There’s Still a Lot of Room for Some Good Old-Fashioned Adventure
Or, the more we discover, the more we understand that what we don’t yet know is far greater than what we know.
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
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Becoming successful feels amazing. But our insatiable goal to acquire more, succeed more, and be as attractive as possible leads us to objectify one another, including ourselves.
When people see themselves as little more than their (attractive) bodies, jobs, or bank accounts, it brings great suffering.
You become a heartless taskmaster to yourself, seeing yourself as nothing more than Homo Economicus. Love and fun are sacrificed for another day of work, in search of a positive internal answer to the question, “Am I there yet?”
You reject the here, are always unhappy with it, want to be farther up the success ladder. But the sad truth is that when you climb up there, you will be just as unhappy because then it will be ‘here.’
What you are looking for, what you want, is all around you, but you don’t want that because it is all around you.
The way you live isn’t natural anymore, it is full of effort, because you imagine your goal to be external and distant. And it will always be so.
Enough talk! On to this week’s essay. It’s about 2,600 words. I borrowed the key idea from Robert M. Pirsig’s all time classic, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Q: Is science all about the quest to find the ultimate truth?
It’s 1925, and a bright twenty-five year-old researcher finds himself walking in the night out of habit at the park behind the Copenhagen Institute of Physics.
It’s really dark, and he is deep in physics thoughts. There are only a few street lamps, casting dim islands of light here and there, separated by large expanses of total darkness.
Suddenly, he sees someone pass by. Actually, he doesn’t see anyone. He just happens to see a figure appear beneath a lamp, then disappear into the dark before reappearing beneath another lamp, and so on, from island of light to island of light, until it eventually disappears altogether into the night.
This gets him thinking. The figure of course does not actually vanish and reappear every time it comes under a streetlamp. Anyone can easily reconstruct its trajectory between one streetlamp and another. After all, this was a person — a substantially big and heavy object. And like all big and heavy objects, a person cannot simply appear and vanish.
But…what about electrons? (Remember, this is a physicist; and unlike us regular human beings who think about money, career, and sex all the time, stuff like the nature of the cosmos, the relationship between space and time, electrons, etc. are what occupy a physicist’s mind on a regular basis.)
He started thinking, electrons aren’t substantially big and heavy objects, so why should they have to honour the rules of large objects? A light bulb goes off in his mind!
He started having an array of dizzying ideas. What if, by some voodoo logic, electrons could vanish and reappear? What if, always having a precise position is something which is required only if one is substantial enough — large and heavy like the person that just passed by? What if the electron could be something that manifests itself only when it interacts with something else, and between one interaction and another, what if the electron could literally be nowhere?
Only someone in their twenties can take such delirious propositions seriously. You have to be very green to believe that such conjectures could be turned into a theory that could explain how the world works.
The name of this young man is Werner Heisenberg — a name very well-known in pop culture because ‘Heisenberg’ was the alias of Walter White in the crime drama Breaking Bad, starring Bryan Cranston.
But it’s equally popular in the scientific community as it’s the name attached to one of the most fundamental concepts in quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the more certain we are about the position of a subatomic particle (such as an electron), the less certain we can be about its momentum, and vice versa.
Today, let’s talk about science. More precisely, let’s talk about the scientific method, it’s quest for truth, and the anxiety that is brought upon by the twentieth‐century Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper’s falsification principle — we cannot know with certainty if something is true; something is true only as long as it isn’t proven false.
Einstein once said, and I’m paraphrasing here: The supreme goal of the scientific method is to arrive at certain universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to stumbling upon these laws. You only have intuition powered by your experience to guide you.
Intuition produces hypothesis (what if electrons behave differently from big and heavy objects) which you can then test in the lab to confirm or dispute. But intuition is a strange word for the origin of scientific knowledge nonetheless. While we can logically define the process of deduction, what is the process of intuition really? The genesis of a hypothesis via intuition is nothing less than mysterious.
Where a hypothesis comes from, no one knows. A person is sitting somewhere, or walking in a park in the middle of the night, deeply engrossed in thought, and suddenly — flash! — they understand something they didn’t understand before. Even though a hypothesis is not the truth, it’s a means to arrive at the truth nonetheless.
Interestingly, what might seem to be the most tedious part of scientific work, thinking up a hypothesis, is actually the easiest.
Say you have a hypothesis that you are testing in the lab by an experimental method. A flood of other hypotheses might come to your mind as you go on about your day, and as you start testing these, some more would come to mind, and as you start testing these, still more would come to mind until it becomes painfully evident that as you continue testing one hypothesis after another, eliminating them or confirming them, their number does not decrease. It only increases as you go along, kind of like entropy.
