"Bonjour," "Swiss Air 833 with information Bravo at 170." "833, bon jour." "Bravo 805, NH1017, prepare for direct approach." "100 to cross Sony 200 or above." "Swiss Air 833 is cleared to 100 to pass Sony 200 or above." "Our final check is completed." "Cleared to land." "I tell you, no matter how much you may like to go Swiss Air, one thing you can't call the experience is a flight of fancy." "Nothing so irrational." "But efficient, yes." "You know their boast." "You want the right time, you set your watch by one of their touchdowns." "Still, what would you expect from a nation of clock makers?" "Even the trams run on time." "They're a tick-tock lot, the Swiss." "I mean, look around." "Life here is logical, orderly, efficient." "They obey the law because the discipline it imposes on the community makes it organized enough to achieve one of the highest standards of living in the entire world." "All you need here is money." "The view they take here, though, is, if you think about it, the epitome of what the modern scientific world we live in is supposed to be about:" "cool, rational common sense." "With science to explain everything-- because, ultimately, everything is knowable-- there's nowhere to go but onwards and upwards." "It's an attitude we inherited, and nobody took to it more enthusiastically than the Swiss about 300 years ago from Newton" "You know, that the universe and everything in it runs like a giant clock, with god the great timekeeper in the sky." "It's 1801, and in Geneva, a visiting Italian is, although he doesn't know it, about to trigger the destruction of the universe with a box he's taking to a party." "Being a swiss party, of course, it's a hair-raisingly serious affair." "Today's shocking display, ho ho:" "all you ever wanted to know about electricity." "All they know about electricity, of course, is not much, a mystery force that goes through people who hold hands and makes sparks." "Electricity also attracts some things and repels others." "And apparently the way electrically charged things do attract and repel each other happens in straight lines and depends on how far apart they are, just like Newton said everything should." "Good old Newton, always right." "Meanwhile, enter our Italian, Giuseppe Volta, with his pal Brugnatelli, on their way to see Napoleon after a brief stopover to galvanize genevan society with this," "Volta's pile of copper and wet pasteboard disks that, would you believe it, makes nonstop electricity as long as you keep it damp." "And the destruction of the universe?" "The pile would spark that off." "Volta's pile caused sparks in more ways than one, because it immediately set the public and the scientists off in that direction, with the public heading for the wonder technology it has mistakenly taken science to be ever since." "Like arcing, for instance." "The same year as that demo back in Geneva," "Humphry Davy in England was sparking current between two carbon rods, producing a brilliant white flash and turning the world on to electric light." "Military gents started exploding mines remotely." "And medical quacks gave shock treatment for everything from infertility to drowning." "Volta's pal Brugnatelli explored the mysteries of electrolysis." "Put the leads from a pile into a solution, say, of salt, sodium chloride, and it splits into sodium metal and chlorine gas." "Great technique for extracting metals." "Or, in Brugnatelli's case, he was coining it, depositing gold from a solution onto medallions." "Electroplating, that." "Turned out great for the table-setting business." "Meanwhile, the scientists were going off the rails." "Mysterious things were happening, because although chemistry could be caused by electricity, electrolysis, it could also happen the other way round." "A solution like lead acid could produce a current." "So was there some connection between electricity and chemistry?" "Interesting train of thought, that." "And it fitted the romantic ideas of the time, with social misfits like Byron and Shelley fetching up here at the Castle of Chillon to write second-rate poems about the lonely grandeur of the Alps and all that back-to-nature stuff." "Because the philosophy behind their reference was called Natural Philosophy." "It had to do with everything in existence being the product of two conflicting forces that resolved themselves into a higher unity after conflicting first, you understand." "All very mystic stuff." "But you can see how that kind of thinking would leap at any new example of a force like electricity to see if it would conflict with anything else around." "And one thing those loony Romantics had noticed was how very easy it was to get lost in these parts, as lightning caused your compass needle to go haywire while you wandered, lonely as a cloud, getting totally sodden in alpine