Page xi
“All things without …” The lines by Sir John Davies come from his poem Nosce Teipsum; I have taken the liberty of modernizing his spelling and punctuation.
“Living matter and clarity are opposites.” Max Born, The Born-Einstein Letters (New York: Walker, 1971).
Page 3
“The mind does not understand its own reason for being.” In Suzi Gablik, “A Conversation with Rene Magritte,” Studio International, vol. 173, no. 887 (March 1967), in Rene Magritte, Secret Affinities (Houston: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1976),.
“A picture without a frame is not a picture.” In Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), galley proof.
Page 7
“The world is a fantasy …” Dennis Sciama, interview with TF, Padua, Italy, July 1983.
The first mention of the word “scientist” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary was by the philosopher and mathematician William Whewell, who wrote in 1840, “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist.”
Page 9
“The scientist asks not what are the currently most important questions …” Ludwig Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, ed. Brian McGuinness (Boston: D. Reidel, 1974).
Page 10
“But all the more splendid …” Ludwig Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, ed. Brian McGuinness (Boston: D. Reidel, 1974)
Page 12
Here is a solution to the nine-dots puzzle:
Page 12
“… the infinite universe.” We do not yet know whether the geometry of the universe is open, in which case the universe is spatially infinite, or closed, in which case it is finite. But in either case the observable universe is infinite in the sense that it contains an inexhaustible amount of information.
Page 15
“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature …” In John D. Barrow and Frank R. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), galley proof.
“When I look at my work I think I’m in the heart of mystery …” In Rene Magritte, Secret Affinities (Houston: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1976).
“The feeling we experience …” In Rene Magritte, Secret Affinities (Houston: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1976).
“The vision of the universe that is so vivid in our minds …” John Archibald Wheeler, “Law Without Law,” in John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek, eds., Quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), unpaginated manuscript.
Page 17
I’ve borrowed the title of this chapter from that of a short story by John Cheever. See his The Enormous Radio, and Other Stories (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1953).
“Maybe we’re here only to say …” Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Ninth Elegy, trans. A. Poulin, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
“Flout ’em and scout ’em …” William Shakespeare, The Tempest, III, ii, 118.
Page 19
“It would be strange …” In F.M. Cornford, “Innumerable Worlds in Presocratic Philosophy,” The Classical Quarterly (January 1934).
“Upon one tree there are many fruits …” Joseph Need-ham, trans., in SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Washington: NASA NP-114, 1990).
Page 21
“… conclusive evidence of these crafty critters can be found at checkout counters from coast to coast.” Rep. Silvio Conte, Congressional Record, June 23, 1990, H4356.
Page 22
“… a signature of civilization.” One of the problems confronting any SETI project is that we don’t know at what radio frequency an alien civilization might choose to transmit. And even if we did know, the received frequency would be altered (“Doppler shifted”) by the drift of the sun and the alien’s home star through space, and by the velocities of the planets in their orbits around those stars. So the preferred approach is to listen to many frequencies simultaneously, relying on computers to sound the alarm if they spot a signal.
Page 22
“… beaming greetings our way.” Suppose, for the sake of argument, that fully ten thousand beacons were sending radio signals that we could detect, and we managed to tune our receivers to the correct frequency to receive them. If there are one hundred billion (1011) stars in our galaxy, then the odds that any given star will be the site of one of the ten thousand transmitting worlds is 1011 divided by 10,000, or one in ten million. We would have to search half this number, or five million, stars to have a 50/50 chance of acquiring the signal. Even if we used a superlatively efficient radio telescope—one that could examine a star every hour, twenty-four hours a day—it would take about sixty years to observe five million stars. An all-sky search reduces the search time dramatically, but at the cost of lower-sensitivity. Since we don’t know how powerful a signal might be, the best strategy is probably the one being adopted by NASA—to run all-sky and star-by-star searches simultaneously.
Page 24
“The one thing that has consistently improved survival value has been intelligence….” In Timothy Ferris, “An End to Cosmic Loneliness,” The New York Times Magazine, October 23, 1977.
Page 24
“The adaptive value of intelligence …” Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii, Intelligent Life in the Universe (New York: Dell, 1966).
“… our neuroanatomy almost certainly has been duplicated nowhere else in the universe.” Neither would we expect our gross anatomy to be duplicated elsewhere. As the American naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote in 1937, “Life, even cellular life, may exist out yonder in the dark. But high or low in nature, it will not wear the shape of man. That shape is the evolutionary product of a strange, long wandering through the attics of the forest roof, and so great are the chances of failure, that nothing precisely and identically human is likely ever to come that way again.” Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York: Random House, 1937), quoted in Nicholas Rescher, “Extraterrestrial Science,” in Edward Regis, ed. Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Page 26
“… the adventurer William Strachey.” Strachey’s account is reproduced in Louis B. Wright, ed., A Voyage to Virginia in 1609: Two Narratives, Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Jourdain’s “Discovery of the Bermudas” …, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964).
