K. C. Cole - Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos

Copyright 2003 by K. C. Cole

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Substantially different versions of Mind Over Matter and Objectivity first appeared in Discover magazine.

Play, by Definition, Suspends the Rules Copyright 1998 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Cole, K. C.
Mind over matter: conversations with the cosmos/K. C. Cole1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.

ISBN 0-15-100816-7

ISBN 0-15-602956-1 (pbk.)

1. SciencePopular works. I. Title.
Q162.C584 2003
500dc21 2003000982

e ISBN 978-0-547-97312-8
v2.0518

For Walter,
And all the readers
who kept me minding
what matters.

Theres no escaping it: We live at the bottom of a gravity well. Its our local pothole in spacetime, created by the sagging weight of the Earth in the four-dimensional fabric that serves (as far as we know) as the backdrop for our universe. Stuck as we are, its a strain to catch glimmers of whats beyond. We turn our shiny mirrored telescopes and radio antennas toward the sky, like upside-down umbrellas, hoping for a drop of news. We bury arrays of light catchers and particle traps deep in the ground, in the ocean, in the ice, waiting for messages in bottles written in some strange and indecipherable tongue.

What big eyes we have! What big ears!

Weve even managed to boost an occasional probe up and out of the well and into the local neighborhood, an emissary to the world beyond. But we havent gotten fat, not even beyond our local star.

Thank goodness, the universe is a chatty place. It has an expansive vocabulary, an impressive range. It whispers to us in microwaves, shrieks in X-rays, rains down tales in the infrared, sparkles in visible light, grumbles in gravity waves, pounds us with cosmic rays, and slices right through us with neutrinos. Sometimes it teases, tugging on us with mysterious dark matter, sending down an occasion giggle of gamma rays. Each signal adds a different kind of clue.

It speaks not only of the great out there but also of the great back when, because peering out into the universe is also peering back in time. We can look ourselves in the face at a time long before we were born, before there were planets, stars, even atoms.

The writing is on the wall, but its often difficult to read. Not surprisingly, our conversation with the cosmos involves a great deal of translation, for as many languages as humans speak, nature speaks more and different ones. And so we commune in equations, metaphors, images, logic, emotionswhatever seems to work.

As in any ongoing discourse, there are (occasionally comicalat least in retrospect) misunderstandings. There are also moments of genuine, astonishing, connection. Unbelievable luck.

The translation problem is compounded by the fact that we are so tightly entangled with our subject, such intimate partners, the cosmos and us. The universe makes us in its image; we return the favor, making it in ours. Its not always easy to separate what is out there from what is in us or even to know to what extent these are useful distinctions. We are what we are because the universe has made atoms and space and time just so; we look back at what made us, and see, to some extent, ourselves.

Still, we cant help trying. We can no more resist the urge to get to know the universe than a baby can resist the lure of its own fingers and toes. This is who we are. This is where we came from, what we will become. Home, sweet home.

For the past seven years, Ive been blessed with the opportunity to carry on an ongoing, public discourse about the universe, the stuff its made of, the people who explore it (or just plain admire it), in a column in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, called Mind Over Matter. Those essays are revised and collected here, along with a few earlier columns from Discover and the New York Times. Although there is no separating the business of seeing from what is seen, or what is seen from who is doing the looking (and how), Ive made the following attempt:

Section I, The I of the Beholder, focuses on the central role of us, the seers and seekers, and our relationship with what is seen. Section II, Stuff, focuses on whats out there. Section III, Doing It, focuses on some of the people who converse with the cosmos, how they do it, the obstacles they encounter. Section IV, Political Science, focuses on some obvious connections between the natural world and political and social issues.

I would like to thank the LA Times for giving me the perch from which to carry on this dialogue, my Harcourt editor Jane Isay for finding the order in the chaos, the faculty and students of UCLAs GE70 cluster for a steady source of inspiration, and most of all GE70 alum Jenny Lauren Lee for stitching all the disparate pieces of this collection together. Id also like to thank Roald Hoffmann and Robin Hirsch for helping include New Yorkers in this conversation through our first-Sunday-of-the-month science events at the Cornelia Street Caf, Dennis Overbye for coming up with the tagline Mind Over Matter, and Mary Lou Weisman for wisdom in all things. As the last essay (Oops) attests, making mistakes goes with this territory. Still, my deep thanks goes out to those who have helped keep the oops factor in this book at a minimum, especially Janet Conrad, Mark Morris, and Tom Siegfried.

You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but the easiest person to fool is yourself. Especially when the products of your own wishful thinking are also being peddled by higher authorities.

So it struck me as particularly apt that I took a class of UCLA students to the oddball Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City during a week when the Enron mirage was dissolving; when dubious claims for the production of fusion energy got major play in the journal Science; when Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson was trying to turn peoples attention to wholesale extinction of life; when military planners were blithely bringing back nuclear weapons as instruments of foreign policy.

The struggle of science has always been somehow to get outside ourselves, so we can see the world objectively. The struggle has always been doomed. We each live our mental life in a prison-house from which there is no escape, wrote the British physicist James Jeans. It is our body; and its only communication with the outer world is through our sense organseyes, ears, etc. These form windows through which we can look out on to the outer world and acquire knowledge of it.

The windows are cloudy, of course, veiled by expectations, distorted by frames of reference, disturbed by our very attempts to look. Especially when we stand so close that we cant see through the fog of our own hot breath, our own smudgy fingerprints.

This is the sort of thinking bound to trail you like a wake out of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. If you havent been there, Im not going to recommend it. It will make you laugh, but it will also upset you. It will leave you wondering if you just didnt get it, or if you got it too well, or if someone was pulling your leg, or if you were pulling your own. You will wonder what thoughts are yours, and which are planted, and why we are so exceedingly well wired to believe official pronouncementsespecially when they are obscure, pompous, and make us feel a little stupid.