Wondering About Chapter 1

Wondering About Wondering

Why is the sky blue?

This simple question, as universal as laughter and tears and as old as the first generation of human children to gaze heavenward, touches what I believe to be the very heart of what it means to be human. Curiosity may in fact be a universal among living things with complex brains, – but only we Homo sapiens sapiens take it to the level of desiring knowledge for its own sake, as though there were something of infinite value in merely asking a question and receiving its answer solely as a treasure.

Answers seem to be just that: a treasure greater than any gold. We begin to seek them almost as soon as we are born, that moment when our eyes are first opened to this vast universe into which we have been instantiated. Our minds appear as if designed to seek them, a fact which itself is a profound question hungering for its own answer. The answers which satisfy us, of course, are not the same for each individual. They aren’t even necessarily correct! For example, to the question which opens this chapter many people will respond that the sky is blue because it reflects the color of the oceans (or vice versa, that the oceans reflect the sky). Some people will even say, “Because God made it that way” and be content with that. It is important not to be distracted or discouraged by the quality of many people’s answers at this point, in the way that they are wrong or simplistic or both, because the emphasis here in the beginning is our human characteristic of asking questions and needing something by way of answers, without worrying too much whether they are right or not.

* * *

Again I ask: why do we want to know? At a certain level, that is more a personal question than a general one; a question each of us has to answer in our own way, in our own time. For myself, I know that it goes very deep into my own existence, back to when I was a small child who had barely learned how to speak and think, back to before I went to school. Children are naturally brimming with questions, as anyone who has raised one – a pleasure I’ve had twice over – can tell you, but somehow I don’t remember asking too many as a child. As I recall, I spent a great deal of time simply being mesmerized by the world around me, in all its phenomena and qualities. I don’t actually remember too many of the details of my life at that age, but looking back on what I do remember, it seems as though I were priming myself for a life of seeking answers; that I was beginning the long process of absorbing and assimilating the universe which I would go on to spend so much of my life exploring and explaining. I can remember being fascinated by everything, from the flowers in our gardens to the grains of sand on the beaches we went to every summer to the patterns and swirls of colors on the oriental rugs in our home. Even mundane things were captivating however: I would make my parents’ coffee every morning just to watch it percolating in the pot, while the cycles of the washing machine were an absolute entrancement I could not tear myself away from.

This is not a book about my childhood, or even childhood in general, but as it is about curiosity, wonder, and imagination, and I believe it all starts here, in the open-eyed gaze of each newborn taking in the world about it. I am tempted to say even, the risks of teleological speculation not withstanding, that if there is a purpose and meaning to our existence, our curiosity and passion to understand must lie at the root of it as much as things like, well, love. Indeed, I will say it, because one of my motivations for writing a book like this is that sense of purpose and meaning we all share, and how deeply that is entwined into our passion to understand. If thousands of years of philosophy, and hundreds of years of science, have not yielded a purpose and meaning which human minds can comprehend, then that is a paradox itself to be marveled at, and explored. This cannot be emphasized enough. There is no need for nihilism or despair. Nor do we need to throw away open-ended questioning for dogma and blind faith. We can take the view that wherever our travels take us, whatever we discover or uncover, that truth in and of itself is something worth pursuing. No single one of us, nor any generation, will ever possess all the answers, but each question answered, and each asked, contributes to that which makes life worth living, even if we never reach the end of all our questioning.

* * *

Having said all this, I want to re-emphasize from the outset of our journey that my preferred method of answering questions is the method of scientific inquiry and study. The reason for this couldn’t be more straightforward: in the approximately half a millennium of its formal development as a way to explore the universe and how it works, science has assembled a foundation of knowledge that no other methodology can ever hope to equal. The combination of rational inquiry, exactness and precision, rigorous data collection and interpretation, parsimony in explanation, all combined with our seemingly infinite human capacity for creativity and imagination, with which science employs to answer questions has proven unparalleled in its ability to extract reality’s secrets and make them comprehensible to our minds. This brilliant synthesis makes science simultaneously the most conservative yet radical of institutions ever created by humans. By endlessly questioning and probing and never accepting as sacred any claim, the scientific mind subverts every other institution it touches; yet at the same time, its marshalling of evidence and logical thought makes the answers it reveals as solid and permanent as the rock beneath our feet. Only in science do we ever reach a level of intellectual satisfaction which lets us state with confidence, “This is understood; it is time to move on” while at the same time keeping a suspicious eye out for all and any dogmas which may infect our thinking.

