physics | Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Sometimes Ancient Wisdom Needs to be Left Behind

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I recently visited Panama and learned the incredible story of how the indigenous Emberá people there helped to teach jungle survival skills to Apollo mission astronauts. It is a fascinating combining and contrast of ancient wisdom and modern technology, equipping the first men to go to the moon with insights from both realms.

Humans tend to have a natural reverence for old wisdom that is probably woven into our DNA. It stands to reason that people more willing to stick with the tried and true might have a survival advantage over those who were more reckless. Ideas that stand the test of time are, by definition, the ones that worked well enough to be passed on.

Paradoxically, to move forward we need to abandon old ideas. It was only by discarding ancient wisdoms that we were able to create the modern world. In much the same way, to move forward now we’ll need to debunk ideas that qualify as expertise today. As in most things, our past can help serve as a guide. Here are three old ideas we managed to transcend.

1. Euclid’s Geometry

The basic geometry we learn in grade school, also known as Euclidean geometry, is rooted in axioms observed from the physical world, such as the principle that two parallel lines never intersect. For thousands of years mathematicians built proofs based on those axioms to create new knowledge, such as how to calculate the height of an object. Without these insights, our ability to shape the physical world would be negligible.

In the 19th century, however, men like Gauss, Lobachevsky, Bolyai and Riemann started to build new forms of non-Euclidean geometry based on curved spaces. These were, of course, completely theoretical and of no use in daily life. The universe, as we experience it, doesn’t curve in any appreciable way, which is why police ask us to walk a straight line if they think we’ve been drinking.

But when Einstein started to think about how gravity functioned, he began to suspect that the universe did, in fact, curve over large distances. To make his theory of general relativity work he had to discard the old geometrical thinking and embrace new mathematical concepts. Without those critical tools, he would have been hopelessly stuck.

Much like the astronauts in the Apollo program, we now live in a strange mix of old and new. To travel to Panama, for example, I personally moved through linear space and the old Euclidean axioms worked perfectly well. However, to navigate, I had to use GPS, which must take into account curved spaces for Einstein’s equations to correctly calculate distances between the GPS satellites and points on earth.

2. Aristotle’s Logic

In terms of longevity and impact, only Aristotle’s logic rivals Euclid’s geometry. At the core of Aristotle’s system is the syllogism, which is made up of propositions that consist of two terms (a subject and a predicate). If the propositions in the syllogism are true, then the argument has to be true. This basic notion that conclusions follow premises imbues logical statements with a mathematical rigor.

Yet much like with geometry, scholars began to suspect that there might be something amiss. At first, they noticed minor flaws that had to do with a strange paradox in set theory which arose with sets that are members of themselves. For example, if the barber who shaves everyone in town who doesn’t shave themselves, then who shaves the barber?

At first, these seemed like strange anomalies, minor exceptions to rules that could be easily explained away. Still, the more scholars tried to close the gaps, the more problems appeared, leading to a foundational crisis. It would only be resolved when a young logician named Kurt Gödel published his theorems that proved logic, at least as we knew it, is hopelessly broken.

In a strange twist, another young mathematician, Alan Turing, built on Gödel’s work to create an imaginary machine that would make digital computers possible. In other words, in order for Silicon Valley engineers to code to create logical worlds online, they need to use machines built on the premise that perfectly logical systems are inherently unworkable.

Of course, as I write this, I am straddling both universes, trying to put build logical sentences on those very same machines.

3. The Miasma Theory of Disease

Before the germ theory of disease took hold in medicine, the miasma theory, the notion that bad air caused disease, was predominant. Again, from a practical perspective this made perfect sense. Harmful pathogens tend to thrive in environments with decaying organic matter that gives off bad smells. So avoiding those areas would promote better health.

Once again, this basic paradigm would begin to break down with a series of incidents. First, a young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis showed that doctors could prevent infections by washing their hands, which suggested that something besides air carried disease. Later John Snow was able to trace the source of a cholera epidemic to a single water pump.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these were initially explained away. Semmelweis failed to format his data properly and was less than an effective advocate for his work. John Snow’s work was statistical, based on correlation rather than causality. A prominent statistician William Farr, who supported the miasma theory, argued for an alternative explanation.

Still, as doubts grew, more scientists looked for answers. The work of Robert Koch, Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur led to the germ theory. Later, Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain would pioneer the development of antibiotics in the 1940s. That would open the floodgates and money poured into research, creating modern medicine.

Today, we have gone far beyond the germ theory of disease and even lay people understand that disease has myriad causes, including bacteria, viruses and other pathogens, as well as genetic diseases and those caused by strange misfolded proteins known as prions.

To Create The Future, We Need To Break Free Of The Past

If you were a person of sophistication and education in the 19th century, your world view was based on certain axiomatic truths, such as parallel lines never cross, logical propositions are either true or false and “bad airs” made people sick. For the most part, these ideas would have served you well for the challenges you faced in daily life.

Even more importantly, your understanding of these concepts would signal your inclusion and acceptance into a particular tribe, which would confer prestige and status. If you were an architect or engineer, you needed to understand Euclid’s geometric axions. Aristotle’s rules of logic were essential to every educated profession. Medical doctors were expected to master the nuances of the miasma theory.

To stray from established orthodoxies carries great risk, even now. It is no accident that those who were able to bring about new paradigms, such as Einstein, Turing and John Snow, came from outside the establishment. More recently, people like Benoit Mandelbrot, Jim Allison and Katalin Karikó had to overcome fierce resistance to bring new ways of thinking to finance, cancer immunotherapy and mRNA vaccines respectively.

