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| James Burke reading the back blurb of my kid poetry book |
I loved the PBS series, The Day the Universe Changed, by James Burke. So I was pretty excited to learn that James was coming to town to do a KCRB PBS benefit, but also to speak at Sonoma State. By the time I found out about it, the event was sold out, so I asked if I could do a story on it, so that I could get in sans ticket, which was extraordinary because I also got to hang out with Ja at the end as well. Drinks with James and no canaries were harmed in the process.
James lecture was the singlemost largest attended lecture in Sonoma State University history. As I transcribe these notes to the electronic format, a reminder this is a rereading of my rough notes—reread, I might add, decades after the fact. Since I had to write an article, most of the, ahem, original connections, were lost. Maybe you might just want to stick to the finished story: Thinking Laterally with James Burke. But I am interested in what gets lost in "translation." Warning: these are my raw working notes.
James Burke kicks off: In the real world the right thing never happens at the right place, the right time. It’s up to journalists to rectify this. I'm condensing 22 years of science and technology into an hour. Hold onto your seats. He explains, We are always second-guessing the future. Looking at the other end of the horse, concepts of knowledge creates an awful lot of horse manure.
Science and technology have changed the deep structure of our lives. Once we understand how technology works, it means that it’s obsolete. It means the psychotic at the beach is having a wonderful time. Ask why.
James talks about constraints and contextualism, how constraints are composed imposed upon us. Take me for example, he says, points to his eye. The oral and the physical of what about scratching your ass? What is it that makes this perceptual itch, and then there’s the cognitive model the recognition system of our neurons and the genetic ZIP code, the basic matrix of neurons and /vs. the physical model.
And then James talks about how world views are radically different—for example, in the United States is that white is for brides but in China, white is for corpses. And when Greek girls nod yes, it's not yes, it's no. Now that could get a man into trouble. We guffaw.
Then he rolled into paradoxical aphorisms. Italy is not a country, it’s a disease for which there is no cure. English are desperate but not hopeless. The Irish are hopeless but not desperate. He delves further into the Irish-English behavioral models. Turns out his grandmother was Irish. That explains much.
Then he delves into the socio-political. The behavior model is the contemporary model of how things are supposed to be, the idea which is lost in Ireland. Then he segues into a story for the Spanish word for mañana, that time which never comes. So, we’ve got these two models warring with each other.
He talks of the medieval version of the sky, that God made the sky. But the Chinese looked up and discovered the universe. The model that you hold controls the universe you believe in. In other words, in an omelette model you might look for a yoke. The yolk's on us. Egg on our face.
He warns against shoehorning the universe into theories. Then he goes off on the forgeries of Piltdown Man, but ironically the evidence was there, they just couldn’t find an authentic skeleton because science was looking for another link. In other words, that conundrum, if you’re looking for something, you might find evidence. If you’re not looking for it, you might ignore the evidence.
And then he talks of models that are internally valid. Why does a boat get rocked, he asks. Why does change happen at all? Models have a habit of finding evidence to support themselves, the little buggers. We hang onto our model because it’s the only sure thing we have.
For example, during the dark ages, the economic recovery from Muslim Spain. He talks about how new technology created riots. The reason why looms changed was that threadmakers couldn’t keep up with the speed of the new loom that evolved from the spinning wheel, which created more riots because the sheep were nervous.
And then how that invention led to knickers and linen rag paper. No more parchment. The scribes rioted. It was a seller's market. And then the plague came along, then when Gutenberg invented the mechanical press in 1450, there were even more riots. There were even riots in the Vatican. The pope realized he could sell indulgences, pay now and sin later. That cash and carry view of salvation was the origin of the Reformation.
People would rather fight change than switch. If the model fits, and people resist, why does change happen at all? He talks of malaria (bad air) and the invention of quinine, then a model gone awry led to the invention of aniline dye. He said the mechanicians of change are not always smooth. And we measure in small things. He segues from nature to philosophy to romanticism to oneness and then how we get to poetry.
He talks of when the models are shifted, then unexpected change happens because a police opens up where we can except the information he says looking for small bits, grave robbing, led to the pathology pathological anatomy of disease. When people were digging canals in England they found fossils, but the found no fossil people. They thought they were mistakes. And so they ignored the discovery of the age of the earth. Are we a catchpile of chemicals, versus God-made? Any lessons from the past to get us out of a bind.
Change happens because it’s needed. Change is the mother of invention. Take a static model, in Egypt the Nile is fertile. Not much need to change. The pyramid became a triangle, leading to geometry. The Greeks had useless scraps of hard rocky land, and they were also more warlike. The Greeks saw stars as roadmaps and ventured forth.
