In my early twenties I visited a Wunderkammer, a chamber of wonders.

Such a chamber, also referred to in English as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, does what it says on the tin: it is a collection of wondrous curios. Picture the scene. You enter a candlelit room overflowing with oddities stacked from floor to ceiling in no perceivable order, looming over you on all sides. On your right, a human-shaped root sits side by side with the remnants of a creature that might or might not exist. On your left, an elaborately carved wooden clock rests below a tiny ivory ship. You will find crammed in a square metre more objects than you have in your entire home, and each of them is (or purports to be) unique.

When modern science was getting started, between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was common for people of note to keep such a Wunderkammer, which could be as small as a cabinet or big enough to occupy a suite of rooms in a palace, depending on the owner’s wealth and inclinations. Natural ‘wonders’ merged seamlessly with artefacts. A wealthy collector might juxtapose a real, stuffed, brightly coloured bird of paradise with an automaton in the form of a duck that appeared to eat grain, digest it and then defecate it. And those fearsome talons, labelled ‘griffin claws’ – were they perchance the claws of an actual griffin?

The thread connecting the exhibits was that they were all in some way interesting, strange – and new. The Wunderkammer gave visible form to the cutting-edge spirit of science, with its insatiable curiosity about everything beneath and beyond the sky, and its thirst to catalogue, to understand, and to know.

In our enlightened times, that kind of Wunderkammer is no more. Some descendants linger, in the form of commercial museums big and small. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is a chain with branches worldwide; the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and Natural History occupies a basement in Hackney, London.

The one I visited was a travelling Wunderkammer that stayed in Florence for several weeks. As soon as I read in an article that the exhibition included a mummified siren, I knew I had to go. Yes, I was perfectly aware that the siren was fake. Even so, someone had taken the trouble to create a siren.

I was living in Rome back then, a student and young writer with more dreams than skills, exquisitely broke. A round trip to Florence, a ticket to the show: the sad truth was, it was an expensive undertaking. I counted my lire and found very few. After some accounting, I realized that if I dialled my social life down to zero for a while, I could make it. Drinks or sirens? It was a no-brainer.

On a November morning I packed my lunch, got on a train, and travelled all the way to Florence. The journey, although not a long one, felt interminable: it had not been possible to book a ticket over the phone (online bookings lay some way in the future), so I fretted I would find the show sold out for the day and would never get to see it.

After taking one or two wrong turns, thanks to my non-existent sense of direction (smartphones too were yet to come), I managed to locate the little building that hosted the Wunderkammer. I was immensely relieved to discover that the show hadn’t sold out. I bought my ticket and, at last, was admitted into the holy place.

It was not at all what I had expected.

There were all the right exhibits, the ones I had read about. Odd plants, check. Stuffed animals, check. There were shamanic masks and mysterious etchings, and the pièce de résistance, the mummified siren. It was brown, and wrinkly, and looked passably siren-like if you weren’t too strict about mythology (it was half-woman and half-fish, but originally the sirens were supposed to be half-woman and half-bird). It was okay.

Only okay.

I realized with horror that I was getting bored. I dragged out the visit, hoping against hope that something would strike my eye, grab my heart, and squeeze out a tiny drop of wonder. I was eager to be amazed, willing to be bewildered. I took another look at the siren. Maybe I had missed something, and if I tried a little harder, I would be left astounded by…

It just didn’t happen. Finally, I had to give up, admit that I had wasted my money, and trudge back to the station, defeated. I couldn’t even afford to buy a consoling glass of wine.

I have visited other Wunderkammern since then. I enjoyed them all the more for lowering my expectations. They didn’t fill me with wonder, but then again, they weren’t trying to. They aimed to entertain, and to make people smile. They were never going to inspire a real sense of wonder. And nor could they, because even though they are offering us more or less the same selection of items as the Wunderkammern of past centuries, we, the spectators, have changed beyond recognition.

A Wunderkammer was a model of the world; it was, in a sense, the world. Lost in its sweeping collection of marvels, visitors participated at a visceral level in the cultural revolution that was going on. Between shelves and cabinets, they would discover the miracles of the natural world, and understand that there were more things in heaven and earth, way, way more, than in anybody’s philosophy. Yes, griffins could be real, and sirens too, and it was possible to build automata, and to stuff birds of paradise. And if that was feasible, what else might be? The Wunderkammer opened up a world of possibilities, of unanswered questions.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the era of the Scientific Revolution – science was asking a whole lot of new questions no one had ever thought of asking before. It was revealing the world to be a Wunderkammer. Were the stars fixed in their positions, as everybody had believed for centuries without number, or did they perhaps move? Why do apples fall? The questioning of the old certainties was creating a climate of doubt, which found its expression in the Wunderkammern.

That climate is long gone. I told myself that knowing that the siren was a fake wouldn’t make any difference, but of course it did. I knew that in all likelihood sirens do not exist, and I also knew that making a mummified one does not require a huge amount of skill. I knew that a mandrake root looked like a person only because of a perceptual phenomenon called pareidolia, by which we see familiar patterns where none exist. Rather than astonishing me, the accumulation of oddities in that modern-day Florentine Wunderkammer made me feel that oddities were cheap and easy to come by.