* * *

It may seem strange that, as successful as it has been, that the scientific way of thinking about the world has only come about so recently, or that it evolved into its modern form in only one culture in human history, the European culture of the latter half of the second millennium AD. This is especially puzzling as it is clear that people from all cultures around the world are quite able to grasp this way of thinking with equal alacrity, and to see its power once it has been revealed to them. Human beings have no doubt been asking questions as long as we have had language, for the last several hundred thousand years at least, and have been silently wondering probably for far longer than that. Yet it is only recently that we have developed a systemetic method of trying to answer them better than pure philosophical musing or supernatural speculation. Furthermore, it is not as if the different parts of science have not been around for a long time: even people in the most “primitive” of hunter-gatherer cultures (that is, most of us during human evolution) must make detailed observations and draw inferences and generalizations from nature, and the Greeks of over two thousand years ago among others were experts at logic and reason. So why is science such a modern enterprise?

This in itself is yet another compelling question, I believe. It suggests that human curiosity, as deeply ingrained an aspect of our psyches as it is, requires the right conditions if it is to flourish and become such a central aspect of life’s meaning. It also suggests that it is easily stifled, whether by design or circumstance or sheer bad luck. If true, then it means we must be very careful to nourish curiosity wherever and whenever it appears, and be on guard to those parts of our natures or our social or cultural institutions that act against it. It means that we must value curiosity for its own sake, feed it wherever it is found growing, develop it as a force unto itself. We must recognize what it means to our own existence and to whatever hopes we have for our future.

More than anything else, it is these convictions which have motivated me to write this book. So powerful are these convictions within me that I am forced to the conclusion that it is an essential part of what makes me what I am, and what makes all of us human. It has taken me on journeys far beyond anything mere physical travel could ever have taken me, and exposed me to places and ideas which neither train nor plane nor space shuttle nor starship could have shown. And so I am driven to share the power of this force with others.

This book is also, as I said in the Preface, an intellectual autobiography: an expedition through my mind and my life as a human being with an unusual condition called Asperger’s Syndrome – as much an amazing thing as anything else in this universe – driven by these aspects of the human mind. At the same time, I want to state at the outset that I do not consider myself particularly special or unique in this way; that in fact any and every human being, whether he or she realizes it or not, has the ability to make many of the explorations I will write about here. That I am writing this book is merely my great fortune in having led a life which has let me realize these capacities within myself. But they are within you too, whatever kind of life you have led, and in everyone you have ever touched in your life, whether they know it or not.

I am tempted towards even greater extravagance and state that these capacities are what differ modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, from all other species that have walked, flown, swam, or burrowed on this planet, probably not excluding our own recent biologic ancestors. It is not that many species do not possess one or more of these traits: witness a cat probing in and about every corner and cranny of some new object brought into the house, or the wondrousness of the seemingly perfect and designed adaptations of so many organisms to their environments, or the ability not just of apes but also many other animals to figure out how to use a stick or a rock as a tool. There is, at least in rudimentary form, something in those brains which is also in our own, albeit so much better refined.

But none of these splendors of nature come even close to putting all of these abilities together, or hones them to the degree, than modern humans even living in the most “primitive” of cultures, have. And not just species living now, but, as far as we can tell, those that have filled the entirety of biological history, hundreds of millions of years if we are speaking of complex, multicellular organism, and billions if we mean life in any form. What we humans can do, both as individuals and in groups, is unmatched by any other species evolution has wrought. This is all the more remarkable in that we seem so feeble compared to our competitions, in so many other ways.

Of course, as almost anyone will tell you without a second thought, this is due to our astonishing intelligence, far above even our closest ape cousins, and probably well above dolphins and their kin as well. It is an intelligence that, many claim, not without some good reason I believe, possibly makes us the greatest threat to life that this planet has ever faced. For every species that is successful is usually successful at the expense of other species, and modern humans have been successful to a degree few other large animals have ever remotely approached: so successful that many people believe that a mass extinction even, similar to many of those in biological history but out of unique reasons, is currently taking place on this planet. But predictions are tricky, especially about the future as Yogi Berra or some other pundit is rumored to have said, and I have devoted an entire chapter to the future where I make my own speculations.

Actually, now that I have given one small hint as to what is to be expected over the next several hundred pages, perhaps this is a good place to pause for a more thorough synopsis. The number and kinds of things humans can employ their curiosity, wonder, and imagination toward are almost endless; yet an endless book is something I have neither time nor ambition to create, even should you wish to read one! The next chapter, “Wondering About the Sky …” details the results of the age of robotic exploration of our solar system. I wrote it because this age was only in its infancy when I was growing up; the difference between our knowledge of the planets and moons of our solar system as it stands now and how it stood when I was very young is so staggering that it truly makes for an entire epoch of human history. It of course also paves the way for the human exploitation of our system, something which will get heavily started in the current century.

