The Demon Haunted World Part 18

x E E = = 0 0 * B B = = 0 0 x E E = - = - x B B = u = u He set a equal to zero, indicating that there are no electrical charges. He also set j j equal to zero, indicating that there are no electrical currents. But he didn't discard the last term in the fourth equation, u equal to zero, indicating that there are no electrical currents. But he didn't discard the last term in the fourth equation, u feeble displacement current in insulators.

Why not? As you can see from the equations, Maxwell's intuition preserved the symmetry between the magnetic and electric fields. Even in a vacuum, in the total absence of electricity, or even matter, a changing magnetic field, he proposed, elicits an electric field and vice versa. The equations were to represent Nature, and Nature is, Maxwell believed, beautiful and elegant. (There was also another, more technical reason for preserving the displacement current in a vacuum, which we pa.s.s over here.) This essentially aesthetic judgement by a nerdish physicist, entirely unknown except to a few other academic scientists, has done more to shape our civilization than any ten recent presidents and prime ministers.

Briefly, the four Maxwell equations for a vacuum say (1) there are no electrical charges in a vacuum; (2) there are no magnetic monopoles in a vacuum; (3) a changing magnetic field generates an electrical field; and (4) vice versa.

When the equations were written down like this, Maxwell was readily able to show that E E and and B B propagated through empty s.p.a.ce as if they were propagated through empty s.p.a.ce as if they were waves. waves. What's more, he could calculate the speed of the wave. It was just 1 divided by the square root of What's more, he could calculate the speed of the wave. It was just 1 divided by the square root of times u times u. But and u and u had been measured in the laboratory. When you plugged in the numbers you found that the electric and magnetic fields in a vacuum ought to propagate, astonis.h.i.+ngly, at the same speed as had already been measured for light. The agreement was too close to be accidental. Suddenly, disconcertingly, electricity and magnetism were deeply implicated in the nature of light. had been measured in the laboratory. When you plugged in the numbers you found that the electric and magnetic fields in a vacuum ought to propagate, astonis.h.i.+ngly, at the same speed as had already been measured for light. The agreement was too close to be accidental. Suddenly, disconcertingly, electricity and magnetism were deeply implicated in the nature of light.

Since light now appeared to behave as waves and to derive from electric and magnetic fields, Maxwell called it electromagnetic. Those obscure experiments with batteries and wires had something to do with the brightness of the Sun, with how we see, with what light is. Ruminating on Maxwell's discovery many years later, Albert Einstein wrote, To few men in the world has such an experience been vouchsafed.'

Maxwell himself was baffled by the results. The vacuum seemed to act like a dielectric. He said that it can be 'electrically polarized'. Living in a mechanical age, Maxwell felt obliged to offer some kind of mechanical model for the propagation of an electromagnetic wave through a perfect vacuum. So he imagined s.p.a.ce filled with a mysterious substance he called the aether, which supported and contained the time-varying electric and magnetic fields - something like a throbbing but invisible Jell-O permeating the Universe. The quivering of the aether was the reason that light travelled through it - just as water waves propagate through water and sound waves through air.

But it had to be very odd stuff, this ether, very thin, ghostly, almost incorporeal. The Sun and the Moon, the planets and the stars had to pa.s.s through it without being slowed down, without noticing. And yet it had to be stiff enough to support all these waves propagating at prodigious speed.

The word 'aether' is still, in a desultory fas.h.i.+on, in use - in English mainly in the adjective ethereal, residing in the aether. It has some of the same connotations as the more modern 's.p.a.cy' or 's.p.a.ced out'. When, in the early days of radio, they would say 'On the air', the aether is what they had in mind. (The Russian phrase is quite literally 'on the aether', v efir.) v efir.) But of course radio readily travels through a vacuum, one of Maxwell's main results. It doesn't need air to propagate. The presence of air is, if anything, an impediment. But of course radio readily travels through a vacuum, one of Maxwell's main results. It doesn't need air to propagate. The presence of air is, if anything, an impediment.

The whole idea of light and matter moving through the aether was to lead in another forty years to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, E = mc2, and a great deal else. Relativity, and experiments leading up to it, showed conclusively that there is no aether supporting the propagation of electromagnetic waves, as Einstein writes in the extract from his famous paper that I reproduced in Chapter 2. The wave goes by itself. The changing electric field generates a magnetic field; the changing magnetic field generates an electric field. They hold each other up, by their bootstraps.

