Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [88]
The Pasteboard Masks of Laplace’s Demon
In 1814 the French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace published his Essai Philosophique in which he created the ultimate thought experiment: “Let us imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists; let us assume, further, that this Intelligence would be capable of subjecting all these data to mathematical analysis. Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the universe and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence. The past and the future would be present to its eyes.”35
Laplace’s demon created a satanic scare that set the science of nonlinear dynamics back a century and a half. It was a chimera. The demon does not exist. But physicists chased the dream, and historians chased the physicists. Then the physicists created a new language, and historians learned to decipher the words. But the words bespoke an ancient language already known by the historians, and through a chaotic fog the physicists could hear Clio, the muse of history, ask Urania, the muse of astronomy: Is not the apparent chaos of history the fog through which we peer to make out a faint outline of meaning to chart our course from the past to the future? Is not the mystery of our past like the whiteness of Ahab’s whale, possessing us to “chase him round Good Hope, and round the horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up”? Only in the pursuit of this hue “can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek.” How do we get to this hidden cause? Herman Melville seems to be telling us, through Captain Ahab’s obsessive quest for “that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever a day” that we must unmask the demon and penetrate the outer layers, no matter how obfuscating, with every tool available.
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.36
Read history for whale and facts for masks.
The Tale of the Typewriter: A Postscript to Chapter 9
In “Exorcising LaPlace’s Demon,” I present what I call the QWERTY Principle: Historical events that come together in an unplanned way create inevitable historical outcomes. My principle is derived from a historical case study involving the development of the typewriter keyboard. The QWERTY keyboard that began life on Christopher Latham Sholes’s 1868 typewriter, purchased and mass produced by Remington in 1873, and still employed today by nearly all computer users, was locked into use by historical momentum even though it is not necessarily the most efficient design. The Dvorak keyboard, patented by August Dvorak in 1936, for example, was claimed by Dvorak and others to be more efficient, and they advocated its use on typewriters that did not suffer from the key jamming problem that supposedly led to Sholes’s keyboard (designed to slow typists down). It was not adopted, it is argued, because of historical “lock-in” and “path dependency”: QWERTY was already so far down the path of historical market momentum that users would not make the switch.
I was inspired to derive my principle from an article by the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in an essay he wrote entitled “The Panda