storms." "Speaking of which..." "That's better." "Speaking of which, as I said, in 1820, an immensely boring dane called Oersted, during a lecture in Copenhagen, applied the basic nature philosophy idea of conflicting forces and decided that if he forced the force, electricity," "by shoving it down a high-resistance wire, the wire, with all the effort, would go incandescent, like lightning was." "And since lightning made compass needles go funny, he thought if he brought a needle close to his wire, something philosophically meaningfully should happen, shouldn't it?" "Sure enough, something did." "The compass needle went, so to speak, wild." "And it did it even when separated from the wire by wood, water, glass, metal, anything friend Oersted could think of." "And it did it all round the wire in a uniform circular manner, even though Newton said everything acted in straight lines." "The electricity in the wire was obviously giving off something strange that affected the magnetic needle." "Electricity was setting up some kind of magnetic field." "Now, there was only one minor awkwardness about that;" "it was supposed to be impossible." "For a start, what was the field?" "And for a finish, how did it work?" "And for a second finish, in what?" "One year later, another intense nature philosophy person called Faraday was trying to answer the questions" "Oersted had left in the air." "An electric wire would generate a magnetic force that actually made a floating magnet circle it, so Faraday reckoned the opposite ought to happen." "Sure enough, it did." "Faraday got turned on by the thought that if an electric current made a magnetic field, maybe a magnetic field would make an electric current." "He set up a compass needle to detect the current if it was there." "It wasn't, except when he switched the magnetic field on and off." "So it was a changing field did it." "Well, there was an easier way to put a changing magnetic field near a wire:" "push a magnet in and out of a coil." "So that was it." "Just moving the magnet made surges of current in the wire." "You could see the current;" "the needle swung." "But why had moving a magnetic made electricity?" "Then he got it." "When you moved the magnetic, the wire cut through its magnetic force lines." "In 1831, Faraday was cutting magnetic force lines with a spinning copper disk and making electricity happen in the disk as long as you cared to turn the handle." "Well, before the public could begin to ponder the philosophic implications of Faraday's deeply meaningful discoveries, here in the United States, they had once again been hijacked by the glitter of technology as assorted american blacksmiths, traveling dentists," "civil servants, and other such riffraff dazzled the eye and numbed the brain with the latest mechanical marvels." "Basically, this avalanche of electromagnetic gizmos, seen here in model form, came in two types." "This lot used the ability to switch on and off the magnetic effect of a current to attract a piece of metal up and down or back and forth." "Most of them linked the movement to a flywheel." "And this one drove machine belts in a factory." "And so on." "The other wonder machine in this electromagnetic extravaganza used the other effect, the way a moving magnet will make current in a wire." "Here's the moving magnet." "Here's the power." "This beautiful-looking thing would one day lead to electricity generators." "And these little wizards, as you will already have guessed, did pave the way to real electric motors." "All good knockout stuff." "But for sending the public right off on the wrong track about science, in 1844, nothing equaled this magic sound." "The Morse key interrupted a current going down a wire and made a magnet turn on and off at the other end." "Morse code united the United States." "Meanwhile back in Cambridge, the study of how electromagnetism actually worked seemed to be leading scientists right up the creek." "You see, for 200 years, Newton's version of the universe had explained absolutely everything." "According to him, the universe was made up of bits of matter surrounded by empty space, and force interacted between the bits, like gravity." "And the force was supposed to go in straight lines, you remember, and act instantaneously through empty space from one bit to another." "Well, electricity wasn't doing any of that." "The force lines were curved." "It was in space and not in the wire or the magnets." "And as for going instantaneously through empty space, was it empty?" "Not according to a guy called Young, who'd looked at light and found that it acted like this." "Like ripples." "Two sets of ripples moving outwards-- here they are-- meet and interact like this, don't they?" "Some waves meet and boost each other: the light bands." "Others cancel each other out:" "the dark bands." "So did