Adam Rutherford - The Universe through a keyhole: 30 Ways Science Proves Your Intuition Wrong

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We all like to believe in gut feelings, but intuition is a terrible guide. If we believed what our minds tell us, wed think the world is flat, the Sun orbits the Earth and that a day is made of 24 hours (its not).

At some point, we humans noticed how profoundly limited and biased our senses are, and how routinely our instincts fail. And so we invented science and mathematics to help us to see the world as it really is. In their joyful and exhilarating book, Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford take us on a journey of scientific discovery, from the origin of the universe to its inevitable ultimate demise, from the beginnings of life on Earth to the possibility of wondrous alien life forms elsewhere in the galaxies, from the darkest depths of infinity to the brightest recesses of our minds.

Along the way, theyll answer head-scratching questions like: Where did time come from? Do we have free will? Does my dog love me? And theyll share tales of great wisdom and hard work, including the many fumbles and mis-steps, blind alleys, blind luck and some really bad decisions that, when put together, amount to the biggest story of all: how a species of mostly bald apes, with unique and innate curiosity, decided not to be content with things as they appear, but to poke at the fabric of the universe and everything in it.

Reality is not what it seems; but if youre ready and willing to set off in search of it, this is your guide.

Rutherford & Frys Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything, Abridged. By Hannah Fry & Adam Rutherford, illustrations by Alice Roberts. Published by Bantam Press.

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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Bantam Press

Copyright Hannah Fry Limited and Adam Rutherford 2021
Illustrations copyright Professor Alice Roberts 2021

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

ISBN: 978-1-473-57150-1

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To the NHS, who saved both our lives during the writing of this book

Introduction

Close your eyes.

Admittedly, reading generally requires your eyes to be open. If you are holding a copy of this book, in a few seconds you will certainly need them open, because you cant read the rest of what were about to say with them shut, obviously.

But for now, close your eyes.

During that brief moment of darkness, not much changed. The words stayed on the page; the book, thankfully, was still in your hands. When you opened your eyes, indeed when you opened them this morning after some restful sleep, the light flooded in, and you recognized everything as pretty much the same as when youd closed them. Reality persists whether you are paying attention to it or not. All of this might seem very obvious. Silly, even. But this is a fact that, once upon a time, you had to learn.

Next time youre playing with a baby, try taking a toy and hiding it under a blanket in front of them. If theyre less than about six months old, they wont pull the blanket away to get the toy back, however much they were enjoying playing with it beforehand. Thats not because they lack the skill to grab and move the cloth its because, unlike you, they simply dont realize the toy still exists. To their tiny mind, it simply poufed out of existence the moment it vanished. This is why babies find the game of peekaboo such fun. Its why peekaboo is played by every culture, by all humans all around the world. When you place your hands in front of your face, a very young and immature mind assumes that you have literally disappeared, and possibly ceased to exist. The joy in discovering that your existence hasnt been erased from the universe shines out in the babys giggles when you take your hands away.

Peekaboo exemplifies quite how badly equipped humans are for comprehending the universe, and everything in it. Were not born with an innate understanding of the world around us. We have to learn that stuff including people doesnt just vanish when we are not looking at it. In babies, its an important milestone in development known as object permanence something that many other animals never quite manage to grasp. A crocodile can be subdued by covering its eyes. Some birds can be calmed by placing a cover over their cage. Its not just that they find the darkness soothing they dont realize the pesky human bothering them is still there, on the other side of the cloth.

Why should their brains care about object permanence? The primary motivation of almost every organism that has ever existed has been not to die at least, not until it has had a chance to reproduce. Most life on Earth is altogether unconcerned with the question of why things are the way they are. Dung beetles navigate at night using the Milky Way as their guide, with limited interest in the structures of galaxies, or the fact that almost all of the mass of the universe is (so far) unaccounted for. The tiny mites that live in your eyebrows are oblivious to the concept of symbiotic commensalism whereby they innocuously feed off us. Until now, you were probably entirely unaware of them too, but they are definitely there. A peahen has no interest in processing the complex equations that explain why she finds that ridiculous tail on a peacock so irresistibly sexy; she just kinda likes it.

Only one animal has ever asked these questions us. At some time in the past hundred thousand years or thereabouts, some mostly bald apes started to get curious about pretty much everything. The brains of these apes had been growing bigger over the previous million years or so, and they began doing things that no other animal before them had done. They started drawing, and painting, and making music, and playing peekaboo.

Its important to not get too mushy about this. Prehistoric life was still pretty wretched compared to today, and survival was still everyones primary concern. But our ancestors had taken a step away from the rest of nature by considering not just the immediate concerns of survival, but the whole universe, and their place in it. However, we are still apes and much of our brains and bodies is still fundamentally concerned with just living and reproducing. Physically, and genetically, we havent changed much in the last quarter of a million years. Take a woman or man from Africa 300,000 years ago, transport them forwards in time, tidy them up, give them a haircut and stick them in a nice dress or sports casual, and you wouldnt be able to pick them out of a crowd today. Much of our biological hardware is largely unchanged from a time when none of these highfalutin ideas about how the universe works were of much concern to anyone.