HOW NKS FITS INTO COOL METAPHORS FROM NEW SCIENCE

by David L Steinhardt
david_steinhardt@breadnet.middlebury.edu

There's a very old joke that sums up for me what happens when you get a metaphor wrong:

A guy tours a prison and hears peals of laughter from the cellblock. As he approaches, he hears, "27!" Gales of laughter. "112!" More hilarity.

The guy turns to the warden and the warden says, "They've been here so long, they refer to their jokes by numbers."

"Can I try?" the guy asks. 

"Sure."

"46!" Silence. "What's wrong?" he asks the warden.

"You didn't tell it right."

In real life, too, our language always refers to something else. Language exists through metaphor. An orange is an orange because we've seen other oranges. A sunset is orange because we know the color from oranges, or somewhere else. But when it's wrong, it doesn't work right.

Even mathematics is nothing but metaphor. "How many for dinner?" "Five." We know what "five" is because we understand the number from other contexts. 

Good metaphors benefit language, and by extension, thought. 

Bad, inaccurate metaphors warp language and thought. 

My politics are left of center and my metaphors tonight will reflect that, but good metaphors can support any sound argument. But I'll argue tonight, for instance, that in talking about a political subject such as war, that words such as "stronger" and "bigger" are increasingly irrelevant in the age of demoralized armies and roadside bombs, so to my political perspective, to say we'll "eventually win in Iraq because we're bigger and stronger than them" is a bad use of metaphor, because it's not about who's bigger or stronger, it's about who wants it more. So any pundit who says "bigger! stronger!" is using an inappropriate metaphor for the war in Iraq.

You can disagree with my politics yet still agree that improper use of metaphor warps an argument, while the opposite enhances one's point. 

The scientific revolutions of the area roughly bordered by the 20th century provided myriad metaphors which could, if used well, enhance our understanding of the world. Unfortunately, these metaphors have been botched as often as they've been helpful.

NKS has the potential to offer countless new metaphors to benefit human understanding, and I'm arguing here it's important we get them right, and correct those who use them incorrectly, in order to benefit language and thought that derives from NKS principles. 

How have they been botched? Most obviously in perhaps the most famous scientific breakthrough of recent times:  It's been a hundred years since Einstein's relativity theory, and most folks still don't know what it means. Worse yet, they misapply it.

Who here believes that Special Relativity and General Relativity can basically be boiled down to the phrase "everything's relative"?

Did you know that Einstein's chosen name for General Relativity was "Invariance Theory"? Because it states there is such a thing as Absolute Spacetime against which all movement occurs? 

I was in a scientific chat room just last week in which a supposedly intelligent person argued that because everything's relative, there's no difference between traveling in a straight line or a curve, because there's no background to anything. If General Relativity were known by Einstein's name of Invariance Theory, no one would make such a ridiculous argument a century after the papers were written, arguing precisely the opposite what the theory asserts!

More bad metaphors: Darwin's theory of evolution is boiled down to "survival of the fittest" and "humans are descended from apes". Nonsense! Apes are descended from proto-apes. Humans are descended from proto-humans! We've all come from somewhere. And the "fittest" refers to those mutations that "fit"! A randomly achieved larger brain? That fits human (or ape) adaptability. Stronger but stupider? The Neanderthals died out.  And with NKS, in this case, one might argue evolution is a series of countless consequences derived from a small number of initial conditions. But for those who imagine "fittest" means "strongest", one derives incorrect conclusions contrary to the theory that's supposedly supporting them.

Quantum mechanics? A century old, and, I'm arguing, because the common metaphors are so poorly drawn, still poorly understood by nonspecialists. Who here thinks a quantum leap is big? It has nothing to do with bigness; it refers to a particle passing from one orbital to another without ever existing in between them. It's not a useful metaphor for much of anything, really. Yet quantum mechanics is filled with exciting metaphors. Anyone here heard of quantum entanglement? It asserts, and it's now been proven, that some particles can separate, yet still remain "one"--separated by great distances, actions to either separated bit instantly--simultaneously--affects the other. Separated, yet still one? Quite a metaphor for love! And just as mysterious.

String theory is of special interest to me, as I worked closely with Brian Greene on the books The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, which attempt to explain these emerging theories. In string theory, eleven dimensions are necessary to resolve the contradictions between relativity and quatum mechanics. I'm hopeful that because we set out the theory with an eye out for its metaphorical implications that folks won't botch them! Like NKS, I believe string theory (which I'm using here interchangably with "superstring theory" and even "M-Theory") demonstrates that deeper, simpler structures may be necessary to explain more complex structures that are more visilbe to us. 

Which brings us to how NKS fits into such metaphorical schemes. 

I'm not a scientist. I haven't taken a science class in nearly 30 years. But as a writer and editor who deals in metaphors, I know NKS proves some fundamental facts about our world. And what I understand about NKS can be summed up by examining Rule 110. 

I've often said that if I were a poet of color, I'd write a poem about racism called "Rule 110."

Look at Rule 110. Eight simple rules, five of which, five-eighths, 62.5% of which yield an outcome of a black square. And what happens? From the first application of the rule, half of all succeeding squares come out white. And of the other half, it's a life-or-death struggle between them that plays out for all eternity. 

Again, I'm sure any right-wingers here can find metaphors for your views here as well. But as a metaphor to describe, say, affirmative action: "We've set aside 5/8 of all slots for you people!" it's pretty devastating. "But half of us get excluded before we even get to the door!" "That's your own fault, then, because the rule clearly sets aside 62.5% of the spaces for blacks!" But, as we see, just because the rules specify 5/8 for one color doesn't mean that's the outcome. Under Rule 110, roughly 25% of the succeeding squares turn out black. 

Forget about "Catch-22", a metaphor from a novel's fictitious army regulation. Rule 110 is a metaphor solidly grounded in unassailable NKS that demonstrates something fundamental about cause and effect. Like everything else about NKS, it demonstrates that simple causes can produce effects of limitless complexity. That's a metaphor the world needs for clarity of language and thought, and I urge all of you to use your understanding of NKS to create your own metaphors to elevate the language and thought of those you interact with, and I look forward to seeing, over the years, how these simple initial actions play out into unimagined complexity. 

Thank you.