light act like ripples?" "If you try it with light going through two holes and then meeting and interacting, you get the same effect." "You see those light and dark bands?" "Interfering waves of light." "Now, the reason Young's idea was dynamite was that if light did travel in waves, it wasn't instantaneous." "It took time." "And it had to be waves in something." "He called the something "ether"." "Out there, in here, everywhere in the universe, invisible stuff making waves and maybe also carrying electricity and magnetism." "It would certainly give Faraday's lines of force a place to be." "But it would also blow Newton's idea of empty space right out the window." "So the fellow who did that in 1861-- a scottish Faraday fan called Maxwell here in Trinity College, Cambridge-- began with caution." "First he made himself a mental model of these mysterious ether forces and imagined them to act like fluids, because you could measure what fluids did." "A cross-section of what was in Maxwell's mind might have looked something like this." "The idea-- and it was pretty weird-- was, tubes of invisible magnetic force surrounded by spinning cylinders of ether." "The faster the ether spins, the more intense the magnetism." "Well, I said it was weird." "Electricity?" "He made that little balls of ether." "A current would be moving balls." "And magnetism could move balls and make electricity or vice versa." "Typically complicated bit of victoriana." "Now, the figures Maxwell got from his mental model told him that if, when the lines of force first came into existence, say, in a live wire and then radiated out to take up position around it," "they should radiate at a certain speed, almost exactly the speed of light." "Although he had no proof," "Maxwell jumped in with both feet." ""You'll see," he said." ""Electricity, magnetism, and light are all one wave moving through the ether."" "Good-bye, Newton?" "Well, nobody could test Maxwell's theory, so now the scientists were going that way." "By now, the public had the bit between its teeth about the wonders of electricity as the first regular trans-atlantic telegraph started in 1866." "Science was indubitably progress." "There were no two ways about that." "And what scientists did was obvious enough." "They turned out gadgets, didn't they?" "To a public whose knowledge of science was rising to zero, one man more than any other was to stamp the image of the tireless scientific genius at work for the betterment of mankind on their consciousness forever, because he made sure of his P.R." "Thomas A. Edison, inventor extraordinaire." "In this laboratory here, he filed no less than 1,039 patents." "You're looking at the world's first inventions factory." "Well, more of a shrine, really." "Henry Ford was so taken with Edison that he moved this lot lock, stock, and the tree outside all the way from New Jersey to this museum here outside Detroit, all to the memory of a man who must have been absolutely insufferable." "Edison used to say, "I can never pick something up without wanting to improve it."" "Except he didn't." "15 loyal and very unknown specialists worked very behind the scenes to obey his pleasant little rule of life:" ""There's a better way." "Find it."" "He himself worked to a set of rules." "One, get the money first." "Two, find the market." "Three, only after one and two, produce the goods." "He reckoned to turn out a minor invention every 10 days and something big every six months." "Modest, no?" "But the stuff in this hallowed spot did somewhat knock the world for six, it must be said, like the phonograph." "Mary had a little lamb." "Its fleece was white as snow." "And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go." "The repeating telegraph." "The electric sewing Machine." "The electric pen." "And perhaps the most illuminating example of why the public was led by the nose into taking technology to be science, the lightbulb." "Bingo!" "Well, it would have been bingo if you'd never seen it before, wouldn't it?" "It took him two years and 6,000 tries to get the right filament inside that bulb." "Well, it took his loyal sidekicks two years and 6,000 tries, et cetera." "Now, by itself, that isn't going to exactly roll 'em in the aisles, is it?" "But then Edison didn't just switch on." "Edison switched on!" "Typically, Edison did it on the grand scale, producing everything needed from switches to cables to generating plant." "He strung lights up all around the laboratory and in 1879 invited a few people-- 3,000-- in a special train to see this, street lighting." "Boffo success." "Wasn't science wonderful?" "Science wasn't here." "It was having a bad time with electromagnetic radiation elsewhere." "Hello, I'd like to call England, please." "Another one of his inventions." "Hello!" "The year after Edison lit up, an american