Many physicists were deeply troubled by the demise of the 'luminiferous' ether. They had needed some mechanical model to make the whole notion of the propagation of light in a vacuum reasonable, plausible, understandable. But this is a crutch, a symptom of our difficulties in reconnoitring realms in which common sense no longer serves. The physicist Richard Feynman described it this way: Today, we understand better that what counts are the equations themselves and not the model used to get them. We may only question whether the equations are true or false. This is answered by doing experiments, and untold numbers of experiments have confirmed Maxwell's equations. If we take away the scaffolding he used to build it, we find that Maxwell's beautiful edifice stands on its own.

But what are are these time-varying electric and magnetic fields permeating all of s.p.a.ce? What do and mean? We feel so much more comfortable with the idea of things touching and jiggling, pus.h.i.+ng and pulling, rather than 'fields' magically moving objects at a distance, or mere mathematical abstractions. But, as Feynman pointed out, our sense that at least in everyday life we can rely on solid, sensible physical contact to explain, say, why the b.u.t.ter knife comes to you when you pick it up, is a misconception. What does it mean to have physical contact? What exactly is happening when you pick up a knife, or push a swing, or make a wave in a waterbed by pressing down on it periodically? When we investigate deeply, we find that there is no physical contact. Instead, the electrical charges on your hand are influencing the electrical charges on the knife or swing or waterbed, and vice versa. Despite everyday experience and common sense, even here, there is only the interaction of electric fields. Nothing is touching anything. these time-varying electric and magnetic fields permeating all of s.p.a.ce? What do and mean? We feel so much more comfortable with the idea of things touching and jiggling, pus.h.i.+ng and pulling, rather than 'fields' magically moving objects at a distance, or mere mathematical abstractions. But, as Feynman pointed out, our sense that at least in everyday life we can rely on solid, sensible physical contact to explain, say, why the b.u.t.ter knife comes to you when you pick it up, is a misconception. What does it mean to have physical contact? What exactly is happening when you pick up a knife, or push a swing, or make a wave in a waterbed by pressing down on it periodically? When we investigate deeply, we find that there is no physical contact. Instead, the electrical charges on your hand are influencing the electrical charges on the knife or swing or waterbed, and vice versa. Despite everyday experience and common sense, even here, there is only the interaction of electric fields. Nothing is touching anything.

No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different. to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different.

Maxwell's equations show that a rapidly varying electric field (making large) ought to generate electromagnetic waves. In 1888 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz did the experiment and found that he had generated a new kind of radiation, radio waves. Seven years later, British scientists in Cambridge transmitted radio signals over a distance of a kilometre. By 1901, Guglielmo Marconi of Italy was using radio waves to communicate across the Atlantic Ocean.

The linking-up of the modern world economically, culturally and politically by broadcast towers, microwave relays and communication satellites traces directly back to Maxwell's judgement to include the displacement current in his vacuum equations. So does television, which imperfectly instructs and entertains us; radar, which may have been the decisive element in the Battle of Britain and in the n.a.z.i defeat in World War Two (which I like to think of as 'Dafty', the boy who didn't fit in, reaching into the future and saving the descendants of his tormentors); the control and navigation of airplanes, s.h.i.+ps and s.p.a.cecraft; radio astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; and significant aspects of the electrical power and microelectronics industries.

What's more, Faraday's and Maxwell's notion of fields has been enormously influential in understanding the atomic nucleus, quantum mechanics, and the fine structure of matter. His unification of electricity, magnetism and light into one coherent mathematical whole is the inspiration for subsequent attempts - some successful, some still in their rudimentary stages - to unify all aspects of the physical world, including gravity and nuclear forces, into one grand theory. Maxwell may fairly be said to have ushered in the age of modern physics.

Our current view of the silent world of Maxwell's varying electric and magnetic vectors is described by Richard Feynman in these words: Try to imagine what the electric and magnetic fields look like at present in the s.p.a.ce of this lecture room. First of all, there is a steady magnetic field; it comes from the currents in the interior of the earth - that is, the earth's steady magnetic field. Then there are some irregular, nearly static electric fields produced perhaps by electric charges generated by friction as various people move about in their chairs and rub their coat sleeves against the chair arms. Then there are other magnetic fields produced by oscillating currents in the electrical wiring - fields which vary at a frequency of 60 cycles per second, in synchronism with the generator at Boulder Dam. But more interesting are the electric and magnetic fields varying at much higher frequencies. For instance, as light travels from window to floor and wall to wall, there are little wiggles of the electric and magnetic fields moving along at 186,000 miles per second. Then there are also infrared waves travelling from the warm foreheads to the cold blackboard. And we have forgotten the ultraviolet light, the X-rays, and the radiowaves travelling through the room.