Overwhelmed by scientific information, at times we might feel the same. A new star was discovered yesterday, but a new star was discovered last month as well. That’s what new stars do, they get discovered. If a sense of wonder is connected to a sense of the mysterious, then science, which has no patience with the mysterious, seems bound to kill wonder. We might be led to believe that science – humanity’s adulthood – has sanitized the world, making of it not a Wunderkammer but, at best, a museum with a gaudy gift shop attached. John Keats, in his poem ‘Lamia’, asked, ‘Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?’

It is a good question.

*

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, painted in the 1760s by Joseph Wright of Derby, is a splendid work of art. I discovered it during my first visit to London, towards the end of a hard day’s sightseeing. After trekking around town since morning, I had reached a point of saturation in which all the sights I had seen merged into a psychedelic kaleidoscope of shapes and colours. The only reason I stopped in front of Wright’s painting, in the National Gallery, was that there was a wizard in it, and even in a state of exhaustion I could never say no to a wizard.

I moved a little closer, and realized it was not a wizard I was looking at.

The painting represents a scientist performing an experiment for a rapt audience. He is a severe man with a mane of white hair, clad in a red robe with black hemming that would be the pride of any wizard. He takes centre stage, light coming from below, his robe a fiery column in a dark room. The scene is candlelit, which adds to the impression that magic is afoot. With one hand the wizard-scientist is beckoning to us, inviting us into his world, while with the other he lightly touches a crank handle on the top of an exquisitely shaped glass jar, which in turn sits on a wooden pillar. In the jar is a bird.

The bird is going to die.

The glass jar and the pillar form an ‘air pump’, a mechanical contrivance invented by the German scientist Otto von Guericke in the seventeenth century. In a moment, the scientist, or ‘natural philosopher’ as he would have been called in 1768 when the painting was executed, will create a vacuum within the sealed jar, and the bird, with no air left, will convulse, and die.

Calling this an ‘experiment’ is generous: the natural philosopher knows perfectly well that the bird is going to die. It would be more honest to say that he is performing a trick.

The audience forms a circle around him. A young woman shields her eyes, while a little girl courageously looks at the bird, upset, but still prepared to watch. A patronizing older man explains the goings-on to both of them. Another man is lost in contemplation, while a younger one looks on attentively. There are other characters; they are all expecting something to happen, something unusual but not mysterious. They know as well as the scientist does that the bird is doomed, and they know – or are learning – why. This is the opposite of the ‘mystery’ we have learned from magicians and witches, and of the ‘negative capability’ praised by Keats, the ability not to ask questions. In this painting, everyone is asking questions, to receive robust, no-nonsense answers.

And yet, not one character is jaded. A powerful awe pervades their faces, the room, the ill-fated bird. Nothing suggests that science is disenchanting the world; quite the opposite, the scientist is casting a spell over the room. Looking at An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, we might feel that, if we could only accept his invitation and find a way into the painting, he would lead us to a secret kingdom of endless miracles, no less astonishing for being ‘scientific’.

Wright’s scientist – part scholar, part showman – was an ‘itinerant professor’, a well-known breed in eighteenth-century England. These professors would travel from town to town, like actors in a touring theatre company, to give lectures, perform spectacular experiments, sell books and gadgets – and then move on. Some of them even went on tour abroad: the blind lecturer Henry Moyes, a Scot, toured the United States for two years between 1784 and 1786, impressing audiences from Boston to New York to Charleston with his wit, his knowledge and his round-rimmed dark glasses.

The very idea of science was young and fresh, and it opened a space for private entrepreneurs. Moyes and his ilk were creating a new form of entertainment, while at the same time teaching real science to real people. A contemporary journalist praised them for being ‘midwives of other people’s discoveries’.1 They awed their audiences with scientific miracles and inspired some to carry out experiments of their own, thus creating new touring opportunities for aspiring scientist-showmen. Science was offering a different kind of magic, alluring and terrifying.

Our third key lies concealed deep in the roots of modern science. In order to unearth it, we will first turn to a mercenary-soldier-turned-philosopher, named René Descartes.

*

Were Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia alive today, she would rightly be recognized as a first-rate intellectual. But she was born to the ‘Winter King’ Frederick V and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of King James I of England (VI of Scotland), in 1618, when it was a pipe dream for a woman to achieve intellectual recognition. She was gifted, though, very much so, and came from scholarly inclined parents, who spent most of their time and money surrounding themselves with books and philosophers. Good scholars rarely make good politicians, and Elisabeth’s parents managed to hold on to power in Bohemia for one meagre year. Still, they made sure that their clever daughter received an excellent education – and she would certainly make the most of it.

In the 1640s, Elisabeth entered into a correspondence with the French thinker René Descartes. He was one of the philosophers that were shaping the Enlightenment – that is, the era that did away with the notion that some questions cannot be answered. During the Enlightenment, our modern notion of ‘rationality’ was born.

In their letters, Elisabeth and René discussed all sorts of matters at length. Descartes recognized the princess as ‘the keenest sort of intellect’, though she posed as a clueless damsel in cultural distress, who looked up to Descartes ‘as someone who can help her to remedy the weakness of her own mind’.2 Elisabeth was an accomplished thinker in her own right, and her pose was a disingenuous one. No mere muse, she was not too shy to challenge Descartes, criticizing him, pushing him to think harder. She convinced Descartes to mine their correspondence to produce a treatise on passions.