living in London was to show an amazing discovery concerning electromagnetic force to local scientific bigwigs." "This clockwork bit automatically breaks an electric circuit for a split second at regular intervals." "Several hundred yards away from the clockwork, out in the garden, the american, a music professor called Hughes." "This is Hughes, and this is his discovery." "Listen." "Hmm." "When the circuit back in the house gets broken, you can hear a noise in a telephone receiver if it's attached to a battery via a loose contact, because Hughes reckons the loose contact is being zapped by waves of electromagnetic energy" "coming from the short-circuiting spark indoors." "But the waves aren't coming through a wire." "They're wireless waves." "Get it?" "Well, the bumbling british boffin doesn't." "There they are on the far side of the lake, sir." "Yes, I see." "Alas for poor old Hughes, the demonstration was a flop." "All the credit went to a german 7 years later." "The english just couldn't believe what they were hearing." ""Mysterious airwaves traveling hundreds of yards?" "Harrumph!"" "Conduction, Mr. Hughes." "Conduction." "This is nothing new." "This summer, the Cleveland Ind" "We're not alone;" "it's a universal prob" "But I think the" "Well, the technology freaks really had a field day a bit later on when the transmission range went up to 4,000 miles because of a fellow called Marconi, who also found a way to use the mysterious waves called radio." "The trouble was, now everybody was happily making waves, the question still remained, what were the waves traveling in?" "What was the so-called ether?" "And why couldn't anybody ever find it to answer that question?" "Well, in 1887, a couple of people here in America decided to have a crack at finding out by shooting light beams through the ether in different directions." "Let me give you their reasoning." "Suppose this boat I'm on is the Earth traveling through the ether of space, say, at 5 miles an hour." "If I shoot a light beam ahead at 6 miles an hour, let's say the beam's that boat there." "It'll creep ahead and leave me behind at 1 mile an hour, the difference in our speeds." "So it'll take quite a while to get, say, half a mile ahead." "At that point when it turns round, of course, our combined speeds will bring us back together again fast." "But if, at the same time," "I send another light beam, that boat, at the same speed as the other one," "6 miles an hour, sideways to me the same distance out and back, he will get back sooner." "Look." "Go!" "See how the sideways beam is moving off quite fast relative to me, getting to the half mile point quickly?" "And the beam pushing out ahead is going to take longer because, relative to me, it's only doing 1 mile an hour." "The sideways beam's already turning back." "Now, if real light beams did that, it would be proof that the ether existed, and you could measure the ether through what it was doing to the light beams." "Those two americans I was talking about," "Michelson and Morley, did this great experiment here at Cleveland, at the university." "Do you remember Young and the light waves and stuff and those interference patterns you get when light waves mix when they're out of phase?" "These light and dark bands here?" "This is the trick they used to see one light beam returning sooner than the other." "Come on;" "I'll show you." "Okay, let's take it that this Lecture Hall and the Earth are going through space-- well, they better be-- that way." "So that's straight ahead." "Here's the light source." "Send the beam out, and split it with this half mirror." "One half of the beam goes that way." "You remember that's the straight ahead direction." "And the other half of the beam goes this way, out to the side." "Now, you give the beams a nice long trip by bouncing them back and forward between these mirrors for one beam and these mirrors for another beam." "And where they finish the trip, you recombine them here and bring them back out here." "I'll show you better with a laser beam and, better still, with some smoke." "Now, since the straight ahead beam will be slowed down more than the sideways beam, the two beams will recombine here, out of phase, with the straight ahead beam lagging behind, right?" "All mixing light beams make interference patterns, so that's what you get to start with here." "I'll show you on this card." "See?" "Michelson and Morley reckoned that if the ether existed, this pattern should be altered when you changed the angle the beams were being shot through it." "So to do that, they rotated the entire experiment and took 16 readings on no less than 36 rotations..." "Just to be sure they were seeing what they were seeing, which was no change in the interference fringe at all." "And you know what that meant." "No shift, no ether." "No ether, no