The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected

A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything

Marcelo Gleiser

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781684581085, 9781684581108
• eBook ISBN: 9781684581092
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Essays

A personal and engaging tribute to nature from a world-famous theoretical physicist. 
 
Marcelo Gleiser has had a passion for science and fishing since he was a boy growing up on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. As a world-famous theoretical physicist with hundreds of scientific articles and several books of popular science to his credit, he felt it was time to once again connect with nature in less theoretical ways. After seeing a fly-fishing class on the Dartmouth College green, he decided to learn to fly-fish, a hobby, he says, that teaches humility. In The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected, Gleiser travels the world to scientific conferences, fishing wherever he goes. At each stop, he ponders the myriad ways physics informs the act of fishing; how, in its turn, fishing serves as a lens into nature's inner workings; and how science engages with questions of meaning and spirituality, inspiring a sense of mystery and awe of the not yet known. Personal and engaging, The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected is a scientist's tribute to nature, an affirmation of humanity's deep connection with and debt to Earth, and an exploration of the meaning of existence, from atom to trout to cosmos. 
 
This softcover edition features a new essay by Gleiser on how we need a profound change of worldview if we are to have a vibrant future for our species in this fragile environment. He describes how this book was an incubator for his current thinking.

If you don’t expect the unexpected you will not find it.

HERACLITUS

1

Cumbria, Lake District, UK

On Unsolvable Mysteries

The journey had begun. I Googled “Fly-fishing Lake District,” and bingo! Lots of places to go, beautiful, pristine rivers and lakes filled with trout and grayling, salmon too, depending when you go. I had hiked through parts of the Lake District with my girlfriend when I was a graduate student in England during the mid-eighties. My misty memories of the place were suffused with breathtakingly beautiful barren hills and warm flesh. Fishing couldn’t have been further away from my mind then.

My next step was to choose a guide. Having but a few days to arrange everything, I e-mailed three names, all of guides based in the Lake District. The third on the list, Mr. Jeremy Lucas, was the one I decided to go with. Why? Well, Jeremy told me he would take me to the famous River Eden. I figured I couldn’t pass up a river with such a name.

In the end, it was a very serendipitous choice. Jeremy turned out to be precisely the kind of guide-mentor I needed. He was then a member of the English fly-fishing team and had just gotten the silver medal at the most recent world championship. How about that? The clumsy apprentice would be learning from someone of such eminence! I was nervous, fearing I would greatly embarrass myself. I knew my casting left much room for improvement and that I had a lot to learn. I kept thinking of the famous words from the Buddha: “All beginnings are obscure.” Fortunately, being a teacher helps you be a better student. I remembered that I too was a mentor and had students at all levels, from beginners to advanced. I was hoping that Jeremy would be as kind and patient with me as I try to be with beginners. You know that in order to learn you must want to learn. The world’s greatest teacher couldn’t teach someone who’s not willing to be taught. And I wanted to learn all right. So I had that going for me.

Sometimes things do seem to happen for a reason. Some call these events happy coincidences, others call them the work of God, or of many gods, while others see them as manifestations of your karma. Being an agnostic (more on this later), I tend to like the happy-coincidence choice better, finding supernatural maneuvering a far-fetched hypothesis. In fact, the whole notion of a supernatural influence doesn’t really make sense. After all, an “influence” denotes a physical occurrence or an event. And an occurrence is something that happens in the physical world through some kind of energy exchange. Any kind of energy exchange or force is very natural and requires a very natural cause. In other words, as soon as the supernatural becomes physical enough to be noticed or detected in some way, it can’t remain supernatural anymore. A “supernatural influence” is an oxymoron. That said, there have been a few events in my life that defy logical explanation; at any rate, that defy any logical explanation that I could come up with. Although my position may sound somewhat shocking—especially coming from a scientist—to those who bet on our ability to explain everything, I’d argue that some things are unexplainable. In fact, I’ll go further and argue that the unexplainable—to be distinguished from the not-yet-explained, which is the province of science—is unavoidable. And should be welcomed.

We are surrounded by mystery, by what we don’t know and, more dramatically, by what we can’t know. Hence my metaphor of the Island of Knowledge, which I elaborated in a recent book and briefly review here:¹ if our accumulated knowledge of the world makes up an island, the island grows as we learn more. (It may also occasionally shrink, as we discard an erroneous theory or explanation.) As with every island, this one is also surrounded by an ocean, in this case the ocean of the unknown. However—and here is the twist—as the island grows, so do the shores of our ignorance, the boundary between the known and the unknown. In other words, new knowledge generates new unknowns. Unless we stop asking questions about Nature, there is no possible end to our search. Furthermore, scattered along the ocean of the unknown are regions of unknowables, questions beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. We will have more to say about those later on.