Page 27
“… When thou camest first / Thou did strok’st me …” William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I, ii, 333ff.
Page 28
“The vault of heaven …” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library).
Page 29
“The probability of success is difficult to estimate …” Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” Nature (September 19, 1959).
Page 31
“I have loved my fellow men …” Quoted in Lawrence LeShan and Jerry Margenau, Einstein’s Space and Van Gogh’s Sky (New York: Macmillan, 1982).
“Heaven and earth shall pass away …” Bible, King James translation, Matthew 24:35.
Page 35
“… to establish an interstellar network.” I originally proposed the feasibility of interstellar networks in an article, “The Universe as an Ocean of Thought,” published in Harpers magazine in July 1975.
Page 36
“Much has been written …” For a discussion of self-replicating probes as an argument against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, see John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press, 1986), chapter 9. Barrow and Tipler estimate the cost of launching the first slow-speed probe as of order only a few tens of billions of dollars; all the subsequent probes are free, in that they are replicated by the original probe and its descendants without cost to the originating society.
Page 36
“The original probe would be small….” Interestingly, while the probe’s antenna, propulsion engine, meteor shield, etc., might have to be relatively large—we don’t really know much about the technology of interstellar spacecraft—its high-capacity memory banks evidently could be tiny. A study of the theoretical limits of memory storage conducted by Richard Feynman indicates that all the information in all Earth’s libraries could be stored in a sphere smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
Page 40
“… a computer ‘as intelligent’ as a human …” For a searching if rather exotic argument against the proposition that machines can think like people, see Roger Penrose, The Emperors New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
“… memory plus perception is the basis of intelligence …” For discussions of the vital role played by memory in human intelligence see, e.g., a paper by the Italian psychoanalyst Eugenio Gaddini, “Notes on the Mind-Body Question,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 68(3), (1987), in which he argues that memory plays “a crucial role in the passage from physiological to mental functioning.” See also Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1989), and George Johnson, In the Palaces of Memory (New York: Knopf, 1991).
Page 44
“This is as strange a maze …” William Shakespeare, The Tempest, V, i, 242ff.
“A great while ago the world begun …” William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, V, i, 393ff.
Page 45
“We may begin to see reality differently …” Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).
Page 51
“… Simon’s shoe repair shop.” VR may offer a way of ameliorating the data glut that currently afflicts many fields of science. Evidence of the ozone hole over Antarctica, for instance, languished unexamined in data tapes for years before experts got round to reducing the data that revealed it; had the tapes been made available in the form of VR simulations of the earth, even a child could have noticed the ozone hole. Indeed, this is one of the exciting educational prospects for VR; high school science students searching through depictions of recent data received from space and downloaded by satellite to their school computers might have a genuine chance of making important discoveries before the professional scientists did.
Page 59
“I am the dog …” William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, II, iii, 20ff.
“Dog? To be dog?” Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog (New York: Knopf, 1988).
Page 60
“Dogs are very loyal.” In Reinhold Bergler, Man and Dog: The Psychology of a Relationship, trans. Brian Rasmussen and Dana Loewy (Boston: Blackwell, 1988).
“… dogs alone have elected subservience to man.” I realize that this may sound a bit harsh, given that the early stages of their domestication must have involved beatings and other exertions of force against wild dogs. Also involved, however, was a degree of self-selection: The wild dogs that were willing to venture into human habitats, e.g., to beg for food, were the ones most often captured and domesticated. Incidentally, all varieties of Canis familiaris hunt in packs, and their devotion to a human master is thought to derive from their innate reliance on a pack leader.
“He leapt on them and killed them both …” Muhammad ibn Khalaf Ibn al-Marzuban, The Book of the Superiority of Dogs Over Many of Those Who Wear Clothes, translated and edited by G.R. Smith and M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Warminster, England: Aris and Phillips, 1978).
Page 61
“I am fine dog.” Rudyard Kipling, “Thy Servant a Dog,” in his Collected Dog Stories (London: Macmillan, 1934).
Page 62
“The person who has cancer …” In Richard Berendzen, ed., Life Beyond Earth & the Mind of Man (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1973).
“We might hear from near-immortals …” Philip Morrison, ed., SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Mountain View, California: NASA Ames Research Center, 1976).
“… a useful and character-building experience …” In Richard Berendzen, ed., Life Beyond Earth & the Mind of Man (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1973).