The title of the third chapter, “Wondering About Reality … “ may sound more metaphysical than scientific, and in some ways it is. But it is also a serious attempt, scientifically, to answer this basic question of what reality is, which is in fact much trickier than it appears on the surface. The chapters following this one are to a degree a continuation, albeit more specifically, first about matter and then biology, in the sense that physics and chemistry in its current state understand it. Let me repeat: it is not meant as a deep, complex scientific treatise, but something the reasonably intelligent, education layman should be able to follow, perhaps with some effort, but follow nonetheless.

Speaking about the chapter on biology -- “Wondering About Ourselves … “ this chapter is possibly the most eccentric in the entire book. It has very little in the way of what one might find in biology textbooks, or even popular books on this subject. My official excuse / reason for this is that I am a chemist by training, and naturally look at the world from this perspective. And so I speak very little about cells and organisms and ecologies, but about the molecular nature of life, and what had to be true in chemistry as well as physics for life to come about on planet Earth. I speak some about both the core atomic / molecular elements of life and its evolution because they both are so critical to the development of the many varieties of life here, and of Darwinian evolution , the only atomic / molecular theory that life has, I believe, even a sporting chance of explaining the dual facets of living things.

Chapter six is returns to astronomy; the nature of stars, galaxies, and, to some degree, the universe as a whole. I speak, to some degree, of these matters as a child might, for astronomy was my first scientific love as a child, and both stargazing and reading about the stars occupied and fascinated me for many hours.

Chapters seven, eight, and nine are about the (possible) future(s), the past, and the universe’s beginnnings. Chapter ten is the only chapter in the book which could be described as purely philosophical – well, purely metaphysical. In it, I try to deal with the paradoxical condition of the existence of sentient beings in this universe; ourselves, of course, but quite probably other species on this planet, and possibly other worlds in the universe as a whole. I try to show that this creates some serious problems for science, although I don’t claim to know what the resolution of these problems are. I also discuss the intriguing fact that a number of constants in our cosmos have values that are hard to explain for any other reason that they make life possible. It is all very speculative, and I welcome the reader to apply his / her own mind to these issues.

All of this I do because I would like to think that what I am writing about is what it means to be human; and I do not mean being human in the narrow, biological sense (as important as this is) but in the broader sense of being a sentient, rational plus emotional being in this universe, a universe surprisingly capable of spawning and nurturing such beings. Another, related reason for my ambition is the recognition that every human mind is an individual, both complete and separate from every other human mind that exists, has ever existed, will ever exist, or hypothetically could exist. Each of us brings our own singular perspective on the reality we collectively experience, a perspective as unique as our fingerprints or DNA or the trillions of neural interconnections within our cerebral cortexes. That, as much as we are all alike – otherwise how could we communicate with each other? – we each bring a way of seeing and thinking and perceiving and recalling the world around us that is as unique as the ancestry that produced us.

It should go without saying that this, in and of itself, ought to provoke our curiosity. Each human mind, or brain I should say, is a window into our universe, yet no two of those minds transmits its many lights in precisely the same way. For that matter why is our universe even constructed in such a remarkable way? There is no reason, at least not in principle I know of, why it should be. It could just as easily be constructed such that all minds worked the same way. Or perhaps with greater ease that there were no minds at all, only inanimate matter and energy. That there should be a myriad of unique minds, or even an infinity of them, is a puzzle one could easily spend a large part of one’s life striving to solve. But then of course, that there should be a universe at all, of any kind, is a puzzle that some people have spent a large part of their lives pouring over.

All of which brings me back again to what has prompted me to write this book. When I look over my life, I have spent considerable time trying to answer many of these questions. I have also spent at least as much if not more time trying to answer more “mundane” questions, or at least in trying to understand their answers. It is not without difficulty that I should explain why I have put such time and effort into these endeavors. In a lot of ways it is not very practical or pragmatic, and I have received my share of argument against, and even criticism for, doing so (though thankfully I have received more encouragement). The only response I can give to these arguments and criticisms is, as I have just said, that it seems to me such a large part of being human; such a large part that I cannot imagine being any other way. Yes, I find it almost impossible to imagine anyone being any other way.

Yet many people do seem to have had their curiosity quashed at some point in their lives, have lost their imaginations and sense of wonder; so many people, in fact, that I have felt compelled for some time now to see if I can understand why this is so; and, more than that, rekindle these essential human characteristics.

