Acts of Volition

While aov rages with debate about web standards and development techniques, a regular reader speaks up for those who aren't enthralled by cascading style sheets and asks us to throw them a conversational bone. Fair enough, how's general relativity for a Sunday conversation topic?

Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe is an introduction to string theory, the latest stepping stone in the scientific quest for the 'unified theory of everything'. The book is intended for a general audience without an academic background in physics (that describes me pretty well - Physics 101 was at 8:30AM and my hair was always frozen from a quick shower and cold walk to the campus).

Greene's book has been worth the price if only for the simple and graceful explanation of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity in the first few chapters. Taking the leaps from Newton to Einstein as if they were steps in a walk through the garden, Greene's gives a sort of history of modern physics for dummies. His ability to simplify and explain the abstract concepts of relativity remind me of how C.S. Lewis can simplify theology without sacrificing the integrity of the topic.

I remember torturing my high school physics teacher when learning about the laws of gravity. 'What is gravity?' I would ask. The answer would come straight from the textbook: 'Gravity is the attraction between any two massive bodies, which is directly proportional to the...'

Of course, this is a descriptive definition. 'Yeah, I know what it does, what what is it?'. I was genuinely curious, though my primary motivation was to illustrate that the teacher didn't know - nobody knew.

Looking back, I give my teacher credit for not screaming that gravity was the warping of space-time but my puny 16-year-old brain was incapable of grasping the concept. She was a good teacher. Conceeding to our weak collective attention span, she read to us from a book called Einstein's Dreams.

I feel, having begun The Elegant Universe, that I'm getting the answer to questions like 'what is gravity?' as well as they can be answered by modern physics to someone with no academic background.

Greene's steers clear of the arrogance (however justified) of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Hawking's writing leaves the reader feeling as though the author had to be persuaded by editors that it was worth writing for the average reader. Greene seems to relish in the potential of the much broader impact of simple and accessible writing.

Most fascinating of the many revelations in these first few chapters is the compounding of human achievement. Einstein found out what was wrong with Newton's ideas (a profound discovery, of course) just as today's physicists are trying to find out what's wrong with Einstein's ideas.

I am constantly amazed by this compounding effect of scientific and technological progress. In 1997, our beautiful Island province was connected to the rest of Canada with the construction of the 12.9Km Confederation Bridge. Every time I drive across the bridge, I marvel at how anyone was able to build such a fantastic structure.

I was wondering about this aloud at work one day (as I often do) and a co-worker drew an apt analogy to our work with software.

Each individual engineer and construction worker did their part, building upon each other's work and expertise. The person who drives the crane (there was a very cool crane involved) doesn't have to understand the effects of cold on the strength of concrete. The person who paints the lines doesn't have to understand the aerodynamics of the structure in high winds.

Progress in software works in a similar way. When I call on a simple PHP function to show the date on a website, I don't need to understand how PHP is interpreted. I don't need to understand the network protocols used to transmit the process page to your computer. Basically, I don't need to understand how computers work because someone else has done it for me.

All of this nonsense brought to mind the recently asked question: Is evolution finally over?. Could it be that this growing external knowledge base (as opposed to being stored in the memory of individual human beings) is the new evolution?

Today's average civil engineer isn't any smarter than a scribe of 3000 years ago. The difference is that the civil engineer has Newtonian physics and centuries of progress in chemistry at his disposal.

Futuretastic guru Ray Kurzweil has drawn this parallel between natural evolution and the progress of technology. He proposes that evolution and eventually technological progress fall on the same grand timeline. He goes so far as to suggest that this scale of progress, both natural and technological, has been accelerating according to an expanded version of Moore's Law.

We are not standing on the shoulders of giants. Rather, we are standing on the shoulders of millions of average people.