This Descartes did, and in 1649 he came up with Les passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul), in which he uses the cold light of reason to understand its apparent polar opposite, the passions (what we would call the ‘emotions’ today). He began by turning his attention to the emotion of wonder.

Up to that moment it had been accepted that our emotional life was based on two basic impulses, that is, whether we were attracted to something, say a happy puppy, or repulsed by something, say a decomposing badger. Every other feeling was a variation on this theme. Descartes didn’t stray too far from this template, and five out of six of the ‘fundamental’ passions he listed (love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness) fit it perfectly. But there is another passion, he said, which comes before you decide whether something is good for you or not. It is the passion that grabs you when you encounter something entirely new – when you witness a curious experiment, when you meet a good-looking stranger, when you embrace a new experience. In the moment before you decide whether that as yet unknown thing is good or bad, you feel a sense of wonder (in French, admiration).

You feel it when you are faced, all of a sudden, with something you did not expect. A tree is nothing remarkable, but a walking tree, that would fire up your sense of wonder. Father Christmas was so impressive to me as a child because, as far as I knew, sledges were not supposed to fly, elderly men were not supposed to come down the chimney, and giving away stuff was not something that trustworthy individuals generally did. I didn’t believe such things were possible until my older brothers assured me that on Christmas Eve, and only on Christmas Eve, they were. This discovery enchanted my Decembers.

Think back to an experience of wonder you had. You will probably find that it had to do with something you had not noticed before, and not necessarily because it was something new. You have seen a full moon a hundred times and more, but when you saw it that night on the beach, then, it filled you with awe; then, you noticed the gentle strength of her light for the first time.

Wonder comes when you notice something, or something happens, that you did not expect. Coming first, when no other passion has arrived yet, wonder sets the stage for them all. Without wonder you would feel no other emotions, because something that does not make you wonder won’t grab your attention at all.

Descartes’ era was brimming with bright new things. Natural philosophers, astronomers, alchemists and other intellectual adventurers were inventing science, which was then far from being common sense. The Sun rotating around the Earth was common sense. But the idea that the Earth might be rotating around the Sun? That was weird and dangerous, that was wild and wondrous.

Science was opening up new, counter-intuitive ways of thinking, ways that shouldn’t work and yet did. Itinerant professors made a living out of demonstrating impossible things – they could kill a bird without touching it! Since the dawn of humanity, the power to smite down hapless mortals with invisible fire had been the preserve of gods. And yet the new philosophers proclaimed that mortals need never be hapless again: they had stolen the fire from the heavens and now it was them doing the smiting.

When people emerged from these professors’ lectures, they were roused. The professors were using a sense of wonder to teach science, and in so doing they were nurturing a sense of wonder in their audiences, showing them a host of new, unexpected things. It was a perfect match – for a while.

It didn’t last long. By the early nineteenth century, John Keats was already mourning the end of enchantment. Science had become commonplace, wonder-phobic. As Keats put it, ‘Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line / Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine.’3 In the century in which Keats lived most of his short life, so many angels were having their wings clipped that, as we have seen, an insurgency of magicians started fighting to save at least a few of them. Keats fought on the front line.

Yet on rereading his poem ‘Lamia’, I am left uneasy. On the one hand, I can relate to the sentiment. On the other, however, blaming science is a dangerous game. Science might have chased gnomes out of mines, but it also saved miners’ lives, and though it made charms fly, it also made us fly. Not to mention that Keats died in Rome at twenty-five, of tuberculosis, and with a little more science, he might have lived.

We know this; so we are tempted to believe that life is a matter of choosing between a short, dysfunctional life of enchantment, or a life that is long, successful and quite dull. It is once again the core choice our society sets up for us – are you a dreamer or a doer? A binary choice, apparently simple, as all the best traps are.

We started our journey because we refused to fall into it. Others made the rules for us and decided they are the only rules possible. We should not obey; we can make rules of our own. Magicians and witches set us on our path, and now scientists will show us the next move.

But first, let’s leave Descartes behind.

*

Descartes said: ‘it’s only dull and stupid folk who are not naturally disposed for wonder.’4 The ‘dull and stupid’ do not understand that trees are not supposed to walk, so if they happen to see one ambling around, they shrug it off and carry on. Nothing can astound them. We tend to believe that the unflappable ones are wise. But no, said Descartes – they are just dense.

The problem is that life, left to its own devices, makes us all dull and stupid. When you are little, you run outside excitedly when it snows, but then, when you are grown up, you grumble about the snow that makes your train run late. I know for a fact that you are dull and stupid. So am I. We are on this journey because we refuse to die that way.

This is where we must part company with Descartes. He noticed that wonder ‘seems to diminish with use’, because with the passing of time fewer things are new to us, and more and more things become déjà vu and déjà entendu. But he was convinced that first, this was inevitable, and second, this was a good thing. Wonder must come, leave useful memories, and then go.