* * *

These subjects, as much as anything else, has gotten me to wondering about the nature of curiosity itself: about why some people seem to be consumed by it while others appear virtually devoid, about what circumstances trigger us to start examining things and asking questions about them, and why any of us ever does so. What is this thing we call curiosity, and what purposes and functions does it serve?

With regard to myself, when I think about it, the first thing I am aware of is that it, as I have said, is something I have always had. It is so integral to my very being that I can not imagine not having it. It is as though reality is hurling questions at me all the time, like darts from a drunken dart thrower, and I find I can’t keep them from striking no matter how hard I dodge and weave. Why is the sky blue? Where does the sun go at night? What causes the seasons? What makes the clouds, and the rain that falls from them? Why are there so many different kinds of animals and plants, and where did they come from? For that matter, where did we come from?

Not only humans but many animals seem possessed of some form of curiosity, although one that does not necessarily present itself the same way. My daughter’s cat Hope, for example, will spend the longest time sniffing around, poking into, and prodding about any new object brought into the house, even crawling into it and inspecting it from the inside out if he can (yes, name notwithstanding, he is a tom). This urge to investigate seems to go hand in hand with even the most rudimentary of intelligence, although intelligence alone doesn’t appear to be sufficient; other cats I have known will ignore a new object in their environment, or at most give the most cursory of examinations. Can we then say that intelligence, while necessary, is not enough to explain curiosity?

Something else indeed seems to be needed. As another example, babies and toddlers, while being much less intelligent than the adults they will evolve into, appear to have much more inquisitiveness than their grown counterparts. Of course, we all know this. It explains in part the difficulty we have in keeping them from incessantly putting all sorts of objects, however unsanitary or otherwise unpleasant, in their mouths. And we can all conjure up the image of the young child with a new toy in his / her hands, exploring it in rapt fascination with both touch and vision. If that is not enough, the unending barrages of questions from children which exhaust all our attempts to answer them make it clear that curiosity plays a major role in the child’s life and intellectual development.

Looked at this way, intelligence and curiosity might even seem negatively correlated, at least when you look at the maturation process of a single human being. The more capable we become of fathoming our environments, the less inclined we seemed to attempt to do so. This is an odd observation indeed: if anything, one would expect it to be the other way around!

That, in itself, should make our ears and minds perk up. It suggests some other ingredient, one which we have yet to identify. As an analogy, imagine a person possessed of great physical strength. Such strength, however, does not in any way compel or induce its possessor to lift heavy weights. The person might even be a couch potato, whose only physical effort is to work the remote control. In the same way, a person of enormous intelligence might not have the slightest desire to use his mind to solve even the simplest of problems. The kinds of questions I mentioned before might not hold the slightest interest for him.

All of which brings me back to our beginnings. These qualities of curiosity, imagination, and wonder would appear to be among the most fundamental traits that characterize humanity (again, in the broad sense of sentient, intelligent beings, rather than the narrow biological sense), but we see that the equation is by no means a simple one. Some might even argue that there is no equation at all; that some people, like some cats, have an insatiable amount of these traits, some have little to none, and the vast majority fall somewhere between these extremes.

I shall argue otherwise however. Part of my argument is based on another experience of mine, one that goes considerably back towards the beginnings of my life. I was ten or eleven at the time, and in the fifth or sixth grade at school. My class had been sent to the school library, perhaps to do research on a project we had been assigned, although I don’t remember the eact reason why. At that age, my curiosity and interest in the sciences had earned me the (albeit rarely used, and probably Asperger’s based) moniker, “Walking, talking encyclopedia,” and, as usual when entering libraries, I’d made a bee-line for the 500s sections (the natural sciences, according to the Dewey Decimal System), where I began looking at my favorite books – mostly the Time-Life series of books on various topics of the natural world. I don’t remember why, but for some reason I managed to collect a crowd around me that day. It was a crowd I quickly had spell-bound. I found myself showing them illustration after illustration from different books showing the history of the Earth and the universe, and their possible futures. To my astonishment, my fellow students were entranced by what I was telling and showing them. It’s an incident I remember so vividly to this day because of how dramatically it showed me how wrong I was even then about the curiosity and wonder of the “average” person. That curiosity and wonder perhaps didn’t often express itself, not as it did on that day, but I realized that it was always there, if only beneath the surface, waiting to be stirred up. I remember how ecstatic I was, how hopeful for the human race. If I, by merely showing pictures out of books, could capture so many minds, what was possible, I wondered?

Indeed, what is possible?

