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

all know the aggravation of having none of the buttons or devices on the computer function except for the plug—the final act—and then when it comes back on, it has the nerve to suggest that you turned it off wrong. In some way, unknown to you or me, the guys thinking about inverting basketballs are really thinking about this. It’s called mathematics. It derives from our senses. Maybe. Things have a tendency to drift away from their origin.
    Pay attention to your senses. Neither differential topology, nor geometry, nor calculus has turned out to be the real underlying root of how things work. The rules of geometry and calculus were derived from sense perceptions and can be applied to the things that usually concern us—throwing a baseball, shooting a missile—things that we can access and confirm with our five senses, but they are not the reality that we consider in this century to underlie our lives. And this is an important sociological point. At a certain level in physics—the realm of the smallest things—calculus means nothing. It is too dependent on time and space. Time and space don’t really count for much in the inferno of the very small things that we now think are fundamental. So senses don’t either. Geometry doesn’t work at all on the really small things.
    Maybe this is saying something important to us. If geometry doesn’t work, then our attempt to understand things way down there in weirdness space may be inappropriate. Sensory perceptions have nothing to do with things there. Sensory perceptions confirm calculus, and calculus doesn’t work there either.We can’t do any engineering down there. Nobody who is sane understands what goes on down at the level where the fundamental things like quarks and electrons do not have any volume or any position. If you can understand something with zero volume and no position, then welcome to insanity.
    Do we need to use billions of dollars to build machines that maybe will put a few of our rightfully treasured eggheads in touch with things so far from what can be engineered into useful items that only they will get a thrill out of finding them? Do we need to do this when there is an obvious threat over our heads, something falling right now onto our planet? Something big, heavy, and headed our way. Something that already has our number on it, a number we could read if we would just point enough telescopes out there to see it.
    I once heard, and I think it is true, that only one man in the world—some Indian mathematician—understood the mathematics of string theory in eleven-dimensional space, and he dreamed it. That may be an exaggeration, but it isn’t far from the facts as I know them. We would need a big machine to find out whether he was right.
    We humans, including mathematicians, have an idea. It is that the smaller something is, the more fundamentally important it is. And the bigger something is, the more fundamentally important it is. Maybe we want to reconsider what we mean by fundamental.
    There is an important story here. It is the story about how, as a culture worldwide after the big wars, we have begun to drift into the idea that reality is not what you see with your senses. That reality can be seen only by specialists with heavy lenses and special machines. It doesn’t seem to matter that formillions of years we’ve been developing some of the best sensory apparatus in the solar system. It grows in the wall of the castle that forms around us as soon as we are conceived, and unless something fucks it up, it works quite well for fifty or more years.
    When did we as a culture decide that extremely little things were fundamental? I think it was this century and the advent of nuclear bombs. At the same time, we decided that very big things were also important. Medium-sized things like us were relegated to the not-so-important closet. How did that come about? Academic departments like Aesthetics and Existential Philosophy vanished without a