Trying to fathom out the true nature of the universe and of our place within it can seem like a decidedly uphill struggle sometimes.
The information's out there in the endless, tractless vastness of space, but here we are, insignificant little creatures a few feet tall practically glued to the surface of our tiny planet, incapable of even seeing the craters on the Moon without artificial aid, and woefully inadequately equipped mentally to understand what's going on. After all, we can't even see optical illusions for what they are.
It's almost enough to make you throw in the towel and just get on with life.
But don't despair. Progress can be made. And one of the great things about progress is that it can take you a lot further than you expect.
This is because progress tends to follow a principle called the snowball effect.
The snowball effect works like this: when a person who is standing at the top of a snowy slope rolls a hand-sized snowball down the slope the snowball picks up more snow as it travels, so that by the time it reaches the bottom of the slope it's a massive object that's the size of a large boulder.
So it is with progress. As progress rolls onwards through time new ideas stick to it, which in turn pick up more ideas, making the ultimate result much more impressive that the small and tentative bundle of ideas that first started rolling (and often making the result more dangerous too, in very much the same way that a boulder-sized snowball is more dangerous than a hand-sized one. But that's another subject).
In this book we're primarily interested in intellectual progress regarding our quest to understand the cosmos and our position in it, but we can draw some relevant conclusions about the nature of progress by looking at a few examples of much more prosaic and down to Earth advancement - examples selected from the realms of the mechanical and the technological.
Take, for example, the progress of writing .
Writing is the slightly bizarre though incredibly useful phenomenon whereby a series of odd-looking marks are lined up in different combinations as a symbolic representation of language, which itself is a slightly bizarre though incredibly useful phenomenon whereby a series of sound effects issued from a person's mouth are made to symbolically represent objects and ideas. You can see some examples of writing on this very page.
Our prehistoric, pre-literate ancestors probably started making marks on cave walls, on the ground, on animal skins and on themselves by dipping their fingers in some form of coloured medium such as mud, ash or blood. The original creator of "the mark" probably wasn't actually seeking to invent the mark as such: it's much more likely that he or she casually dragged a dirty finger across a surface and noticed that it made a blotch or smear - and then realised that this was a phenomenon that was worth exploiting. The invention essentially presented itself - all it took was someone with the insight to appreciate the implications.
From there it was a small step to noticing that a similar marking effect could be obtained by using a stick instead of finger, which had the advantage of avoiding the painful wear and tear on the digit's tip.
The earliest forms of mark-making would involve the creation of self-contained symbols and images, such as representations of mammoths, but over time some of these marks would be appropriated for use in language, either to represent words or individual parts of words such as letters. (To this day some of our letters still bear the fossilised form of simplified images: the letter A for example is an inverted ox's head - based on aleph, an early eastern Mediterranean word for ox.) The stick (or possibly bone) mark-making implement sufficed for all writing needs for untold thousands of years, only to be superseded in the relatively recent past by the use of cut reeds, feathers (in the form of quill pens) and brushes. Only in the very recent past have the writing implements that we're familiar with today been invented.
Pencils, for instance, were initially developed in the first half of the sixteenth century, in Borrowdale in the English Lake District. The local people, who reared sheep as a living, discovered in their hills a seam of unusually pure graphite - a form of very high-grade coal - which they found to be extremely useful for marking their sheep. To this day the seam is still the purest graphite deposit known to man (and sheep). The raw mined graphite was wrapped in sheepskin or string to create a marking implement. The mineral was called graphite because of its qualities as a graphic marker.
The pencil as we know it, made from a mixture of graphite and clay held in a wooden sheath, was patented in 1795 by a French army officer and inventor named Nicolas-Jacques Conte. He had been asked to come up with an alternative to the pure graphite pencils that had until then been imported into France from Britain, but which were at that time unavailable due to the inconvenient fact that Britain and France were at war. It only took him a few days to come up with his idea once he'd put his mind to it.