Today, it’s becoming increasingly clear we need to break with the past. In just over a decade, we’ve been through a crippling financial crisis, a global pandemic, deadly terrorist attacks, and the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II. We need to confront climate change and a growing mental health crisis. Yet it is also clear that we can’t just raze the global order to the ground and start all over again.

So what do we leave in the past and what do we bring with us into the future? Which new lessons do we need to learn and which old ones do we need to unlearn? Perhaps most importantly, what do we need to create anew and what can we rediscover in the ancient?

Throughout history, we have learned that the answer lies not in merely speculating about ideas, but in finding real solutions to problems we face.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: 1 of 950+ FREE quote slides from http://misterinnovation.com

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Time is Not Fundamental

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

For all my life I have been taught that time is the fourth dimension in a space-time continuum. I mean, for goodness sake, Einstein said this was so, and all of physics has followed his lead. Nonetheless, I want to argue that, while the universe may indeed have four dimensions, time is not one of them, nor is it a fundamental element of reality.

Before you think I have really jumped off the deep end, let me just say that my claim is that motion is a fundamental element of reality, and it is the one that time is substituting for. This is based simply on observation. That is, we can observe and measure mass. We can observe and measure space. We can observe and measure energy. We can observe and measure motion. Time, on the other hand, is simply a tool we have developed to measure motion. That is, motion is fundamental, and time is derived.

Consider where our concept of time came from. It started with three distinct units—the day, the month, and the year. Each is based on a cyclical motion—the earth turning around its axis, the moon encircling the earth, the earth and moon encircling the sun. All three of these cyclical motions have the property of returning to their starting point. They repeat, over and over and over. That’s how they came to our attention in the first place.

If we call this phenomenon cyclical time, we can contrast it with linear time. The latter is time we experience as passing, the one to which we apply the terms past, present, and future. But in fact, what is passing is not time but motion, motion we are calibrating by time. That is, we use the cyclical units of time to measure the linear distance between any given motion and a reference location.

As I discuss in The Infinite Staircase, by virtue of the Big Bang, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the ongoing rush to greater and greater entropy, the universe is inherently in motion. Some of that motion gets redirected to do work, and some of that work has resulted life emerging on our planet. Motion is intrinsic to our experience of life, much more so than time. As babies we have no sense of time, but we immediately experience mass, space, energy, and motion.

Because mass, space, energy, and motion are core to our experience, we have developed tools to help us engage with them strategically. We can weigh mass and reshape it in myriad ways to serve our ends. We can measure space using anything as a standard length and create structures of whatever size and shape we need. We can measure energy in terms of temperature and pressure and manipulate it to move all kinds of masses through all kinds of spaces. And we can measure motion through space by using standard units of time.

The equation for so doing is typically written as v = d/t. This equation makes us believe that velocity is a concept derived from the primitives of distance and time. But a more accurate way of looking at reality is to say t = d/v. That is, we can observe distance and motion, from which we derive time. If you have a wristwatch with a second hand, this is easily confirmed. A minute consists of a wand traveling through a fixed angular distance, 360°, at a constant velocity set by convention, in this case the International System of Units, these days atomically calibrated by specified number of oscillations of cesium. Time is derived by dividing a given distance by a given velocity.

OK, so what? Here the paths of philosophy and physics diverge, with me being able to pursue the former but not the latter. Before parting, however, I would like to ask the physicists in the room, should there be any, a question: If one accepted the premise that motion was the fourth dimension, not time, such that we described the universe as a continuum of spacemotion instead of spacetime, would that make any difference? Specifically, with respect to Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, are we just substituting terms here, or are there material consequences? I would love to learn what you think.

At my end, I am interested in the philosophical implications of this question, specifically in relation to phenomenology, the way we experience time. To begin, I want to take issue with the following definition of time served up by Google:

a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future.

From my perspective, this is just wrong. It calls for using events to measure time. The correct approach would focus on using time to measure motion, describing the situation as follows:

an intra-spatial continuum that can be measured in terms of time as one event succeeds another from a position of higher energy to one of lower energy.

The motive for this redefinition is to underscore that the universe is inherently in motion, following the Second Law of thermodynamics, perpetually seeking to cool itself down by spreading itself out. We here on Earth are born into the midst of that action, boats set afloat upon a river, moving with the current on the way to a sea of ultimate cool. We can go with the flow, we can paddle upstream, we can even divert the river of entropy to siphon off energy to do work. The key point to register is that motion abides, inexorably following the arrow of entropy, moving from hot to cold until heat death is achieved.

If motion is a primary dimension of the universe, there can be no standing still. Phenomenologically, this is quite different from the traditional time-based perspective. In a universe of space and time, events have to be initiated, and one can readily imagine a time with no events, a time when nothing happens, maybe something along the lines of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In a universe of space and motion, however, that is impossible. There are always events, and we are always in the midst of doing. A couch potato is as immersed in events as a race car driver. Or, to paraphrase Milton, they also move who only stand and wait.

A second consequence of the spacemotion continuum is that there is no such thing as eternity and no such thing as infinity. Nothing can exist outside the realm of change, and the universe is limited to whatever amount of energy was released at the Big Bang. Now, to be fair, from a phenomenological perspective, the dimensions of the universe are so gigantic that, experientially, they might as well be infinite and eternal. But from a philosophical perspective, the categories of eternity and infinity are not ontologically valid. They are asymptotes not entities.

Needless to say, all this flies in the face of virtually every religion that has ever taken root in human history. As someone deeply committed to traditional ethics, I am grateful to all religions for supporting ethical action and an ethical mindset. If there were no other way to secure ethics, then I would opt for religion for sure. But we know a lot more about the universe today than we did several thousand years ago, and so there is at least an opportunity to forge a modern narrative, one that can find in secular metaphysics a foundation for traditional values. That’s what The Infinite Staircase is seeking to do.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay