What Remains to be Discovered by John Maddox

Picking up a copy of Scientific American has always been a humbling experience for me. The titles of the articles are always intriguing, but the articles themselves -- nine out of ten times -- are utterly incomprehensible.

I had just enough science in high school and college to recognize what sounds like a "break through," but not enough to make sense of it. I'm a serial science-breakthrough-reader, buying and reading book after book designed to explain quantum physics and related topics to the layperson. And each and every time, I come out with only the vaguest understanding of the reality described. I always figured that the barrier was math -- modern physicists thought in terms of mathematics, and the word explanations were just secondary. Another dimension was just another variable in an equation, in a branch of math that was several years, at least, beyond my introductory calculus class in college. I didn't understand the symbols, couldn't plug in values, couldn't make sense of results, much less understand how the equations were derived. As for biology, I know what a double helix looks like, but have no understanding of chemistry, and the complexities of proteins and DNA and RNA, all depend on chemistry.

In field, after field of science, for one reason or another, I couldn't understand the basics -- I could never hope to conduct an experiment of the kind that modern scientists do, much less draw the appropriate conclusions. I was condemned to be an outsider -- watching from the topmost row of the upper deck, unable to figure out what was happening on the field without radio commentary. In my ignorance, I had to take science on faith, rather than on its own terms. Rather than questioning natural processes directly in a laboratory, I could only question those who worked in laboratories, and I didn't even know enough to properly speak their language. In the history of science, I began to lose touch somewhere in the 17th century, with Newton.

My high school and college science classes didn't really teach me science. Rather they taught me the names and acts of the saints of science and the canon of faith that they profess has been revealed to them. Yes, I should revere Einstein, just as I should revere the doctrines of relativity and quantum physics. But the longer I was out of college and the faster the pace of scientific development, the more difficult it became for me to judge what was happening and assign the appropriate degree of holiness and divine truth to the major figures and the theories they espoused. How could I possibly determine how many quarks could dance on the head of a needle? How could I be sure there even were such things as "quarks"? Increasingly, it seemed that not only were energy and matter interchangeable, but reality and unreality as well. Or rather it seemed that all language was irrelevant -- trying to catch water in a sieve. All that mattered were the mathematical equations that resembled Sanskrit and that predicted and described the results of experiments that could only be performed in one or two specially-equipped laboratories.

Now, thanks to What Remains to Be Discovered by John Maddox, finally I have a framework for understanding current scientific developments -- a context or mind-map to relate them to. This former editor of Nature provides a very readable and helpful summary of all current scientific development. He does so with the tongue-in-cheek authority of a scientist who has been asked by editors to do the impossible -- to describe "what remains to be discovered," what science hasn't done yet, but will soon. He sets that tone in the subtitle: "Mapping the secrets of the universe, the origins of life, and the future of the human race." In the table of contents he describes Part One: Matter, "...in which the origins of the universe and of matter are explored, as well as the prospects for a theory of everything." Similarly, for Part Two: Life, he says, "... in which the origin of life is considered, as well as biological machinery, the riddle of the selfish gene, and the next human genome projects." And he finishes with Part Three: Our World, "... in which the nature of our brain is explained, as well as our greatest invention, mathematics, and how we will avoid the catastrophes of the future."

We soon learn that the author is, in fact, quite humble in dealing with the immense range of scientific inquiry, and is very reluctant to make the kinds of wild predictions that the title and table of contents would suggest. Rather, he carefully, and very readably presents an overview of what has happened up to now, with an emphasis on the last half of the twentieth century. He explains complicated concepts in simple language, points out how one field of inquiry depends on and influences others, and shows the general direction of scientific endeavor.

His approach differs radically from the writings of 19th century apostles of science or 20th century Marxists who believed in Progress and believed it was inevitable. Through Maddox' story we get a sense of the human drama of science -- the competition to be the "first," the exhilaration of making "discoveries." We learn to respect these new heroes and saints and to recognize the far-reaching practical implications of their seemingly abstruse theoretical pursuits. But at the same time, we come to realize that the "reality" they seek to understand is in large part an illusion. It is as if they were coming up with better and better ways to describe the Veil of Maya, without coming any closer to understanding or even glimpsing what lies beyond.