Over the years since that day, and both earlier and later ones, I have come much to speculate and ruminate a great deal on humans and curiosity. Two conclusions I have reached are: one, that we have curiosity is impossible to deny, and two, that it is often muffled and misdirected in various ways is impossible not to observe. There appears to be something of a contradiction here, a contradiction I hope to resolve in this book. But one source of the contradiction is, I think, fairly obvious to anyone who looks at it:

This is that curiosity and wonder are as innate to the human mind as any instincts can be, but they are not the only such instincts. Another, almost as powerful and often even more so is our need to believe. I am not the first writer to note that the human brain, to a great degree, is a pattern-seeking, story-telling machine; a machine that prefers answers, even poor ones, over open questions, however fascinating. The result is that once we have found a pattern, or story, that seems to satisfy the experiences our senses have provided us, we quickly acquire a sense of comfort which we are loathe to challenge. I am not merely speaking of religion, mythology, and folklore here. The hundreds of thousands of years our immediate ancestors spent as nomadic hunter-gatherers living their day to day, hand to mouth existence, no doubt chose for genes that wired our brains to make quick, certain decisions about the natural world around us. As that natural world could be swiftly lethal to any mind which spent too much time pondering over it, those quick, certain decisions were often preferable to ones that required more data acquisition and hypothesis-testing, even at the cost of being more often wrong in the long run. The tendency to impose large-scale patterns on the evidence of our senses, though catastrophically wrong at times, would also have been selected for.

To a degree, that is. It would still have been of great value to have at least part of our evolving brains willing to challenge the patterns, stories, and beliefs, however firmly held, because there would still be many times when open-ended inquisition and wonder would have saved us too. This would probably be more pronounced in the young, who had the advantage of parents and other elders to protect them from mistakes. But even adult minds would have had it too. To what degree is difficult to say; all of this hypothesizing about the ways our stone-aged ancestors’ minds work is largely guesswork because, after all, we do not possess any Neanderthal or Homo erectus brains to examine (and even if we did, it is not clear which parts of them we would need to examine to support our hypotheses – this isn’t even clear in modern human brains although a medical technique known as functional magnetic resonance imagining, or fMRI, has recently been making serious inroads to which parts of our brains associate with which mental functions).

At any rate, that we have the capacity for curiosity, for wonder, and for the imagination and desire to explore which these capacities invariably give rise to, is, I believe, hard to deny, exceptions to the contrary duly noted. I am not one of those who cynically ascribe the Apollo moon program of the 1960s solely to Cold War paranoia and nationalistic fervor; I grew up during those times and will personally vouch for the fact that the pure desire to explore and to answer questions about what lay beyond the Earth’s limited reaches was a large part of what drove the United States to fulfill President Kennedy’s and others’ challenges to our abilities to do just that. And that these desires still play a strong role in ours and others more limited efforts at space exploration since then, a subject I shall cover more in the next chapter.

* * *

I have said that more than intelligence alone is needed if we are to account for human, or any other kind of, curiosity. One of these things I believe I have touched on in the preceding paragraphs: we are also pattern-seeking, story-telling creatures as well. The irony here is that while both are essential for each other, both tend to counteract, or restrict the other, as well. Once again, however, I am not speaking only of things like religion or the various forms of nationalistic and social / cultural and even personal mythologies which we unavoidably pick up in our lives. Perhaps to our astonishment, this part of our mental facilities show up directly in our open-minded attempts to explain the world; even in science; even, though to a lesser degree I submit, in modern science as it has evolved over the last century.

Actually, it is easy to spot if we look over the last several centuries of scientific thought, building to our present time. And again, I am by no means the first writer to make note of it. I am in fact close to paraphrasing when I say that science is in no way the step by step, bit by bit accumulation of knowledge and theory into a cognizant whole that is sometimes presented as being. No field of science, or related field such as medicine, has taken this pristine approach. No, they have all unfolded by the contested discovery of new information, which initially was force-fit into existing theories and paradigms (e.g., stories and patterns), and then overthrew those theories and paradigms only when a), the fit became so awkward that only the most sedentary minds were still comfortable with it and b), those sedentary minds – generally known as the scientific / medical establishment of the day – either died off or became so absurd as to be marginalized. The new, young Turks, not so steeped in traditionalistic thinking as to be confined by it, more or less storm the ramparts and take over those establishments. It may take a while – it took over a hundred years for so radical an idea as matter being composed of atoms to be fully accepted – for the revolution to complete, but complete in the end it always is. And we see this in all fields of science and related knowledge: from physics to chemistry to biology to astronomy, and of course, to medicine. At every stage we see how the establishment already has a fairly complete vision of the way things are and how they work, from the geocentric universe to blood-letting, and how the now obvious failures of these systems appears utterly invisible to its adherents in their times.