Powerful as they are, our brains are limited, as are the tools of scientific inquiry, the machines we use to collect data about the world. Every measuring device has a range and a set precision. Telescopes can “see” only so far—that is, they can collect light from sources up to a certain distance. Whatever lies beyond their reach can’t be seen, even if it’s as real as what is seen. The same applies to microscopes, of course. Tiny things may escape detection, even if they are there, as real as the things we can see with the naked eye. If we continue into the world of subatomic particles, the smallest entities that exist, how far we can probe into the heart of matter depends on the machines we can build. Particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, can probe matter only up to a certain limit. Whatever exists below that limit goes undetected. We may increase the accuracy of our machines and thus probe smaller distances, but we can’t do this indefinitely, up to “zero” distance. There is no perfectly accurate, all-seeing measurement. We are permanently myopic to some fraction of what exists.

Therefore, we must conclude that this ever-growing body of knowledge called science cannot explain all there is for the simple reason that we won’t ever know all there is to explain. How could we possibly know all the questions to ask? To presume that we can know all there is to know only shows how supremely arrogant some people can be. It also flies against all that we have learned about how science generates knowledge.

Some may consider my task of exposing the limits of science to be dangerously defeatist, as if I were “feeding the enemy.” (I’ve been accused of that.) But that is surely not the case. To understand the limitations of science is not the same as labeling it as weak or exposing it to the criticism of antiscience groups, such as Bible literalists. It is, in fact, liberating to those who consider it, as it frees science from the burden of being godlike, all-knowing and all-powerful. It protects its integrity in a time when so many claims from scientists get inflated beyond their validity, either by those making them (they should know better) or by the media. Cases in point: statements that we understand the physical mechanisms behind the Big Bang, which we do not, or that life is ubiquitous in the Universe, which we know not. Scientists should be quite careful about what they say and how they say it, as their pronouncements carry weight in the social sphere. Furthermore, and this is a key point for us, why should we want to know everything? Imagine how sad it would be if, one day, we arrived at the end of knowledge. With no more questions to ask, our creativity would be stifled, our fire within extinguished. That, to me, would be incomparably worse than embracing doubt as the unavoidable partner of a curious mind. Science remains our most effective tool to explore the world in its myriad manifestations. However, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is a human invention and that, as such, it does have limitations. Every system of knowledge is fallible. It needs to be in order to evolve. Failure compels change. Besides, we don’t want reason to invade every corner of our existence. Some mysteries can be solved by reason, and others just can’t.

Immortally Beautiful Open Spaces

It was all arranged. Jeremy would pick me up on Saturday at 9:30 AM at Collingwood College, where the conference participants were housed. I could hardly contain my excitement. But first, of course, there was the conference, the official reason I was in Durham. Classical field theory . . . three words that everyone knows separately but that sound very bizarre and mysterious when put together. “Classical” relates to works—in classical music, or the classics of world literature, or classical Greece and Rome—that earned distinction; more than that, immortality. A work is a classic when, in spite of its old age, it’s relevant today and will still be when we are gone: classic is the opposite of ephemeral. People will be listening to Beethoven, Mahler, and the Beatles for a very long time. What books being written today will be read (or the futuristic equivalent of reading) two hundred years from now? Although I have my list, I doubt it will overlap much with those of others. It takes time for a work to become a classic.

“Field,” on the other hand, usually means open spaces where things grow, or where ball games are played. In Portuguese, the language I grew up speaking, campo—the word for field—can also mean countryside.

So, is a “classical field theorist” someone who comes up with theories of immortally beautiful open spaces? Sounds like poetry. In reality, though, classical field theorists, even if some may be poets or see Nature as a poem written without words, seek to express themselves in other ways. In classical physics—to distinguish it from quantum physics, which studies the world of atoms and subatomic particles—a “field” is a sort of extension in space of a source of some kind. For example, a body creates a temperature field around it that falls quickly with distance: moving away from the body, different points in space have different temperatures. The collection of these measurements, in principle including every point in space, is the temperature field around the body. If the body moves about, so does its temperature field, creating a “time-varying” field.

Another familiar field is the one any concentration of mass creates, the gravitational field. Every massive body attracts every other massive body. We all know that a rock suspended in air falls down if we let go. In reality, rock and Earth attract one another with equal (and opposite) strength, but the much more massive Earth “wins,” and it’s the rock that moves. (A body’s mass is a measure of its inertia, the resistance it offers to a change in its state of motion.) We can visualize a field surrounding both rock and Earth, extending their gravitational pull out into empty space, like someone wearing strong perfume. The concept of field alleviates the mystery of the Newtonian “action at a distance,” the fact that objects may attract one another (or repel one another) even without touching. We know that if we want to make a ball move we need to kick it or throw it. But the Sun makes the Earth move about it without any touching. Why is that? With the concept of the field, we can picture a ghostly presence in space interacting with the Earth and causing its motion.

