Broca's Brain: The Romance of Science

None of these numerical coincidences proves the existence of God-or if it does, the argument is subtle, because these effects are due to resonances. For example, an asteroid that strays into one of the Kirkwood Gaps experiences a periodic gravitational pumping by Jupiter. Every two times around the Sun for the asteroid, Jupiter makes exactly one circuit. There it is, tugging away at the same point in the asteroid’s orbit every revolution. Soon the asteroid is persuaded to vacate the gap. Such incommensurable ratios of whole numbers are a general consequence of gravitational resonance in the solar system. It is a kind of perturbational natural selection. Given enough time-and time is what the solar system has a great deal of-such resonances will arise inevitably.

That the general result of planetary perturbations is stable resonances and not catastrophic collisions was first shown from Newtonian gravitational theory by Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, who described the solar system as “a great pendulum of eternity, which beats ages as a pendulum beats seconds.” Now, the elegance and simplicity of Newtonian gravitation might be used as an argument for the existence of God. We could imagine universes with other gravitational laws and much more chaotic planetary interactions. But in many of those universes we would not have evolved-precisely because of the chaos. Such gravitational resonances do not prove the existence of God, but if he does exist, they show, in the words of Einstein, that, while he may be subtle, he is not malicious.

BLOOM CONTINUES his work. He has, for example, demonstrated the preordination of the United States of America by the prominence of the number 13 in major league baseball scores on July 4, 1976. He has accepted my challenge and made an interesting attempt to derive some of Bosnian history from numerology-at least the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo, the event that precipitated World War I. One of his arguments involves the date on which Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington presented a talk on his mystical number 136 at Cornell University, where I teach. And he has even performed some numerical manipulations using my birth date to demonstrate that I also am part of the cosmic plan. These and similar cases convince me that Bloom can prove anything.

Norman Bloom is, in fact, a kind of genius. If enough independent phenomena are studied and correlations sought, some will of course be found. If we know only the coincidences and not the enormous effort and many unsuccessful trials that preceded their discovery, we might believe that an important finding has been made. Actually, it is only what statisticians call “the fallacy of the enumeration of favorable circumstances.” But to find as many coincidences as Norman Bloom has requires great skill and dedication. It is in a way a forlorn and perhaps even hopeless objective-to demonstrate the existence of God by numerical coincidences to an uninterested, to say nothing of a mathematically unenlightened public. It is easy to imagine the contributions Bloom’s talents might have made in another field. But there is something a little glorious, I find, in his fierce dedication and very considerable arithmetic intuition. It is a combination of talents which is, one might almost say, God-given.

CHAPTER 9

SCIENCE FICTION – A PERSONAL VIEW

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from

earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1

BY THE TIME I was ten I had decided-in almost total ignorance of the difficulty of the problem-that the universe was full up. There were too many places for this to be the only inhabited planet. And judging from the variety of life on Earth (trees looked pretty different from most of my friends), I figured life elsewhere would look very strange. I tried hard to imagine what that life would be like, but despite my best efforts I always produced a kind of terrestrial chimaera, a blend of existing plants and animals.

About this time a friend introduced me to the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I had not thought much about Mars before, but here, presented before me in the adventures of John Carter, was an inhabited extraterrestrial world breathtakingly fleshed out: ancient sea bottoms, great canal-pumping stations and a variety of beings, some of them exotic. There were, for example, the eight-legged beasts of burden, the thoats.

These novels were exhilarating to read. At first. Then slowly doubts began to gnaw. The plot surprise in the first John Carter novel I read hinged on him forgetting that the year is longer on Mars than on Earth. But it seemed to me that if you go to another planet, one of the first things you check into is the length of the day and the year. (Incidentally, I can recall no mention by Carter of the remarkable fact that the Martian day is almost as long as the terrestrial day. It was as if he expected the familiar features of his home planet somewhere else.) Then there were incidental remarks made which were at first stunning but on sober reflection disappointing. For example, Burroughs casually comments that on Mars there are two more primary colors than on Earth. I spent many long minutes with my eyes tightly closed, fiercely concentrating on a new primary color. But it would always be a murky brown or a plum. How could there be another primary color on Mars, much less two? What was a primary color? Was it something to do with physics or something to do with physiology? I decided that Burroughs might not have known what he was talking about, but he certainly made his readers think. And in those many chapters where there was not much to think about, there were satisfyingly malignant enemies and rousing swordsmanship-more than enough to maintain the interest of a citybound ten- year-old in a Brooklyn summer.

A year later, by sheerest accident, I stumbled across a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction in the neighborhood candy store. A glance at the cover and a quick riffle through the interior showed me it was what I had been looking for. With some effort I managed to scrape together the purchase price, opened it at random, sat down on a bench not twenty feet from the candy store and read my first modern science- fiction short story, “Pete Can Fix It,” by Raymond F. Jones, a gentle time-travel story of post-nuclear-war holocaust. I knew about the atom bomb-I remember an excited friend explaining to me that it was made of atoms-but this was the first I had seen about the social implications of the development of nuclear weapons. It got you thinking. The little device, though, that Pete the garage mechanic put on automobiles so passers-by might make brief cautionary trips into the wasteland of the future-what was that little device? How was it made? How could you get into the future and then come back? If Raymond F. Jones knew, he wasn’t telling.

I found I was hooked. Each month I eagerly awaited the arrival of Astounding. I read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, read from cover to cover the first two science-fiction anthologies that I was able to find, made scorecards, similar to those I was fond of making for baseball, on the quality of the stories I read. Many of the stories ranked high in asking interesting questions but low in answering them.

There is still a part of me that is ten years old. But by and large I’m older. My critical faculties and perhaps even my literary tastes have improved. In rereading L. Ron Hubbard’s The End Is Not Yet, which I had first read at age fourteen, I was so amazed at how much worse it was than I had remembered that I seriously considered the possibility that there were two novels of the same name and by the same author but of vastly differing quality. I can no longer manage credulous acceptance as well as I used to. In Larry Niven’s Neutron Star the plot hinges on the astonishing tidal forces exerted by a strong gravitational field. But we are asked to believe that hundreds or thousands of years from now, at a time of casual interstellar spaceflight, such tidal forces have been forgotten. We are asked to believe that the first probe of a neutron star is done by a manned rather than by an unmanned spacecraft. We are asked too much. In a novel of