Page 65
“How do dogs feel about your God, Krister?” In Richard Berendzen, ed., Life Beyond Earth & the Mind of Man (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1973).
“You might even have to reorganize your behavior to dogs …” In Richard Berendzen, ed., Life Beyond Earth & the Mind of Man (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1973).
Page 71
“As long as the brain is a mystery …” In Victor Cohn, “Charting ‘the Soul’s Frail Dwelling-House,’” The Washington Post, September 5, 1982, Final Edition.
“One of the most misleading techniques …” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
Page 72
“The strong subjective sense …” Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Social Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
Page 73
“The mother of invention …” In Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi, The Three-Pound Universe (New York: Dell, 1986).
Page 74
“… experiments … conducted by Benjamin Libet …” Earlier research in areas related to Libet’s was carried out by Wilder Penfield, by Sir John Eccles, and by Robert Porter and Corbie Brinkman. Also relevant was the work of Nils Lassen and Per Roland in Copenhagen.
Page 75
“Their neurons were firing a third of a second before they were even conscious of the desire to act …” In Tom Siegfried, “How Free Is Free Will?” The Miami Herald, March 5, 1989.
Page 78
“Going to get a Coke.” Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Social Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
“The patient always gives some more or less adequate reason for doing what he does.” John R. Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science (London: British Broadcasting Corp., 1984).
Page 79
“I want to learn about French food …” Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Social Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
Page 80
“Language is merely the press agent …” In Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi, The Three-Pound Universe (New York: Dell, 1986).
Page 83
“All things are one.” In G.S. Kirk, Heraclitus the Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge University Press, 1962).
“Nature tools along …” Allan Sandage, telephone conversation with TF, January 1990.
Page 85
“I experienced a rocking sensation …” Gopi Krishna, Kundalini (London: Robinson & Watkins, 1971).
“Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh …” Bible, King James translation, Exodus 3:11.
Page 86
“I have felt / A presence …” William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, Seven Volumes in Three (Boston: Hurd & Houghton, 1877), vol. II, 198:189; quoted in Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 1969).
“The everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition …” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library).
Page 87-88
“There was a sound like a nerve thread snapping …” Gopi Krishna, Kundalini (London: Robinson & Watkins, 1971).
Page 88
“Conviction … ineffability … unity.” I am drawing here primarily on studies by the American philosopher William James, the English physician and author Richard Maurice Bucke, the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki, and the American professor of philosophy W.T. Stace.
Page 88-89
“Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated is false …” Reginald Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics (Tokyo: Hokusiedo, 1964), vol. 2.
Page 89
“The life of this world is but a play and a sport.” The Koran, Part II, trans. E.H. Palmer; in Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness (New York: Button, 1969).
“The five colors blind the eye …” Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, trans. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English (New York: Knopf, 1974) Chapter 12.
“This life’s five windows …” In Lawrence LeShan and Jerry Margenau, Einstein’s Space and Van Gogh’s Sky (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1982).
“It can neither be spoken nor written about …” In The Essential Plotinus, trans. Elmer O’Brien (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1984).
“The vision baffles telling …” In W.T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1960).
“It is impossible to describe …” Gopi Krishna, Kundalini (London: Robinson & Watkins, 1971),.
Page 89
“… The name that can be named …” Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, Chapter 1, TF retranslation.
Page 90
“I should not have left a line to survive me …” Plotinus to Flaccus, in Robert Alfred Vaughan, Hours With the Mystics, sixth edition (New York: Scribner’s, 1893), vol. 1.
“The more we say, the more we wish we hadn’t …” Reginald Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1970), vol. 3.
Page 91
“MADAM, WISE MEN NEVER TELL.” In Frederick Albert Lang, The History of Materialism (London: Kegan Paul, 1925).
“Absolute knowledge …” Plotinus to Flaccus, in Robert Alfred Vaughan, Hours With the Mystics, sixth edition (New York: Scribner’s, 1893), vol. 1 Plotinus, Enneads, VI, 9, in Elmer O’Brien, ed. and trans., The Essential Plotinus (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1984).
“In mystic states we become one with the Absolute …” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1936).
“Everything is made of one hidden stuff …” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1990).
Page 91
“The One begets all things.” In Elmer O’Brien, ed. and trans., The Essential Plotinus (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1984).
“The Tao begot one …” Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, trans. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English (New York: Knopf, 1974), chapter 42.
“He showed me a little thing …” In R.H. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics (Tokyo: Hokusiedo, 1964), vol. 2 for a more literal translation see Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Clifton Wolters (London: Penguin, 1966).