Descartes expressed himself like a tough-talking boss who tells you that enjoying the magic is fine only as long as you stop early. Let your jaw go slack, kid, but then shut it and get to work. You live in a clockwork world and you’d better get on with it. For Descartes, the sole function of our sense of wonder is to spur us on to understand the world better and master it with a stronger grip. That’s it. Wonder on its own is worthless. Those who don’t have a sense for it are ‘dull and stupid’, true, but having too much of it is a ‘disease whose victims seek out rarities simply in order to wonder at them and not in order to know them’. Even worse, ‘things of no importance are as likely to grab their attention as things that would actually be useful to investigate’.

You hear the echo of his words in those of the teacher who kept telling you to stop looking out of the window and focus on what really matters. Do not become ‘too full of wonder’, he admonished, with Descartes. Don’t build castles in the air. It’s bad for you.

This might seem wise: too much of a good thing is a bad thing, they say. Is that true, though? Descartes took it for granted that everything comes in definable measures, like the amount of water you drink from a single cup, or the miles you cover in a day. He believed – superstitiously, for he had no reason to do so – in a purely mechanical universe, in which everything was a pump, a cog, a quantity either known or soon to be known. So, you should keep track of how much wonder you feel, until the moment you say, ‘I’m good, thanks’, as you would say to the guy buying the next round at the pub.

Everything is quantifiable, measurable, everything is a matter of economics. All life (and human relationships) can be reduced to a zero-sum game. It is a waste of time to just sit and contemplate a hare in springtime; you contemplate just enough, then you hunt the hare and slice it open, to understand how it works. There are things of consequence and things of no consequence, the useful and the useless, and sober Descartes knows which is which.

Well, let’s not be sober: let’s jump on the table and sing bawdy songs. Too much of a good thing, as I read once on a graffiti in Glastonbury, can be wonderful. Let’s kill the idea that our sense of wonder is a humble servant whose job is to prepare the place for the better things to come.

I am not implying that we shouldn’t study a hare’s biology. There is a lot of pleasure to be gained from that, a lot of wonder, and a lot of wisdom too. I am saying that life is not a zero-sum game, it is not a sum of binary choices, of yes or no, here or there. Unfortunately, we inherited Descartes’ view: wonder is a young people’s game, and in order to grow up we have to give it away. This is a widespread superstition in which we should stop believing.

Rather, we might let our sense of wonder breathe and speak and grow. It will change organically on its own, becoming at times the curiosity to understand a tree, at times the inspiration to write a poem. Rather than decide where to go from wonder, rather than fretting over being in control of it, let’s trust wonder and see where it leads us. You might discover that what you wanted to do all along was, indeed, to study a hare’s biology; or just to sit under the canopy of a beech tree. You thought you wanted to be an artist and instead you discovered you were keen to go to law school; you thought you wanted to get a PhD in mathematics but you found that life as a schoolteacher was more rewarding.

Descartes left us with the gloomy prophecy that we will lose our sense of wonder as we grow older. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which only comes true if we believe it to be so. Rather than the first move of your emotional life, you could think of wonder as its bass note, booming into prominence sometimes, then fading in the background only to rise again, always playing. It is not something that happens first but something that happens always. Listen to it and you will realize that ‘things of no importance’ do not exist in this bizarre universe of ours, only things you didn’t look at closely enough, because you were too ‘dull and stupid’ to realize how new they could be. Descartes too was dull and stupid in some respects. We will find our third key when we learn to look more carefully.

We began our journey by locating a first spark of wonder within us, with the help of magicians. When that spark lit a flickering candle, we danced with witches in the shadows it cast. Now we are going to set our world ablaze, and to do that, we are not going to hide from the light of reason any more. Rather, we are going to embrace it – to the utmost extent.

*

The world is not a second older than you. Are you seventy-four? Then your world is seventy-four years old. Depending on your knowledge of history, you have a vague or a slightly less vague idea of some of the stuff that happened before you were born, and a vaguer idea about what might happen after you die, and yet every idea you have had, every experience you have been through, every thought you have ever thought, the entire lifespan of the world from your point of view is contained within those seventy-four years. Do you seriously believe that you can run out of new experiences in seventy-four years?

Think about this: 66 million years ago, dinosaurs became extinct. Before that, they walked the Earth for around 177 million years. This is such an enormous span of time that it is almost impossible for us to conceive it. To get a better idea, just think of this – our entire species, Homo sapiens, has been kicking around for a mere 200,000 years or thereabouts, and we are already self-destructing: I wouldn’t bet on our making it to our one-millionth birthday. Dinosaurs were on this planet far – immeasurably far – longer than us. No scholar believes that dinosaurs ever managed to create the advanced technology it takes to self-destruct. Maybe they were too stupid, or maybe they were too smart.

And now this: there is a jellyfish in the Mediterranean, called Turritopsis dohrnii, that is as immortal as Tolkien’s elves. It can be killed, but if it manages to keep a low profile, it can live for ever, by regularly reverting to an earlier stage of development, literally rejuvenating itself. The jellyfish you killed last summer in Puglia could have been swimming with Cleopatra.

And now this: peregrine falcons, which can dive faster than a Ferrari 488, have left their wild lairs and come to squat in London. They nest on roofs and niches high above the streets and find prey in abundance. Londoners rarely get to see them only because Londoners rarely bother to look up. They are too busy looking at their mobile phones.

