Part Five: Turtles all the way down

On 28th February 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick made an earth-shattering breakthough.  They had discovered the structure of DNA, the fundamental building template for all known life.  The importance of this cannot be underestimated; first and foremost it gave the best answer yet as to what life is and it also answered the question of how heredity between generations works.

It also paved the way for the human genome sequencing project (completed in 2000), and every single discovery relating to genetics, including cloning, stem cell cultivation, genetic engineering and all manner of other things that get scientists accused of 'playing God', but are completely and utterly awesome.

Whatever your view on the rights or wrongs of genetic manipulation, everyone must accept that the fact that we as a species have learnt to engineer life at this sort of level is a phenomenal achievement, especially when you consider that we're essentially just glorified chimpanzees who evolved to avoid getting eaten on African plains.

Famously, Watson and Crick wandered into the local Eagle pub in Cambridge on the lunchtime of the 28th and said with as much English reserve as is possible, "we have discovered the secret of life".  No doubt the drinkers in the pub asked for some of what they were on, and rightly so.  The reason being that Francis Crick had been regularly using LSD as a mind-expanding tool, and it was whilst under the influence that he made the final mental leap required to accurately model DNA. 



Back again to the idea that reality is created by the observer based on what they expect to see, I believe that this has profound implications for modern science.  There are only a handful of people in the world who are expert enough in modern science to be able to correctly interpret the cutting edge and draw conclusions, so now instead of having six billion minds to convince of the correctness of their reality, the modern physicist for example has only to convince all the other quantum physicists that he is right.  In this case, a good enough argument will change reality.

Before Crick had the fully-realised DNA molecule in concrete terms, it could have been a little bit different this way, or a little bit different that way.  Due to his mind being able, aided by LSD, to fit all the data into something that fitted the already-established facts and arrive at a beautiful conclusion, DNA was discovered as it was created.

This might seem like a huge logical leap, so please think of the multiverse theory.  Every possibility is played out in some parallel universe, and although we experience time in one direction, causality runs both ways.  Something in the future can affect the past.  For example, when the Big Bang theory was being touted as the origin of the universe, Fred Hoyle was championing an alternate, "steady-state" model that stated that the universe had always existed, and that matter spontaneously appeared in the gaps in an expanding universe.  Sound ridiculous?  Only because you've been taught to believe the Big Bang, in fact if Hoyle had won the argument then the Steady State would be as true as the Big Bang is now.  We continually rewrite history and as we do it we change the present.

Please excuse my MSPaint skills, but here's a representation:



So as well as all the possible futures we could end up, there are an infinity of possible histories we could have come *from*, and this is rewritten each time a new discovery is made, each time a new fact is made.

How can the past be changed, and how would we know if it can?  There's a variant on the double slit experiment that shows that the "decision" of light to behave as a probability wave (i.e. as an undefined probability cloud, which in the original experiment is the cause of the interference pattern) or as a particle can be made after the fact. Here's some more information on related experiments.

The actual mechanics of the variant experiment are pretty complex, but in simple terms you can imagine a situation where the experiment is performed and the data from the photon detector that records the path the photons have taken is stored for instance on a computer without being looked at.  The next day you decide to look at the data, and you find that there is no interference pattern and therefore the light has behaved as definite particles.  However, if you decide to delete the data without looking at it, the interference pattern appears, showing that the probability field has not been forced to fuse into one reality or another.

It's hard, scientific evidence that actions in the present can alter what happened in the past.

Pretty incredible stuff, but it doesn't do anything to show that DNA wasn't like that all along.  For that we need to look at something else entirely.

This is a molecular diagram, you've probably seen examples of these before:



It shows how the atoms in the molecular compound attach to each other, and what those atoms are.  It's worth pointing out that the normal way of picturing atoms is pretty inaccurate.  We imagine them as looking like this:



The nucleus sits in the middle made of protons and neutrons, and it's orbited by a number of electrons.  For one, this orbit is not as uniform as the usual picture would have you believe, due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and rather more significantly the scale is way off.  In fact, if the atomic nucleus was a fly sitting on the centre spot of a football pitch, the electrons would be orbiting at a distance roughly equivalent to the outer wall of the stadium.



Just to compare another sort of diagram, this is a basic electrical diagram:



And this is what the actual circuit board that it represents looks like:




You can tell the diagram represents the circuit board, but they don't really look very alike.

Unlike a circuit board, you can't just look at a molecule.  Even a powerful optical microscope has a physical limit caused by the wavelength of light:  you can't physically see something that's smaller than light's wavelength as it doesn't have a chance to reflect off an object that small.

Luckily, and because science is resourceful, atomic force microscopy was invented in 1986.  This uses mind-bending science to scan the object with a tiny probe.  In 2009, the first molecule was successfully imaged using one of these microscopes.

This is the diagrammatic representation of pentacene:



Pentacene is used in photovoltaic applications, but that's not really relevant here.  Bearing in mind what I said above about scientists now creating reality as they observe it because there are so few people qualified enough to say if they are right or wrong, check out this atomic force microscope image of a pentacene molecule:



It's exactly the same as the diagram.  Not just a bit similar, or vaguely alike, but exactly the same.  Scientists had a picture in their heads of what the pentacene molecule should look like, and blow me if that's not exactly what they found.

In Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, he recounts a brilliant anecdote which goes along these lines:

'A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"'

Turtles all the way down.

As science progresses, there are effects not accounted for by the current theories*, so new theories have to be formulated where parameters are tweaked and refined.  At one stage the smallest particles were protons, electrons and neutrons, but as it became clear the description of reality wasn't complete, even smaller particles were discovered/willed into existence, and these new particles became the building blocks of the previously elementary particles. 

The standard model of particle physics says that there is one particle left to find, the Higgs boson.  This particle has been referred to as the "God particle", because it is theorised to be the particle that gives all the others their mass.  Tests at the Tevatron in America and the Large Hadron Collider in Europe have yet to find the Higgs boson, and it's not showing up in the places the theory says it should.

There are other theories competing with the Higgs boson, and I don't personally believe that the Higgs will be found.  Instead some other theory will receive supporting data, and it'll maybe open up a whole new field of exploration.  Whatever it is, it won't be a theory of everything, it can't be because as long as we keep looking, we'll create new things to find.

Remember Baudrillard's hyper-reality,: to paraphrase, the map will always be less complex than the reality, unless it becomes the reality.  We can never perfectly describe reality, because we create it by living it.  To take it to its logical extreme, if we somehow did describe all of reality, we'd then need to describe the act of describing it, and so on ad infinitum.

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*Having had silly online conversations with Intelligent Design proponents (i.e. Creationists) I want to make it clear that a scientific theory is not just a wild guess.  Creationists will say that it is a "theory" that God created the earth in seven days, but this is a misuse of the word in a scientific context.  Scientific theory is (at least in principle) testable, it involves hideously complex mathematics in the case of quantum theory, and it is the current best fit for the available data.


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Coming up in later editions:


How differences in religious belief cause conflict, and why this entire phenomenon is based on a huge misconception

Different methods of achieving the same ends, and why those methods can produce equal results despite different methods




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