anything." "You could hear the stunned silence all the way to Ireland." "Here in Ireland was a Dublin physics professor called George Fitzgerald with two ambitions:" "to get off the ground and to explain the light beam failure." "So while he has yet another go at the former, here are his thoughts on the latter." "Electromagnetic waves travel in ether, so ether has to be everywhere, no?" "Oh, hang on a minute." "Where was I?" "Oh, yeah, if ether is everywhere, then it's kind of the universal absolute thing to measure everything against." "If you can't even find the ether, measurement isn't possible." "That's why the american experiment was such a disaster... except to a nimble irish mind like this one." "And Fitzgerald's solution was beautifully irish:" "moving through ether shrank things, so the american light beam instrument that had pointed forward had been shrunk by just enough to shorten the forward light beam trip and make it equal to the sideways unshrunk bit." "But you couldn't measure the shrink, 'cause the ether would shrink your measuring equipment." "Right." "Away you go, professor." "God bless your honor." "Sadly for this last imaginative defender of the Newton and common-sense view of things, thanks to a viennese philosophy teacher, everything Fitzgerald and the other people were trying to do to explain how the ether worked was to crash in ruins." "The viennese genius who turned everything upside down was called Ernst Mach." "Mach turned everything upside down 'cause that's what he spent his time doing:" "turning people upside down... or sideways or round and round." "By 1895, Mach had spent years investigating what happened to people's senses when they were put into every position he could conceive of." "He'd blindfold them, for instance, and then tilt them in an environment that was also moving and test their sense of direction." "Mach came up with some of the basic ideas of modern perceptual science." "He was really trying to find out how much of what you observed was affected by your senses-- the way, for example, you could be in something that was moving up or down and yet feel as if you weren't." "Mach became convinced that much of what you sensed about the world was in your mind and that everything you could ever say about reality was subjective, altered by conditions like temperature or sound, acceleration, pressure, even mood." "There was nothing out there that you could be certain of unless you were in direct contact with it." "Were you going down here, or was Vienna going up?" "But it was how Mach used his work on perception that made him such a big wheel among the scientific thinkers of the time, because he argued that it showed all a scientist could be sure of was what his own personal experience," "his five senses showed him." "Take movement, for instance, forces on you acting up or down or from side to side." "You might invent some scientific law to explain those forces, but you should always remember that it was you that invented the law." "For Mach, there was no reason why the rest of the cosmos should be doing what your little bit was doing." "so science should only describe, not try to explain." "And even description is relative." "I mean, am I moving, or is the background moving?" "Or take the position of a star." "It depends on where you see it from, which depends on the date and time, which depends on the position of the Earth in solar orbit in a solar system moving round and round at the edge of the galaxy," "which itself might be drifting away from some other galaxy, and so on and so on." "So say you've decided that I'm moving and the background's standing still." "How do you know the background isn't moving relative to something else, hmm?" "That's why there was no point in playing around with light beams to try and find some theoretical universal absolute;" "there were no absolutes you could ever know anything about." "They couldn't find the ether, said Mach, because there was no ether to find." "Well, you can guess what that did to Newton." "Quite." "And there was worse to come from people working on these things-- well, these things, cathode ray tubes." "Another mystery force, cathode rays." "Anything they hit glowed, and you could make the glow move with a magnet." "Electricity was affected by magnetism." "So were the cathode rays electric?" "Well, if you took some cathode rays and used a magnet to aim them at two little gold foil leaves, the leaves separated, which they only did if they were getting electrified." "A positively charged rod would cancel that effect, so that meant the cathode rays were making negative electricity." "In 1897, an englishman called Thompson, who thought cathode rays were really particles, worked out a technique for weighing them." "He changed the direction of the stream of particles with a magnetic