Page 92
“In a grain of dust are all the scrolls …” In Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Enlightenment: Origins and Meaning (New York: Weatherhill, 1979).
“There are things that are so serious you can only joke about them.” In Ruth Moore, Niels Bohr (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985).
“What is the reflector and what the reflected?” Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Harper, 1974).
“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical …” Albert Einstein, The World as I See It (New York: Philosophical Library, 1934); in Philipp Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times (New York: Knopf, 1970).
Page 93
“God of Abraham, God of Isaac …” In Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 1961).
“… grandeur of the human soul.” In Francis X.J. Coleman, Neither Angel Nor Beast: The Life and Work of Blaise Pascal (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
Page 94
“The thrice-great Hermes.” Copernicus, On the Revolutions, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
“A vital agent diffused through everything …” In Richard S. Westfall, Never At Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Page 96
“Satori may be defined …” D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series (New York: Grove Press, 1978).
Page 100
“… there are many sorts of intelligence.” For an analysis of the multiple-intelligence view of the brain, see Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
Page 101
“Everything looked easy.” Robert Oates, Jr., “Mind Over Matter,” Don Heinrich’s Pro Preview (Seattle, Washington: Preview Publishing, 1990).
Page 104
“I’m going to take a nice nap.” In Mark Heisler, “Comfy Joe Could Have Won This From Easy Chair,” Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1990, part C.
“Football’s Fred Astaire.” In The New York Times, January 22, 1990.
Page 104-5
“I seestepthrow.” In Irvin Muchnick, “Joe Montana: The State of the Art,” The New York Times Magazine, December 17, 1989.
Page 105
“It might screw up the whole process.” In Joe Montana and Bob Raissman, Audibles: My Life in Football (New York: Morrow, 1986).
Page 106
“It’s like a movie running through my mind.” In Joe Montana and Bob Raissman, Audibles: My Life in Football (New York: Morrow, 1986).
“You’ve got to mentally dominate the game …” Harry Edwards, interview with TF, Berkeley, February 26, 1990.
Page 107
“For a quarterback the game is at least seventy per cent mental.” Joe Montana and Bob Raissman, Audibles: My Life in Football (New York: Morrow, 1986).
Page 108
“… cortex grows in size.” For a review of the surprising finding that cortical maps change in response to behavior rather than being fixed from birth, see J.T. Wall, “Variable Organization in Cortical Maps …” Trends in Neurosciences, vol. 11 (1988).
Page 110
“The supposed specialization of the left brain for language …” William H. Calvin, “Bootstrapping Thought; Is Consciousness a Darwinian Sidestep,” Reality Club lecture, Whole Earth Review (June 22, 1987).
Page 111
“If I can make a mechanical model I can understand it …” In P.N. Johnson-Laird, “The Ghost-Hunters,” Times Literary Supplement, December 14, 1984.
“The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.” In Richard S. Westfall, Never At Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Page 112
“Nothing is ‘mere.’” Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures of Physics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1963), vol. 1.
Page 113
“What computers can’t do very well is to act.” For more on robot shortcomings, see Greg Freiherr, “Invasion of the Spacebots,” Air & Space (February/March 1990).
“… the intellectual acme of human thought.” Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Page 114
“‘How can the shot be loosed if “I” do not do it?’” E. Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (London: Routledge, 1953).
Page 115
“He recently put together a tape recorder …” In R.M. Restak, “Islands of Genius,” Science 82 (May, 1982).
Page 117
“Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma.” In Edmund Bergler, Laughter and the Sense of Humor (New York: Intercontinental, 1956).
“Comedy is a serious business.” In Tom Dardis, Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down (New York: Limelight Editions, 1979).
Page 118
“Every laugh is a paradox.” Heartfelt laughter is essentially involuntary, though we can to some degree control it, as we can other involuntary spasms such as coughing. The English physician and humorist Jonathan Miller notes that when a stroke victim who has lost control of the muscles on one side of his face is asked to grin, “they respond by grinning on just one side.” But when the same patient encounters something amusing, he breaks into a grin that animates both sides of the face. See John Durant and Jonathan Miller, eds., Laughing Matters: A Serious Look at Humor (London: Longman, 1988).
“Laughter has no greater foe than emotion.” In Wylie Sypher, ed., Comedy: George Meredith, “An Essay on Comedy,” and Henri Bergson, “Laughter” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 1956).
“The human child lacks all feeling for the comic.’” In Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937).
Page 119
“… Norman Cousins engineered his recovery …” For an account of his recovery see Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (New York: Bantam, 1981).
“A fool lifteth up his voice with laughter …” Bible, King James translation, Ecclesiastes xxi, 20. In I Corinthians 3:18, however, we find the assertion that “if any man [thinks he is] wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may [really] be wise.”
“Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob …” Lord Chesterfield, letter to his son, October 19, 1748.
“… Cervantes …” “I have heard that a great poet of antiquity once said that it was a difficult thing not to write satire,” says Cipión in Miguel de Cervantes’ “The Dialogue of the Dogs,” from his Six Exemplary Novels, trans. Harriet de Onís (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s, 1961).
Page 122
“Spasmodic contractions …” Norman N. Holland, Laughing: A Psychology of Humor (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982).
“Apt to burst into loud laughter …” In Edmund Bergler, Laughter and the Sense of Humor (New York: Intercontinental, 1956).
Page 123
“Life is too serious …” In Tom Dardis, Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down (New York: Limelight Editions, 1979).
Page 123
“He is aware of death at every moment …” In Robert Payne, The Great God Pan: A Biography of the Tramp Played by Charles Chaplin (New York: Hermitage House, 1952).
Page 125
“See it? I directed it.” The Jack Benny Show, written by Sam Perrin, George Balzer, Al Gordon, and Hal Goldman, untitled episode broadcast December 1, 1957, UCLA Research Library Special Collections 134, box 46, folio 3, script.
“I’m thinking it over!” In Irving A. Fein, Jack Benny: An Intimate Biography (New York: Putnam’s, 1976).
“… paradox, the ultimate incongruity.” A young boy said to his father: “Father, I want to marry granny.” His father laughed at him and said, “You can’t marry my mother.” The boy replied, “Why not? You married mine.” Paradoxes of this sort are found in all languages, even mathematics.
Page 127
Chaplin “had a way of kicking people …” In Robert Payne, The Great God Pan: A Biography of the Tramp Played by Charles Chaplin (New York: Hermitage House, 1952).
Page 128
“I could not even whimper.” In Tom Dardis, Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down (New York: Limelight Editions, 1979).
Page 128
“Jests which slap the face are not good jests.” In Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937).
“Laughter is an affection …” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Bernard in Ralph Piddington, The Psychology of Laughter (New York: Gamut Press, 1963).
Page 129
“The cause of laughter …” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, 1896), vol. I.
Page 130
“The more a man is capable of entire seriousness …” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, 1896), vol. I.
“In humor the little is made great and the great little …” In Norman N. Holland, Laughing: A Psychology of Humor (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982).
“The Great Matter … is like the funeral of one’s parents …” In R.H. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1970), vol. 3.
Page 132
“At this Tokusan was enlightened.” In R.H. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1974), vol. 4.
Page 133
“The gigantic adult menaces the child …” The English essayist William Hazlitt pointed out, years ago, that an infant will laugh if an adult first presents him with a threat and then dissipates it: “If we hold a mask before our face, and approach a child with this disguise on, it will at first, from the oddity and incongruity of the appearance, be inclined to laugh; if we go nearer it, steadily, and without saying a word, it will begin to be alarmed, and half inclined to cry; if we suddenly take off the mask, it will recover from its fears, and burst out a-laughing; but if, instead of presenting the old well-known countenance, we have concealed a satyr’s head or some frightful caricature behind the first mask, the suddenness of the change will not in this case be a source of merriment to it, but will convert its surprise into an agony of consternation, and will make it scream for help, even though it may be convinced that the whole is a trick at bottom.” Rene Spitz, who beginning in the 1940s studied children’s grins and laughter in response to masks, found that infants like to see a smile, but respond even more happily when confronted “by extreme widening of the mouth, somewhat after the manner of a savage animal baring its fangs.” See William Hazlitt, “On Wit and Humour,” in Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Selected Essays of William Hazlitt (New York: Random House, 1934) also Edmund Bergler, Laughter and the Sense of Humor (New York: Intercontinental, 1956).
Page 135
“It is very beautiful over there …” In Ronald Siegel, “The Psychology of Life After Death,” American Psychologist, 35:10 (October 1980).
“This is eternal bliss …” Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe (New York: Pantheon, 1961) Journal of Thanatology, 1:1 (January-February 1971).
“… being in an ecstatic state …” In Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Page 135-36
“A sense of profound peace …” In Sharon L. Bass, “You Never Recover Your Original Self,” The New York Times, August 28, 1988, Late City Final Edition.
Page 136
“Why did you bring me back?” In Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death (New York: Avon, 1977), quoted in Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
“… a poor Essex farmer …” Thurkill’s journey is described in Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, see also Nicholas Lehmann in The Atlantic, July 1987.
Page 136
“… intense feelings of joy, love, and peace.” Raymond A. Moody, Life After Life (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 1976).