Flying across the room are electromagnetic waves which carry music of a jazz band. There are waves modulated by a series of impulses representing pictures of events going on in other parts of the world, or of imaginary aspirins dissolving in imaginary stomachs. To demonstrate the reality of these waves it is only necessary to turn on electronic equipment that converts these waves into pictures and sounds.

If we go into further detail to a.n.a.lyze even the smallest wiggles, there are tiny electromagnetic waves that have come into the room from enormous distances. There are now tiny oscillations of the electric field, whose crests are separated by a distance of one foot, that have come from millions of miles away, transmitted to the earth from the Mariner [2] s.p.a.ce craft which has just pa.s.sed Venus. Its signals carry summaries of information it has picked up about the planets (information obtained from electromagnetic waves that travelled from the planet to the s.p.a.ce craft).

There are very tiny wiggles of the electric and magnetic fields that are waves which originated billions of light years away - from galaxies in the remotest corners of the universe. That this is true has been found by 'filling the room with wires' - by building antennas as large as this room. Such radiowaves have been detected from places in s.p.a.ce beyond the range of the greatest optical telescopes. Even they, the optical telescopes, are simply gatherers of electromagnetic waves. What we call the stars are only inferences, inferences drawn from the only physical reality we have yet gotten from them - from a careful study of the unendingly complex undulations of the electric and magnetic fields reaching us on earth.

There is, of course, more: the fields produced by lightning miles away, the fields of the charged cosmic ray particles as they zip through the room, and more, and more. What a complicated thing is the electric field in the s.p.a.ce around you!

If Queen Victoria had ever called an urgent meeting of her counsellors, and ordered them to invent the equivalent of radio and television, it is unlikely that any of them would have imagined the path to lead through the experiments of Ampere, Biot, Oersted and Faraday, four equations of vector calculus, and the judgement to preserve the displacement current in a vacuum. They would, I think, have gotten nowhere. Meanwhile, on his own, driven only by curiosity, costing the government almost nothing, himself unaware that he was laying the ground for the Westminster Project, 'Dafty' was scribbling away. It's doubtful whether the self-effacing, unsociable Mr Maxwell would even have been thought of to perform such a study. If he had, probably the government would have been telling him what to think about and what not, impeding rather than inducing his great discovery.

Late in life, Maxwell did have one interview with Queen Victoria. He worried about it beforehand - essentially about his ability to communicate science to a non-expert - but the Queen was distracted and the interview was short. Like the four other greatest British scientists of recent history, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, P.A.M. Dirac and Francis Crick, Maxwell was never knighted (although Lyell, Kelvin, J.J. Thomson, Rutherford, Eddington and Hoyle in the next tier were). In Maxwell's case, there was not even the excuse that he might hold opinions at variance with the Church of England: he was an absolutely conventional Christian for his time, more devout than most. Maybe it was his nerdishness.

The communications media - the instruments of education and entertainment that James Clerk Maxwell made possible - have never, so far as I know, offered even a mini-series on the life and thought of their benefactor and founder. By contrast, think of how difficult it is to grow up in America without television teaching you about, say, the life and times of Davy Crockett or Billy the Kid or Al Capone.

Maxwell married young, but the bond seems to have been pa.s.sionless as well as childless. His excitement was reserved for science. This founder of the modern age died in 1879 at the age of 47. While he is almost forgotten in popular culture, radar astronomers who map other worlds have remembered: the greatest mountain range on Venus, discovered by sending radio waves from Earth, bouncing them off Venus, and detecting the faint echoes, is named after him.

Less than a century after Maxwell's prediction of radio waves, the first quest was initiated for signals from possible civilizations on planets of other stars. Since then there have been a number of searches, some of which I referred to earlier, for the time-varying electric and magnetic fields crossing the vast interstellar distances from possible other intelligences - biologically very different from us - who had also benefited sometime in their histories from the insights of local counterparts of James Clerk Maxwell.

In October 1992, in the Mojave Desert, and in a Puerto Rican karst valley, we initiated by far the most promising, powerful and comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). For the first time NASA would organize and operate the programme. The entire sky would be examined over a ten-year period with unprecedented sensitivity and frequency range. If, on a planet of any of the 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy, anyone had been sending us a radio message, we might have had a pretty fair chance of hearing them.