field and then saw how much of an electrical field was needed to straighten it out again." "Sure enough, they turned out to be particles of negative electricity-- we call them electrons-- that were a thousand times smaller than the smallest atom." "Thompson reckoned he had the basic unit of electricity there in his measuring tube." "But the big shock was this." "Ultraviolet light waves would knock negative electrons out of metal." "Look; the gold leaves collapse." "By the turn of the century, what with waves of the mysterious force rippling out through ether nobody could find, an incredible shrinking irish instrument, and Mach saying it was all meaningless anyway, and Thompson's light rays" "knocking subatomic particles out of metal, well, poor old Newton's universe had more holes in it than this bit of gruyere." "And the physicists were, to put it mildly, cheesed off with the whole affair... until, fittingly, a swiss government bureaucrat called Einstein simply invented a new universe." "And the reason I'm telling you this on board a Concorde flight is because Concorde goes at over Mach 2." "That's the Mach you know and who gave Einstein the idea." "Two stands for twice the speed of sound, which Mach identified, which means I'm going at quite a lick, which makes my point for me, because Einstein's cosmic rewrite of the laws of nature just said that everything in the universe was relative," "and everything you observed about it depended on the frame of reference you were in at the time." "Like this Concorde cabin, where I'm standing still, dropping my pen in comfort." "In this cabin, I'm not going at 1,400 miles an hour, am I?" "And everything works like that, conditioned by its frame of reference." "All the electrics in all the instruments on board this plane obey the same laws they would if they were standing still, because inside this frame, like me, they are not going at Mach 2." "And all the laws of nature behave the same way." "This beam of light is going out in all directions at 186,000 miles a second, and being on Concorde makes no difference to its speed forwards, backwards, or sideways." "That's why the way the Earth was moving made no difference to the Michelson and Morley light speed." "It never could have." "You can never measure the speed of light except relative to your frame of reference." "And, like Mach said, you could never measure it against anything outside your frame of reference, because you would never know what it was doing relative to you." "There was no absolute, because you could never know anything was absolute." "So that sorted out the light beam and the ether business." "As for Thompson's light knocking electrons out of metal, well, Einstein said obviously light came in bits and knocked bits out of the metal." "And the more intense the light, the more bits it knocked out." "However, this moving moment in the study of light went almost entirely unnoticed in the light of another moving moment in the study of light, the movies, another great example of the triumph of technology." "It was probably the movies above all that convinced the millions that in this new 20th century, fortune and success would come only to the kind of fellow who kept up with science." "The modern hero would be the man who could change with the times." "Taking advantage of the latest technology was going to be the way to get ahead." "The movies showed that without science, life was no fun at all." "The music, of course, wasn't really there." "It still had to be played by somebody in the movie theater watching the film." "Until somebody used the light going through the film to hit metal to produce electrons to make electricity for a loudspeaker." "And the public's love affair with technology really took off with the talkies." "Let's not knock it." "I'd be out of work without it." "But it did all ignore the awful implications of what Einstein had said." "If the more intense the light was, the more electrons it knocked out of the wall, that sounded as if light wasn't a wave at all, more like a stream of particles." "Einstein said, "sure" and called them photons." "That's how something like this works." "When I remove the card, the stream of light particles can hit a metal target." "That gives off electrons, that makes electricity, and that closes the door." "Well, if light wasn't a wave, that blew the last hundred years' work right away, didn't it?" "But then what about Young and the way light interfered with itself to produce those light and dark ripples the way only waves can?" "What about that?" "In 1923, the same year of that movie you saw, a frenchman called de Broglie muddied the waters by coming at it the other way round." "If waves could be particles, could particles be waves?" "'Cause if they could, they'd make patterns like waves, wouldn't they?" "Now, this was