Page 137
“How rarely the act of dying appears to be painful …” William Osier, Can. Med. Surg. J., 16:511, 1888; in Russell Noyes, Jr., “The Art of Dying,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 14, No. 3 (Spring 1971).
Page 138
“There was no anxiety …” Albert Heim, “Remarks on Fatal Falls,” 1892, translated in Russell Noyes and Roy Kletti, “The Experience of Dying From Falls,” Omega, vol. 3 (1972).
Page 139
“We are no closer …” Raymond A. Moody, The Light Beyond (New York: Bantam, 1989).
Page 141
“… there is such a thing as a will to live …” Interview on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, April 11, 1990.
Page 142
“Among its ministers …” In John Dart, “After ‘Near-Death,’ Atheist Yields Slightly on Afterlife,” Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1988, Home Edition, part 2.
“In cold terror I fell into the abyss …” Heinz Pagels, The Cosmic Code (New York: Bantam, 1982).
Page 143
“… I will choose the death by which I leave life …” In Russell Noyes, Jr., “The Art of Dying,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (Spring, 1971).
“My coffin will be Heaven and Earth …” Quoted in R.H. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1964), vol. 2.
“I sang to the beauty of the stars …” Heinz Pagels, The Cosmic Code (New York: Bantam, 1982).
“Nothing to fear from God …” In Giorgio Santillana, The Origins of Scientific Thought (New York: New American Library, 1970).
Page 144
“… you would need some mechanism that made dying and death acceptable.” Lewis Thomas, interview with TF, New York City, October 20, 1979.
“I could not think of a better way to manage …” Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (New York: Viking, 1979).
Page 145
“… selected on aesthetic grounds …” For more on the possibility of aesthetic selection, see Timothy Ferris, Space-Shots (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), introduction.
Page 149
“Name now our names …” Dennis Tedlock, trans. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
“Thunderbolt steers all things.” In G. S. Kirk, Heraclitus the Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).
Page 150
“Mark how it mounts, to Man’s imperial race …” Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle I, VII.
“… unforeseeable, large-scale changes …” For a discussion of possible mechanisms by which the ice ages may have driven homo evolution toward higher intelligence, see William H. Calvin, The Ascent of Mind (New York: Bantam, 1991).
Page 151
“No cataclysm has desolated the whole world …” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, sixth edition, 1872 (New York: Modern Library, 1936).
Page 152
“Internalization of a tragic metaphor …” Robert Rein-hold, “California Struggles With The Other Side of Its Dream,” The New York Times, Sunday, Oct. 22, 1989, 4:1.
Page 153
“A comet nucleus six miles in diameter …” The impact of a ten-kilometer diameter object at a velocity of twenty kilometers per second would release approximately seventy million megatons, which is a thousand times the total power of Soviet and American nuclear weapons combined.
Page 158
“Evidence continued to mount …” Estimates vary widely as to just how many mass dieouts have occurred, ranging from just five up to two hundred thousand. The fossil record is difficult to read—one is, after all, trying to extract hard data from dirt—and even were the data perfectly reliable, their statistical interpretation would continue to present problems. Amplitude is problematical: All may agree that a dieout has occurred when ninety percent of species perish, but it is more perplexing to determine whether a rise of, say, five percent in the extinction rate constitutes a dieout. Troublesome, too, is the question of periodicity; where some see regular cycles, others see random intervals. For the sake of clarity and coherency I am presenting a case for the new catastrophism that minimizes these uncertainties, on the assumption that the theory will in the long run hold up. This is to some degree a judgment call on my part, and a fully objective account would be rather less assured.
Page 159
Owing to imperfections in the fossil record, the demise of the dinosaurs might have taken less than the millions of years usually cited. The paleontologist J. John Sepkoski asserts that “the data (as I and some others read them) are equally consistent with one bad weekend.” Private correspondence, March 11, 1991.
“… tugs at the cloud and perturbs their orbits.” This comet shower scenario relies heavily on computer simulations and other studies by Piet Hut of Princeton, Eugene M. Shoemaker of the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, and Paul R. Weissman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. See, e.g., Alvarez Hut, et al., “Comet Showers as a Cause of Mass Extinctions,” Nature, 329:6135 (10 Sept. 1987). Also P.R. Weissman, in R.L. Duncombe, ed., Dynamics of the Solar System (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979).
Page 162
“The implications of periodicity are profound …” David M. Raup and J. John Sepkoski, Jr., “Periodicity of Extinctions in the Geologic Past,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, vol. 81.
“I got a crazy paper from Raup and Sepkoski …” Richard Muller, Nemesis: The Death Star (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson), 1988.