The title implies a concept of "discovery" that resembles the maps of the mid-19th century. Much of the world had been visited by European man. There were still some tracts of land marked "unknown," but it was inevitable that explorers would reach there soon and fill in all the gaps in "what remained to be discovered."

But, in fact, as Maddox gently and eloquently teaches us, the more we know, the more we know we don't know, and the more we know about the limitations of what man can ever know.

Consider this passage from Emerson's essay/portrait of Swedenborg in Representative Men:

"He was apt for cosmology, because of that native perception of identity which made mere size of no account to him. In the atom of magnetic iron, he saw the quality which would generate the spiral motion of sun and planet.

"The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in nature; the Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or conversion of each into the other, and so the correspondence of all the parts; the fine secret that little explains large, and large little; the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that subsists throughout all things: he saw that the human body was strictly universal, or an instrument through which the soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter...

"This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps its best illustration from the newest. It is this: that nature iterates her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature is always self-similar."

To Emerson and the thinkers who came before him, the world and our senses, nature and our ability to understand it seemed perfectly suited to one another. And what we learned about the world in our own scale, applied as well to the very small and the very large. By extension, well into the twentieth century, school children were taught an atom was like a solar system in miniature, with electrons orbiting around the nucleus.

In the modern science described by Maddox, our minds -- our ability to understand -- evolved as a practical mechanism to deal with the "reality" we encountered at the human scale.

Repeatedly, science has dethroned "man," disproving long-standing assumptions that gave us a false sense of being the center of the universe or the culmination of all of natural history. Now we realize that even our brains are not at the center of things, that we are not equipped to understand what lies beyond a very limited horizon, and that we cannot with any confidence predict that the workings of nature at the very small or very large will bear any resemblance at all to the world we see around us, or follow patterns that we would consider "logical" or could describe adequately with even the most advanced mathematics, or even that the same "laws" of physics apply throughout the universe at great distances as well as at different scales.

As Maddox says in his concluding chapter, "Unwilling or unable to accept the seemingly paradoxical behavior of single particles, such as electrons moving through both of two slits at the same time, for example, he [Albert Einstein] sought instead a set of equations whose elegance and symmetry would command respect, and by which even paradoxical phenomena would be explicable. Einstein's quest was no doubt impelled by his great success with the general theory of relativity (otherwise the theory of gravitation), which first won attention through its elegance. As the world now knows, it was a fruitless search. Quantum phenomena are often wrongly described as paradoxes for no better reason than that they conflict with the expectations of common sense, which themselves spring from human senses that have been honed by natural selection for telling what the macroscopic world is like. It is disconcerting that phenomena on the small scale are at odds with expectation, but there is a wealth of experimental data for which no other explanation is possible. How else than by experiment can reality be described?" (p. 373)

In context, that rhetorical question is far from rhetorical. Science, based on experiment, is reaching into a realm that our brains are ill-equipped to understand. And the experiments required to give us insight into the next lower order of magnitude -- quarks and gluons and gravitons -- require ever more sophisticated and expensive accelerators backed by ever more powerful computers to help capture and sort the results. The possible implications of these experiments to come are extraordinary and fascinating, but must wait until the next generation of accelerator is completed at CERN in 2005. Then to go beyond that level will require far more expensive experimental apparatus, taking many more years to construct; and then the next and the next... Indeed, a non-scientist, like myself, might well dream the impossible dream of a science that goes beyond science, a means of learning about "reality" and describing it without depending on experiments.

Speculating in a realm where Maddox certainly doesn't go in this book, I can't help but wonder that if our brains are limited by having evolved in the macroscopic world of our daily activity, then might it not be possible through computer simulation to let computer programs evolve specifically intended to "understand" or at least cope with the flavors of reality encountered at different sub-atomic scales?

So on the one hand, What Remains to Be Discovered provides a practical context for understanding today's science news and enjoying all those great articles in Scientific American. And on the other hand, it poses interesting questions about the nature of man and the knowability of the universe, taking us far beyond the realm of science.

Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer

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