To put it plainly, the number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite. You can literally never run out of hypotheses. Even if you have failed a thousand times.
The upside of this realisation is that even when your experimental work seems dead-end in every conceivable way, you know for a fact that if you just sit down and muddle about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would come along. Suddenly, Edison’s alleged quote, “I will not say I failed 1,000 times, I will say that I discovered there are 1,000 ways that can cause failure,“ starts to make more and more sense. He was really onto something.
But…even though all of this sounds very optimistic, it’s in fact extremely nihilistic. The concept of infinite hypotheses actually disproves the general validity of all scientific method. How?
Well… if the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster and faster, to ad infinitum, so that experimental method cannot keep up anymore, then it is clear (at least in theory) that all hypotheses can never be tested.
And if all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment is inconclusive, and the entire scientific method falls short of its purpose of establishing proven knowledge. This is a paradox.
Even Einstein was hinting at it when he said: Evolution has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest.
There are two important phrases to note: ‘at any given moment’ and ‘superior to the rest.’ Is Einstein really saying that truth is the best hypothesis from all the available hypothesis at a given moment? Does he mean that truth is a function of time? Does it really mean that scientific method can only uncover ephemeral truth, and not the ultimate truth?
If you give it some thought, you would conclude that the history of science is nothing but a story of continuously new and changing explanations of the same old facts. In order to explain gravity Aristotle, for example, proposed that each substance has a ‘natural place’, a proper altitude, where it always wants to return to — earth at the bottom, water a little way above it, air a little higher still, and fire even higher.
The time spans of the validity of such explanations is completely random. While some scientific truths seem to last for centuries, others last for less than a decade. Scientific truth, thus, is not eternal, but a temporal quantitative entity.
In fact, the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. Thus, the scientific truths of the twenty-first century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is now much greater.
Here’s a quick rundown of a series of scientific development since ancient Greece.
It’s 5th Century BCE, and ancient Greek philosophers, such as Thales, Democritus, and Aristotle, are the first to study the natural world using a scientific approach. They develop ideas about the structure of matter, motion, and the universe.
Give it about twenty-one-hundred years and the Scientific Revolution happens in the 16th–17th Century, which is a period of great change in science and philosophy. Scientists like Galileo, Kepler, and Newton develop the laws of motion, study the behaviour of light, and develop the theory of gravity.
Now, give it just about three-hundred years, and it’s the 19th Century where Physics continues to advance rapidly with the development of electromagnetism by Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. The discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie, and others also mark significant breakthroughs in many fronts.
Then, only a hundred years later, the 20th Century sees some of the greatest breakthroughs in physics, including the development of quantum mechanics, which explains the behaviour of particles on a subatomic level, and the theory of relativity, which revolutionises our understanding of space and time. Scientists like Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger make significant contributions to these fields.
Today, much much less than a hundred years later, physicists continue to explore the mysteries of the universe, including the nature of dark matter, the origins of the universe, and the behaviour of particles at high energies. The development of new technologies, such as particle accelerators and modern telescopes, has enabled physicists to make new discoveries and push the boundaries of our understanding of the natural world.
If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth as long as now.
What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth.
And what seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you search, the more you find, and the more you disprove.
What this means logically is that as you try to move toward an unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is your application of scientific method that is causing it to change!
For example, we thought that the Earth was flat, and that it was the still centre of our world for centuries. This idea was even supported by ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Ptolemy, but was eventually disproven by the work of astronomers like Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler.
In the 18th century, chemists believed in the existence of a substance called phlogiston, which they thought was released when materials burned. However, experiments by Antoine Lavoisier and others showed that the true explanation for combustion was the presence of oxygen.
In the early 19th century, scientists believed in the existence of a fluid-like substance called caloric that was thought to be responsible for heat transfer. However, the work of scientists like Joule and Carnot showed that heat was actually a form of energy, and that it could be converted into other forms of energy like work.
In the late 19th century, physicists believed in the existence of a medium called the ether that was thought to permeate all of space and serve as the carrier for electromagnetic waves. However, the famous Michelson-Morley experiment failed to detect any evidence of the ether, leading to the development of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
Newton believed in the concept of absolute space and time, which meant that space and time were fixed and did not depend on the observer’s perspective. Later developments in physics, including Einstein’s theory of relativity, showed that space and time are actually relative to the observer’s frame of reference.
Einstein, on the other hand, introduced the concept of the cosmological constant in his theory of general relativity, which he added to the equations to balance the force of gravity and prevent the universe from collapsing. However, later observations suggested that the universe was actually expanding, and the cosmological constant was no longer needed in the equations.
This realisation that scientific method is dragging us away from the eternal truth is basically the annihilation of the most basic presumption of all science! There’s no eternal, neverchanging, permanent truth. Something is true as long as it isn’t proven false, and is replaced by another temporal truth. In lieu of finding the truth, science and the scientific method are taking us away from it.