Moving on to ink-based implements, the fountain pen was developed during the nineteenth century, with a version being patented in France in 1827. The design of the fountain pen was improved on by insurance broker Lewis Waterman in the USA in the 1880s - he developed a pen that provided a much smoother supply of ink to the nib by exploiting the phenomenon of capillary action. His desire to improve the design had been prompted due to the experience of having his previous, inferior fountain pen leak ink all over an important document that was being signed.
The ballpoint pen was invented in the 1930s by Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro, with the aid of his brother Georg, a chemist. They invented it as a means of using quick drying (and therefore very convenient) newspaper printer's ink in a pen, as this type of ink dried too quickly to be used in a fountain pen.
So there we have it, a brief history of writing implements, from the bronze age to almost the present day. Almost 6,000 years of writing with sticks and only 70 years of writing with ballpoint pens. Notice the time scales.
(I myself was possibly among the last generation of British schoolchildren to have gone to school when it was still necessary to use pens that were dipped into inkwells set into the desks, and when new-fangled ballpoint pens were actually banned because they were thought to encourage bad handwriting. By the time I left school everything had changed and the inkwells had been assigned to the dustbin of history. Ballpoint pens were by then so cheap, ubiquitous and disposable that there were many of them in the dustbins too.) All of the writing instruments that I've described here have been hand-held writing implements that dispense a pigment or dye from their tips. They all require the user to move a hand across a surface in order to form the letters.
In the relatively recent past there has of course been a massive development of mechanical and electrical type-based writing instruments, starting with typewriters and moving through to the computers of today. Significantly more advanced as these mechanical and electrical machines are in comparison to hand-held writing instruments such as the quill and the ballpoint pen, it's important to realise that none of them would ever have been invented if people hadn't previously used the simpler hand-held implements to develop the medium of writing for which the machines were applied. In other words, machines such as computers wouldn't exist if earlier people hadn't written down their ideas using burnt sticks, quills, ballpoint pens or whatever relatively primitive instruments were available to them at the time.
This is a very good example of the snowball effect in action: new inventions adhering to older ones as they roll through history (and with the newer inventions frequently burying the earlier ones deep within the rolling ball as they are rendered obsolete).
I'll come back to typewriters and computers later, in a different context, but for now let's just go back to those hand-held writing devices for a moment.
I'd like to point out something about the way that they were each invented.
Several were invented as a result of necessity: the familiar (wood-bound) pencil was devised due to the fact that English (sheepskin bound) pencils weren't available in France thanks to hostilities, while the capillary action fountain pen was developed because of the fact that earlier pens blotted important documents. It would seem to be true that in many cases necessity is indeed the mother of invention.
However, there's another factor at work in the creation of some of the inventions. Several of them were invented to a large extent as a result of the resources that just happened to be to hand at the time: the prehistoric stick with its coating of ash/mud/blood (or even more so the prehistoric finger, which was nothing if not to hand); the first (sheepskin bound) pencil with its graphite (and sheepskin) from the hills; the ballpoint pen with its quick-drying ink from the printing presses. In these cases the usual mother of invention, necessity, took the passenger seat, and the driving seat of innovation was occupied by another concept - the realisation that there was a resource or idea that could be exploited.
This factor, that inventions, and thus progress, are influenced by what is immediately available has quite a profound influence on human development, and possibly more importantly, on human thinking.
It works like this.
Imagine that you're a prehistoric person and that you have a problem that needs addressing.
Imagine, for example, that you need to build a shelter or a dwelling in order to protect yourself from the elements.
If you lived in a forest you'd look around, see all of the wood that was surrounding you, and you'd almost automatically start collecting lengths of branch with which to build the shelter.
If you lived somewhere rocky (and treeless) things would be different. You'd look around, see all of the rocks everywhere and you'd almost automatically start to pile them on top of each to build your shelter.
You wouldn't choose your building material, wood or stone, by virtue of whether or not the material was the best one to use to build a shelter: you'd choose it simply because it was the material that was available.
In fact your choice of building material wouldn't really be a matter of choice at all. If you happened to live in a place where the landscape was totally devoid of objects other than, for some bizarre reason, snails, you would no doubt devise an ingenious way to make a shelter out of snail shells.
If you lived in a forest and you were totally unaware of the existence of rocks the idea of building with rocks simply would never present itself to you, and you'd never find yourself thinking along the lines of "If only I could find a hard mineral substance that exists in handy sized blocks (or that could be chiselled to such shapes) then I could build a dwelling that's a lot more permanent than the relatively flimsy wooden structures that I've managed to construct so far." You solve practical problems such as how to build a shelter by creating solutions based on what materials are to hand, and linked to this, your thoughts about how to solve these problems tend to be shaped by what's to hand too. To solve any immediate problem you often look around not just for materials but for an idea about how to go about your task. People very rarely think too deeply about problems or approach them from first principles.
This doesn't only apply to basic practical problems such as shelter building: it applies to cutting-edge technological advances as well. Such advances often occur because they simply present themselves as basic modifications to already existing technologies. Even radical innovations often consist of taking existing ideas or principles and applying them in novel ways or to different fields or disciplines.
Here's an example.
The city of London lies on the River Thames, close enough to the sea for the river level to rise and fall with the tides. From time to time when there's an exceptionally high tide (known as a surge tide) the water coming up the Thames estuary threatens to flood the low-lying parts of the city. To prevent this undesirable occurrence a moveable barrier was built across the river a few miles downstream of central London in order to hold back the rising tide. The barrier, which was completed in 1984, had to be designed in such a way that it was only moved into position when it was needed, as it was important that it didn't interfere with the normal flow of the river or of the boats and ships that used it..
Imagine that you were given the task of designing such a barrier. How would you go about it? You'd probably think about the structure of other barriers and related mechanisms that you were aware of and you'd adopt or modify one of them to fit your needs (Figure 13).
You may for instance think of a portcullis type barrier, where the barrier would be suspended on a gantry above the river and would drop vertically down into the water, or you'd think of a road checkpoint type barrier, where the barrier would hinge down from one side. A gate type barrier, similar to those used in canal locks might be another option, where the barrier would swing out horizontally from the riverbank.
The chances are that you probably wouldn't think of the design that was conceived of by the barrier's designer, Charles Draper. He used none of the previously mentioned tried and tested concepts. He devised a barrier that lay flat on the riverbed and that rose up when it was in use. You may now be imagining something along the lines of a flat, door-like barrier that's hinged along one edge, with the hinged edge remaining on the riverbed while the other edge swings upwards like a drawbridge, not unlike Figure 14.
You'd be wrong. The design is much more innovative than that. You can see it on the next page, in Figure 15.
To understand how the barrier works, imagine a gigantic, long metal drum lying on its side (Figure 16) and mounted between two piers so that it can revolve. Then imagine that most of the drum is cut away, apart from the ends, so that there's only a thin slither of about a quarter of the circumference left. That remaining sector is the barrier.
Normally this sector lies flat on the riverbed, but when it's needed the drum (or rather what's left of the drum) is rotated so that the barrier rises upwards, slicing through the water with minimal resistance.
How was it that Draper came up with such an ingenious idea? I actually worked on the development stage of the barrier, in a very junior capacity, and this is the story that I heard in the office. He thought of the idea while he was at home one day doing a few jobs in the garden. He looked at the outside tap, and the concept came to him in a flash. He knew that some types of tap worked on the principle of blocking the flow by rotating a cut-away cylinder, and he realised instantly that this technique could be used for the barrier..
The barrier's design is known as a rising sector gate. It's interesting is ponder whether or not Draper would have devised such a mechanism if he hadn't by chance looked at that tap. If he hadn't done so would he have created a design using one of the more obvious methods such as the lock gate method or the dropping portcullis method? It's probably significant that Draper was not technically speaking a professional engineer, which may have helped him to steer clear of conventional solutions to his design problems. He was certainly a lateral thinker.
The Thames Barrier is a good example of how we formulate concepts based on examples that are presented to us in the world around us. Here's another water-based concept that was supposedly conceived in a similar manner, and that will re-emerge later in this book under different circumstances: Archimedes' famous principle that when an object is immersed in liquid the object is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid that's being displaced by the object (meaning that if the upward force that's buoying up the object is greater than the downward weight of the object, the object floats).
