This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.
—Morpheus in the movie The Matrix
Scientists uncover interesting things every day, yet most people rarely hear of them. People tend to prefer fiction, imagination, tales of the supernatural—reality seems plain and boring. The odd thing is that it’s not. As British physicist Bruno Bento put it, “Reality has so many things that most people would associate with sci-fi or even fantasy.”[1] Biologist Richard Dawkins wrote, “If it’s amazement you want, the real world has it all.”[2] You might think they’re exaggerating, but I’m going to do my best to show they’re not.
I’d like to take you on a meandering exploration of the universe and beyond, touching on the many topics I find useful, intriguing, and astonishing. From life, death, your mind, sex, quantum weirdness, everything large and small, and how they interrelate, we’ll examine them from the point of view of the scientists that study them.
In my initial attempts at writing my science book, each chapter ran to the length of six chapters and began sounding like a textbook. That wouldn’t do, so I’ve had to trim it back to the essentials, but I still had to split the manuscript into at least three books—possibly more. I feel a bit like the White Rabbit, looking at my pocket watch and exclaiming, “There’s so little time! I must be off. We have thousands of discoveries to explore and don’t have the time to stop smell the Queen of Heart’s painted roses.”
While that makes for more interesting books, I won’t be able to go into as much detail or explain the evidence behind some of these discoveries and ideas as I would like. Perhaps another time. For now, you can to look into whatever areas interest you yourself using my references, and I highly encourage you do just that. Hopefully this will launch you on your own scientific road trips that take you further down the rabbit hole.
We tend to think of science as a compilation of facts, laws, and observations. That’s true...much of it is. But that’s what is already known. Scientists are working on what isn’t known. They are on the cutting-edge of knowledge. Scientists are explorers of the unknown. And much of what they are discovering is absolutely astounding. Many of their theories are even wilder, yet as far out as these are, there is evidence to support them. I’ve been there and can tell you that it is worthwhile.
As the American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once said, “In the case of science, I think that one of the things that makes it very difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination. It’s very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like.”[3]
I’ll try to make it easier.
We are encircled by curiosities and enigmas, although we’re usually blissfully unaware of them. In fact, we, ourselves, are perhaps the greatest curiosity and enigma of all. But what is most astonishing is that the world is not the way we think it is.
But let us start with reality itself and the vagaries of our senses. Prepare yourself to fall down the rabbit hole and watch for the curious things on the shelves on your way down.
© John Richard Stephens, 2024. |
How do we know what's real?
That might seem an easy question, but let’s think about it a bit. We don’t usually realize it, but everything we know about everything comes to us through our many senses. Albert Einstein stated this when he wrote that “even the concept of the ‘real external world’ of everyday thinking rests exclusively on sense impressions”, adding that even “with the totality of our sense impressions”, our concept of the world “is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind.”[4]
I might take issue with the word “arbitrary”, since as a species our senses have been finely honed by natural selection to enhance our survival, but it is rather arbitrary on an individual level as to how your senses differ from someone else’s.
Still, the main point holds: our sense of the world is something of an illusion. Everything you know is processed by your brain and your brain is encased in darkness inside your protective skull. If you were born without senses, your brain would be a useless blob of gelatinous tissue. You wouldn’t be able to learn anything about the world or even know that the world existed. You probably wouldn’t even be able to think, as there wouldn’t be anything to think about and nothing to compare it to, with no language to express it in.
Think of what Helen Keller’s life was like. Being unable to see or hear limited her exploration of the world to touch, taste, smell, and her internal senses. She eventually understood that objects had color and could make sounds, but she never experienced either.
While the version of the world that we experience is close enough to reality for us to live our lives and get a vehicle to land on a small asteroid, there is a lot that we are missing.
Your senses are your windows to the world. They allow you to experience what’s outside of your skull. The information they gather is reduced to electrochemical neuron pulses that feed into your brain. It is the pulses that your brain convert into everything you perceive.
Or, as V. B. Mountcastle, neurophysiologist and Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University put it, “Each of us believes himself to live directly within the world that surrounds him, to sense objects and events precisely, and to live in real and current time. I assert that these are perceptual illusions. Contrarily, each of us confronts the world from a brain linked to what is ‘out there’ by a few million fragile sensory nerve fibers, our only information channels, our lifelines to reality.[...] Sensation is an abstraction, not a replication of the real world.”[v]
We rely on our senses to give us an accurate representation of the world around us, but science has found they are limited, inaccurate, distorted, and unreliable. This affects how we view and experience reality. It also prompts some scientists who research the senses to suggest that what we experience is a controlled hallucination—one that we each experience differently.
So how do we know whether our view of the world reflects objective reality? This is a tricky question. Physicists and philosophers are still hotly debating what objective reality actually is and whether it still exists when there’s nothing around to perceive it. We’ll take a closer look at this later. First I want to look at our perceptions of reality.
It’s clear that we can’t see all of reality and what we do see has been modified. The question I’m interested in is how much of what we perceive is real. Some researchers, like University of California, Irvine’s cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, are convinced that none of it is. Hoffman presents this conclusion in his book The Case Against Reality. But there are other views, so we need to look at some evidence—especially since, using your own experience as a guide, you’ve probably already jumped to the conclusion that Hoffman’s idea is nonsense.
Fifty years ago almost all scientists would have agreed with that assessment, but virtually all the researchers in the field of perception will now tell you the evidence clearly shows that what we experience is modified, distorted, and manufactured by our brains. What hasn’t yet been resolved is how much of it, if any, reflects reality.
Click here for the next article in this series:
[1] Paul Sutter, “What if the universe had no beginning?”, Live Science, October 10, 2021, https://www.livescience.com/universe-had-no-beginning-time.
[2] Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life, New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
[2] BBC, Fun to Imagine (interview with Richard Feynman), London: BBC, 1983, https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/.
[4] Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality”, Journal of the Franklin Institute, vol. 221, March 1936. Reprinted in Albert Einstein, A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion, (Stephen Hawking, ed.), Philadelphia: Running Press, 2021, pp. 401-02.
[5] Vernon Mountcastle, the Dean’s Lecture at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, October 1974. Quoted in part in Richard Restak, The Brain: The Last Frontier, New York City: Warner Books, 1979, p. 426 and in Eric R. Kandel and James H. Schwartz, eds., Principles of Neural Science, New York: Elsevier/North-Holland, 1981, p. 158.