But… all isn’t so hopeless. There is an upside to it.
The more hypotheses we conjure, the more truths we refute, the more wonders we discover. And the more we discover, the more we understand that what we don’t yet know is far greater than what we know. This means, there’s still a lot of room for some good old-fashioned adventure.
The more powerful our telescopes become, the stranger and more unexpected becomes the heavens we see. The closer we look at the minute details of matter, the more we learn of its profound structure. And the more we wonder!
This is what makes the scientific method so so much fun. This is precisely why we do science. This is what Richard Feynman meant when he said: Physics is like sex; sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
In a famous myth related by Plato in the seventh book of The Republic, some men are chained at the bottom of a dark cave and see only shadows cast upon a wall by a fire behind them. They think that this is reality. Then, when one of them frees themselves and leaves the cave, they discover the light of the Sun, and the wider world.
At first the light, to which their eyes are unaccustomed, stuns and confuses them. But eventually they can see, and returns excitedly to their companions to share what they have seen. But the companions find it hard to believe.
We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance, by our prejudices, our temporal truths, and our weak senses reveal to us only shadows. If we try to see further, we are confused: we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is science.
The scientific method explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Science, in its essence, is more about a continual exploration of ways of thinking, and less about discovering an eternal truth. In simpler words, it’s about the journey, not the destination.
In fact, the strength of the scientific methods comes from this very capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct novel and more effective images of the world.
Who knows if we would ever be able to see the full picture! In fact, we don’t care much about it, because the journey sure as hell is full of adventure, and that’s what we are here for anyway.
I’m gonna stop here and conclude this with a passage from Carlo Rovelli’s brilliantly written Reality is Not What it Seems which, despite being a science book, is nothing short of poetic excellence:
This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change. The world is boundless and iridescent; we want to go and see it. We are immersed in its mystery and in its beauty, and over the horizon there is unexplored territory. The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don’t know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.
Today I Learned
If the world wants to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, what’s the most important thing we need?
Lithium!
See, most of these harmful emissions like Carbon Dioxide and Methane are generated when we burn fossil fuels. So if we need to cut back on emissions, we must dump fossil fuels. We have to switch to alternatives — electric cars and renewable energy.
And that’s where Lithium comes in. Or more specifically, lithium-ion batteries. These things power electric cars. And come in handy when we need to store solar and wind energy for later use.
But why lithium, you ask?
For starters, it’s actually the lightest metal in the world. So it makes the batteries relatively lighter too. It won’t weigh down a car. It can also pack lots of energy in less space. While a typical lead-acid battery stores only 25 watt-hours (Wh) of energy per kg, lithium-ion batteries pack 150Wh per kg. They also last much longer than other batteries and can live through multiple charge cycles. There’s nothing else quite like it.
So, if everyone’s targeting net-zero emissions, you can imagine that lithium will be in red-hot demand. And countries that have abundant lithium reserves will be rubbing their hands in anticipation too.
Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia hold more than 50% of the world’s proven lithium reserves. It’s the Lithium Triangle of the world. And most of the lithium in this region is found underneath the famous salt flats of these countries.
But there’s a cost to mining it.
You see, in order to get the metal, miners first pump the lithium-rich saltwater or brine from underground onto the surface. They let it evaporate and harvest the lithium from that. Pumping and washing these deposits needs a lot of water too. It takes 2,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of lithium.
This also affects the groundwater levels. And when the groundwater recedes, it pulls in water from freshwater reservoirs that people and their cattle use. This hurts the local communities who depend on these lands for their livelihood. Their crops suffer and their cattle don’t get enough water too. The rivers and lakes are disappearing as a result of this egregious use of local water resources.
Then there’s the impact on wildlife. For instance, the saltwater lakes in this area are prime habitats for certain species of flamingos. But as the water levels decline due to mining, their food sources are affected. And the flamingo population has dropped by 11% in the past decade. It hurts the ecosystem which relies on these birds to regulate it. It could even spell the loss of a major ecotourism attraction that brings in money.
So yeah, we need lithium to transition to a greener world. But we also need to be sure that it’s environmentally viable too. Because if we’re not careful, this metal that’s supposed to lead our transition into a clean energy future could first end up destroying our ecosystem.
Timeless Insight
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do, it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out.
That’s never the way.
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible, and without desire to reach the top. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed.
If you become restless, speed up. If you run out of breath, slow down.
You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.
This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice while climbing. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.
What I’m Reading
The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements — the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution — weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
— Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing
Tiny Thought
Choosing something once is easy. Choosing it repeatedly makes a difference.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