of chromosomes and there does not seem to be any rhyme or reason for the differences.

DNA The large molecule that carries an organism’s genetic information: a nucleic acid molecule in the form of a twisted double strand, or double helix, that is the major component of chromosomes and carries genetic information. DNA, which is found in all living organisms except some viruses, reproduces itself and is the means by which hereditary characteristics pass from one generation to the next. David Baltimore: DNA is the chemical molecule that carries the genetic information of the organism. It’s the backbone of chromosomes. But fundamentally it’s just a chemical that carries information in a code. The code happens to be a four-letter code, which means that if you look down DNA, at position one, two, three, four, five, going out to three billion—which is

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the number of letters in the human genetic code—at every one of those positions there is either an A, G, C, or T, which are the notations for specific nucleic acids in those positions and which constitute the genetic code. So DNA is a marvelously and almost infinitely variable polymer of individual units. But the important thing about it is it carries information.

GENE The basic unit of heredity: the basic unit capable of transmitting characteristics from one generation to the next. It consists of a specific sequence of DNA or RNA that occupies a fixed position locus on a chromosome. David Baltimore: Genes are circumscribed regions of DNA sitting on chromosomes which have a particular function. I’m not going to define it any better than that because in fact when you try to define a gene, the notion of a gene dissolves in front of you. It turns out that different people use the term ‘‘gene’’ in different ways, but the field goes on perfectly happily anyway.

GENOME A set of chromosomes for any particular living thing: the full complement of genetic information that an organism inherits from its parents, especially the set of chromosomes and the genes they carry. David Baltimore: The genome is the aggregate of all of the genes, all those little places on chromosomes where there is useful information that goes into constructing the organism. It’s a word you could almost do without, but it’s convenient for describing what scientists do when they sequence all the DNA that an organism has—the description is ‘‘sequencing the genome.’’ In fact, that is not what is being done; what is being done is sequencing just all the chromosomes. But that’s the usage of the term ‘‘genome.’’

SEQUENCING David Baltimore: Sequencing DNA is merely determining its detailed chemical structure, particularly the sequence of nucleic acids (represented by letters) that constitute the genetic code. So when we say sequencing, what we mean is putting all of these A’s, G’s, C’s and T’s in sequence as they appear in the DNA of a newt or a person or a plant or whatever organism. The DNA of each species is different. The DNA of each type of organism is different. The DNA of each individual within the species is different. There’s a whole hierarchy of differences which are fundamentally the remnants of evolution. And so we can use sequencing as a way of figuring out what evolution did.

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Chapter 10: How Weird is the Cosmos? DARK MATTER Roger Blandford: Dark matter is a form of matter whose identity we don’t yet know. We see evidence for it in our galaxy, in other galaxies, and in the clusters of galaxies, and indeed in the universe at large because we see gravitational effects that cannot be explained by the total amount of ordinary matter. We call it dark matter because it doesn’t have light associated with it; it doesn’t have stars that create starlight. It doesn’t appear to be like the matter that everything we know is made up of. It appears to be some other sort of matter. We suspect that dark matter may be a fundamental particle of a sort that has not yet been described.

BLACK HOLES Roger Blandford: Supermassive space objects that gobble up matter and light. A black hole is a body where the gravity is by definition sufficiently strong that no material particle and not even light can escape. What this essentially means is a black hole defines a surface, which is known as the event horizon, and after anything has crossed that event horizon then there is no way of going back. It could be photon, it could be a material particle, but once they’ve crossed that horizon then they can no longer escape.

DARK ENERGY Roger Blandford: When we try to describe the way in which the expansion of the universe is accelerating, we cannot do this with all the matter in the universe, including all the ordinary matter and all the dark matter. We need some extra force in the Newtonian sense, an extra substance present that has properties that are different from regular matter, either ordinary or dark. And we call this mysterious force dark energy. Some are looking for an explanation of dark energy by investigating the energy resident in the vacuum of space, derived from quantum mechanics.

EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE See inflation, which holds that during the first fraction of a millisecond after the Big Bang, fundamental forces drove the newborn universe to expand at an unimaginable speed, faster, even, than the speed of light. Today one of the weird and unexpected findings is that the expansion of the universe seems to be speeding up, or as physicists call it, accelerating. The best candidate for that is what is currently called dark energy.

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GAMMA RAY BURSTS Roger Blandford: High-energy waves from space. A gamma ray burst is an intense pulse of gamma rays that is seen mostly from the distant universe. It lasts for time scales from about a tenth of a second to 100 seconds typically. There are different types of them. We believe gamma ray bursts are associated with either the birth or the augmentation of a black hole. Shri Kulkarni: Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful energy streams known in the universe; these events that roughly take place a few times a day. They are extremely high energy bursts in the gamma ray part of the spectrum and we now believe they come from great distances. You won’t see them on Earth at sea level but if you go up in space, and you have any instrument which can sense gamma rays, they’re very, very bright events. It doesn’t take much to see a gamma ray burst.

GRAVITATIONAL LENSING Refers to the way light travels in curved paths around stars and galaxies, and was predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity

INFLATIONARY THEORY (INFLATION) MIT Physicist Alan Guth worked out this still-reigning theory which holds that during the first fraction of a millisecond after the Big Bang, fundamental forces drove the newborn universe to expand at unimaginable speed —vastly faster, even, than the speed of light. This did not violate Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which states that nothing in space can go faster than the speed of light, since during inflation space itself was expanding (like dots on a balloon’s surface while it is being pumped with air).

Chapter 11: Is the Universe Full of Life? ASTROBIOLOGY Astrobiology is the study of life in the universe. It provides a biological perspective to diverse areas and links such endeavors as the search for habitable planets, exploration missions to Mars and Europa, and efforts to understand the origin of the universe.

INTERFEROMETER A device for determining wave properties: a device that uses an interference pattern to determine wave frequency, length, or velocity, used here for increasing the power of astronomical telescopes. Neil de Grasse Tyson: We know from basic optics that the bigger your telescope the more the resolution you have when observing some object in

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the cosmos—its resolution being simply your ability to determine detail. When I first looked at the moon through binoculars, I had more resolution through the binoculars than I had with my unaided eye because I was able to see more detail. The bigger the telescope, the sharper the resolution, and resolution is key to see, for example, structure on the surface of a planet that’s otherwise too small to observe. Astronomers want as big a telescope as they can possibly have. Here’s the problem, though: big telescope mirrors or lenses are unrealistically expensive, but you can cheat by making smaller telescopes, planting them in strategic locations relative to one another and linking them electronically to work together and thereby simulate the diameter of a larger telescope. Combining the light from different telescopes in such a way that your image thinks it came through a single telescope mirror that’s the size of the entire much larger area is called interferometry.

SPECTRUM The continuous distribution of colored light produced when a beam of white light is dispersed into its components, e.g. by a prism. The spectral analysis of light from stars is used by astronomers to determine the star’s chemical constituents. Shri Kulkarni: The best definition of a spectrum is in one from Newton’s work. He has light rays coming on to a prism and you get a nice rainbow. So a spectrum is basically splitting the light into its constituent fluxes and that tells you some detailed information about what that light is made up of.

Chapter 12: Will Computers Take a Quantum Leap? QUANTUM THEORY Quantum theory is the remarkable way for describing the world at the smallest scales where the act of observation of the system is inseparable from the objective state of the system. Quantum theory is the theoretical basis of modern physics that explains the nature and behavior of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic level. At the beginning of the twentieth century, physicist Max Planck sought to discover the reason that radiation from a glowing body changes in color from red, to orange, and, finally, to blue as its temperature rises. He found that by making the assumption that energy existed in individual units, or separate packets, in the same way that matter does (atoms), rather than just as a constant electromagnetic wave—as had been the conventional wisdom—and was therefore quantifiable, he could find the answer to his question. The existence of these individual units, called quanta, became the core concept of quantum theory, and their descriptions came to be framed in terms of probabilities and probability functions, not deterministic statements and fixed equations. Several decades

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later, two major interpretations of quantum theory’s implications for the nature of reality were developed: the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds theory. Niels Bohr proposed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which asserts that a particle is whatever it is measured to be (i.e., a wave or a particle), but that it cannot be assumed to have specific properties, or even to exist, until it is measured. In short, Bohr was saying that objective reality does not exist. This translates to a principle called superposition that claims that while we do not know what the state of any object is, it is actually in all possible states simultaneously, as long as we don’t look to check. The second interpretation of quantum theory is the many-worlds (or multiverse) theory. It holds that as soon as a potential exists for any object to be in any state, the universe of that object transmutes into a series of parallel universes equal to the number of possible states in which that the object can exist, with each universe containing a unique single possible state of that object. Furthermore, there is a mechanism for interaction between these universes that somehow permits all states to be accessible in some way and for all possible states to be affected in some manner. Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman are among the scientists who have expressed a preference for the many-worlds theory.