Just one year later, Congress pulled the plug. SETI was not of pressing importance; its interest was limited; it was too expensive. But every civilization in human history has devoted some of its resources to investigating deep questions about the Universe, and it's hard to think of a deeper one than whether we are alone. Even if we never decrypted the message contents, the receipt of such a signal would transform our view of the Universe and ourselves. And if we could understand the message from an advanced technical civilization, the practical benefits might be unprecedented. Far from being narrowly based, the SETI programme, strongly supported by the scientific community, is also embedded in popular culture. The fascination with this enterprise is broad and enduring, and for very good reason. And far from being too expensive, the programme would have cost about one attack helicopter per year.

I wonder why those members of Congress concerned about price tags don't devote greater attention to the Department of Defense, which, with the Soviet Union gone and the Cold War over, still spends, when all costs are tallied, well over $300 billion a year. (And elsewhere in government there are many programmes that amount to welfare for the well-to-do.) Perhaps our descendants will look back on our time and marvel at us, possessed of the technology to detect other beings, but closing our ears because we insisted on spending the national wealth to protect us from an enemy that no longer exists.*

[* The SETI programme was briefly resurrected, using $7 million in private contributions, in 1995 under the appropriate name Project Phoenix.]

David Goodstein, a physicist at Cal Tech, notes that science has been growing nearly exponentially for centuries and that it cannot continue such growth, because then everybody on the planet, would have to be a scientist, and then then the growth would have to stop. He speculates that for this reason, and not because of any fundamental disaffection from science, the growth in funding of science has slowed measurably in the last few decades. the growth would have to stop. He speculates that for this reason, and not because of any fundamental disaffection from science, the growth in funding of science has slowed measurably in the last few decades.

Nevertheless, I'm worried about how research funds are distributed. distributed. I'm worried that cancelling government funds for SETI is part of a trend. The government has been pressuring the National Science Foundation to move away from basic scientific research and to support technology, engineering, applications. Congress is suggesting doing away with the US Geological Survey, and slas.h.i.+ng support for study of the Earth's fragile environment. NASA support for research and a.n.a.lysis of data already obtained is increasingly constrained. Many young scientists are not only unable to find grants to support their research; they are unable to find jobs. I'm worried that cancelling government funds for SETI is part of a trend. The government has been pressuring the National Science Foundation to move away from basic scientific research and to support technology, engineering, applications. Congress is suggesting doing away with the US Geological Survey, and slas.h.i.+ng support for study of the Earth's fragile environment. NASA support for research and a.n.a.lysis of data already obtained is increasingly constrained. Many young scientists are not only unable to find grants to support their research; they are unable to find jobs.

Industrial research and development funded by American companies has slowed across the board in recent years. Government funding for research and development has declined in the same period. (Only military research and development increased in the decade of the 1980s.) In annual expenditures, j.a.pan is now the world's leading investor in civilian research and development. In such fields as computers, telecommunications equipment, aeros.p.a.ce, machine tools, robotics, and scientific precision equipment, the US share of global exports has been declining, while the j.a.panese share has been increasing. In that same period the United States lost its lead to j.a.pan in most semiconductor technologies. It experiences severe declines in market share in colour TVs, VCRs, phonographs, telephone sets and machine tools.

Basic research is where scientists are free to pursue their curiosity and interrogate Nature, not with any short-term practical end in view, but to seek knowledge for its own sake. Scientists of course have a vested interest in basic research. It's what they like to do, in many cases why they became scientists in the first place. But it is in society's interest to support such research. This is how the major discoveries that benefit humanity are largely made. Whether a few grand and ambitious scientific projects are a better investment than a larger number of small programmes is a worthwhile question.

We are rarely smart enough to set about on purpose making the discoveries that will drive our economy and safeguard our lives. Often, we lack the fundamental research. Instead, we pursue a broad range of investigations of Nature, and applications we never dreamed of emerge. Not always, of course. But often enough.

Giving money to someone like Maxwell might have seemed the most absurd encouragement of mere 'curiosity-driven' science, and an imprudent judgement for practical legislators. Why grant money now, so nerdish scientists talking incomprehensible gibberish can indulge their hobbies, when there are urgent unmet national needs? From this point of view it's easy to understand the contention that science is just another lobby, another pressure group anxious to keep the grant money rolling in so the scientists don't ever have to do a hard day's work or meet a payroll.

Maxwell wasn't thinking of radio, radar and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnet-ism; Newton wasn't dreaming of s.p.a.ce flight or communications satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon; Roentgen wasn't contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it 'X-rays'; Curie wasn't thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Fleming wasn't planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mould; Watson and Crick weren't imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry of DNA; Rowland and Molina weren't planning to implicate CFCs in ozone depletion when they began studying the role of halogens in stratospheric photochemistry.