Again, I won’t go over these histories in detail because others have already done so, in much better detail. What I want to concentrate on is how, in all of these cases, the sciences nevertheless did advance because a small cadre of minds were willing to experiment, examine nature in more detail, ask questions others had not thought of, and challenge standard answers simply because they didn’t fit. These minds – Galileo, Newtown, Dalton, Darwin and Wallace, Pasteur, the Curies, Einstein, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Shrödinger, come to mind first – revolutionized their worlds because they were not content with standardized thinking and / or their imaginations couldn’t let go of what others might have regarded as minor puzzles.

This restless examination and challenge of standardized things, combined with the insatiable desire of imagination to solve puzzles, even seemingly innocuous ones, lies at the heart of curiosity, at least curiosity in the human sense. It is also what one sees while watching a young child fumbling with an unknown object for the first time, or its incessant questioning of every answer the exasperated adults try to placate it with. It is also what my daughter’s very non-human cat Hope seems to be doing whenever he pokes his head in an unknown container, or spends many minutes sniffing and probing my shoes and socks and pants after I’ve been out walking. It is something we all do, if only momentarily and peripherally, when we gaze at the night sky, or examine the different stones and shells washed up on a beach, or listen to the variety of bird songs and calls as we walk through the spring underbrush, or the trills of insects in the summer night. Yes, indeed, we are all filled with curiosity, curiosity and wonder and imagination, however we were raised or however pedestrian we may think we have allowed our minds to become. I really believe that; really believe we can’t avoid or evade this primary instinct of ours, however hard we try.

* * *

There is another paradoxical aspect to this phenomenon of curiosity I wish to discuss before moving on to specific things we as humans are curious about. That is curiosity’s pairing of the desire to know, to understand, to fathom in all details the object of curiosity, with the simultaneous acceptance, often even pleasure, of our own ignorance. Anyone who has spent a decent portion of their life examining and exploring one of nature’s mysteries will appreciate this curious pairing, I propose. I also suggest that this is why curiosity and romantic passion so often seem to go hand in hand in individuals. There is the pleasure of obtaining the object of one’s desire. Yet at the same time it is the pursuit of said object which thrills us as much if not more than the acquisition itself. Yet with curiosity it is even better, for acquisition often only opens our eyes to still further pursuits. There is an addictive quality to it, the only difference between this one and most addictions is that one never suffers the agony of withdrawal and regret. On the contrary, there is the additional thrill of obtained knowledge with the vision of horizons still to be reached and explored.

In the 1960’s science fiction television series Star Trek (and several of its later incarnations) space is described as the “final frontier.” I believe this is incorrect: to us wonder addicted humans there is no final frontier; or at least we desperately hope not because if there is one then we are all bound to come face to face with the end of one of our most fundamental raison d’êtres. To emphasize this in a humorous way, there is a hilarious line in a well known Monty Python sketch which captures this spirit even better: one character, having been told that Dr. (“bloody”) Bronowski knows everything, replies, “I wouldn’t like that; it’d take the mystery out of life.” The simultaneous co-existence of endless mystery and the tangible answers to puzzles that all of us mull over at one point of our lives or another does seem unique to us humans; or, if not to all of us in practice, then at least in principle. In this way we really are distinct from other animals – yes, even Hope – that display this desire for knowledge, because in our non-human cousins the desire is purely for practical ends: obtaining food, exploring territory, seeking out refuges from enemies and nature’s rages. Only humans, as far as we can tell, seek understanding and knowledge for their own sake. (Of course, time and research may show that some of our closer hominid kin have some sense of this, but certainly it appears only on the way to being human.)

* * *

Having said this, however, I must backtrack lest the reader think I have overlooked a contradiction. I am speaking of humans here in the purely biological sense, but didn’t I also say that I meant any sentient being, however, and wherever, that has evolved? Yes I did, so I must explain myself. What I am suggesting is that sentient life, wherever it may be found elsewhere in the universe, and whatever evolutionary track it may have followed, should be expected to possess curiosity and imagination and a sense of wonder in very much the same sense as we possess it. In this sense we may also label it “human”, however little sense that might make from a chemical-biological point of view.