QUANTUM PHYSICS David DiVincenzo: Quantum physics is the application of quantum theory to physical problems, to use quantum theory as we have come to understand it to solve problems in physics and to come to an understanding of the physical world.

SUPERPOSITION Superposition is a principle of quantum theory that describes a challenging concept about the nature and behavior of matter and forces at the atomic level. The principle of superposition claims that while we do not know what the state of any object is, it is actually in all possible states simultaneously, as long as we don’t look to check. It is the measurement itself that causes the object to be limited to a single possibility. K. Birgitta Whaley: An object can appear to exist in two different states at the same time. Imagine that you have a cup of coffee and a glass of whiskey in front of you, and as a person living in a classical world, you would drink either the cup of coffee or the glass of whiskey. The quantum superposition is putting that person in the situation where they would be essentially drinking the cup of coffee and the glass of whiskey simultaneously.

ENTANGLEMENT Entanglement is a term used in quantum theory to describe the way that particles of energy/matter can become correlated to predictably interact with

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each other regardless of how far apart they are. This means that the quantum states of two or more objects (e.g., particles) must be described in reference to each other or one another, irrespective of their spatial distance. David DiVincenzo: Entanglement is correlation between quantum information, or it’s a correlation between quantum states of two parts or more parts. We have learned that those kinds of correlations, or the correlations that those systems have, are stronger than the correlations that exist between ordinary, classical data. Another aspect of entanglement is that typically it is created by a physical interaction or by a physical force between the two quantum systems, which may have, however, taken place long in the past. So you can have two systems which are not presently interacting, which are far apart from one another, but which have a kind of memory of their previous interaction, and this memory is embodied in those correlations.

TUNNELING K. Birgitta Whaley: Tunneling is the name that we give to the phenomenon where elementary particles pass through barriers by apparently disappearing and reappearing on the other side, as through a tunnel. As an analogy, imagine a person is a particle who wants to go from town A to town B and there’s a big mountain in between and no way over the mountain, and you certainly don’t know any way through the mountain. If you’re a normal person (or ‘‘classical’’ particle), then you would have to trek up to the top of the mountain and then down again over the other side. And during that process, your energy would increase considerably. If you are a quantum particle, however, there exists a finite probability that you can go from town A to town B without ever going over the mountain—you would essentially move through a process of quantum mechanical superposition of your state in both town A and town B. You would basically appear in town B after a certain very short amount of time.

QUANTUM COMPUTER A computer that uses quantum mechanical processes to do computations which regular computers could never perform.

FACTORING Breaking a number into its prime components; that is, given an integer like 15, doing a computation to find that its prime factors are three and five. Factoring is a simple computation for a number like 15 but an extremely hard computation for a 100-digit number. Only a quantum computer could, in theory, factor large numbers.

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Chapter 13: How Does Basic Science Support National Security? PURE SCIENCE Scientific research to explore an interesting fact of nature often done solely for the exploration, the elegance, or the beauty of the discovery. Research not directed toward the exposition of reality or solution of practical problems.

BASIC SCIENCE Scientific research that deals with general principles, often fundamental principles, rather than practical application. Basic science seeks discovery of essential structure, function, or facts.

APPLIED SCIENCE Scientific research put to practical use, such as the technology of lasers being applied to the making of CDs, fax and copying machines.

Chapter 14: Can Religion Withstand Technology? FUNDAMENTALISM Fundamentalism is term applied to many religions as signifying a kind of religious thought and practice that claims to adhere faithfully to original tenets and precepts, including literal interpretation of sacred texts such as the Bible or the Koran, and often includes anti-modernist movements or theories. Donald Miller: Fundamentalism is often a flight from modernity; it often refers to a group of people who are being left out of the march of progress. Such people often idealize a golden age of fidelity and strictness that they want to return to. Typically this golden age is something where they fantasize there were religious absolutes, where people were more moral, more pure, less given to moral looseness, and so forth. I think we have to be very careful about this sort of mythical use of religion.

ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM Muzaffar Iqbal: In every religious tradition, there is what we call the normative tradition, which is the mainstream way of thinking. In the case of Islam, we fortunately have had throughout the centuries, the two primary sources which are living sources, the Koran and the practice of the prophet Mohammed. These resources have never gone into oblivion. They have always been living sources. And there is a huge amount of literature on what

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constitutes the normative practice of Islam. So those people who are extremist and who claim to be following the norm of Islam, the onus is on them to explain how they justify their position in the face of 1,400 years of scholarship that has very clearly defined ways of revolution—for example, when the foreign enemy has attacked, the ways of behavior in every single situation. So it is not just my position that defines the norm, it is the living sources of Islam themselves.

CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM Donald Miller: The term fundamentalism was born in the early part of the twentieth century; I think it was actually coined about 1920. Psychologically it comes out of a response of some Christians to a modernizing influence of theologians who wanted to look at scripture in more critical and historical ways. These Christians wanted to secure their faith in clear and absolute terms, which usually includes the literal belief in the Bible. I do think we’re getting more polarization among peoples, whether it be among Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or even Buddhists, and we are having more backlash effects. Unfortunately it seems that this is the trend. There are probably greater similarities between liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics, liberal Jews, and liberal Muslims, then there are between Christians who are fundamentalists and Christians who are liberal or between Jews who are liberal or Jews who are orthodox.

EXTREMISM Nancey Murphy: I suppose you could apply it to any religious movement where rather than attempting to confront the new intellectual problems that arise, the group’s leaders attempt to maintain their belief system by means of authority, which often includes severe attitudes toward nonbelievers. And because this is such a difficult strategy, it usually goes along with an attempt to separate oneself from the host culture. So there’s a sort of us-against-them mentality and a fear of confronting intellectual problems facing the tradition.

SOCIAL SCIENCE & RELIGION Don Miller: I’m a sociologist of religion and have conducted a number of different projects that look at the social science side of religion, much more than the theological side. I don’t really examine the issue of truth, but instead people’s perception of truth or what is true for them.

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Chapter 15: Can We Believe in Both Science and Religion? DUALIST One who views human beings as constituted of two distinct substances or elements , matter (body) and spirit (soul).

MATERIALIST One who believes that physical matter is the only reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter.

PHYSICALISM Nancey Murphy: Physicalism is a position that’s best understood in contrast to the opposing or competing position, which is in contrast to a dualist view of the person that says that in addition to our bodies we have some nonmaterial part, a soul or a mind or something nonphysical of that sort. And physicalists hold that all those higher human capacities are really the result of our complicated brains (see materialist).

SCIENTISM Michael Shermer: Scientism is a world view that takes the empirical methods of science seriously, that attempts natural explanations for all phenomena, does not turn to supernatural or superstitious explanations, and most importantly, is open minded and flexible to changing answers to questions because science is always changing.

SKEPTIC Michael Shermer: A skeptic is somebody who is a scientist. It’s somebody from Missouri who says, ‘‘Show me,’’ who says, ‘‘That’s nice. Show me the evidence. How do you know this is true?’’ Skeptics basically ask questions about quality of the evidence, and they seek the source of the claim. They want to know how your belief system came about. Really, this is just science. Skepticism is literally thoughtful inquiry; that’s the original meaning. And the kind of thoughtful inquiry that’s most effective today is the scientific method.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn is an international investment banker and corporate strategist with extensive relationships and activities in China. With a doctorate in brain research, he is a public intellectual who speaks and writes frequently, the author or editor of over 25 books, a philanthropist and foundation chairman, and the creator and host of the Closer To Truth television series. For ten years Dr. Kuhn was president and co-owner of The Geneva Companies, the leading merger and acquisition (M&A) firm representing middlemarket companies, prior to Geneva’s 2001 sale to Citigroup, the world’s largest financial services company, where Dr. Kuhn is Senior Advisor to Citigroup Investment Banking (focusing on China). He is Senior Partner of IMG, the world’s premier sports, entertainment, and media company, where he is responsible for its business in China. Dr. Kuhn is the author of The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin, a precedent-setting biography of the former Chinese president that was China’s best-selling book in 2005 with substantial nationwide publicity. Dr. Kuhn has been featured in lead and cover stories in numerous Chinese newspapers, magazines, and websites. His book is recognized as the first time that a biography of a living Chinese leader has been published on the Chinese mainland and stories of its unusual success have run in the international press. Five of Dr. Kuhn’s books have been published in Chinese, including the first investment banking book published in China. Since 1989, when he was invited by Dr. Song Jian, Chairman of the State Science and Technology Commission and State Councilor in the administration of former General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, Dr. Kuhn has been advising the Chinese government at highest levels in economic policy, media and entertainment policy, mergers and acquisitions, science and technology, cultural exchanges, and international communications. He is advisor to senior officials restructuring China’s media industries, in understanding and improving China’s international image, and in bringing Chinese culture to the world. He is interviewed often in China’s business and national press (e.g., People’s Daily and CCTV).