And now this: when you look at the stars, you are looking at the past. Starlight takes many, many years to reach our planet, and when you lay your eyes on a star burning seventy-four light years away from us, you are looking at the star as it was when you were born, if you are seventy-four. Meanwhile it might have ceased to exist, or it might have turned into cheese, and even with the most advanced telescope, you couldn’t possibly know. Moreover, each star is set at a different distance from our planet, so the light of each star comes from a different time. The night sky is a patchwork of ages woven in light.

And think about this, too: the matter that makes your legs, your head, your chest, was created in the Big Bang, at the beginning of the universe. After you die, it will go on to make other things – animals, planets, stars, tentacled aliens. For a pitifully brief time, that matter came together in a very specific way to generate a conscious being, you, a being that would allow that matter to think. Before you were born and after you die, the matter just went on being and it will go on and on, like Lego bricks that sometimes take the shape of a house, sometimes of a car. How come that when those bricks took the form of you, they suddenly could think, and in such a sophisticated way that they were capable of creating, well, actual Lego bricks? No one knows.

Our universe is weird. A human lifespan is not enough to make it seem less weird, even marginally so. For that matter, the amassed knowledge of the puny 200,000 years our species has been here is not enough to make it seem less weird, even marginally so. If anything, the more we learn, the weirder the universe seems. Respectable physicists argue that parallel universes might exist;5 respectable neuroscientists argue that you don’t feel an emotion as a reaction to an event, but as a prediction based on past experiences and cultural expectations.6

The problem remains, the universe might be forever strange, but we still get disenchanted as we grow older. If that is not because we inevitably run out of new experiences to reignite our sense of wonder, then why is it?

This is the question I asked myself in the cold, rainy winter weeks I spent shuttling between my study and the library, surrounding myself with books and articles on the history of science, the philosophy of science and the lives of scientists – and chatting with my scientifically inclined friends and acquaintances.

The peregrine falcons of London brought me a possible answer.

*

I learned about the falcons from an article in the Guardian, which I read on the Tube. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I walked from Piccadilly Circus Tube station to the library. The article is by an urban birdwatcher,7 David Lindo, whose motto is ‘Look up’. His words resonated with me. In a novel I wrote more than ten years ago, Pan,8 I made the same point: we city-dwellers should look up more. Lindo says that, by not looking up, we are missing a lot: including the fact that peregrine falcons have arrived on London’s rooftops. There are wonders above our heads we could enjoy if only we bothered to use our necks a little more.

I read the article, I felt validated, understood, and nodded vigorously. I got to the library, left my umbrella and my coat in the cloakroom, and set to work, internally smirking at those lesser mortals, corporate drones and suchlike, who never look up.

As I sat down in the hushed atmosphere of a panelled room, I realized that, while I was thinking about an article on the importance of looking up – an article I was going to quote in the book I was researching – I had, in fact, never actually looked up. My attention had been divided between juggling the umbrella and a bag full of books, and trying not to get run over by cars and tourists. I hadn’t thought of checking the sky for peregrines. I was a lesser mortal myself.

I had excellent reasons for not looking up: I had a lot of work to do and not enough time to do it. Nonetheless, I felt like a bad person and the worst kind of writer – one who doesn’t put his money where his mouth is. A liar, in fact.

Then I realized that in my predicament was the answer I had been looking for.

The older we get, the more relentlessly we focus on what we must do, and the trade-off is that we cannot focus much on what we would like to do. As an infant, I was looked after: there were no duties to perform – I could enjoy (for the one and only time in my life) the luxury of unlimited free time and a quiet mind-space. Then, slowly, social interactions started and I had to make friends. And, on top of that, there was homework to be done. In a while, I needed to muster the courage to ask girls out. Then came essays, then bills to pay, then a career, then health checks, responsibilities stacking one on top of the other. The tower of things we have to do grows taller by the day, but the day’s length remains the same.

To make our lives manageable, we find shortcuts. We focus on the things we know how to do, the paths already mapped, so that we don’t have to map a new path every time. It makes sense. When you must regularly get to the other side of a mountain, it is more convenient to dig a tunnel once than to climb up and down every time. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you never forget that by going through the tunnel you won’t get to meet deer and pick blackberries and stumble upon sweet secret glades.

But you take the tunnel day in day out, and you do forget. You forget that you could climb the mountain any time you wanted to. You forget that taking the tunnel is a strategy, not a necessity; a habit, not a destiny.

*

Peregrine falcons soar above children and adults alike, but only children look up. Growing up is a process of making and wearing our own blinkers. A spectacularly strange world unfolds around us; we train ourselves not to see it, so that we can continue blithely on our way. It is not that we run out of new things to see, it is that we stop seeking them out.

We deserve compassion for that. Probably some New Age guru would say that you must rip off your blinkers, now!, and let your soul joyously fly with the falcons. This makes for a good sound bite – but it is terrible advice. Humans get used to things: this is one of our most significant traits. We put on our blinkers and carry on in the face of illness, carnage, stress, loss of limbs and loved ones. The cars that could run me over in Piccadilly were real enough and so were my deadlines, and for the time being I needed to be blind to the falcons so that I could see the cars and the deadlines. Ripping our blinkers off would leave us defenceless, like children, who are free and safe only insofar as adults take care of them.