“Suppose we found a way to make an asteroid hit the earth every 26 million years …” Richard Muller, Nemesis: The Death Star (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson), 1988.
Page 164
“… ‘dark matter’ might take the form of brown dwarfs …” Brown dwarfs are out of fashion in astronomical circles at this writing, owing to studies that seem to rule out their presence in binary star systems, to which the majority of known stars belong. But in my opinion, we still know too little about how stars form to abandon the hypothesis that there may indeed be lots of small, dim ones around.
Page 165
“Impact theory is still the subject of active controversy …” For a review of the extinction debate see Stephen K. Donovan, ed., Mass Extinctions: Processes and Evidence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
“The prospect of a celestial mechanism …” Comets may also have influenced terrestrial affairs without having struck the earth, simply by hanging around. In one recent paper, two scientists propose that amino acids found above and below the KT layer could have come from comet dust spewed into the inner solar system by a giant comet trapped in an orbit near Earth’s. See David Grinspoon and Kevin Zahnle, “Comet Dust as a Source of Amino Acids at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary,” Nature, vol. 348 (November 8, 1990).
Page 166
“… a small marine fish from the Gulf of California …” The saga of bairdiella in the Salton Sea is discussed in Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
Page 168
“Had it not been for the large comet …” Richard A. Muller, “An Adventure in Science,” The New York Times Magazine, March 24, 1985.
Page 171
“Dear Posterity …” In Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Albert Einstein, The Human Side: New Glimpses From His Archives (Princeton University Press, 1979).
“Some races wax and others wane …” Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford University Press, 1947, 1972).
Page 175
“See my charred hair.” Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book II, trans. Horace Gregory (New York: Viking, 1958).
Page 176
“We have the power to inaugurate events totally beyond our control.” Kosta Tsipis, Arsenal: Understanding Weapons in the Nuclear Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).
Page 177
“Then Phaëthon / Numbed, chilled, and broken, dropped the reins.” Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book II, trans. Horace Gregory (New York: Viking, 1958).
Page 178
“Evolution has made countless mistakes …” In Arne Tiselius and Sam Nilsson, eds., The Place of Value in a World of Fact (New York: Wiley, 1970).
Page 180
“I don’t know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” In Charles Krauthammer, “The End of the World,” The New Republic (March 28, 1983).
“Not a matter of opinion, but scientific certainty …” Charles Krauthammer, “The End of the World,” The New Republic (March 28, 1983).
“… the biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted …” See Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968).
Page 181
“It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction …” In M. Taub, Evolution of Matter and Energy, unnumbered manuscript page, 1986.
Page 183
“The Manichean heresy …” In David Castronovo, Edmund Wilson (New York: Ungar, 1984).
Page 184
“… we have at least an hypothesis which can be followed up …” In Timothy Ferris, The Red Limit (New York: Morrow, 1983).
Page 185
“Wait and see!” In Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Albert Einstein, The Human Side: New Glimpses From His Archives (Princeton University Press, 1979).
Page 187
“In the vast Library …” Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in his Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964).
“Hell is truth seen too late.” In Norman Myers ed., Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984).
“… a tenth of the Amazon is gone.” The situation in Brazil has improved somewhat since 1988. President Fernando Collor de Mello has signed a decree banning all cutting and exploitation of native vegetation in Brazil’s decimated Atlantic Forest, while legislative and law-enforcement improvements resulted, in 1990, in a twenty-five percent reduction in the amount of Amazon jungle cleared annually for ranching.
Page 188
“A pond in Brazil …” These examples of biological diversity in rain forests are drawn principally from studies by Terry Erwin of the Smithsonian Institution, and Peter Ashton and Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University.
Page 189
“… the folly that our descendants are least likely to forgive us.” In Norman Myers, ed., Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984).
Page 192
“… computers use algorithms.” The word algorithm is a corruption of Al Kworesmi, the name of a ninth-century Arab mathematician whose book on the subject was influential in Renaissance Europe.
Page 195
“Too great even to conceive, let alone duplicate.” Edward O. Wilson, “Threats to Biodiversity,” Scientific American (September 1989).
Page 196
“American consumers spent twelve billion dollars on pharmaceuticals.” N. R. Farnsworth and D. D. Soejarto, “Potential Consequences of Plant Extinction in the United States on the Current and Future Availability of Prescription Drugs,” Economic Botany 39 (3) (1985).
Page 196-97
“A single shaman of the Wayana tribe …” Mark J. Plotkin, “The Healing Forest: The Search for New Jungle Medicines,” The Futurist (January 1990).
Page 197
“The Indians are disappearing.” It is estimated that six to twelve million Indians populated the Amazon when Columbus reached America, and that only two hundred thousand are alive today. See Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cock-burn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon (New York: Harper, 1990).