getting out of hand." "A wave's a wave, and a particle's a particle, right?" "Wrong." "And in 1927, an accident proved it." "Two americans called Davisson and Germer were quietly shooting electrons from an electron gun at a nickel target to see how the electrons bounced off when the vacuum tube in which their whole gizmo worked cracked." "Disaster." "The air coming into it contaminated the target." "Having heated it up and so on to clean it, back to work." "Only this time, when they moved their little electron collector around the target to catch the electrons, no electrons." "Then lots, then none, then lots, and so on." "Big investigation." "Turned out the reheat on the target had produced big crystals on its surface." "Now, in crystals, atoms are neatly spaced like that." "So now the electrons were coming in and bouncing off but in a series, like that." "Now, just supposing those electrons were waves, they'd do this, wouldn't they?" "And those waves would interact like waves do, building up or canceling out, so you'd get lots, none, lots, none, lots, none." "Interference ripples." "Don't believe me?" "Look." "Modern equipment." "Vacuum tube inside electron gun and target." "The electrons scatter out here." "I'll fire the gun." "See?" "Interference ripples." "Particles are waves." "Now, if you're getting a bit worried about how things can be two things at once, hold on to your subatomic hats, because the bottom is about to drop out of everything." "I'll go slow, because I won't understand it if I don't." "In 1927, a fellow called Heisenberg decided to take a look at what these particle electrons and the waves they seem to go with were up to." "And he announced that you could either say where an electron was by examining an individual intense wave crest-- the electron would be in there somewhere-- or how fast it was going by looking at a whole group of waves moving," "getting the general speed." "But then you wouldn't know which wave crest had the electron." "So position or speed but not both." "And, worse, to look, you had to shine a light to see, you know, and the light particles would hit the electrons, so you could never be sure that the electrons were where they were," "doing what they were doing naturally or because you'd hit them." "Get it?" "Heisenberg called this drain down which everything went the uncertainty principle." ""Now we know," he said, "that we shall never know."" "He said that because you can't know if it's a particle or a wave." "There's nothing at the fundamental level of existence that you can see as it is, because in seeing it, you do something to it." "There's no true, basic reality to find beyond the one you yourself make by looking, if there's any reality at all." "And in that case, which way is up, for god's sake?" "Yeah, this is the event." "It does not have very much energy in the calorimeters." "The size is about 100 Kilobytes, you said." "We're in the countdown now." "We wait two cycles." "Here at the high-energy physics laboratory outside Geneva, for scientists, the truth is, you can only talk about the universe in terms of probabilities." "You can never, by definition, be certain about it." "Well, this depends on the trigger rate as well, I guess." "But the reading time is slow." "You see what that implies." "The comfortable certainty science is supposed to provide isn't there anymore." "But we ignore that fact." "We only see the technology." "The electron that caused all the trouble makes a digital watch work and all that electronics, and that's good enough." "As far as we're concerned, the world is still the same as it was at the beginning of this program, Newton's world, when there was a true reality, final certainty, order, with everything knowable, a swiss clockwork-type world." "But, as you've seen, in science, that world is long gone." "We talk about living with uncertainty, but it's this kind of uncertainty:" "war, crime, disaster, famine, uncertainty about how tomorrow will turn out." "But in some form or other, it will turn out." "That's not the kind of uncertainty those guys back down that hole live with, where, ultimately, reality itself is only what you say it is because it's only there when you and your amazing technology decide it is" "in the form your instruments give it." "So time, for instance, is only what your clock says or when your plane takes off, nothing more, which is okay as long as you don't pretend it's some kind of real reality, the one we create," "if you accept that as we rush headlong into the future, it's a future already defined as the only one our instruments will take us to." "Check normal." "So is there any direction to our journey into knowledge, or do we make up the route as we go along?" "And if that's the case, what is knowledge?" "The next and final program will see where that question leads."