The trouble begins when we stop seeing the blinkers as blinkers, clever survival devices that we can take on and off, and start seeing them as ‘the way it is’. In other words, when we start believing too much in what we think we know. It does not matter what kind of blinkers we have, it does not matter whether we believe in gnomèd mines or in a purely mechanical universe. Every world view, every belief, every ‘reality tunnel’, to borrow an expression from the cult novelist and self-styled ‘agnostic mystic’ Robert Anton Wilson, becomes disenchanting when you convince yourself that is all there is. Even ghosts get boring when ghosts are all you think about.

A sense of wonder does not come from a specific way of seeing the world; it comes from your ability to shift whatever way you have of seeing the world.

Children don’t yet have a fixed world view, they shift it all the time, so they wonder a lot. And they love science. A chemistry set is an evergreen present; looking at a flea through the lens of a toy microscope never did any harm to anyone’s sense of wonder.

We won’t even try to set aside the blinkers. Rather, we will learn how to make a thousand of them, all different from one another, so we can look at the world in a thousand different ways, and continuously rejuvenate our world view, like immortal jellyfish. Good science helps us with that.

*

When science erupted on to the scene, it came with punk-rock braggadocio. It wanted to unblock tunnels with loud explosions, be loud and brazen. It was born as a reaction to the dominant mode of thought, that said that any person worth their salt was supposed to do little else than obey their betters and admire God’s work. In a different way from our own, the world into which science came was disenchanted: nothing new was to be discovered, nothing new was to be understood. ‘And there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon’, to use Shakespeare’s words. Miracles and prodigies could show you the greatness of God, but then, you already knew God was great. Miracles were not meant to rock your world, but to confirm its ultimate nature.

The early scientists – Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo – mostly believed in God, and yet they said, look, we can lift the lid off His cauldron and look inside. They were not casting themselves as enemies of spirituality. Their faith was much more than perfunctory: Isaac Newton devoted his last years to biblical scholarship. They were rejuvenating spirituality, seeking to remove blinkers that were preventing people from seeing the full glory of God’s creation.

Then as today, though, scientists also needed something less elevated than enthusiasm and courage: they needed hard cash. They had to convince wealthy patrons to finance their research, and, as a rule, wealthy patrons wanted something back. Scientists started arguing that their research was principally useful, that it created things of practical benefit – like better weapons, for example. The strategy worked all too well, and too many people (unfortunately, even some scientists among them) started believing in the delusional idea that science must be for something. Science came to be valued for the technology it helped to produce, and for the money it helped to make. Before you knew it, science and capitalism were marching in step. Science existed in order to make things in order to make money. Human beings existed in order to make things in order to make money.

This was exactly the kind of ‘philosophy’ that John Keats was denouncing in ‘Lamia’. And with good reason: if science’s only job was to cleanse the mines of gnomes so as to make miners work harder, science would be indeed a force of despair. But science is a way of seeing the world, and while at its worst it is cold and disenchanting, it is at its best exactly the opposite.

To the best kind of scientist, the world is forever full of questions, and the scientific method is a way to scramble for temporary answers. As the writer Philip Ball puts it, science began when philosophers started asking questions about things that had until then seemed entirely obvious9 – such as the revolution of the Sun around the Earth. Scientists were mocked by those who had far too much common sense to entertain such fanciful theories (the definition of common sense changes, the unquestioning certainty of its enforcers does not).

The difficulty lies in that the blinkers you have been wearing have come to define what the world is for you. You only see other people, the planet, the universe, elephants and jellyfish, as filtered through those blinkers. Your entire life experience has been shaped by looking through those blinkers, and you see only those things that they allow you to see. If you had never seen a giraffe, never read about a giraffe, and never talked to anyone who has seen a giraffe, it would be virtually impossible for you to realize just what long-necked splendours you were missing. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Early scientists understood this problem. The remarkable thing they did, the thing that changed history, was to find a quite elegant, simple solution. It goes like this: when you are in doubt, ask questions, and when you are not in doubt, ask questions anyway. (Yes, I know, witches taught us precisely the opposite lesson; but please, trust me for now and we’ll get there.)

If you found yourself in a completely dark room, you would, naturally, wish to find the exit. You would grope your way around, not expecting to encounter anything specific but preparing yourself to negotiate whatever you might stumble upon. The same goes for scientific questions. Because we don’t know what it is that our blinkers are hiding, we question everything without fear of appearing naive. With this simple move, the tremendous strangeness of the world reveals itself again.

Let me provide an example.

*

Let’s look at a word: dog.

OK? Good.

The word evoked an image in your mind. You automatically associated the word with the image, even though, when you think about it, in and of itself the word does not ‘mean’ the image. It does not mean a thing. Words are shapes made of straight and curvy lines. They do not ‘communicate’ by means of some special, intuitively graspable power; they are doodles.

Words have meanings because you and I decided that some specific doodles are not doodles at all, but ‘letters’ that represent units of spoken sound. We also decided we can assemble these letters to form larger doodles that we call ‘words’; and we decided that ‘words’ represent objects, memories, experiences of beauty and of sorrow.