Members of Congress and other political leaders have from time to time found it irresistible to poke fun at seemingly obscure scientific research proposals that the government is asked to fund. Even as bright a senator as William Proxmire, a Harvard graduate, was given to making episodic 'Golden Fleece' awards, many commemorating ostensibly useless scientific projects including SETI. I imagine the same spirit in previous governments - a Mr Fleming wishes to study bugs in smelly cheese; a Polish woman wishes to sift through tons of Central African ore to find minute quant.i.ties of a substance she says will glow in the dark; a Mr Kepler wants to hear the songs the planets sing.

These discoveries and a mult.i.tude of others that grace and characterize our time, to some of which our very lives are beholden, were made ultimately by scientists given the opportunity to explore what in their opinion, under the scrutiny of their peers, were basic questions in Nature. Industrial applications, in which j.a.pan in the last two decades has done so well, are excellent. But applications of what? Fundamental research, research into the heart of Nature, is the means by which we acquire the new knowledge that gets applied.

Scientists have an obligation, especially when asking for big money, to explain with great clarity and honesty what they're after. The Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) would have been the preeminent instrument on the planet for probing the fine structure of matter and the nature of the early Universe. Its price tag was $10 to $15 billion. It was cancelled by Congress in 1993 after about $2 billion had been spent - a worst of both worlds outcome. But this this debate was not, I think, mainly about declining interest in the support of science. Few in Congress understood what modem high energy accelerators are for. They are not for weapons. They have no practical applications. They are for something that is, worrisomely from the point of view of many, called 'the theory of everything'. Explanations that involve ent.i.ties called quarks, charm, flavour, colour, etc. sound as if physicists are being cute. The whole thing has an aura, in the view of at least some Congresspeople I've talked to, of 'nerds gone wild' - which I suppose is an uncharitable way of describing curiosity-based science. No one asked to pay for this had the foggiest idea of what a Higgs boson is. I've read some of the material intended to justify the SSC. At the very end, some of it wasn't too bad, but there was nothing that really addressed what the project was about on a level accessible to bright but sceptical non-physicists. If physicists are asking for $10 or $15 billion to build a machine that has no practical value, at the very least they should make an extremely serious effort, with dazzling graphics, metaphors and capable use of the English language, to justify their proposal. More than financial mismanagement, budgetary constraints and political incompetence, I think this is the key to the failure of the SSC. debate was not, I think, mainly about declining interest in the support of science. Few in Congress understood what modem high energy accelerators are for. They are not for weapons. They have no practical applications. They are for something that is, worrisomely from the point of view of many, called 'the theory of everything'. Explanations that involve ent.i.ties called quarks, charm, flavour, colour, etc. sound as if physicists are being cute. The whole thing has an aura, in the view of at least some Congresspeople I've talked to, of 'nerds gone wild' - which I suppose is an uncharitable way of describing curiosity-based science. No one asked to pay for this had the foggiest idea of what a Higgs boson is. I've read some of the material intended to justify the SSC. At the very end, some of it wasn't too bad, but there was nothing that really addressed what the project was about on a level accessible to bright but sceptical non-physicists. If physicists are asking for $10 or $15 billion to build a machine that has no practical value, at the very least they should make an extremely serious effort, with dazzling graphics, metaphors and capable use of the English language, to justify their proposal. More than financial mismanagement, budgetary constraints and political incompetence, I think this is the key to the failure of the SSC.

There is a growing free-market view of human knowledge, according to which basic research should compete without government support with all the other inst.i.tutions and claimants in society. If they couldn't have relied on government support, and had to compete in the free-market economy of their day, it's unlikely that any of the scientists on my list would have been able to do their groundbreaking research. And the cost of basic research is substantially greater than it was in Maxwell's day -both theoretical and, especially, experimental.

But that aside, would free-market forces be adequate to support basic research? Only about ten per cent of meritorious research proposals in medicine are funded today. More money is spent on quack medicine than on all of medical research. What would it be like if government opted out of medical research?

A necessary aspect of basic research is that its applications lie in the future, sometimes decades or even centuries ahead. What's more, no one knows which aspects of basic research will have practical value and which will not. If scientists cannot make such predictions, is it likely that politicians or industrialists can? If free-market forces are focused only towards short-term profit - as they certainly mainly are in an America with steep declines in corporate research - is not this solution tantamount to abandoning basic research?

