Into the Woods

One of the healthier elements of our culture, including our media culture, is that we still have celebrity scientists. After the death this week of Stephen Hawking, we are left with a vacuum. To help fill that vacuum, I nominate Roger Penrose.

What are the characteristics that help elevate a scientist to celebrity status? Certainly they need to have discovered something or explained something that captures the public imagination. It helps if their personal stories are intriguing. It also helps if they’re charming and photogenic.

If you read this blog, you’re probably a serious reader. But do you read science? Much of my nonfiction reading is science, particularly physics. If you’re not reading science, then you’re missing a lot of the good stuff about what makes our times so interesting. Despite the steady progress in technology, and despite rapid progress in some of the sciences, physics is stuck and has been stuck for nearly a hundred years. That’s a big deal. It’s also a serious problem. But that doesn’t make physics boring. To the contrary, there is a growing suspense and sense of drama in physics as scientists struggle to unify relativity with quantum theory. Those two theories have been proven valid again and again. And yet they contradict each other in exceedingly mysterious ways. We still have no idea what gravity is — or time, for that matter — though there is tantalizing evidence that, when we finally do have a grand unification theory, an understanding of gravity will come along with it.

I have often said that I would like to live long enough to see two things — the grand unification theory, and the day the extraterrestrials land. I also am seriously open to the possibility that a grand unification theory will reveal that there is simply nothing here, nothing physical anyway, and that that is what has made the investigation so hard. Don’t laugh! Remember that Einstein warned us that we won’t get anywhere without imagination.

Why do I nominate Roger Penrose? I think I won’t even try to explain it, except to say that Penrose tries to tie the mystery of consciousness to the elusive grand unification theory. That’s not a mystical proposition. If you know about the “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment, then you know that observation by a conscious observer does seem to have something to do with the missing pieces of a grand unification theory, not to mention the mystery of something vs. nothing, or at the very least the mystery of something vs. bewildering uncertainty. I believe that Penrose is the Einstein of our time, the smartest person alive. You can find his books at Amazon. There also are many Penrose lectures on YouTube.

Science is a healthy antidote to the increasing primitiveness of our media and political culture. To read science is to strike a blow against the Republicans and religionists who are working to roll back the Enlightenment and turn off any lights that aren’t powered by coal. Next time you’re in a bookstore, why not check out the science section? Just pick a book on a subject that interests you. One subject always leads to another.

Roger Penrose