‘Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.’
Leonardo da Vinci
I wonder whether the planners for the 2014 film ‘Interstellar’ had Leonardo da Vinci’s quote in mind when they scripted Cooper’s line, ‘We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.’ Humanity may struggle with a lot of Gordian knots today, but I still believe it is Leonardo’s reflection which inspires us rather than Cooper’s lament, and especially in the field of science.
The journey of scientific discovery is there for us all to see, and its acceleration over the past two hundred years has been impressive. It all started with the wheel, a structure without parallel in animal evolution but which must have enabled a total transformation for prehistoric humans.
More recently, the major breakthroughs have been electricity, flight, radio communication and computing. So far as the discovery of radio communication was concerned, imagine people’s initial astonishment at their ability to communicate over vast distances with no visible indication of connection.
There are two extraordinary features about this process of scientific discovery: firstly, that humans — unlike any other animal species — have the ability to build on knowledge acquired by previous generations and thereby to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’. Secondly, how current and future generations take these amazing discoveries for granted so quickly, with the only question being, ‘what comes next?’.
It is the human capability not just to think and memorise which makes possible this ability to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, but also to pass on that acquired intelligence to future generations. In contrast, a horse may well learn to be scared of a vehicle on the road, but it cannot pass on that knowledge to its colt or filly, which will have to learn it all over again for themselves.
Mind you, it is extraordinary how humans just assume that the latest discovery will be embedded for centuries to come, and that they will not be overtaken by new discoveries.
Think of the canal system: it may provide enormous leisure enjoyment to people today, but the purpose behind the construction of this amazing network was to transport fuel and heavy goods at a time when horses were the only mode of transport. All that is now redundant, and the main challenges remaining are for removing weeds out of their boats' propulsion systems and providing sufficient water for people to travel through the canal network.
Redundancy caused by overtaken technology continues to beset us. The 19th century railway network throughout the United Kingdom was quickly overtaken by road transport: this was fully recognised by Dr. Richard Beeching in the 1960s, however it didn’t prevent Lord Adonis and a series of governments since 2009 from persisting with the great white elephant of our time, which is costing about £1 billion per mile. Will we ever learn?
We need to look ahead in order to explore the potential new discoveries in the future which could result in such legacies. For example, huge investment is still being made in airport expansion: the proposed third runway at Heathrow is still a very live issue. But will we always need two-mile runways to get aircraft into the sky? Or will some genius scientist in the mould of Tesla or Marconi discover the way to reverse gravity without requiring huge consumption of hydrocarbon energy? In his book, ‘The Hunt for Zero Point’, Nick Cook provided some interesting glimpses into that possibility.
And what of our huge investment in hydrocarbons? Notwithstanding the archaic calls of Trump and Farage to ‘drill, baby drill’, the operational cost of renewable energy is now well below that of fossil fuels — and, as people in business know only too well, it is that production cost which drives real change. How long will it be before we must start dismantling oil wells, refineries and distribution systems?
Experience across the millenia has shown us that the frontiers of science are unimaginable, and that's why we must take care not to build up still more legacies of redundancy. We must also continue to foster those who continue to contribute by thinking ‘outside the box’: artificial intelligence is a great way of manipulating existing knowledge and creativity, but can it really introduce us to the next dimension? I doubt it.
Therefore, when Adam Cox invites us to join him in exploring the cosmic wormhole in this week's episode of The Hypnotist, who knows what we might discover within ourselves …
Gavin Oldham OBE
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