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter, but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

Of course there are many pressing problems facing our nation and our species. But reducing basic scientific research is not the way to solve them. Scientists do not const.i.tute a voting bloc. They have no effective lobby. However, much of their work is in everybody's interest. Backing off from fundamental research const.i.tutes a failure of nerve, of imagination and of that vision thing that we still don't seem to have a handle on. It might strike one of those hypothetical extraterrestrials that we were planning not to have a future.

Of course we need literacy, education, jobs, adequate medical care and defence, protection of the environment, security in our old age, a balanced budget, and a host of other matters. But we are a rich society. Can't we also nurture the Maxwells of our time? To take one symbolic example, is it really true that we can't afford one attack helicopter's worth of seed corn to listen to the stars?

24.

Science and Witchcraft*

Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom. Where there is doubt, there is freedom.

Latin proverb

[* Written with Ann Druyan. The following two chapters include more political content than elsewhere in this book. I do not wish to suggest that advocacy of science and scepticism necessarily leads to all the political or social conclusions I draw. Although sceptical thinking is invaluable in politics, politics is not a science.]

The 1939 New York World's Fair - that so transfixed me as a small visitor from darkest Brooklyn - was about The World of Tomorrow'. Merely by adopting such a motif, it promised that there would be be a world of tomorrow, and the most casual glance affirmed that it would be better than the world of 1939. Although the nuance wholly pa.s.sed me by, many people longed for such a rea.s.surance on the eve of the most brutal and calamitous war in human history. I knew at least that I would be growing up in the future. The sleek and clean 'tomorrow' portrayed by the Fair was appealing and hopeful. And something called science was plainly the means by which that future would be realized. a world of tomorrow, and the most casual glance affirmed that it would be better than the world of 1939. Although the nuance wholly pa.s.sed me by, many people longed for such a rea.s.surance on the eve of the most brutal and calamitous war in human history. I knew at least that I would be growing up in the future. The sleek and clean 'tomorrow' portrayed by the Fair was appealing and hopeful. And something called science was plainly the means by which that future would be realized.

But if things had gone a little differently, the Fair could have given me enormously more. A fierce struggle had gone on behind the scenes. The vision that prevailed was that of the Fair's President and chief spokesman, Grover Whalen - a former corporate executive, New York City police chief in a time of unprecedented police brutality, and public relations innovator. It was he who had envisioned the exhibit buildings as chiefly commercial, industrial, oriented to consumer products, and he who had convinced Stalin and Mussolini to build lavish national pavilions. (He later complained about how often he had been obliged to give the fascist salute.) The level of the exhibits, as one designer described it, was pitched to the mentality of a twelve-year-old.

However, as recounted by the historian Peter Kuznick of American University, a group of prominent scientists, including Harold Urey and Albert Einstein, advocated presenting science for its own sake, not just as the route to gadgets for sale; concentrating on the way of thinking and not just the products of science. They were convinced that broad popular understanding of science was the antidote to superst.i.tion and bigotry; that, as science popularizer Watson Davis put it, 'the scientific way is the democratic way'. One scientist even suggested that widespread public appreciation of the methods of science might work 'a final conquest of stupidity' - a worthy, but probably unrealizable, goal.

As events transpired, almost no real science was tacked on to the Fair's exhibits, despite the scientists' protests and their appeals to high principles. And yet, some of the little that was added trickled down to me and helped to transform my childhood. The corporate and consumer focus remained central, though, and essentially nothing appeared about science as a way of thinking, much less as a bulwark of a free society.

Exactly half a century later, in the closing years of the Soviet Union, Ann Druyan and I found ourselves at a dinner in Peredelkino, a village outside Moscow where Communist Party officials, retired generals and a few favoured intellectuals had their summer homes. The air was electric with the prospect of new freedoms - especially the right to speak your mind even if the government doesn't like what you're saying. The fabled revolution of rising expectations was in full flower. But, despite glasnost, glasnost, there were widespread doubts. Would those in power really allow their own critics to be heard? Would freedom of speech, of a.s.sembly, of the press, of religion, really be permitted? Would people inexperienced with freedom be able to bear its burdens? there were widespread doubts. Would those in power really allow their own critics to be heard? Would freedom of speech, of a.s.sembly, of the press, of religion, really be permitted? Would people inexperienced with freedom be able to bear its burdens?