Incidentally, if I am right about this, it is very good news from the standpoint of the SETI program – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – the technological hunt for alien civilizations which has undergone so many ups and downs since Frank Drake essentially started it with his famous equation on the probability of other technological civilizations existing in the universe in the early 1960’s. Whatever the odds of any form of SETI ever succeeding (always very small, even by its most stalwart enthusiasts’ estimations – though not because the possibility of advanced alien civilizations existing somewhere in our galaxy is necessarily small), if we ever do make contact, there is one thing we can be almost certain of: we will both share that same sense of curiosity and wonder which will make it easy to communicate with and understand each other. The reason I make this argument is straightforward: the success of SETI is based on the other civilization having reached a technological level at least equal to if not greater than our own; yet such technology cannot come about without a deep scientific underpinning of knowledge about the universe behind it; and science rests on a bedrock of innate, insatiable curiosity that is the trademark of human-like minds.

This is not to say that there could be highly intelligent species elsewhere in the universe that lack our passion for knowledge and understanding; only that such species, should they ever be encountered – unlikely, as contact typically requires advanced technology – will have minds so different from our own as to possibly even surpass our ability to understand them … or / and for them to understand us. If we ever do contact such a species, I predict it may be a long time before we even recognize them as intelligent, so essential is the curiosity component of our own intelligence (the reverse would equally be true, but would they even be interested in trying?). This of course is the stuff of science fiction, and more than one SF tale has involved human explorers encountering minds so different from their own that all kinds of (often unpleasant) consequences ensue before someone wises up to what is happening. For example, one can imagine humans colonizing a world with a Gaia-like (worldwide) planetary intelligence, with neither species recognizing the potential pitfalls of such an encounter until … hmmm, having written a fair share of science fiction back in the 1990’s perhaps I shouldn’t give away any potential plots in such a scenario!

* * *

There is one other trademark of curiosity, and that is humility. One of the great pleasures I have had in my life is to work with scientists, and one of the most profound aspects of that pleasure is their humility. It perhaps surprises us to hear that, for we have read and seen and heard of so much fiction in which the main antagonist is the arrogant or misguided scientist. You are no doubt familiar with this stock character: someone who thinks his (it is almost invariably male) brilliance makes him superior if not infallible to ordinary humans, and in his hubris commits terrible sins against humanity, often out of an ignorance he could not recognize in himself – e.g., Frankenstein’s monster, or the scientist who releases an incurable disease on humanity, or builds weapons of mass destruction he cannot control … the list could go on almost endlessly. My personal favorite is Greg Bear’s story Blood Music, in which nanotechnological (on the scale of individual molecules) robots become intelligent, multiply out of control, and destroy humanity via a mass contagion. Of course, one of the reasons such tales are so compelling is that the possibility of one becoming true is realistic enough to worry about! It is not at all inconceivable that science and technology really will do us in one day; indeed, it is one of the factors in Frank Drake’s famous equation, already alluded to, about the possibility of technological civilizations elsewhere in the universe: the average time before they self-destruct through nuclear war or some other internally caused catastrophe.

All these stories, and even possibilities, aside, I say again that humility is almost the primary trademark of the scientific mind. I have often noticed that a scientist is someone who will spend an hour trying to persuade you of the value of his work and correctness of his theories, and then point you to someone else solely because, though s/he may not use exactly these words, “S/He thinks I’m full of crap.” I am not speaking hypothetically. One of my most profound experiences as a chemistry undergraduate was getting involved in some research on vitamin B-12 with a professor I especially liked. This gentleman had an interesting theory involving isomerization – never mind what this means – of B-12 under acidic or alkaline conditions; a theory which decidedly butted heads with conventional wisdom of the subject, but which, if true, would certainly have earned the man a great deal of attention and respect (and money) within the scientific community. I remember how, after having worked on the project for several weeks, he directed me toward a pile of papers written by other scientists on the subject. To my utter astonishment, when I read the papers, I realized that most of them did not ascribe to his ideas and were in some cases were seriously critical of both them and him. The reason for this was simple: my professor didn’t want to sell me his ideas, or gain followers, or even deceive me to any degree about the controversy surrounding his research; lowly undergraduate that I was, he wanted me to hear all the facts and all the ideas from all sides and make up my own mind. Nor has this been my only experience of this kind. I’ve met Nobel Prize winners who sincerely treated me as a colleague deserving as much respect as themselves. I’ve had conversations with scientists having worked many years in a field listen to my ideas carefully, and either give me credit for my insights or at least patiently and politely educate me away from them. I don’t ever recall myself being simply dismissed or treated with anything approaching contempt. Not ever.