Your mind translated the doodle ‘dog’ into its meaning, ‘a diverse range of four-legged animals with a bizarre love for, and loyalty towards, Homo sapiens’. But try looking at the word itself, as a series of scribbles on paper or screen, without immediately rushing to translate it into a mental image. I will type the word here again, so that you don’t have to search for it: dog. Now, try to look at it as a meaningless doodle.

It is hard, isn’t it? The meaning of the simplest word is something that we create, but once we have created it, it binds us. The moment your eyes rest on the doodle-dog, images of canines start crowding your mind.

Everything we know (about the world and ourselves) is like this. Every piece of knowledge we have only exists within an immensely sophisticated network of rules. Within these networks, what we know seems obvious, banal, even. But only when we accept the rules without question.

By contrast, when we look at things in close-up, what we thought we knew becomes out-and-out strange: a simple action like reading a word reveals endless layers of complexity (in our lightning-quick tour around the meaning of the word ‘dog’, we did not touch on the question of how words sound). Get close enough to a solid-looking wall, and you will find that a wall is not actually as solid as it looks. Look closely at a crow (yes, the glossy black bird of the family Corvidae), and you will see that it knows how to use tools. Look at trees as closely as a dendrologist does, and you discover that they communicate with each other using an ‘internet’ of underground networks of fungus. All is strange. The world has always been, and ever will be, the ultimate Wunderkammer.

Children intuitively grasp this strangeness. Then society trains that intuition out of them, out of us, by teaching us the rules, forcibly so if need be: if you don’t do exactly as you are told, you will get a bad mark; if you want to get a grant, you need to pursue this line of research, not that one. You might think that you wonder less than you did as a child because you know more, but in a sense, it is because you know less: you have lost touch with the real weirdness of the world, while you were trained to believe in the false reality of banality.

But the world remains weird, and banality remains false.

*

In 1660, shortly after the Restoration of the English monarchy, King Charles II gave his blessing to a new scientific institution, the Royal Society. It was dedicated to asking questions and finding answers, and one of the ways it did this was by carrying out experiments. The Society had a programme of ‘public’ experiments, whose curator was a ‘natural philosopher’, from a modest background, called Robert Hooke. His role meant that he had to know how to do research, but also how to put on a good show: he was the David Attenborough of his time. He was the first to use the word ‘cell’ in biology, borrowing it from the word used for monks’ sleeping quarters: when he looked into sliced cork with a microscope, he noticed structures that, to his eyes, could be best described as similar to those found in monasteries.10 In his Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon, Hooke revealed the magnified flea as a fearsome armoured monster, bristling with spikes – but also as a recognizable animal, with head, body and limbs.

In the heyday of the Scientific Revolution, microscopes and telescopes were revealing things so strange and extraordinary that they seemed to go beyond the bounds of human understanding, and the best that early scientists could do to explain their findings to people, and in some measure to themselves, was to use analogies. Not much has changed: quantum physicists today use analogies to try to explain their findings to us, and in some measure to themselves (Schrödinger’s cat is not an actual cat). The closer we look at our universe, the stranger it turns out to be. We try to normalize it as much as we can in order to pretend that we get it.

As Philip Ball has pointed out, the technology of lenses had been available for centuries, but it was only with the beginning of modern science that people realized that, by changing point of view so radically, they were seeing new things, rather than simply seeing better what they already knew.11 It was a different mindset, rather than a more advanced technology, that ushered in an age of discoveries and made the world a stranger place. Everybody could look into a microscope; it took a scientist to ask, what if these things we see through a microscope can point us to as yet unknown features of nature? Sensible people were certain that their senses were all they needed to understand nature. Gizmos that amplified them were just a bit of fun. Or are they? scientists asked. Scientists were not very sensible, and where others saw obviousness, they saw doubt.

The adventures of scientists, their colourful lives and the risks they take (whether Galileo facing the Inquisition, or Marie Curie dying from the effects of radiation) are born of their passionate spirit of inquiry. Scientists doubt everything, even their senses, even common sense, especially common sense. The motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in verba, which means ‘Take nobody’s word for it’. Like children sitting in the back on a long car journey, scientists keep asking questions, never tiring, never stopping.

And not just any questions. The neuroscientist Stuart Firestein says that the best questions are the ones that make us, not less, but more ignorant, by giving us a glimpse of what we don’t know.12 The scientific use of the telescope was a watershed moment because for millennia we had thought that we knew what was going on in the heavens, and then suddenly, we didn’t any more. By answering a tiny question about the rotation of celestial bodies, Copernicus and Galileo were opening up a million more. In Firestein’s words, ‘science produces ignorance, possibly at a faster rate than it produces knowledge’.13 Ideally, science shows you a little bit of what you don’t know: it broadens your world to include a magical menagerie of immortal jellyfish and city-dwelling falcons.

*

We can apply the same thinking to our non-scientific lives, to make ourselves more ignorant. Let’s start with a very simple question: how did we get here?

I don’t mean in any grandiose, meaning-of-life kind of sense. Just, how did we get here, you and me? I take it that you – a ‘you’ that exists in my future, while I am tapping these words on a laptop perched on a ramshackle bureau – bought this book, or someone bought it for you. You might have stolen it, or borrowed it, or picked it up from a skip outside a neighbour’s house, but let’s say, for the sake of my mortgage, that cash was exchanged. You and I are not face to face, this much is obvious. I might well be dead by now (your ‘now’). And yet, in a way, we are meeting one another. How did we come to do this?

