“The
human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around
a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies”
The
above quote, as famously put by Professor Stephen Hawking, aptly places our
place in the universe in perspective. The human race is but one of billions of
species that have walked on the Earth, and the Earth is, on planetary scales, a
very average planet, orbiting a very average star. The sun is just one out of
the estimated three hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is in
turn a pretty mundane collection of stars in the Universe where at least a
hundred billion others exist. If there is anything to be said about our place
in the universe, we can be almost certain that we are nowhere privileged. We are but a grain of sand in an endless ocean.
As if being insignificant weren't enough, we could even see ourselves as a 'chemical scum’. The major
elements that make up the human body, aside from primordial hydrogen, were
cooked up in the hearts of stars that have lived and died. We are made up of
nuclear ash, a chemical waste from the guts of dead stars. The elements that
make up you and I are no more special than a chunk of rotting log.
For centuries, we have pondered about our place in the Universe – it
seems almost as though mankind has had an obsession with wanting to be in a special
position, one in which all of existence revolves around. With the geocentric model of the universe
being mostly unchallenged for over a millennium, the advent of Copernican heliocentrism
seemed to have kicked start a wave of new discoveries that relegated our
position into the distant periphery.
Perhaps,
then, we shouldn’t quite determine how special we are from our literal place in
the cosmos, or the reductionist perspective of the individual elements that
make up our bodies. After all it isn’t a matter of substance that makes us who we are.
Human life, as many would agree, is worth more than its weight in gold. Life
differs from non-life not in terms of substance, but in terms of information.
Digital information, arranged in bits of the nucleotide sequence that form the
library of blueprints that make up all organisms.
It
is almost unarguable that the trait that distinguishes us humans from any other
species lies in a single organ: the brain. Not only can information be
transferred in the form of genetic language from ancestor to descendant, it can now be stored, understood,
and processed in a multiplicity of ways, limited only by the complex circuitry of neuronal complexes. Although the brain isn’t unique to
humans, the ability of human brains to comprehend the natural world to such great
depth beyond any other species is what has enabled us to dominate the globe.
Furthermore, the
ability of the human mind to comprehend the workings of the universe stretches
above and beyond the purposes of hunting or maintaining survivability. It is
more than just a curiosity of runaway evolution. It represents, above all, the
universe understanding itself. We are in the universe, and a very small part
indeed, but in some sense, the universe is also in us.
One
video that I came across some time ago that inspired me to make this post is a
speech made by physicist Dr. David Deutsch. His speech at the TED talks, titled
‘The Chemical Scum that Dream of Distant Supernovae”, describes what knowledge
actually is. The ideas here represent what insights science brings to epistemology,
or the philosophy of knowledge, and how this perspective of what knowledge
actually is relates to our unique position, metaphorically speaking, in the
universe.
The
main part that I found incredibly thought provoking was his description of what
knowledge is, with reference to Quasars billions of light years away. It is
also this amazing speech that I would end this post with. For convenience, as
well as for the benefit of those who are unable to view the video, I have typed
out a slightly paraphrased transcript of what he said in the video below.
“Look out even further than [the Earth], with a telescope, and you’ll see things that look like stars. They are called ‘Quasars’. Quasars originally meant ‘Quasi Stellar Object’, which means things that look a little bit like stars. But they’re not stars, and we know what they are. Billions of years ago, and billions of light years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a supermassive black hole. And then, intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse (and some of the matter) back out in the form of tremendous jets, which illuminated lobes the brilliance of a trillion suns.
The
physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a
jet. We couldn’t survive for an instant in it; the language breaks down when
trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a
little like experiencing a supernova explosion, but at point blank range, and
for millions of years at a time. And
yet, that jet happened at precisely such a way, that billions of years later on
the other side of the universe, some bit of ‘chemical scum’ could accurately
describe, model, predict, and above all, explain what was happening there in reality.
The one physical system (i.e. the brain) contains an accurate model of the
other (i.e. the quasar). It’s not just a superficial model of it (although it
contains that as well), but also an explanatory model embodying the same
mathematical relationship and same causal structure. Now that is knowledge.
And
if that weren’t amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure
resembles the other is increasing with time, and that is the growth of
knowledge. The laws of physics have this special property: physical objects as
unlike as they could possibly be can nevertheless embody the same mathematical
and causal structure, and to do it more and more so over time.
We
are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its
structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of
everything. This place, and not other places in the universe, is a hub, which
contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the
rest of physical reality. So far from being insignificant, the fact that the
laws of physics allow this, or even mandate that this can happen, is one of the
most important things about the physical world. “
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