The late Carl Sagan spoke about this many times, more eloquently and forcefully than I can, so I won’t go on. My point in raising the subject is that I believe there is a strong and undeniable connection between this humility and curiosity. One could simply sum it up by noting that the fastest way to stifle curiosity is to get it in one’s head that you know it all and are right about everything. Quite probably this is just another expression of our pattern-finding, story-telling brains, which all too often look for quick answers and then plant the pillars of belief and dogma in them without further explanation. It is of course, also an expression of ego, something we all have and which likes to insist we are right about everything.

Humility is possibly not natural to the human mind, and so is something in continuous, even desperate, need of nurturing. Which brings me to a personal statement. I have been lucky enough to have been born into and raised in just such an environment. No dogma, religious or otherwise, was ever drilled into my head. Instead, as I mentioned in the Preface, I grew up in a house full of books, a house in which the greatest treat for my childhood self was a trip to a museum or the local library. My youthful sense of wonder and desire to understand the world around me was given just about all the nourishment a child could get. Dissent from conventional ideas – from any ideas at all for that matter – was never quashed. And, again at the risk of repeating myself, I was also fortunate enough to attend a public school environment in which curiosity and knowledge were as encouraged as much as such an environment can encourage. More than that even, in a society and time – America in the 1960s – which were as open-minded as a society can be. Quite probably no place and no period in history has urged its members to question and to doubt established authority; and although some of those questions and doubts gave rise to new forms of dogma, there was still in the 1960s onward an open-ended air of humility which no doubt had a great affect on me and many others of my generation. In this way I have been fortunate indeed.

* * *

The humility I have described here is not the humility we see (not always in sincere form) in various Eastern religious leaders and the like, although it is related. I am speaking of intellectual humility: the ability to accept that anything one has come to believe, whether it be from schooling or a church, from books, parents or other authorities, or even as the product of one’s own observations and thoughts, could genuinely be mistaken; mistaken no matter how much observation and thought or the weight of authority or time lend to it. Or how many people hold the belief, for how many centuries. It is the recognition of human limitations and fallibility, even among the most brilliant, well-educated minds. My personal favorite example of this is Einstein adding the so-called Cosmological Constant to his equations for General Relativity to prevent, for what were mainly esthetic reasons of his, an expanding (or contracting) universe, something which his raw equations implied. When Edwin Hubble was within barely a decade to demonstrate by his observations of the red shifts of distant galaxies that the universe is in fact expanding, Einstein pronounced this ad-hoc addition of the Cosmological Constant the greatest blunder of his career. What makes this example my favorite is how a more recent discovery in cosmology, that the universe is not only expanding but that, contrary to all expectations the expansion rate is accelerating (the mutual gravitational pull of the galaxies ought to be slowing it down, yet it is speeding up), has resurrected Einstein’s self-disavowed constant, albeit in somewhat different form. Einstein’s confession of his greatest blunder may thus prove itself an even greater error, an irony I have to expect he would have enjoyed.

Another, important aspect to humility is the overwhelming feeling, shared by most of us I suspect, at looking upon a universe not only greater than our ability to fully understand, but, as the biologist J.B.S. Haldane observed (though he used the word queerer rather than greater), greater than we can understand. One of the most wondrous and compelling things about science, which is such a large part of the reasons I have spent a lifetime immersed in it, is how strange and wonderful it can make the most “ordinary” of things, simply by the act of explaining them.

* * *

Where should our journey commence? From a thematic, or even esthetic, point of view, there are of course many possibilities; but as this is also in part an autobiographical tome, I choose to start where I started in my own life. As that child, nothing was more interesting and spell-binding to me than the night sky and the stars and planets in it, and the idea that we lived in an immense universe far vaster than anything we could imagine. I don’t know that I would have put it that way at those tender years, but looking back, clearly that was what had me reading books on astronomy, pestering my parents for a telescope (as well as building one), and finding a trip to the Fels planetarium at the Benjamin Franklin Institute in Philadelphia a treat to top any birthday or holiday celebration.

After that, well, despite what I said before, we shall see. Emily Dickenson wrote “The brain is wider than the sky,” but no brain ever born has been or ever will be vast enough to encompass these questions and their answers. But I do hope and believe that I can give the reader a basic groundwork into the subjects involved, and a flavor for the arguments and evidence for them; and, of course, most of all, that I can trigger a passion and curiosity and wonder deep enough that the reader will be left wanting more.

This is all I shall say on these things now. It is time for the journey to begin. Step outside and turn your eyes to the sky. Watch the sun traverse the heavens, reach and sink into the reddening horizon, and the endless vista above your head go from blue to purple to black, and the myriads of stars of all colors and brilliance slowly light up within it. Watch all this and take it in, and let your imagination run free over the possibilities. Do all these things and return to the warmth of your home, and we shall take the first steps.