“Of all the shamans with whom I have lived …” Mark J. Plotkin, “The Healing Forest: The Search for New Jungle Medicines,” The Futurist (January 1990).
Page 199
“A new salient of knowledge is being created …” Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).
Page 201
“The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1988), 1.1.
“The subject matter of research is no longer nature in itself …” In Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
“Mind and universe.” In an important sense the mind is a creation of the universe and the universe is a creation of the mind. I don’t mean that the universe doesn’t exist, but merely that the concept of a “universe”—and all we can ever know about it—must necessarily reside in the mind. This I take to be the position of the more undogmatic among those philosophers who assert that “it’s all in the mind.” Its spirit was exemplified in a 1990 conversation between Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and my friend Alex Shoumatoff. Inquiring about the Buddhist belief that objects are but a projection of mental images, Shoumatoff told the Dalai Lama that the night before he’d awakened in his hotel room and tripped over his suitcase in the dark while searching for the light switch. “You can’t tell me the suitcase was just in my mind,” Shoumatoff said. “I didn’t even know it was there until I tripped on it.” The Dalai Lama chuckled. “But what is a suitcase?” he asked. “You can describe the color, shape, size, weight, and material of the suitcase, but still there is something else. At the quantum mechanical level there is no suitcase, and if you were a subatomic particle you could pass right through the suitcase. If you analyze it, you can find the independent existence of neither the suitcase nor yourself. But that does not mean that they do not exist at all.”
Page 201
“… actively searching for things to see …” J.Z. Young, Programs of the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Page 204
“Uncertainty principle.” As often happens with scientific discoveries, the language used to describe Heisenberg’s finding tends to obscure its significance; “uncertainty” implies a temporary limitation of one’s knowledge, whereas the whole point of Heisenberg’s principle is that we can never extract all the information about a subatomic system. The physicist and historian of science Abraham Pais writes that “it might have been better had the term ‘unknowability relation’ been used.” The physicist Victor Weisskopf opts for “limiting relation.” My own preference is “indeterminacy principle.” But, as Pais points out, “One neither can nor should do anything about that now.” See Abraham Pais, Inward Bound (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Victor Weisskopf, The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist (New York: Basic Books, 1991), chapter 3.
Page 205
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1988).
“The famous ‘dual slit’ experiment …” For a more detailed discussion of the dual slit experiment, see Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures of Physics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1963), vol. III, Chapter 1.
Page 208
“If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understand the first thing about them.” In Ruth Moore, Niels Bohr (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).
Page 210
“Entropy.” The concept of entropy arose from the research of some of the nineteenth century’s greatest scientists, notably Sadi Carnot, James Joule, Lord Kelvin, Rudolf Clausius, and, especially, Ludwig Boltzmann. For a review see P.W. Atkins, The Second Law (New York: Freeman, 1984).
Page 213
“Bits.” The term bit, I am advised, was coined by John Tukey, later of Princeton University, in a September 1, 1947, Bell Laboratories memorandum titled “Sequential Conversion of Continuous Data to Digital Data.”
Page 215
“… human creativity seems to reduce the amount of entropy …” See Leon Brillouin, Scientific Uncertainty, and Information (New York: Academic Press, 1964).
Page 216
“… the brain is a ‘Turing machine’ …” For an analysis see Donald H. Perkel, “Logical Neurons: The Enigmatic Legacy of Warren McCulough,” Trends in Neurosciences (January 1988), also George Johnson, In the Palaces of Memory (New York: Knopf, 1991).
Page 217
“Biological reproduction can be likened to a communications channel …” For an analysis of how biological replication may be viewed this way, see Lila L. Gatlin, Information Theory and the Living System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).
Page 218
“Quantum.” John Wheeler notes that “quantum” is German for “hunk.” Under wartime rationing, each German received his quantum of bread and margarine. Wheeler writes that “one can only adequately convey in English the flavor of Planck’s ‘quantum theory’ by calling it the ‘hunk theory’ of radiation.”
“It from bit …” John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” Proc. 3rd Int Symp. Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Tokyo, 1989.
“No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” John Archibald Wheeler, “Delayed-Choice Experiments and the Bohr-Einstein Dialogue,” London, American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society, papers read at a meeting, June 5, 1980, For a technical discussion of the question of observation in quantum mechanics, see John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek, eds., Quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).
Page 220
“An observer participates in the making of meaning.” John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” Proc. 3rd Int. Symp. Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Tokyo, 1989.
Page 221
“How far foot and ferry have carried meaning-making communication …” John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” Proc. 3rd Int. Symp. Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Tokyo, 1989.