Free Dancing Naked in the Mind Field by Kary Mullis Page A

what you’re licking.
    Some species have other, somewhat amazing to us, sensory abilities. They are amazing because we have this inaccurate perception that everything that is real is perceptible by atleast one of our senses, and invisible things are kind of freaky. A bumblebee can find its way, supposedly, by observing the polarization angle of light, which we ourselves can’t observe without equipment. Dogs can sense when their masters may be in jeopardy. Mailmen are quite familiar with the phenomenon, which, in their case, is dysfunctionally aroused in the dog unless they are bringing a notice of foreclosure. Dolphins use sound to visualize three-dimensional space. Sharks, I am told, can smell a drop of blood in water hundreds of feet away. Ants sense one another’s needs well enough to work in huge teams. Bats navigate by sonar.
    How do I know when someone is standing behind me even though I can’t see them? I can’t hear or smell the person, but I have a sense about it. I also have a non-visual, non-scent-related, non-intelligence-linked sense for finding my way out of the woods at night, which is convenient because I’m in there a lot and it can be very dark in Mendocino when it’s foggy.
    Intuition is used to describe those odd feelings we get from time to time that cannot be ascribed to our five favorite channels. We don’t have names for the remainder of our senses, and they have gotten a bit of a tawdry reputation because of the amazing success of the five that do have names. We have made a lot of cool things, some of them charming and some of them horrible, using the logic that developed out of those Fantastic Five. But perhaps the most important thing that those five senses and the rules of mathematics that we created from them have told us is that they cannot tell us everything. They are a narrow slit, swept only briefly through a glass darkly.
    What do senses have to do with logic and mathematics?
    In the mid-nineteenth century, anybody who thought aboutit thought science was based on mathematics, and mathematics was an abstraction based on sensory input. It was assumed that mathematical laws, and in particular geometry and calculus, were at the root of the way things worked. The parabola that Newtonian physics predicted for the trajectory of a cannonball could be trusted to drop the cannonball on the heads of the Prussians if necessary. The relationship between the charge in the cannon, the weight of the ball, and the angle of the shot would faithfully define the parabola. Only a few people have the slightest idea how to deal with math. Most of us just light the fuse.
    You probably didn’t like math in high school and you probably still don’t. You also probably think math is arithmetic. Arithmetic is the part of math that is useful for balancing your checkbook. Most professional mathematicians can’t balance their checkbooks. Some of them are involved with trying to understand whether a basketball could be turned inside out—if the only restraint on the substance of the basketball was that it could not be crinked excessively. It could, for instance, be pushed through itself. It just couldn’t be crinked—without causing any folds in it from becoming infinitesimally thin. Remember that this is abstraction supposedly based on sensory information. Sounds bizarre, doesn’t it? The very few strange people in the world working on this are called mathematicians and would be further classified as differential topologists. What they are doing is similar to what most theoretical mathematicians are doing. They are taking the things that our senses can tell us, drawing some conclusions from that, and then trying to understand things that are not, and may never be, discernible through our senses. It may have something todo with whether we can make a device that will transport us to Venus in a heartbeat without stopping our heart or, more to the point just now, make our computer keyboards stop freezing up. We