Some of the Soviet citizens present at the dinner had fought for decades and against long odds for the freedoms that most Americans take for granted; indeed, they had been inspired by the American experiment, a real-world demonstration that nations, even multicultural and multiethnic nations, could survive and prosper with these freedoms reasonably intact. They went so far as to raise the possibility that prosperity was due due to freedom -that, in an age of high technology and swift change, the two rise or fall together, that the openness of science and democracy, their willingness to be judged by experiment, were closely allied ways of thinking. to freedom -that, in an age of high technology and swift change, the two rise or fall together, that the openness of science and democracy, their willingness to be judged by experiment, were closely allied ways of thinking.

There were many toasts, as there always are at dinners in that part of the world. The most memorable was given by a world-famous Soviet novelist. He stood up, raised his gla.s.s, looked us in the eye, and said, To the Americans. They have a little freedom.' He paused a beat, and then added: 'And they know how to keep it.'

Do we?

The ink was barely dry on the Bill of Rights before politicians found a way to subvert it, by cas.h.i.+ng in on fear and patriotic hysteria. In 1798, the ruling Federalist Party knew that the b.u.t.ton to push was ethnic and cultural prejudice. Exploiting tensions between France and the US, and a widespread fear that French and Irish immigrants were somehow intrinsically unfit to be Americans, the Federalists pa.s.sed a set of laws that have come to be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

One law upped the residency requirement for citizens.h.i.+p from five to fourteen years. (Citizens of French and Irish origin usually voted for the opposition, Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party.) The Alien Act gave President John Adams the power to deport any foreigner who aroused his suspicions. Making the President nervous, said a member of Congress, 'is the new crime'. Jefferson believed the Alien Act had been framed particularly to expel C.F. Volney,* the French historian and philosopher; Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, patriarch of the famous chemical family; and the British scientist Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and an intellectual antecedent of James Clerk Maxwell. In Jefferson's view, these were just the sort of people America needed.

[* A typical pa.s.sage from Volney's 1791 book Ruins: Ruins: You dispute, you quarrel, you fight for that which is uncertain, that of which you doubt. O men! Is this not folly?... We must trace a line of distinction between those [subjects] that are capable of verification, and those that are not, and separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities; that is to say, all civil effect must be taken away from theological and religious opinions.]

The Sedition Act made it unlawful to publish 'false or malicious' criticism of the government or to inspire opposition to any of its acts. Some two dozen arrests were made, ten people were convicted, and many more were censored or intimidated into silence. The act attempted, Jefferson said, 'to crush all political opposition by making criticism of Federalist officials or policies a crime'.

As soon as Jefferson was elected, indeed in the first week of his Presidency in 1801, he began pardoning every victim of the Sedition Act because, he said, it was as contrary to the spirit of American freedoms as if Congress had ordered us all to fall down and wors.h.i.+p a golden calf. By 1802, none of the Alien and Sedition Acts remained on the books.

From across two centuries, it's hard to recapture the frenzied mood that made the French and the 'wild Irish' seem so grave a threat that we were willing to surrender our most precious freedoms. Giving credit for French and Irish cultural triumphs, advocating equal rights for them, was in effect decried in conservative circles as sentimental - unrealistic political correctness. But that's how it always works. It always seems an aberration later. But by then we're in the grip of the next hysteria.

Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. It could be ethnic differences, as it was then, perhaps different amounts of melanin in the skin; different philosophies or religions; or maybe it's drug use, violent crime, economic crisis, school prayer, or 'desecrating' (literally, making unholy) the flag.

Whatever the problem, the quick fix is to shave a little freedom off the Bill of Rights. Yes, in 1942, j.a.panese-Americans were protected by the Bill of Rights, but we locked them up anyway -after all, there was a war on. Yes, there are Const.i.tutional prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure, but we have a war on drugs and violent crime is racing out of control. Yes, there's freedom of speech, but we don't want foreign authors here, spouting alien ideologies, do we? The pretexts change from year to year, but the result remains the same: concentrating more power in fewer hands and suppressing diversity of opinion - even though experience plainly shows the danger of such a course of action.

If we do not know what we're capable of, we cannot appreciate measures taken to protect us from ourselves. I discussed the European witch mania in the alien abduction context; I hope the reader will forgive me for returning to it in its political context. It is an aperture to human self-knowledge. If we focus on what was considered acceptable evidence and a fair trial by the religious and secular authorities in the fifteenth- to seventeenth-century witch hunts, many of the novel and peculiar features of the eighteenth-century US Const.i.tution and Bill of Rights become clear: including trial by jury, prohibitions against self-incrimination and against cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and the press, due process, the balance of powers and the separation of Church and State.