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Dr. Kuhn is a frequent commentator on China’s economic, political, social, and foreign policies, explaining, among other topics, the political philosophy and diplomatic policies of Chinese President Hu Jintao and China’s senior leadership; in China, Dr. Kuhn was among the first foreigners to lecture on President Hu’s political theory. As part of his continuing efforts to tell the real story of China to the world and to support his policy advisory work with China’s senior leaders in Beijing, Dr. Kuhn has toured 36 Chinese cities in 22 provinces, meeting business executives and senior officials of provincial and municipal governments, and lecturing at universities, public forums, and leadership schools. Dr. Kuhn is chairman of The Kuhn Foundation, which he founded and funded to disseminate new knowledge in science, support cultural endeavors, and promote good relations between America and China. The Kuhn Foundation’s primary project is the continuing public television (PBS) series Closer To Truth, which Dr. Kuhn created, produces, and hosts to present leading scientists and scholars exploring the meaning of leading-edge knowledge (brain and mind, biology and medicine, cosmology and astronomy, science and philosophy, philosophy & religion). The next season of Closer To Truth focuses on cosmology and fundamental physics, the philosophy of cosmology, the philosophy of religion, and philosophical theology. Closer To Truth websites are hosted at PBS (www.PBS.org/closertotruth) and at Caltech (www.closertotruth.com). A sister website, www.scitechdaily.com, is a leading source of science news. The Kuhn Foundation produced the critically acclaimed film Khachaturian (on the life of the Armenian-Soviet composer), which won the Best Documentary award at the 2003 Hollywood Film Festival. Dora Serviarian Kuhn (Dr. Kuhn’s wife), a concert pianist known for her critically acclaimed performances of the Khactuaturian Piano Concerto, is executive producer. Dr. Kuhn holds a Ph.D. in anatomy/brain research from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), a M.S. in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Sloan School), and an A.B. in human biology from Johns Hopkins University. He was creator and executive producer of In Search of China, a primetime special on PBS (2000), in co-production with China Central Television. He is a trustee of Claremont Graduate University, serves on the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and is co-founder and vice chairman of the Beijing Institute for Frontier Science. Dr. Nancy C. Andreasen Neuropsychiatrist Nancy Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, director of The MIND Institute, and editor-in-chief

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of The American Journal of Psychiatry. She has authored or edited nine books, including the best-selling The Broken Brain: The Biological Revolution in Psychiatry. She is a leading researcher on schizophrenia, a group of brain disorders that involve hallucinations, delusions, disrupted sense of self, emotional problems, and bizarre behavior. In her early work, Dr. Andreasen developed a now-standard set of techniques for assessing the symptoms and severity of schizophrenia. Currently she is at the forefront of attempts to come up with a specific neurological explanation for it, as well as ways to mitigate or cure it. Her laboratory uses numerous techniques to study schizophrenia (as well as other major psychoses), including computer science, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, the study of twins, and psychiatry. On the Web: http://www.uiowa.edu/~neuro/Faculty/andreasenn.htm Dr. David Baltimore Virologist, Nobel laureate David Baltimore, Ph.D., is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he was president from 1997 to 2006. Early in his career, as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, his investigations of viral infection earned him and two colleagues the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology in 1975. That work identified the enzyme ‘‘reverse transcriptase,’’ which was key to understanding retroviruses like HIV. More than a brilliant scientist, Dr. Baltimore has also proved to be a talented administrator and policy shaper. In the 1970s he helped fashion national science policy on recombinant DNA research, and in the 1980s he served as founding director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. Dr. Baltimore was also an early advocate of federal AIDS research, and was appointed in 1996 to head the National Institutes of Health AIDS Vaccine Research Committee. He is married to Alice S. Huang, a molecular biologist, who is also a panelist on Closer To Truth. Jeanne Bamberger Musicologist Jeanne Bamberger is Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she teaches music theory and music cognition. Her interests include learning and the development of music cognition in both children and adults. She was a student of Artur Schnabel and Roger Sessions (prominent pianists and composers) and performed extensively in the U.S. and Europe as piano soloist and in chamber music ensembles. Her most recent books include The Mind Behind the Musical Ear and Developing Musical Intuitions: A Project-Based Introduction to Making and Understanding Music. On the Web: http://web.mit.edu/jbamb/www/

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Dr. Roger Blandford Astrophysicist Roger Blandford, Ph.D., is Pehong and Adele Chen Professor of Physics at Stanford University. He was Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). His research interests include: black holes, those famous supermassive space objects that gobble up matter and light; ‘‘gravitational lensing,’’ which refers to the way light travels in curved paths around stars and galaxies; highenergy waves from space known as gamma ray bursts; the dim class of stars known as white dwarfs; and the structure and evolution of the universe. On the Web: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~rblandfo/ Dr. Joseph E. Bogen Neuroscientist/Surgeon Joseph Bogen, M.D., is a clinical professor of neurological surgery at the University of Southern California (USC), a visiting professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1962, Dr. Bogen was part of the first team of neurosurgeons ever to perform a human ‘‘commissurotomy’’—severing the connection between the brain’s left and right hemispheres. The procedure was effective in treating the patient’s severe epilepsy, as hoped, but had some other fascinating unintended consequences. The hemispheres were able to think and behave independently in ways that surprised everybody. It proved that each hemisphere has a different set of talents: for example, in the average brain, language and logical thought dwell in the left half while spatial and whole-situation awareness are the specialty of the right. Even more astonishing, the different halves often held different personalities, desires and ambitions. The implications for neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind were great, and Dr. Bogen has continued to study the lessons from these ‘‘split brain’’ patients for a long time. His research focus is the investigation of consciousness from a neuroscientific point of view. On the Web: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jbogen/ Dr. David Brin Scientist, Author David Brin, Ph.D., left his career as an academic physicist when his science fiction novels became successful. His fiction books include Startide Rising, The Uplift War, Earth, and Kiln People. His post apocalyptic novel The Postman was turned into a movie. Dr. Brin also wrote an esteemed nonfiction book, The Transparent Society, in which he weighs the various possible tradeoffs in privacy, surveillance and freedom in the electronic century ahead. He frequently travels around the country giving public lectures on these topics, and writes essays on other topics including ecology, the course

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of modern culture, and space and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). On the Web: http://www.davidbrin.com Dr. Leslie Brothers Psychiatrist Leslie Brothers, M.D., is an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine. Based on her research into the neural basis of emotion and social cognition in primates, as well as work with psychiatric patients, she has proposed a new conception of what consciousness is. While the Western philosophic tradition views the conscious mind as an isolated object, something that can be viewed as a thing-in-itself, a thing-apart from its community, Dr. Brothers argues that the mind is actually inseparable in all ways that matter from the social context that shapes it. On this view, our emotional life and our sense of self are far more deeply embedded in the social fabric than we are aware. Brothers argues this case and draws out its implications for neuroscience, psychiatry and sociology in her books, Mistaken Identity: The MindBrain Problem Reconsidered and Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind. Octavia E. Butler Author Octavia E. Butler, a science fiction writer, explores issues of gender, race and society in her books. She is the author of several novels, including Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Sower, and Kindred, as well as short stories and essays, and an anthology called Bloodchild: And Other Stories. Ms. Butler, of the few female African-American voices in science fiction, has won both of the genre’s most prestigious awards, the Hugo and Nebula. She is was also awarded the MacArthur ‘‘genius grant’’ in 1995. Dr. Alexander Capron Bioethicist Alexander Capron, Ph.D, is a professor of law and medicine and CoDirector of the Pacific Center for Health Policy an Ethics at the University of Southern California (USC). He is a member of the national Bioethics Advisory Commission and has held many appointments, including executive director of two major national bioethical commissions and chair of the Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee of the U.S. Congress. In 2002 he began a two-year leave of absence from USC to serve as Director of Ethics and Health at the World Health Organization in Geneva. Dr. Capron has written numerous books, articles, and reviews, and has testified before Congress many times on bioethical issues. He has weighed

