“But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past” — Chuck Klosterman
“Now there are folks who are trying to rethink gravity itself. They suspect gravity might not even be a fundamental force, but an emergent force. So I do think — and I think many would agree — that gravity is the least stable of our ideas, and the most ripe for a major shift.”
“It’s also shackled by its own formal limitations: Most rock songs are made with six strings and electricity, four thicker strings and electricity, and drums. The advent of the digital synthesizer opened the window of possibility in the 1980s, but only marginally. By now, it’s almost impossible to create a new rock song that doesn’t vaguely resemble an old rock song. So what we have is a youth-oriented musical genre that (a) isn’t symbolically important, (b) lacks creative potentiality, and © has no specific tie to young people. It has completed its historical trajectory. It will always subsist, but only as itself. And if something is only itself, it doesn’t particularly matter. Rock will recede out of view, just as all great things eventually do.”
“In 1981, the standard belief was that dinosaurs were cold-blooded lizards, with the marginalized caveat that “some scientists” were starting to believe they may have been more like warm-blooded birds. There were lots of reasons for this alternative theory, most notably the amount of time in the sun required to heat the blood of a sixty-ton sauropod and the limitations of a reptilian two-cham-bered heart. But I rejected these alternatives. When I was nine, people who thought dinosaurs were warm-blooded actively made me angry. By the time I hit the age of nineteen, however, this line of thinking had become accepted by everyone, myself included.”
“Tyson uses an example from 1846, during a period when the laws of Newton had seemed to reach their breaking point.
For reasons no one could comprehend, Newtonian principles were failing to describe the orbit of Uranus. The natural conclusion was that the laws of physics must work only within the inner solar system (and since Uranus represented the known edge of that system, it must be operating under a different set of rules).
“But then,” Tyson explains, “someone said: ‘Maybe Newton’s laws still work. Maybe there’s an unseen force of gravity operating on this planet that we have not accounted for in our equations. So let’s assume Newton’s law is correct and ask, ‘If there is a hidden force of gravity, where would that force be coming from? Maybe it’s coming from a planet we have yet to discover.’ This is a very difficult math problem, because it’s one thing to say, ‘Here’s a planetary mass and here’s the value of its gravity.’ Now we’re saying we have the value of gravity, so let’s infer the existence of a mass. In math, this is called an inversion problem, which is way harder than starting with the object and calculating its gravitational field. But great mathematicians engaged in this, and they said, ‘We predict, based on Newton’s laws that work on the inner solar system, that if Newton’s laws are just as accurate on Uranus as they are anywhere else, there ought to be a planet right here — go look for it.’ And the very night they put a telescope in that part of the sky, they discovered the planet Neptune.”
“Even if NASA did accidentally invent faster-than-light travel, it wouldn’t even be a useful tool for exploring these particular possibilities. Depending on what estimate you use, Earth is somewhere between 24,000 and 94,000 light-years away from the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. Even if Em-Drive technology allowed us to travel at the improbable top speed of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1.04 light-years per hour), and even if we used the low end of the distance estimate, it would still take 2.6 years just to reach the Milky Way’s edge. The distance to the next major galaxy is another 2.5 million light-years, so that would be a 26-year trip. Most critically, the known universe is over 90 billion light-years in diameter (and that’s just the observable part, which — even in a non-multi-verse theory — might be one-thousandth of its actual size). Even if we irrefutably knew there was a cosmos beyond our cosmos, it could never be reached by anything except a wormhole, the likes of which have been found only in fiction. The multiverse could not be seen or described, and certainly not visited. Which means incontrovertible proof of an infinite multiverse would be like incontrovertible proof of purgatory — we’d just have to dogmatically accept it, with no functional application to our daily lives.”
“Boxing was the biggest sport in America during the 1920s.”
“A key reason college football came into existence in the late nineteenth century was that veterans who’d fought in the Civil War feared the next generation of men would be soft and ill prepared for the building of a republic “We gotta give these boys something to do,” these veterans believed.”