Friedrich von Spec (p.r.o.nounced 'Shpay') was a Jesuit priest who had the misfortune to hear the confessions of those accused of witchcraft in the German city of Wurzburg (see Chapter 7). In 1631, he published Cautio Criminalis (Precautions for Prosecutors), Cautio Criminalis (Precautions for Prosecutors), which exposed the essence of this Church/State terrorism against the innocent. Before he was punished he died of the plague - as a parish priest serving the afflicted. Here is an excerpt from his whistle-blowing book: which exposed the essence of this Church/State terrorism against the innocent. Before he was punished he died of the plague - as a parish priest serving the afflicted. Here is an excerpt from his whistle-blowing book: 1. Incredibly among us Germans, and especially (I am ashamed to say) among Catholics, are popular superst.i.tions, envy, calumnies, backbiting, insinuations, and the like, which, being neither punished nor refuted, stir up suspicion of witchcraft. No longer G.o.d or nature, but witches are responsible for everything.

2. Hence everybody sets up a clamour that the magistrates investigate the witches - whom only popular gossip has made so numerous.

3. Princes, therefore, bid their judges and counsellors bring proceedings against the witches.

4. The judges hardly know where to start, since they have no evidence [indicia] [indicia] or proof. or proof.

5. Meanwhile, the people call this delay suspicious; and the princes are persuaded by some informer or another to this effect.

6. In Germany, to offend these princes is a serious offence; even clergymen approve whatever pleases them, not caring by whom these princes (however well-intentioned) have been instigated.

7. At last, therefore, the judges yield to their wishes and contrive to begin the trials.

8. Other judges who still delay, afraid to get involved in this ticklish matter, are sent a special investigator. In this field of investigation, whatever inexperience or arrogance he brings to the job is held zeal for justice. His zeal for justice is also whetted by hopes of profit, especially with a poor and greedy agent with a large family, when he receives as stipend so many dollars per head for each witch burned, besides the incidental fees and perquisites which investigating agents are allowed to extort at will from those they summon.

9. If a madman's ravings or some malicious and idle rumour (for no proof of the scandal is ever needed) points to some helpless old woman, she is the first to suffer.

10. Yet to avoid the appearance that she is indicted solely on the basis of rumour, without other proofs, a certain presumption of guilt is obtained by posing the following dilemma: either she has led an evil and improper life, or she has led a good and proper one. If an evil one, then she should be guilty. On the other hand, if she has led a good life, this is just as d.a.m.ning; for witches dissemble and try to appear especially virtuous.

11. Therefore the old woman is put in prison. A new proof is found through a second dilemma: she is afraid or not afraid. If she is (hearing of the horrible tortures used against witches), this is sure proof; for her conscience accuses her. If she does not show fear (trusting in her innocence), this too is a proof; for witches characteristically pretend innocence and wear a bold front.

12. Lest these should be the only proofs, the investigator has his snoopers, often depraved and infamous, ferret out all her past life. This, of course, cannot be done without turning up some saying or doing of hers which men so disposed can easily twist or distort into evidence of witchcraft.

13. Any who have borne her ill now have ample opportunity to bring against her whatever accusations they please; and everyone says that the evidence is strong against her.

14. And so she is hurried to the torture, unless, as often happens, she was tortured on the very day of her arrest.

15. In these trials n.o.body is allowed a lawyer or any means of fair defence, for witchcraft is reckoned an exceptional crime [of such enormity that all rules of legal procedure may be suspended], and whoever ventures to defend the prisoner falls himself under suspicion of witchcraft - as well as those who dare to utter a protest in these cases and to urge the judges to exercise prudence, for they are forthwith labelled supporters of witchcraft. Thus everybody keeps quiet for fear.

16. So that it may seem that the woman has an opportunity to defend herself, she is brought into court and the indications of her guilt are read and examined - if it can be called an examination.

17. Even though she denies these charges and satisfactorily answers every accusation, no attention is paid and her replies are not even recorded; all the indictments retain their force and validity, however perfect her answers to them. She is ordered back into prison, there to consider more carefully whether she will persist in obstinacy - for, since she has already denied her guilt, she is obstinate.

18. Next day she is brought out again, and hears a decree of torture - just as if she had never refuted the charges.

19. Before torture, however, she is searched for amulets: her entire body is shaved, and even those privy parts indicating the female s.e.x are wantonly examined.

20. What is so shocking about this? Priests are treated the same way.

21. When the woman has been shaved and searched, she is tortured to make her confess the truth - that is, to declare what they want, for naturally anything else will not and cannot be the truth.