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in on all the important bioethical issues of our day, including the proper criteria for death, genetic engineering, the patenting of genes and organisms, stem cell research, and medical and genetic privacy. On the Web: http://lawweb.usc.edu/faculty/acapron.htm Dr. Hyla Cass Psychiatrist Hyla Cass, M.D., is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. Dr. Cass, also in private practice, integrates nutritional and natural health techniques with mainstream clinical psychiatry. She is the author of several best-selling books, including All About St. John’s Wort and Kava: Nature’s Answer To Stress, Anxiety And Insomnia. Her latest book is Natural Highs: Supplements, Nutrition, and Mind/Body Techniques to Help You Feel Good All the Time. Her areas of focus include anti-aging, women’s health, natural hormone therapy, stress reduction, and natural treatments for addiction, anxiety disorders, and depression. Cass has also written book chapters and magazine pieces, is a frequent lecturer and consultant, and has appeared many times on television and radio. On the Web: http://www.cassmd.com/ Dr. Eric Courchesne Neuroscientist/Neurologist Eric Courchesne, Ph.D., is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California at San Diego and director of the Center for Autism Research at the San Diego Children’s Hospital. He is a leading researcher in the study of the neural basis of autism. Autism is a developmental brain disorder that affects the ability to communicate, form relationships, and respond appropriately to the environment. Autism can vary greatly in its severity, from mild social impairments to extreme retardation, bizarre behavior, and total withdrawal from the world. Some autistics develop ‘‘savant’’ abilities such as prodigious talents for mental arithmetic. Dr. Courchesne studies the brain wiring and genetic basis of autism, hoping to discover the causes of this mysterious disorder that afflicts one in 500 people. Michael Crichton Author, Filmmaker Michael Crichton began his career in medicine in the early 1970s but soon switched tracks to become a highly regarded writer and filmmaker. Most of Dr. Crichton’s books are set in the present or near future, and some of his most successful stories are cautionary tales about the potential pitfalls of science and technology. Known as ‘‘the father of the technothriller,’’ his fiction novels include The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Prey. He has also penned four non-fiction books,

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including Five Patients, Travels, and Jasper Johns. His books have been global bestsellers, translated into 30 languages. 12 have been made into films. Dr. Crichton is also creator of the hit television drama ‘‘ER.’’ In 2000, a newly discovered species of ankylosaur, Bienosaurus crichtoni, was named after him. On the Web: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/crichton/ Dr. Agnes A. Day Microbiologist Agnes Day, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Howard University College of Medicine and Associate Director for Basic Research at the Howard University Cancer Center. She studies and teaches immunology, medical microbiology, and infectious diseases. Dr. David DiVincenzo Research Scientist David DiVincenzo, Ph.D., is a research staff member at IBM’s Watson Research Center. He is a leading researcher in the emerging field of quantum computation. Quantum computers take advantage of the bizarre fact that atoms and electrons are able to exist in multiple, mutually exclusive states simultaneously. Though the concept has been proven to be sound in theory, there are still significant technical hurdles to building large and practical quantum computers. Such computers, which Dr. DiVincenzo strives to construct, will one day whip through certain kinds of calculation with vastly more efficiency than our present-day digital computers. Doc Dougherty Aerospace Engineer Doc Dougherty is director of technology at Raytheon Electronic Systems. Raytheon is a large aerospace company that works on national defense, missile technology and missile defense, government and commercial electronics, and aircraft. Dr. Robert Epstein Psychologist Robert Epstein, Ph.D., is University Research Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology and west coast editor of ‘‘Psychology Today,’’ where he was formerly editor-in-chief. His research focus is creativity and problem solving. He developed a formal scientific theory of creativity, called Generativity Theory, which captures some of the key mechanisms people use when coming up with new ideas. Dr. Epstein’s books include Cognition, Creativity, and Behavior: Selected Essays and Creativity Games. He is also an avid motorcyclist and the father of three sons. On the Web: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/repstein/

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Dr. Paul Ewald Biologist Paul W. Ewald, Ph.D., is a professor of biology at The University of Kentucky. Dr. Ewald, the author of the groundbreaking book Evolution of Infectious Disease and a follow-up, Plague Time, is widely credited as the father of a new discipline called evolutionary medicine. He has demonstrated that a great range of medical ailments cannot be well understood— and in many cases have been tragically misunderstood—without a Darwinian evolutionary perspective. For example, he has shown that there is a direct relationship between how easy it is for a bacterium, virus, or parasite to spread among its victims and how virulent it can afford to be. This new understanding has opened serious new avenues for designing treatment programs and improving public health around the globe. By influencing, for instance, how a particular disease gets spread through the human population, we can encourage it to evolve into a more benign form. Dr. Ewald also argues that there are a lot more deadly pathogens at work against us than just the blatantly obvious infectious diseases people have known about for a long time, like chicken pox, the plague, syphilis, and the flu. Dr. Ewald has shown, to the surprise of the medical community, that many common afflictions such as heart disease and cancer—diseases which doctors have long thought were rooted purely in genetics, environment, or lifestyle—are in fact caused by infections. On the Web: http://www.kli.ac.at/theorylab/AuthPage/E/EwaldPW.html Dr. Robert Freeman Musicologist Robert Freeman, Ph.D., is dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. An accomplished pianist and musicologist, he has also proved a strong leader and administrator. Dr. Freeman taught at MIT, Princeton, and Harvard, then went on to serve as head of two leading American music schools—the Eastman School of Music and the New England Conservatory—before taking his current office. He has spent his career looking for ways to connect music to other disciplines, working to shape arts education, and considering the future of the arts in America. Dr. Murray Gell-Mann Physicist, Nobel Laureate Professor Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D., is co-chairman of the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1969 for his work on the theory of elementary particles. The most well known part of Dr. Gell-Mann’s work was his theory of ‘‘quarks,’’ the fundamental particles that make up the protons and neutrons of ordinary matter.

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Dr. Gell-Mann and others further developed his ideas to build the powerful ‘‘standard model’’ of particle physics, which to this day reigns as our best theory of the nature of matter. Since then he has taken up broader interests that include natural history, historical linguistics, archaeology, history, depth psychology, creative thinking, and biological and cultural evolution. He taps all these fields in his study of ‘‘complex adaptive systems,’’ which is the subject of his popular science book, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. Dr. Gell-Mann is also concerned with global policy matters such as population growth, conservation and biodiversity, sustainable economic development, and geopolitical stability. On the Web: http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/mgm/ Dr. David L. Goodstein Physicist David Goodstein is vice provost and a professor of physics and applied physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He has served on numerous scientific and academic panels and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the California Council on Science and Technology. His research focus has been condensed matter physics—roadly speaking, the study of solids and liquids under a variety of conditions of pressure, temperature, and radiation. In the 1980s Dr. Goodstein was director and host of ‘‘The Mechanical Universe,’’ an innovative and highly acclaimed television series that has taught high school-level physics to millions of students around the world. His books include States of Matter and Feynman’s Lost Lecture. On the Web: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/ Dr. Alan Guth Physicist Alan Guth, Ph.D., is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research focuses on what the theory of elementary particles can tell us about the birth and fate of the universe. He is best known for working out the ‘‘inflationary theory’’ of the universe, which holds that during the first fraction of a millisecond after the Big Bang, fundamental forces drove the newborn universe to expand at unimaginable speed—vastly faster, even, than the speed of light. Dr. Guth’s inflationary model accounted for some curious features of the modern universe which the older, more naively straightforward Big Bang theory could not. He is the author of a popular book, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins, about the state of modern cosmology and his own experiences as a scientist. On the Web: http://web.mit.edu/physics/people/alan_guth.htm

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Dr. Stuart Hameroff Anesthesiologist, Consciousness Researcher Stuart Hameroff, M.D., is a professor of anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona, where he is associate director and co-founder of the Center for Consciousness Studies. He is also a clinical anesthesiologist. He has written or edited five books including Ultimate Computing: Biomolecular Consciousness and Nanotechnology. Dr. Hameroff co-developed, with physicist Sir Roger Penrose, the ‘‘Orch OR’’ theory of consciousness. The mainstream view of consciousness holds that it arises from the complex interactions between neurons in the brain. Orch OR proposes instead that consciousness happens through ‘‘quantum computations’’ (interactions that take place according to the bizarre, counterintuitive logic of quantum mechanics) occurring inside the networks of tiny tubes (microtubules) inside of neurons. On the Web: http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/hameroff/ Dr. David Herrelko Military Technologist David A. Herrelko, Ph.D., was a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force. He is now the New Engineer Leadership Professor at the University of Dayton, where he helps engineering students prepare for their careers. He is also site leader at the MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that does research and development in engineering and information technology for the U.S. government. Dr. Herrelko began his military career in 1970 and served for three decades in numerous posts supervising the research and development of military technology, including aerospace electronics, precision-guided weapons, and radar, reconnaissance, communications, and air traffic control systems. On the Web: http://www.af.mil/news/biographies/herrelko_da.html Dr. Alice S. Huang Microbiologist Alice Huang, Ph.D., is senior councilor for external relations and a faculty associate in biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She began her career as a microbiologist and eventually became a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School, where she made important discoveries in virology. She has since moved on to a far-ranging career dealing variously with medicine, science and technology policy, science writing, and higher education. She holds several chairs and sits on several boards of major organizations, including the Foundation for Microbiology and the Food and Drug Administration Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biological Products. Prior to coming to Caltech, Dr. Huang was Dean for Science at New York University. Her husband, Nobel laureate David Baltimore, is also a panelist on Closer To Truth.