100 years after the invention of the printing press in Europe, some 20 million books were printed I’m not knocking specialization. I am interested in the body of physics, the magnetic transmission of communication. The trick is putting things together that have never been done before: 1+1 = 3. Then take the census, a counting machine lead to other inventions.
Perfume atomizers lead to the invention of the carburetor. Mechanisms for change. He circles back to the cluster of neurons and associative pathways, and he talks of structure of the brain, and new relationships between data. He says oil, Arab, sand, castle, night, day, son, daughter, this is why we write poetry. It’s all the same model.
Take the word bird and then fruit each has the other word for drunk. He asks, do lemons whistle? Then the punchline. Oh my God, I just squeezed a canary into my gin and tonic. He plays with associative words and humor. This is a model how we handle complex changes versus a singular model. The Aristotelian universe: there is only one right way, or the Newtonian universe, God‘s clock is ticking, or the 19th century universe we are sentient organisms.
Each age had its own truth, and the controls were set up to control politics, social roles, dress, are the very reason for institutions. And of course, institutions self-perpetuate themselves as they become an integral part of life that we can’t get away from. Take the IRS. Rules don’t get questioned and the original attitude or reason for the institution is long gone.
This leads to a segue on representational government and about the dangerous roads were laden with highwaymen and thieves which lead to government structures. He discusses the unforgiving rigidity of models and he said some of the same systems are in place today. Take Rome, its governmental offices carried on via the church long after Rome fell.
Descartes was the improbable model of the reductionist approach to questions. New information changes us irrevocably. The technique for asking questions has changed—and information is everything. The whole world is information to whom it may concern kind of information.
The key task for the future is not in inventing new things, or second-guessin the social effects on us. Take the pill, or deodorant. What happens to models when the world changes? He talks of Third World political boundaries and how deodorant is destroying the ozone layer. And the invention of the microchip, will that lead to no more offices? Will we all have terminals at home?
The oil industry, city infrastructure tax base, pensions, marriage—how will all of this affect us, how will we function without backstabbing at the office? Who gets to decide what abnormality is? Do we want all sons and no daughters? Our social structure is based on institutionalize models and when the model shifts, there is a reaction to Darwin.
Back to Gutenberg. People said printing will destroy memory. (It has). The single model reaction to change is vicious. Our present structural breakdown and our lack of social consensus, the politics. Should we move to a more flexible model? Suppose we could recognize that there is no pattern to the universe, there is no true view of our explanation of reality.
Those positivists leading to Einstein, by examining the universe you interact with it. Knowledge, we manufacture knowledge create based controls, which controls behavior. Is it a watershed or is it a hole? Casual models, forms of information how processing will change. Darwin equals progress in a single view model, our older view. If knowledge is not a move towards truth, then what is it our responsibility, what is truth, what should it be, our value systems are in flux and should we prepare for change?
I am a generalist that straddles disciplines. The role of children’s education is to teach them to not memorize in the historical sense of the world, but to contextualize. We are creating educational illiterates incapable of thinking for themselves a whole new breed.
There are so many new information systems that allow us to tap the immortal pool which was ignored by ages if we teach people to laterally think, to daydream, will free people from drudgery, to use their flare their imaginations. And nothing compares with our brains.
Consider the whistling lemon's point of view.
Our brains are waiting to do this. They love the symbiotic relationships between things. All scientific advance is neutral. He says we need to make sure tomorrow is better than today. I’ve learned that naïve trust will lead us astray. We ordinary human beings have more power than that.
James Burke was BBC chief correspondent for the first moon launch. He said I got to know the astronauts. How vulnerable they were 240,000 miles from the nearest workbench, and repairs had to be done on the fly.
The lecture was followed by a Q&A and he talked about the pluralist model versus a single model and why educational system fails. He said we need to run an infrastructure that is more flexible, similar to anarchy. Again he circles back science is neutral, why destroy the planet? We’re made this way. On occasion science and technology is neutral but it has a vested interest. War, economic and political power the single model entrenched entrenched.
His contract with the BBC was not renewed because there were no new progress, its modes is not to lead it but to move toward the dumbing down of commercial TV. Guess where I’m going with this? He asks the audience. It leads to innovation programming like PBS, which will support the next series I’m working on for a year. I don’t yet know what it is. He says history belongs to the hacker.
We all adjourn to reception at a local restaurant. We had a nice long natter about poetry and connections. And I gave him one of the latest student poetry books from my residency. This story is one of the hardest I have written because I had bitten off way more than I could chew. There’s a funny typo in my story. Quantum mechanics and the theory of relevant relatively are models of the universe. But it came out "motels of the universe." I must admit, I had to laugh, best typo ever. Motels of the universe. Do you need a reservation?
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