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.
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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.
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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.