About the Author and Contributors

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Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal Islamic Scholar, Chemist Muzaffar Iqbal, Ph.D., is the founder-president of the Center for Islam and Science in Canada. Dr. Iqbal began his career as a biochemist and held academic and research positions at universities in the United States and Canada. Later he moved to Pakistan where he worked with the Organization of Islamic Conference and the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, helping to develop scientific institutions in the Muslim world. Dr. Iqbal’s areas of active interest include the intellectual history of Islam, the Islamic philosophy of science, Islam and the West, and Islam and the contemporary world. He has written and edited several books. Apart from the ones that deal with Islam and the modern world, they include two novels, many short stories, compilations of ancient poetry, and a biography of Herman Melville. His most recent books are Islam and Science and God, Life & the Cosmos: Christian and Islamic Perspectives. Dr. Iqbal is also the editor of Kalam (www.kalam.org), a moderated listserv and news service dedicated to the promotion of a constructive discourse on Islam and science. On the Web: http://www.cis-ca.org/muzaffar.htm Portia Iversen Autism Activist Portia Iversen and her husband Jon Shestack co-founded the Cure Autism Now (CAN) foundation in 1995 after learning that their two year-old son Dov was autistic. Autism is a developmental brain disorder that affects the ability to communicate, form relationships, and respond appropriately to the environment. Affecting around one in 500 people, autism has several varieties and spans a wide range of severity. CAN has been very effective at increasing public awareness of autism and expanding government support for autism research. Recently, the foundation brought an autistic teenager named Tito and his mother Soma to the United States so that North American scientists could meet and study him. Before founding CAN, Iversen was a screenwriter and an Emmy Awardwinning art director. On the Web: http://www.canfoundation.org/ Dr. William T. Jarvis Public Health Expert, Consumer Health Advocate William Jarvis, Ph.D., is a retired professor of public health and preventive medicine at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine. His specialties include consumer health education and public health issues such as fluoridation of the water supply, immunization, pasteurization, and food technology. He is also an expert on the claims of alternative, pseudoscientific, deviant, and paranormal medical practices, as well as health fraud,

290

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quackery, and food faddism. Dr. Jarvis is founder and president of the National Council Against Health Care Fraud and is co-author of a textbook, Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decisions, 7th Edition. On the Web: http://www.chirobase.org/10Bio/wjvitae.html Dr. Christof Koch Consciousness Researcher Christof Koch, Ph.D., is a professor of computation and neural systems at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Koch studies the neuronal basis of consciousness, and especially visual consciousness, since vision is the best understood of all the human senses. Not satisfied with the limits and vagueness of philosophy, Dr. Koch and other scientists are hunting for the ‘‘neural correlates of consciousness.’’ In other words they are gathering hard data about which cells and circuits in the brain are active during specific conscious experiences. They hope such data will lead to new theories on consciousness, which many people see as life’s central mystery. Dr. Koch is the author a popular science book, The Quest for Consciousness: A Scientific Approach, and a textbook, Biophysics of Computation. He is also an avid rock climber and adventurer. On the Web: http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/ Dr. Steven E. Koonin Physicist Dr. Steven Koonin was educated at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), receiving a B.S. in physics in 1972, and at MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1975. He then joined the Caltech faculty in 1975, became full professor in 1981, serving as Chairman of the Faculty from 1989-1991. Professor Koonin held the position of Provost of Caltech from 1995 to 2004. Early in his career, he was a research fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute from 1976-77 and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow from 1977-79. In 1975-76 he received the Caltech Associated Students Teaching Award, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Scientist Award in 1985. In 1999 he received the prestigious E.O. Lawrence Award in Physics from the Department of Energy. Dr. Koonin is a member of the Council for Foreign Relations and has served on a number of advisory committees for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense and its various national laboratories. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research interests include theoretical nuclear, many-body, and computational physics, nuclear astrophysics, and global environmental science. Dr. Koonin is currently on a leave of absence from his faculty position as professor of theoretical physics at Caltech to serve as Chief Scientist of British Petroleum in London.

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291

Dr. Andrea Kovacs Pediatrician Andrea Kovacs, M.D., is an associate professor of pediatrics and pathology at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. She heads the Department of Pediatrics and is director of the Comprehensive Maternal/Child HIV Management and Research Center at the L.A. County-USC Medical Center. Since Dr. Kovacs took the reins there, HIV clinical trials for transmission rate from mother to infant have been brought to zero. Her expertise includes clinical virology, maternal/child AIDS treatment, and antiviral AIDS drugs in children. Dr. Shri Kulkarni Astrophysicist Shrinivas ‘‘Shri’’ Kulkarni, Ph.D., is a professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). His research interests include: the super-dense remnants of exploded stars (pulsars, neutron stars and black holes); the gasses and dust clouds that fill the space between stars; and the development of new methods and instruments for observing the cosmos. In 2001 he was elected to the British Royal Society, one of the oldest and most prestigious international scientific societies. On the Web: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~srk/ http://www.astro.caltech.edu/department/bluebook/kulkarni.html Dan Labriola Naturopathic Physician Dan Labriola, N.D., is a naturopathic physician with the Northwest Natural Health Specialty Care Clinic. Dr. Labriola works with cancer patients who wish to pursue both conventional treatment, such as chemotherapy and surgery, and alternative medical approaches, such as dietary, botanical, and psychological therapies. His book, Complementary Cancer Therapies, has received praise from both the mainstream and alternative cancer communities for its balanced approach, making Dr. Labriola one of the few physicians in the United States to successfully bridge the two. He works as a consultant to hospitals, bone marrow transplantation centers, and cancer treatment facilities worldwide. On the Web: http://www.cancure.org/dr_labriola.htm Dr. Seth Lloyd Information Theorist Seth Lloyd, Ph.D., is a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and also holds an appointment at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Lloyd is interested in how systems of all kinds—computers, atoms, brains, cells, societies, and the universe as a whole—process

292

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information. He has done important work on the tricky but essential problem of scientifically defining ‘‘complexity,’’ which is relevant to understanding all those systems. Dr. Lloyd is also a leading pioneer in the field of quantum computing, which involves harnessing the bizarre, counterintuitive properties of matter at the atomic scale to create, someday, a dazzling new class of computer. On the Web: http://www.rle.mit.edu/rlestaff/p-lloyd.htm Dr. Peter Loewenberg Psychoanalyst Peter Loewenberg, Ph.D., is a professor of history and political psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He is also dean of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. Combining his expertise in psychoanalysis, political science, and history, Dr. Loewenberg studies and teaches European history, political psychology, and ‘‘psychohistory’’— using the tools of psychology to explain historical trends and events, as well as their application to understanding the present-day world. He visits these themes in his writings, which include two books: Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach and Fantasy and Reality in History. He has lectured and taught widely in many countries. As a psychoanalyst, he also maintains a clinical practice. On the Web: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/loewenberg/ Dr. Donald E. Miller Religious Scholar Donald E. Miller, Ph.D, is a professor of religion and a social scientist. He directs the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California (USC), which studies the civic role of religion in Southern California and collaborates with congregations, academics, funders, and faith-based organizations in creative ways. Dr. Miller is co-editor of the book Gen X Religion and the author of several other books including: Writing and Research in Religious Studies; Homeless Families: The Struggle for Dignity; Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide; and Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium. Dr. Miller has also written widely in other media, and has issued reports and testimony to the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations and the U.S. House of Representatives. On the Web: http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/religion_online/ Rajarshi ‘‘Tito’’ Mukhopadhyay Autistic Youth Tito Mukhopadhyay is an autistic teenager from India who is teaching scientists a great deal about autism. Autism is a developmental brain disorder that