Fields are usually strongest near the source, weakening with distance. A field that actually grew in intensity away from its source would probably violate a few natural laws.² As Isaac Newton showed in 1686, the gravitational attraction of any body with mass, from a rock to a person to the Sun, weakens with the square of the distance from it, a very precise statement that caused quite a sensation in Europe at the time. Newton’s new physics changed the way people saw the world around them. Likewise, the concept of field, a later, nineteenth-century invention due mostly to Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, changed the way we picture the nature of physical reality, what philosophers call ontology. Instead of the Newtonian particles moving about because of the action of forces, after Faraday and Maxwell we would picture particles moving under the influence of fields. Instead of an empty arena where things happened, an inert background, space became an entity filled with stuff, a concrete player in the nature of physical reality. No longer atoms moving in the Void, as the pre-Socratic philosophers Leucippus and Democritus had conjectured around 400 BCE but fields filling up the void and making things move about.

We are literally surrounded by fields: the gravitational field created by the Earth and by everything else that has mass; the electromagnetic fields from countless kinds of electromagnetic radiation, from the visible light from the Sun and lightbulbs to the invisible radio waves beamed from hundreds of FM and AM antennas, the ultra high-frequency radio waves from cell phones, the infrared heat from our bodies and every warm object . . . the list is very long.

In fact, for physicists like me who deal with the inner structure of matter and the cosmos, everything is a field of some sort, coming in two types: matter fields and force fields. Matter fields comprise essentially all the matter that makes up our bodies and the stuff around us: rocks, air, water, refrigerators, iPods, stars. Think of atoms and their constituent electrons, protons, and neutrons. Each one of these matter particles has an associated field that defines its identity: the electron has its field, and so does the proton. You can picture each particle as a chunky excitation of a field, a kind of energy knot that moves about in space and interacts with other energy knots. A suggestive (and only that) image is that of small waves moving atop the surface of a swimming pool, crashing against one another. The obvious difference is that water waves tend to disperse after colliding with other waves or obstacles, while particles tend to keep their shape.³

The other types of fields are force fields, which describe how matter particles interact with one another. Think of two people talking to each other. The people are the matter fields: they interact via words, their “communication field.” This field establishes a verbal link between them. According to modern physics, force fields are the communication fields of matter fields. And they come in several kinds (four so far). Pushing the analogy a bit further: just as people in different places speak different languages, different particles feel different forces. An electron, for example, has a tiny mass and a negative electric charge. So it attracts other electrons gravitationally (very weakly, owing to its tiny mass) and repels them electrically (much more strongly). These two force fields are needed to describe interactions between electrons. Back to our analogy, words are not the only way people interact. There are other “communication fields” that are used, such as looks and body movement. To fully describe how people interact, you need to include all possible “communication fields.”

A chunk of matter made of (electrically neutral) atoms, and hence with a mass and no net electric charge, gravitationally attracts other chunks of matter made of (electrically neutral) atoms. Consider, as an illustration, you and Earth, two sizable chunks of matter with vastly different masses. Each has an associated gravitational field. If you are far away from Earth—say, on Mars—the gravitational pull Earth exerts over you (and you over Earth) is so small as to be negligible. But as you come closer, the two fields overlap more strongly, and you feel a harder pull toward Earth. The gravitational field is the messenger, telling how the two chunks of matter should attract each other. More generally, force fields such as gravity or electromagnetism are the links, the bonds between matter fields. And they add up. Right now not just Earth but also the Sun, the Andromeda galaxy, the rings of Saturn, all the objects around you, your children away in school or your parents at work, your worst enemy, your secret love, the world’s most horrendous criminal as well as its most enlightened being, are pulling at you gravitationally. And you are pulling back at them. Fortunately, the pull weakens with (the square of the) distance and is sensitive to the amount of mass. So the attractions from faraway things and light objects don’t exert much of a pull on you. Otherwise, moving about would be a very complicated process, as massive objects would tend to blob together into a tangled mess.

Let’s pause for a second to contemplate how fluid this portrayal of the inner workings of Nature is, connecting everything and everyone. As the nineteenth-century naturalist John Muir wrote in My First Summer in the Sierra, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Physics tells us how this universal hitching works.

Field theorists describe the world combining mathematics with the results of experiments that measure how particles of matter—themselves excitations of fields like ripples on the surface of a lake—interact with each other via force fields. To a greater or lesser extent, everything influences everything else. Isolation is an abstraction, at best a useful approximation.

Reality is a weblike structure of mutually interdependent influences, of which we perceive very little.

We may now move on from fields to “classical.” Again, the me...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. Cumbria, Lake District, UK
• 2. São José dos Ausentes, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
• 3. Sansepolcro, Tuscany, Italy
• 4. Laxá River, Mývatnssveit, Iceland
• Epilogue to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author