What I like about the rule-based understanding of nature is that it breaks the walls down. If basic rules explain, for example, economics, which I think they do, then the physicist can do economics and vice versa. At the moment everything is disconnected and so people just don’t communicate with each other any more, they shout because there are all these box walls around. Who listens to the shouting man?
Do you think science and society communicate?
On the whole I don’t think they do communicate and that is a real loss. Part of the reason is that the deeper science becomes, the less the ordinary person understands.
Are we back to the maths thing?
That’s right. I mean, apart from a handful of physicists, who understands spiral field maths? Yet to truly understand Mitchell’s Superforce, one must know how the maths works. Those who don’t are excluded and rely on what others tell them. That robs almost everyone of true understanding. And if you don’t understand you can never truly appreciate.
It seems you’ve done a lot of talking about Mitchell over the past few months.
I think a lot of it has been exaggerated by the media, but there is a very basic difference between us. Don’t get me wrong: I think Mitchell has done some good things. Some of the work he has put into his show helps to explain the impact science has on our society and that’s a good thing. For example, helping people understand how Einstein has contributed to the laser and so to modern mass communications really does help to break open those boxes I’ve been talking about and it’s good for improving the communication between science and society. Yet, Mitchell himself is still in his own mathematical box, however smart and special that box might be. His theory doesn’t explain everything. I think it’s a really basic mistake to think that just because you can unite relativity and quantum you can explain the universe. In fact I think it’s arrogance beyond measure. In the past, physicists said that once we united these grand theories we would have an understanding of everything. Well, we have believed our own press, but, of course, it doesn’t explain very much of nature; it doesn’t explain why the butterfly has a patterned wing.
The other thing I’m unsure of about Mitchell is the way he goes about informing. He seems to live this lavish life of the rock star. Where is the humility? Where is the humanity for that matter? I think there’s a moral and ethical standard for a scientist and he’s eroding that standard by the way he conducts himself.
You seem to be questioning his ethics. Why?
In a way I am, yes. Let me explain. I think in many respects Francis Bacon has proved to be the greatest prophet in history. In 1627 he published The New Atlantis, which told the story of a traveller shipwrecked on the shores of a fabulous land where man has discovered that science can serve faith and restore him to the state of grace before the Fall. Man achieves this goal by controlling nature through the technologies that flow from science. This improves the people’s material lives and thus leads them to happiness. The land is ruled by Solomon’s House, a group of scientist priests who improve lives morally, not just materially.
In the hundreds of years following the book we took to heart the power of technology to control nature and improve our lives, but we left out the moral part. We’ve separated everything, so I come back to our boxes. But if we really want better lives we shouldn’t forget the moral aspect, in other words the moral effect of what scientists do.
I think that’s where Mitchell has gone wrong with what he does. It’s too loud, too brash; there’s no ethical substance to what he is saying. It’s just a kind of pop science and that isn’t enough.
How close do you think we are to the kind of scientific society Bacon wrote about?
Closer than people imagine. I look at the world today and I see a real turning point. For the past two hundred years the big debate has been about economics. A country has been defined by whether it’s capitalist or socialist; a person has been defined by whether they’re left or right. It really has been the age of economic man. However, I see that kind of argument ending now. Look at the political parties in most Western countries and you see so little dividing them. The economic argument between the Conservative and Labour parties in England is really minimal in comparison to what it was even twenty years ago and that’s the same in most countries between the old parties of the left and right. There seems to be broad agreement on the way an economy is now run.
I see the real debate in the future about how we use and control science. We’re already seeing argument about genetics and the environment, and the debate surrounding GE is a prototype of debate in the future about how far we’re prepared to proceed along the scientific route. I see a time in the not too distant future when a person will be defined by whether they’re for or against scientific advancement, whether they agree or disagree with the technology stemming from a scientific breakthrough. I see a time when politics will be about science and not economics. And, of course, for people to debate they have to understand.
Do you think your patterns and rules will help the debate?
I think they will actually, because as I tried to set out at the beginning of this interview, what I’m talking about is changing the way science is done so people can more readily understand it. I hope that in fewer than ten years the entire way in which science is taught in schools and universities will have been revolutionised by this kind of thinking. So yes, I think the future debate will be helped enormously by what I’m saying. In fact I think it will be at the heart of the coming argument because it will be the language by which people articulate what they say.
If there’s one thing you would like people to remember about your theory, what would that be?
Remember, rules not maths instead of maths rules.
I let the magazine drop to my lap. ‘What a crock of shit,’ I said to no one in particular.
THIRTEEN
Las Vegas has to be one of the strangest cities on the planet. It reminds me of a film set—all façade and no substance. Everything is artificial, even the grass. When driving to the city there are no suburbs to signal its approach: you simply round a hill in the desert and there it is, like a huge spaceship dumped from the sky. During the day the place lazes in the burning sun, subdued and half asleep. Come the night, though, and the place erupts in a symphony of light, water and sound. The people come alive as though injected with a serum to tickle their pleasure zones. At night Las Vegas is a modern Pompeii where the threat of being buried by burning decadent lava is very much alive.
Even I had balked at bringing the show to Las Vegas. I might have set out to blur the boundaries between serious science and the real world, but the home of Elvis Presley’s sequinned jumpsuits, chorus girls wearing barely enough to make dresses for dolls, and the legitimised front for mafia money hardly seemed the right place for relativity and quantum—even with a laser show. Perhaps Driesler was right: I was just an entertainer. However, the United States division of Taikon insisted on three Vegas dates where the returns were forecast to be the best throughout the American tour. So money spoke, as always, and here I was in Casino City. Two shows down, one to go and then on to the east coast for shows in New York and Philadelphia before a return to England. Already there were negotiations for more dates in the States and Europe, but nothing was decided. The company was now projecting that the tour might be extended by a further four months, but I was making plans of my own. After the States and during the interlude, I had no intention of returning to England; I was going back to New Zealand, alone. All I had to do was break the news to Bebe and convince him to help.