About the Author and Contributors

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affects the ability to communicate, form relationships, and respond appropriately to the environment. Most children with severe autism, like Tito, need so much care and are so difficult to reach that they are allowed to sink into lives of deep inner isolation; in fact, this was long thought to be inevitable. But Tito’s mother, Soma Mukhopadhyay, reared and educated Tito so intensively that he was able to develop his keen mind to an unheard-of level of engagement with the physical and social world. Though his speech is difficult to understand, he writes with eloquence (including poetry), has read widely, and can describe his condition as no one before him could. He says, for example, that he can only keep his attention on one sense at a time—so he can see or he can feel, but not both, and switching from one to the other is a great effort. He also describes why he periodically needs to shake his limbs, spin and rock: otherwise Tito loses track of his own body and cannot stay grounded in his surroundings. Explanations like these are helping neuropsychologists to understand better than ever before how the brain—whether autistic or normal—works. Soma Mukhopadhyay Mother, Teacher Soma Mukhopadhyay is the mother of the autistic child Tito. When he was 11, Soma brought him from their native India to the UK and then to America. Tito’s unprecedented ability to describe what it is like to be autistic is giving scientists new insights into this mysterious neurological malady. Autism is a developmental brain disorder that affects the ability to communicate, form relationships, and respond appropriately to the environment. People with severe autism are all but unreachable and live deeply inward lives the rest of us cannot fathom. But Soma, a professional teacher and loving mother, was fiercely determined that Tito reach his full potential. She educated him intensively with what she now calls the ‘‘rapid prompting mechanism,’’ forcing Tito to keep focused while she taught him to learn to read and write, to listen, and to engage with the physical and social world around him. Soma’s labors with Tito not only saved him from a lifetime of psychic inner imprisonment, but offer the same chance to other autistics and their families to form rich relationships. Dr. Bruce Murray Planetologist Bruce Murray, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus of planetary science and geology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Dr. Murray has been a mainstay of unmanned space exploration for over three decades. He was involved with the Mariner missions to Mercury, Venus, and Mars in the 1960s and early 1970s, and was director of the NASA/Caltech Jet

294

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Propulsion Laboratory during the time of the Viking landings on Mars and the Voyager flybys of Saturn and Jupiter. Dr. Murray is cofounder (along with the late Carl Sagan) and president of The Planetary Society, a large international public participation organization dedicated to exploring the solar system and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). Dr. Murray is also co-producer of the Closer To Truth television series on which this book is based and a senior member of the Closer To Truth web site team. On the Web: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~bcm/HomePage/ http://www.planetary.org/html/society/advisors/society-bio-murray.html Dr. Nancey Murphy Theologian Nancey Murphy, Ph.D., Th.D., is a professor of Christian philosophy at the Fuller Theological Seminary, a corresponding editor for Christianity Today, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren. She also serves on the board of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at Berkeley, and is a member of the Planning Committee for conferences on science and theology, sponsored by the Vatican Observatory. Dr. Murphy is a leading scholar and a highly sought speaker at nationwide conferences on the relationship between theology and science. She is also a prolific writer. Her books include On the Moral Nature of the Universe, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, and the award-winning Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. Most recently, she coauthored the award-winning Whatever Happened to the Soul? On the Web: http://www.counterbalance.org/bio/murph-frame.html Dr. Wallace Sampson Physician, Consumer Health Advocate Wallace Sampson, M.D., is a clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University and editor-in-chief at the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. Sampson studies and teaches about unscientific medical systems and aberrant medical claims. He sits on the board of directors of the National Council Against Health Fraud, and is affiliated with several other professional organizations that protect consumers from bogus healthcare claims and products. Dr. Sampson is a highly-respected and well-known authority in numerous medical fields, including oncology, hematology, and pathology. He has held, and currently holds, responsibility positions in a wide variety of medical institutions and activities. He was formerly the Associate Chief of Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, and a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Sampson is also a prominent and active member of numerous professional organizations devoted to the protection of consumers from

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fraudulent healthcare products and claims. He has the ability to address a variety of audiences, and has written for publications as diverse as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the Saturday Evening Post. On the Web: http://www.hcrc.org/contrib/sampson/sampson.html Dr. Erin M. Schuman Biologist Erin M. Schuman, Ph.D., is an associate professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and an assistant investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She studies the low-level mechanisms of nerve cells: how they signal each other using a variety of molecules, how they alter their own functioning in response to those signals, how they grow and form new connections, and how they organize themselves into networks to process information. In short, she studies the nuts and bolts of ‘‘neuroplasticity,’’ or learning. On the Web: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~biology/ brochure/faculty/ schuman.html Dr. Terrence Sejnowski Computational Neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski, Ph.D., is professor of biology and an adjunct professor of physics, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science and engineering at the University of California at San Diego. He is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Dr. Sejnowski is a leading pioneer of computational neuroscience, and his lab studies the principles that link brain mechanisms, mind, and behavior. They use a variety of techniques to study the brain at both low and high levels of description. On one end they study the low-level biophysical properties of individual neurons. On the other, they build large-scale neural network models to help them understand how the brain processes vision, stores memory, coordinates sensation and action, and how it all evolved. On the Web: http://www.salk.edu/faculty/sejnowski.html http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/sejnowski.html Dr. Lucy Shapiro Cell Biologist Lucy Shapiro, Ph.D, is director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stanford University and a professor of genetics. Dr. Shapiro has made innovative use of microorganisms to shed light on how higher organisms, including humans, develop all their complex organs,

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tissues, and parts starting from a single cell. By studying an unusual bacterium that splits into two different cell types at a certain stage in its life, she made major advances in understanding the genetic and molecular mechanisms behind embryonic development. Her work has also led to better understanding of how proteins move around and perform their work inside cells. Dr. Shapiro also works actively to promote public understanding of science and to reduce scientific illiteracy. She is a board member of the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information, and gives frequent talks to lay audiences and policy makers. She was invited to the White House to advise President Clinton and his Cabinet about the risks biologically altered pathogens pose to national security and the food supply. Among other issues, Dr. Shapiro educates people about breast cancer policies and science, and has also spoken out about the alarming levels of resistance which bacteria are developing to antibiotics. Dr. Shapiro is co-founder of Anacor, a pharmaceutical company that is working to develop new treatments for microbial infection to compensate for the waning effectiveness of present-day antibiotics. She also sits on the board of directors of GlaxoSmithKline, a research-based pharmaceutical company. On the Web: http://devbio1.stanford.edu/usr/ls/ Dr. Michael Shermer Skeptic Michael Shermer, Ph.D., is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the director of the Skeptics Society—both large, international venues for defending the scientific method and refuting the claims of pseudoscience, religion, and mysticism. Dr. Shermer is the author of five books, including Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, Why People Believe Weird Things, How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, and The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense. He has also co-authored a number of books, including Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, and is a monthly columnist for Scientific American. Dr. Shermer also used to be a competitive transcontinental cyclist, and is the author of several books on cycling. On the Web: http://www.skeptic.com/director.html Dr. Robert J. Temple FDA Official Robert J. Temple, M.D., is associate director for medical policy at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which is part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Center is responsible for regulating the claims of drug makers and for assessing the quality of clinical trials with

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new medical treatments. Dr. Temple has held many important positions at the FDA over the years and is an expert in pharmaceutical regulation and research. Dr. Mark Jude Tramo Neuroscientist/Neurologist Mark Tramo, M.D., Ph.D., is an assistant professor of neurology and director of The Institute for Music & Brain Science at Harvard Medical School. He is also an assistant attending neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as a composer. Dr. Tramo studies the neural basis of music perception and cognition in infants and adults. He looks for the brain areas and patterns of neural activity associated with melody, harmony, rhythm, the emotions they evoke, and the universal elements that are found in the music of all cultures. On the Web: http://www.researchmatters.harvard.edu/people.php? people_id=210 Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ph.D., is director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. He is also a visiting research scientist in astrophysics at Princeton University. Dr. Tyson’s professional research interests include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our Milky Way. He works to educate the public about cosmology through his writings and lectures. Dr. Tyson has written many professional publications and is a monthly essayist for Natural History magazine. He has authored and coauthored several books, including The Sky is Not the Limit, One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos, Merlin’s Tour of the Universe—which has been translated into several languages—Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual, and a playful Q&A book on the universe for all ages titled Just Visiting This Planet. Dr. Tyson’s contributions to the public appreciation of the cosmos have recently been recognized by the International Astronomical Union in their official naming of asteroid ‘‘13123 Tyson.’’ In 2000, People magazine declared Tyson ‘‘the sexiest astrophysicist alive.’’ On the Web: http://research.amnh.org/users/tyson/ Dr. K. Birgitta Whaley Chemist Birgitta Whaley, Ph.D., is a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley. She studies the properties of ’’quantum clusters’’—ultra-tiny assemblages of atoms or molecules that are too large to be studied with ordinary chemistry techniques, but too small to be studied with traditional bulk-manipulation methods. Quantum clusters have unique energetic, structural, and dynamical

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properties, and understanding them will be crucial to the development of ‘‘quantum computers.’’ Quantum computers take advantage of the bizarre fact that atoms and electrons are able to exist in multiple, mutually exclusive states simultaneously. They have not yet been built on any useful scale, but they will one day far outpace the digital computer in certain kinds of computation. On the Web: http://chem.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/whaley/whaley. html


Index

abstract objects and cause of existence, 244 academic community and national defense, 188–89 acoustical energy, 25 acupuncture, 79–80, 85–86 aerosol-based epidemics, 99 AIDS. See HIV alchemy, 166 aliens. See life in the universe all possibilities, multiverse of, 242 almost necessity of current reality, 239 alternative futures, 3–4 alternative histories, 3 alternative medicine, 77–89, 263–64 amino acids, defined, 265 anaerobic bacteria, 98 Andreasen, Nancy C., 74–75, 280. See also psychiatry The Andromeda Strain (novel), 10, 13 anecdotal evidence, defined, 264–65 anesthesia, 37–38 anthrax, 94. See also microbes anthropic principle, 146, 221–22, 237 anti-science sentiment, 195–96 antibiotic resistance, 92–93, 103 antidepressants. See drugs (medications); psychiatry antioxidants, 83–84 antivirals, defined, 265 applied science, defined, 275 assent vs. consent, 110 assumptions in science, 132–33 astrobiology, 156, 165, 271. See also life in the universe astrophysics, 139. See also cosmos atomic clocks, 175

attention: autism and, 53, 55; consciousness vs., 37 auditory system. See brain activity autism, 47–63, 261–62 auto-immune diseases, 97, 129. See also HIV awareness. See consciousness B2 bomber, 190–91 bacteria. See microbes Baltimore, David, 133–36, 281. See also order in the universe Bamberger, Jeanne, 31, 281. See also music, significance of basic science: defined, 275; in national security, 185–200 Being and Non-Being 243–44 belief systems. See religion and fundamentalism Big Bang, 140–41, 149–50, 236–37; what preceded, 221 binding problem, 262 bioethics, defined, 266 biology. See life sciences biomedical psychiatry. See psychiatry biomedicine, defined, 263 bioterrorism, 94, 99, 130 black holes, 138, 270 Blandford, Roger, 152–53, 282. See also cosmos blinded clinical trials, 112 Bogen, Joseph E., 45, 282. See also consciousness bottom of ocean, life at. See extremeophiles

300

Index

brain activity, 39; autism, 47–63, 237–38; binding problem, 131; consciousness, 33–46, 236, 260; depression and, 69; information representation, 59; music and, 24–26, 28; thoughts vs. neurons, 222–23. See also memory. brain imaging techniques, 59–60, 72– 73, 261 brain vs. mind, 71 Brin, David, 14–17, 282. See also science, in science fiction Brothers, Leslie, 44, 283. See also consciousness Brunner, John, 4 brute fact of existence, 239 Butler, Octavia, 17–19, 283. See also science, in science fiction CAM (complementary and alternative medicine), 77–89, 239–40 cameras, proliferation of, 7 CAN (Cure Autism Now), 61–62, 262 cancer, caused by infection, 95–97 Capron, Alexander, 121, 283. See also testing new drugs ‘‘cargo cult’’ behavior, 194–95 Carter, Brandon, 237 Cass, Hyla, 284. See also alternative medicine Cause of universe, theories of, 242–44 cell phones, 203–4 chemotherapy, 83–84 children: HIV clinical trials, 110, 111; impact of music on, 28 chlamydial pneumonia, 104 Christianity, 223–25, 276 chromosomes, defined, 268. See also genetics and genetic engineering Cipro, 94 cleanliness, 101 clinical trials. See testing new drugs clock precision, quantum mechanics and, 175

commercialization of universities, 198–99 communicable disease. See microbes communication and music, 22–23 compassionate use, 109 complementary medicine, 77–89, 239– 40 complex adaptive systems, 128–30, 267–68 complexity, 123, 126–30, 133, 267 computational biology, defined, 266 computing. See quantum computing consciousness, 33–46, 243; as cause of existence, 260 consent vs. assent, 110 consonance in music, 27–28 Copenhagen interpretation (quantum theory), 273 cosmological constant, 143, 152, 236 cosmos, 137–53; inflation of, 140–41, 145, 146, 247; microwave background, 142, 147; science and theology of, 220–21; visions of, See ultimate reality Courchesne, Eric, 62–63, 284. See also autism Crichton, Michael, 12–14, 259. See also science, in science fiction cryptography. See factoring; secrecy, quantum mechanics and culture: clinical trials and, 116–19; music and, 27; science fiction and, 10–11 Cure Autism Now (CAN), 61–62, 238 cybernetic implants, 216 cybersecurity, 192–93 cyclic multiverse, 240–41 dark matter and dark energy, 137, 140–42, 270 Davies, Paul, 239, 242, 244–45 Day, Agnes A., 103–6, 285. See also microbes death, 207 defense, national. See national security Deistic First Cause, 243

Index depression, defined, 263. See also psychiatry Dicke, Robert, 237 Dietary Supplements Health & Education Act (1994), 83 dimensions: multiverse in extra dimensions, 241 Dirac, Paul, 237 disease. See microbes disconnected regions, multiverse in, 240 disinfectants, 103 disorder. See order in the universe disruptive technologies, 188 dissonance in music, 27–28 DiVincenzo, David, 181–82, 285. See also quantum computing DNA, defined, 268–69. See also genetics and genetic engineering DOD (Department of Defense), 188– 89 Dougherty, Llewellyn ‘‘Doc,’’ 200, 285. See also science, in national security dreaming, defined, 261 drugs (medications): aggressive prescriptions, 82–83; for mental health, See psychiatry; naturopathy, See alternative medicine; placebo reaction, 72, 85–86; testing, 107–22 dualist, defined, 277 E. coli, 93, 97 education, rational, 208–9 effective complexity, 127 Einstein, Albert, 4, 143 emergence, 123, 130, 133 empowerment from technology, 207–8 entanglement, 173–75, 273–74 environment, 15–17; global warming, 8; heredity vs., 135–36; planetary, 193 Epstein, Robert, 75, 285. See also psychiatry

301

ethics of clinical trials. See testing new drugs Europa, life on, 162 evolution of universe. See order in the universe Ewald, Paul, 100–101, 286. See also microbes existence, explanation for. See ultimate reality exotic objects (cosmology), 147 expansion of universe, 139–40, 145, 270 explosives detection, 191–92 extra-solar planets, 159–61, 168 extremeophiles, 156, 158–59, 165 extremism, 211–12, 213, 276 F-117 Stealth aircraft, 191 factoring, 169, 172, 182, 183, 274 failure modes, 16–17 faith. See religion and fundamentalism fake universes, 245 false gods, 244–245 fantasy vs. science fiction, 2–3 fine tuning required for Big Bang, 236–37 fine structure constant, 143–44 food preferences, 219–20 formation of life. See life in the universe free will, 42–43 Freeman, Robert, 31–32, 286. See also music, significance of functional brain imaging, defined, 261 fundamental laws, 127–28 fundamentalism. See religion and fundamentalism future of the universe, 144–145 gamma ray bursts, 152, 157, 271 gedanken experiments. See thought experiments Gell-Mann, Murray, 136, 286. See also order in the universe gene therapy, 103 genes, defined, 269 genetics and genetic engineering, 125;

302

Index

antibiotic engineering, 93; autism and, 55–56; bioweapons, 99; DNA as complex adaptive system, 129; DNA of brain cells, 133; heredity vs. environment, 135–36 genome, defined, 269 global warming, 8 globalization, 16 God. See Supreme Being Goodstein, David L., 287 gravitational lensing, defined, 271 gravitational radiation (gravity waves), 147, 150 gravity, planetary discover and, 159– 60 Guth, Alan, 149, 287. See also cosmos Hameroff, Stuart, 288. See also consciousness Hawking, Stephen, 210,236 hearing. See music, significance of Helicobacter pylori, 96, 97, 98, 265 heredity vs. environment, 135–36 Herrelko, David, 200, 288. See also science, in national security hippocampus, 54 HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), 109–10, 122, 129; clinical trials, 110, 111, 117; gene therapy, 103 homeland defense (national security), 185–200 homeopathic immunization, 84 how questions, 218–20 Huang, Alice, 101–2, 288. See also microbes Hubble Space Telescope, 168 human genome. See genetics and genetic engineering humanness, consciousness and, 42 idealism, 244 ‘‘idiot plot’’ requirement, 17 illusion, reality as, 244–45 infectious disease. See microbes

inflationary universe theory, 140–41, 145, 146, 271 information representation in brain, 59 informed consent, defined, 266 integrative medicine, 80, 81, 264 interferometry, 161, 162–63, 271–72 internet, 192–93 interstellar travel, 167, 168 Iqbal, Muzaffar, 213–14, 227–29, 289. See also science, harmonized with religion; technology, as threat to religion Islam, 211, 222, 224, 227; fundamentalism of, 275–76 Iversen, Portia, 60–62, 289. See also autism Jarvis, William, 88–89, 289. See also alternative medicine Jurassic Park, 4–6. See also Crichton, Michael Kiln People, 8–9 kinesthesia, 48–49 knowledge, narrow vs. shallow, 194 Koch, Chrisof, 46, 290. See also consciousness Koonin, Steven E., 198–99, 290. See also science, in national security Kovacs, Andrea, 122, 291. See also testing new drugs Kulkarni, Shri, 167–68, 291. See also life in the universe Labriola, Dan, 89, 291. See also alternative medicine language, 38 Leinster, Murray, 4 life in the universe, 155–68; defining ‘‘life’’, 166–67 life sciences, 124–25; astrobiology, 156, 165 lipid-lowering drugs, 115 Lloyd, Seth, 183, 291. See also quantum computing Loewenberg, Peter, 292 long-term memory, 54

Index Madrasa system, 209 many-worlds theory, 273. See also multiple-universe models of reality Mars (planet), life on, 161–62, 166 Marx, Karl, 6, 16 materialist, defined, 277 mathematics, multiverse by, 242 mathematics and music, 29 matter, ultimate stability of, 131 me-too drugs, 114–15 medication and drugs: aggressive prescriptions, 82–83; for mental health, See psychiatry; naturopathy, See alternative medicine; placebo reaction, 72, 85–86; testing, 107–22 memory, 59, 133; autism and, 54–55; cultural emphasis on memorization, 6, 29 mental health. See psychiatry Merzenich, Michael, 61 microbes, 91–106; in hostile environments, 156 microbial antagonism, defined, 265 microwave background (cosmic), 142, 147 MIDI, 259 Miller, Donald E., 214–16, 292. See also technology, as threat to religion mind vs. brain, 71 mobile phones, 203–4 molecular computers, 181 Mooij, Hans, 177 morality, 230. See also religion and fundamentalism morbidity, defined, 267 Mozart effect, 28 Mukhopadhyay, Rajarshi ‘‘Tito,’’ 58, 292. See also autism Mukhopadhyay, Soma, 293. See also autism multiple-universe models of reality,146, 240–42 Murphy, Nancey, 231–33, 294. See also science, harmonized with religion

303

Murray, Bruce, 166–67, 293. See also life in the universe music, significance of, 22–32 Muslims, 211 nanomachines, 181 narrow vs. shallow knowledge, 194 national security, 185–200. See also bioterrorism nationalism, 212, 213 Natural Nutritional Food Association, 80–81 naturopathy, 264. See also alternative medicine necessity of current reality, 239 neurobiology, 259 neuroimaging, 59–60, 72–73, 237 neuroscience. See brain activity neurotransmitters, 54 NICMOS (Near Infrared Camera Multiple Object Spectograph), 168 1984 (novel), 6–7 nonphysical accounts of reality, 242– 44 nothing, 245–46 nuclear fission, 187 nufs, 222 numbers that define the universe, 237 occulting signature of planets, 161 ocean environment data, 193–94 ocean organisms. See extremeophiles one-universe models of reality, 238–40 order in the universe, 123–36 Orwell, George, 6–7 pain control, 85 pantheistic substance, 243 pathogen, defined, 265 peer review process, 189–90 Penrose, Roger, 236 peptide, defined, 266 perception, defined, 261. See also sensory experience perinatel, defined, 267 pharmacy. See drugs (medications) phases of clinical trials, 112 philosophical method, 231–32

304

Index

physicalism, defined, 277 PKU (phenylketonuria), 56 placebo reaction, 72, 85–86 placebos in clinical trials, 112–14, 118 planet formation, 162–63 planets, extra-solar, 159–61, 168 plasmids, defined, 266 plasticity of brain, 26 platonic forms as cause of existence, 244 poetry, autism and, 49–51 political extremism, 212, 213 possibilities, multiverse of, 242 practical vs. artificial problems, 125– 26 predicting science in science fiction, 1, 3 prescription drugs. See drugs (medications) principle of sufficient power, 244 privacy, 7–8; quantum mechanics and, 173–75, 179 probabilities vs. regularities, 127–28 probiotics, 97–98 promiscuous plasmids, 95, 104 proto-consciousness, 34, 39 proton decay, 131 psychiatry, 65–75; depression, defined, 263; drug trials, 118–19 pure science, defined, 251 qualia, 35, 42, 261 quantum branching or selection, 241 quantum computing, 169–83, 274 quantum mysticism, 42–43 quantum physics, defined, 272–73 quantum teleportation, 199 quantum theory, defined, 272–73 Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), 60– 61, 238 rationalism, 208–9 Rees, Sir Martin, 237 regularities. See order in the universe religion and fundamentalism, 195;

defining ‘‘fundamentalism,’’ 210– 11, 275; harmonized with science, 218–33; scientism, 205, 210, 233, 253; threatened by technology, 201–16 research universities and national defense, 188–89 resistance to antibiotics, 92–93, 103 resurrection of Jesus, 223–25 ritual, 213 Roy, Arundhati, 10 RPM (Rapid Prompting Method), 60– 61, 262 ruah, 222 Sagan, Carl, 16 Sampson, Wallace, 88–89, 294. See also alternative medicine scenario forecasting, 235 schemas. See complex adaptive systems schizophrenia, 73 Schro¨dinger, Edwin, 173–74, 181–82 Schro¨dinger’s cat, 181–82 Schuman, Erin M., 63, 295. See also autism science: definition of, 5; harmonized with religion, 218–33; in national security, 185–200; as religion (scientism), 205, 210, 233, 253; in science fiction, 2–19; technology vs., 203–4 scientism, 205, 210, 233, 277 Second Law of Thermodynamics, 126, 131 secrecy, quantum mechanics and, 173– 75, 179 security and privacy, 7–8; national, 185–200; quantum mechanics and, 173–75, 179 Sejnowski, Terry, 58–60, 295. See also autism self-destruction, 16–17 self-explaining, universe as, 239 semantic memory, 54 sensory experience:

Index autism and, See autism; binding problem, 131; kinesthesia, 48–49; perception, defined, 261; visual awareness, 35–37, 41 sequencing (genetics), defined, 269 sequential selection of multiverse, 241 shallow vs. narrow knowledge, 194 Shapiro, Lucy, 295. See also microbes Shermer, Michael, 216, 229–30, 296. See also science, harmonized with religion; technology, as threat to religion simplicity, defined, 267. See also complexity simulation in appearance, 245 simulation in fact, 244–45 simulation in virtual reality, 245 six numbers that define the universe, 237 skepticism, defined, 277. See also scientism; technology, as threat to religion sleep, brain activity during, 49 Sloan Digital Sky Survey, 147 Smith, Quentin, 240, 242, 245–47 social brain, 38–39 social science, defined, 276 solipsism, 245 sonar data, 193–94 soul, 222–23 Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), 161, 163–64 spectrum, defined, 272 speculative history, 3 spirit (soul), 222–23 spirit realms, 243 squid, eyespot of, 95 stability of matter, 131 standard candles (astrophysics), 139– 40 stomach cancer, 96 string theory, multiverse by, 241 strong anthropic principle, 237, 222. See also anthropic principle superconductors for quantum computing, 177 supernovas, 139, 157

305

superposition, 172, 273. See also quantum computing Supreme Being, 215, 233, 242–243. See also religion and fundamentalism; science, harmonized with religion Susskind, Leonard, 236 symbiosis, defined, 266 technology, as threat to religion, 201– 16 technology, science vs., 203–4 telephones, mobile, 203–4 telescopes, 161, 164, 175 Temple, Robert, 121–22, 296. See also testing new drugs temporal coding (brain), 59, 262–63 temporal selection of reality, 239 The Terminal Man (novel), 13 Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), 164 terrorism. See bioterrorism; national security testing new drugs, 107–22 theistic person. See Supreme Being theology. See religion and fundamentalism third-world countries. See culture thought experiments, 4 three dimensions, multiverse in, 240 Tramo, Mark Jude, 30–31, 297. See also music, significance of tunneling, defined, 274 turning off technology, 205–7 Tyson, Neil deGrasse, 149–52, 297. See also cosmos; life in the universe Ultimate Mind, 243 ultimate reality, 235–45; why vs. how, 218–20 ultimate stability of matter, 131 unconscious systems, 36–37, 41. See also consciousness universe: expansion of, 139; life in, 155–68, 166–67; order in, 123–36; reality of, 218–20, 235–45

306

Index

universities, commercialization of, 198–99 vaccinations, 98 Varmus, Harold, 125 virtual reality, universe as, 245 viruses. See microbes visual awareness, 35–37, 41 volition (free will), 42–43 water supply, quality of, 94, 98–99 weak anthropic principle, 221, 237. See also anthropic principle weapons systems, 187, 190

web (internet), 192–93 Weinberg, Steven, 236 Whaley, K. Birgitta, 180–81, 297. See also quantum computing why questions, 218–20, 238. See also religion and fundamentalism; ultimate reality worship technologies, 204–5. See also technology, as threat to religion xenogenesis, 235 zombie consciousness, 36–37, 41