Wanting to Believe Things - I
In September 2011 a story about a physics experiment made headlines in virtually every newspaper round the world. My bet is it caught your interest as well: a group of physicists at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy estimating how long it took neutrinos to reach them from the CERN laboratory in Geneva, 700 km away. Remember all that? It’s odd how interested we all were, isn’t it? The results were perplexing. They suggested that certain weird sub-atomic particles arrived sooner than they should have; indeed, arrived faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Now every schoolchild knows that trains can’t arrive before they depart, so in that sense nothing should travel faster than the speed of light. Alright, the particles only arrived a very little too early (60 billionths of a second, to be precise) but certainly enough to get us poring over that piece in the newspaper. Why?
The story made a splash in The Courier in Dundee and The Times in New York, and all places intervening. The professional view was: “Hold on a bit - let’s think about this, Einstein had better not be wrong on this point.” And that was not mere professional mulishness; practical science relies on the concept of causation. A cause produces an effect; practical science would have obvious difficulty accommodating to a world where things worked the other way round. But oddly enough, that’s a difficulty non-professionals – what you might call ordinary people - don’t seem to share. Hence, this essay.
The hold that story had on the imagination of the general public was quite extraordinary. It was as if we had all been told something we yearned to believe: something we really wanted to be true. Now, “normal science” and “wanting to believe” are two phrases that should be mixed with great caution. Within hours of the first tentative report, newspaper comment sections and blog sites the world over were debating with quite extraordinary passion whether or not the Gran Sasso result was correct. Don’t you think there’s something odd about that? Because none of the journalists; none of the energetic blog-writers; none of the authors of earnest letters; none of the worthy bishops – really none of them - had the faintest idea what a neutrino was. Yes, I’m sure hits on the Wikipedia topic neutrino increased substantially, but I’m equally certain that didn’t help at all. All it meant was that for a few brief weeks a few brief people inched their knowledge regarding this mysterious particle from “nothing” to “still nothing”. Perhaps it’s even worth asking what “still nothing” means because, naturally, I looked as well. I also know that neutrinos have a half-integer spin, exhibit the property of chirality and have a “disputed but small non-zero mass”. And yes, I share your enthusiasm for that word “disputed” – there’s something attractive about it. But in truth the sum of my knowledge really is nothing, nothing at all. Perhaps, like me, you were tempted to guess that the words “spin” and “mass” might mean roughly what they mean in a game of snooker, but the encounter with the word “chirality” offered more than a hint that that would be misguided. A view confirmed by looking the word up - the concept of chirality leaves all but the initiated few completely baffled.
I know that neutrinos pass through ordinary matter almost unaffected because they managed that on their trip through the Alps. So far so good, although that word “almost” is an irritation. It’s when you discover that around 65 billion of them – and that’s just those from the sun – pass “almost unaffected” through every square centimetre of the earth every second you start to feel uneasy – beaten over the head, as it were. The newspapers made it sound as if a train had arrived too soon: all of a sudden it seems a bit more complicated than that. So perhaps you will not quibble with my contention that 99.999 percent of those debating the correctness or otherwise of the experiment (do feel free to add another digit) had not the least understanding of the science involved. Not even enough to understand the claim, “Einstein was wrong” – still less, evaluate it. Surely this is very strange.
I am certainly not going to try and arbitrate on whether those Gran Sasso physicists were correct or not. In that matter I had only one tiny advantage over the majority of journalists – I knew that I didn’t know. What interests me is why such large numbers of people had an opinion at all: why they should want to believe the Gran Sasso physicists were correct. As distinct from, for example, believing they were incorrect; or believing nothing at all; or not giving a damn one way or the other. After all, what have we all got against Einstein that we should relish his comeuppance? Why should so many people suddenly care about a few billionths of a second? Care so deeply they would argue about an experiment they didn’t understand. Argue about a topic so obscure that even the concepts cannot easily be defined? The answer is not so difficult to find; in fact it is obvious. We want to believe in time travel. We still do.
Our experience of time is psychological as well as physical and the way we think about time frequently brings these two into opposition. The apparent flow of time – the tick of the inner clock - underpins thought itself, it is an essential property of being conscious. Proust, you recall, went in search of its lost bits. Anthony Powell, in a much less remarkable venture, wanted to dance to its beat. In as much as our thought processes involve a kind of inner speech, they must be spread out in time because that’s how speech works. Although we live in an instantaneous experienced moment, it’s not how we think. Thinking is very definitely one damned thing after another, creating our personal history as a series of events coded in time, stretching back to our childhood. That’s what defines our notion of self and is why we fear losing it, for truly if that goes, we go with it. But although we can remember – call back our yesterdays – this does not free us from the perception that we are, nonetheless, cruelly strapped to the arrow of time, all flying inexorably to the same end – our extinction. Little wonder time travel answers a deep psychological need. Perhaps the arrow can be stopped? Perhaps it can be reversed? Perhaps we can release ourselves from the arrow, dismount, step down? Control of the flow of time answers possibly the deepest psychological question regarding our purpose in an otherwise pointless universe running its inexorable course to a cold dark end.
We’re stuck with this existential dilemma because of the laws of physics: it’s all their fault. The laws of physics – whether we grasp them or not - trapped us, and how we resent it! It is the laws of physics that define the possible - but the irony is, we evolved with a fully-fledged ability to conceive of the impossible. The evolution of language and thought – and it’s not for nothing we refer to ourselves as homo sapiens - allows for an effortless, albeit metaphorical, escape from the tyranny of time. In fiction, time is not the master: we can do what the hell we like with it. It can even run backwards. Cause, effect … who cares? In fiction, time expands and contracts at will – we even comprehend a narrative that treads the same patch of time over and over again. Indeed, in film we have learned a completely new vocabulary of time where every conceivable manipulation can be realised, including the physically impossible. Surely god should have arranged things so that the impossible could not be thought. What on earth was he thinking of? What’s the point of the concept, otherwise?
That’s why the news from Gran Sasso was so engaging - it validated a potent metaphor. However absurd the proposition, the impossible suddenly looked as if it could be achieved not only in imagination, but in physical reality. In that sense, whether the evidence was flimsy or not was rather beside the point. A hint that we might escape the iron laws of physics was bound to be embraced with quite extraordinary passion. The Gran Sasso story addressed, at a metaphorical level, one of mankind’s basic psychological needs.
By the way, it was a false alarm – a calibration error. Einstein sleeps easy. I can’t say the same for the rest of us.
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