Let’s see. I can speak for myself: I am alive (for the time being), it is early morning, I had a breakfast of yogurt, honey and abundant coffee, and then I shuffled to my office to work. Before that, I found a publisher who wanted me to write this book and gave me some money to get started, and before that I found an agent who found me a publisher. Before that, my girlfriend at the time suggested we could spend four months in London. Four months became ten years and counting, during which time she became my wife. Before that I wrote a few books in Italian, learning the ropes of the craft of writing; and before that I met my girlfriend, one childhood summer many years ago. And we can travel even further back in time until we get to a gentle day in May 1981 (or so I am told), when I was born in a southern Italian town to a ridiculously loving family. An interplay of decisions and chance brought me from there to here, from southern Italy to London, from crying and wetting myself to writing a book on a topic that interests you, in a language that you understand.

What about you? How did you end up here, with me? Whatever mind-bending series of coincidences brought you to read these pages, you, too, will have started your life in a manner very similar to myself, wailing and helpless.

But we haven’t yet answered the original question. The chain of events that brought us here to meet (more or less) started before we were born. Before being a baby, you were a foetus, and before you were anything at all, there was an ovum and a spermatozoon, and before those met, there were two people who might even have been in love. Keep hopping from one before to the next, picking them up like rocks in the stream of time. From parents to grandparents to ancestors, from global conflicts to the first signs of language, the further back we travel, the more your path and mine will diverge, only to come together again, intimately, in a land we know as Africa, where our species, Homo sapiens, originated around 200,000 years ago.

The story of you and me does not begin there either. Before Homo sapiens there were other species, and before those species there were other forms of life, and before them there was probably a single cell, from which all life on Earth originated (you and I, your dog, my cat, the octopus you had for dinner that unforgettable night in Crete, the crunchy Greek salad you ordered as a side). And before that, there were majestic cosmic forces shaping a star and a planet, just at the right distance from one another to give birth to life, and before that there were cosmic forces even more majestic that shaped what we sometimes call the ‘laws’ of physics, laws that seem miraculously fine-tuned to allow a star and a planet to give birth to life. And before that there was no ‘before’ because time and space themselves did not exist, and when we reach that beautiful and terrifying point, the magic of words fails us.

A lot of effort went into me writing this book, and you reading it.

Just a few years ago we were a bunch of apes hanging out on the savannah. From an evolutionary perspective, it was a blink of an eye, and in a very real sense we are still a bunch of apes. Nothing changed there. You and I were born naked beasts with a hard-wired desire to eat and fuck and avoid pain, animals trapped on a not-so-big planet with other animals, which are, for the most part, better endowed in a physical sense than we are. We are poor runners, pitiful climbers, abysmal fighters, and our fangs and talons are rubbish. We are the nerds of Planet Earth.

And yet one way or another we managed to leave our caves and visit the moon, and now we are making plans to travel further, towards Mars and beyond. We have come a long way, and if we can prevent idiots with too much power from blowing us to smithereens, we still have a long way to go.

What happened in the little less than 14 billion years that passed from the Big Bang to now is extraordinary. But it is even more extraordinary that a bunch of apes are figuring it out.

*

Descartes was not alone among his contemporaries in his belief that wonder was only good to start off the journey, not see it through. Scientists were re-enchanting the world by revealing its strangeness, and yet their endgame was to make wonder cease, to answer all questions and master nature. This is an unfortunate view; and it is even more unfortunate that it has somehow survived to this day. This is science gone too far, some might say. I disagree. This is science that hasn’t gone far enough.

A scientist’s training is long and demanding. After spending twenty years shuttling between a university and a lab, working late hours for very little financial reward, you can be forgiven for thinking that your specific way of doing things is the best way there is. It is a handy delusion you use to keep yourself sane. Because of the way science works in practice, because of the byzantine twists and turns of grants and academic careers, scientists need to build their own tunnels, in the same way we all do, in order to get on with life, pay their bills, raise children and put them through university. Exactly like anybody else, they can end up forgetting that those tunnels are shortcuts through reality and not reality itself. They stop questioning what they think they know. They learn that they must look up, and they do so, but then they always look up, and never sideways.

We tend to believe that scientists are the ultimate grown-ups, that they have everything sorted out. But they are not, and they have not. They are people like us, and they are winging it, like us. They are prone to the same mistakes we are prone to, the same delusions of grandeur. The good ones are aware that this problem is inescapable, and they keep applying science’s clever trick – they keep asking questions, and all the more so when the answer seems obvious. Is immortality possible? Do animals have consciousness? What about plants? Sooner or later those questions will lead them to strange, unexpected places they have never seen before. To the stars and beyond.

Scientists and witches use opposite methods to reach the same point, a point where their dearest certainties hold no water. We are going to steal both methods. Life needs to breathe in, breathe out, and we shall alternate between moments when we stop asking questions and moments when we push questions to their extreme limits. We will switch between strategies, so that neither becomes just another deception, just another cage. Breathing in with mystery, breathing out with questioning, your world will be forever new, forever unexpected.