Legend has it that Archimedes conceived of this principle after he got into a bath of water and noticed that the level of the water rose as he got in. He was thus presented with the evidence that when an object is put into water the water is displaced. One has to ask: how would Archimedes have got on if the ancient Greeks had been in the habit of taking showers rather than baths? In fact, do eureka moments ever occur in showers? This dynamic by which experiences in the real world give rise to concepts in people's heads brings me to a social trend that is causing me some anxiety at the moment. I'm extremely worried that in future such avenues towards inventiveness will be in short supply, due to the way that people now experience the world more and more through the screens of their computers and televisions. As a result of our increasing tendency to gain experiences through electronic media our stock of real life experiences is becoming worryingly impoverished, giving us depleted mental libraries of concepts to call on when the need to be inventive arises. The stimuli that are supplied through electronic media are fantastic in their own way of course, but you can only get out of such media what someone else has already thought to put into it.
The Thames Barrier design probably wouldn't have been conceived had Charles Draper been staring at a computer screen rather than at a tap.
Similarly, if computer generated virtual worlds (such as Second Life) had been available in ancient Greece, and Archimedes had been having a virtual bath in a computer simulation rather than a real bath (because he was so immersed in his Second Life that he neglected bodily hygiene in his real one), it's quite possible that the water level in the virtual bath wouldn't have risen, because the programmer of the simulation may have neglected to add code to incorporate it, and thus Archimedes' principle would have remained undiscovered. On top of this, the fact that Archimedes wouldn't even have experienced the feeling of lightness that one gets on entering a bath, which is another clue to the buoyancy principle, wouldn't have helped either.
So there you have it.
One of the ways that people solve practical, material problems such as how to construct a shelter or a writing instrument is by exploiting any potential that's inherent in the materials that are to hand (such as wood or stone for shelters, or ash, mud, blood, sticks or bones for writing instruments). The materials provide prompts as to their potential usefulness, and they are then either accepted or ignored.
It's not only the materials have to present themselves - the concepts and ideas have to present themselves too. They do this by having some link to experience (the tap that prompted the concept for the Thames Barrier; the bath water for Archimedes' principle). Concepts and ideas don't come out of thin air. We are incapable of thinking of things that are completely alien to our interactions with the world, as we simply don't have the conceptual models with which to comprehend them. This has implications beyond the developing of ideas that are of practical use, such as the design of shelters or of barriers across rivers. It has implications for our desire to understand the deeper workings of the universe, as it means that we are incapable of formulating concepts that function in ways other than those that we come across in our day-to-day lives.
However, as we progress, courtesy of the snowball effect mentioned earlier, we find that we have new day-to-day experiences that we can call upon with which to model our view of the world.
For instance, nowadays it's conventional to think of the brain as working by using electrical impulses, and of being some kind of organic computer. In earlier centuries electricity was completely unknown (apart from static electricity), and computers were inconceivable, so such a theory would have been impossible to contemplate. It would have been impossible, for example, for Thomas Willis (1621 - 1675), an Oxford physician, to devise such a theory. For his time, however, Willis developed very advanced ideas about the brain, even coining the term neurology. Being a citizen of the seventeenth century he thought of the brain as a form of alembic - a type of device composed of bottles and tubes that alchemists used for the distillation of substances. To him, the brain's activity was the result of "spirits" carrying messages through the brain's substance. He devised the theory that people of low intelligence (especially peasants) were mentally slow because their spirit messengers had a difficult time travelling through their brains due to the fact that the substance of their brains was especially thick or dense. Notice those adjectives. Thick and dense. Terms that are still in use today as derogatory descriptions of people of below average intelligence.
Willis's views of the brain were ahead of his time, but were obviously firmly rooted in the attitudes of the era.
We have a tendency to scoff at some assumptions from bygone days - especially, and ironically, the ideas of people such as Willis who actually made an effort to think about things in original ways (I wonder what people in 400 years' time will think of the attitudes of our own age). At the same time that we deride some assumptions from times gone by we positively take on board other beliefs from the past - ones that happen to chime with our contemporary preoccupations. These ideas we elevate to the ranks of "ancient wisdom".
