Let me tell you a joke.
Somebody apparently once went up
to the great philosopher Wittgenstein,
and said "What a lot of morons people back in the Middle Ages
must have been to have looked every morning
at what is going on behind me now, the dawn,
and to have thought that what they were seeing
was the Sun going round the Earth,
when, as every school kid knows, the Earth goes round the Sun
and it doesn't take too many brains to understand that".
To which Wittgenstein replied,
"Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like
if the Sun had been going round the Earth".
The point being, of course,
it would have looked exactly the same.
You see what your knowledge tells you you are seeing.
Well, that's what this series is going to be about:
how, what you think the universe is
and how you react to that, in everything you do,
depends on what you know, and when that knowledge changes,
for you, the universe changes.
And that is as true for the whole of society
as it is for the individual.
We all are what we all know today.
What we knew yesterday was different,
and so were we.
So that's why this series is also going to look at the past,
at the way we were because of what we knew
that was different from today
and at how, through history,
every time our view of the universe changed--
and us with it--
something was created that would help to make us
the way we are in the modern world
with the distinctive way of thinking that makes us us
and not some other bunch with a different view.
Not some other bunch thinking and acting differently,
us, the end product of centuries of change
that thinks it's the best there is,
just like all the others do.
Every group, nation, tribe, cult, ideology,
each one certain of its version of the truth,
prepared if necessary to defend that version to the death
to keep it alive.
And we are no different.
We defend ours 1,000 feet down,
here below me, under that mountain.
It doesn't matter whether it's a hermetically sealed,
radiation-proof, high-tech place like this
or a stack of bows and arrows in a jungle hut.
Every culture has one of these.
It's where the truth is protected.
This is what's meant by putting your money where your mouth is.
It shows just how far you're prepared to go
to defend your view of things.
Here, as you can see, the attitude is quite far.
It's the North American Air Defense Center
inside Cheyenne Mountain.
Any defense command center is where we define our boundaries,
within which our view operates
and across which any threatening movement will start a war.
Here, those boundaries extend far beyond national frontiers.
They reach out into space.
If how right your view is
can be measured by the territory you defend,
then this global defense makes this view
about as right as you can get.
But then, we would think that, wouldn't we?
So do all the others in their war rooms or jungle huts.
And for everybody,
the amount of effort you expend on defense
enhances the value of your way of life.
That effort here is maximal.
A single multimegaton nuclear warhead
would wipe this place out,
and the Russians could put one through the front door
if they tried.
Should it come from an offshore submarine,
its flight time will be 10 minutes,
3 to identify it as incoming,
7 to react,
to get countermeasures off the ground
to handle whatever else follows the missile.
All over the Western World,
military forces train for what they would have to do
in those first 7 minutes.
The numbers are massive,
4 1/2 million troops, 25,000 battle tanks,
over 11,000 aircraft,
an unknown number of nuclear warheads.
The Soviet Union test launches 500 missiles a year.
The next one could be real.
Readiness is unquestioning,
the entire system poised to go
perhaps for the first and last time
in reaction to the words nobody wants to hear:
unknown track.
This is the command port.
Prepare to copy and print the traffic for missile warning.
I'll check, sir.
Air Defense, operation center with an unknown track.
Track number is Zulu 462.
Time in all, 19-30-Zulu.
Course, 1-3-0 degrees.
Speed, 420 knots.
Altitude, 28,000 feet.
Identification, none.
F-15s, scramble to time of 19-30-Zulu.
So why are we so attached to being the way we are,
so attached that all these people
are prepared to die for it?
Well, if you asked 9 out of 10 people in the West,
they'd probably use the word "freedom", wouldn't they?
Freedom of speech, freedom of movement,
freedom of self-expression,
or maybe "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness",
that and the fact that we think our version of things
is the best version there is.
Look back as I'm going to in this series
to the moments when what we were changed
because what we knew changed, and you see how far we've come
and also how each of those stages
in the growth of our knowledge also brought into existence
a vital bit of what it is we are today.
Look.
In 11th-century arab Spain,
these christian crusaders made a discovery
that led directly to the invention
of the modern university degree.
In 1420, we found a new way of painting
that helped to give us in the modern world
the ability to navigate our ships to a precise landfall
anywhere on Earth or on another planet.
Up to the 15th century,
we memorized our knowledge in song or poetry.
Then we invented a way to do without memory,
and as a result,
ushered in today's standardized technological existence.
300 years ago,
we believed the sky was made of crystal spheres.
Then around 1600,
these gunners destroyed that glass universe
and triggered the beginnings of modern science.
For centuries, we handcrafted everything we needed.
Then an 18th-century religious misfit
invented the power to move mountains
and turned us all into compulsive consumers.
The french revolutionary wars brought into existence
an obsession with gambling
that was to make every 20th-century western citizen
a healthy, long-living number.
In the 19th century came discoveries about nature
that generated our belief ever since
in the inevitability of progress.
And in 1844 came the invention that would give us computers.
So why did all that happen to us
and not to the other cultures on the planet?
Why did we keep on changing?
Well, because of the kind of people we are.
Let me try and show you what I mean.
Look.
You don't know what that is, do you?
But you want to, don't you?
Okay, I'll show you.
That enough?
No?
Okay, try this.
There, it's a lock.
See?
That's the kind of thing we do.
We try to take the universe apart to see how it works.
We can't leave anything alone without knowing what it is.
We are insatiably curious,
and that's what we defend here with all this military hardware,
the right to be curious,
to ask questions and get answers,
to question authority and to remove it from power
if we don't like what it's telling us.
And that's why we've changed constantly throughout history
to become what we are today,
because we've never stopped asking questions.
And what have we got as a result?
Answers, a mountain of them gathered over the centuries,
so much we've had to invent systems just to handle it;
so big, information processing itself is now a science;
so total, it's generated the full entire complex
of the modern western world, a world based on information
that we can defend from a hole inside a mountain
thanks to the knowledge we've accumulated
and that we want to go on being free to accumulate.
So why are we so uniquely curious like that?
Why did we first start asking questions,
and why did we start...
there?
If, as I said earlier, we are what we know--
and we know a lot--
then we have Greece to thank for it.
The western view of things
varies a certain amount from one place to another,
but basically it's a dynamic view we all share,
a highly individualistic approach to things.
And we all keep order in the same way
with the same common beliefs
and the understanding that to hold it all together,
you have to compromise between doing your own thing
and sticking to a minimal number of rules everybody agrees on
if you're going to avoid chaos.
If you landed here from another planet,
came from another time,
all this agreement, all the symbols,
the way we all do what we do as a group,
would be like a kind of message that you could read
to find out what kind of civilization we are now.
Because like everything else,
this unspoken agreement is based on what we all know,
and we're unique in the way we learn that.
It's not genetic.
You pick it up as you go along,
the order things are supposed to be in,
the way things are done.
And when you get down to the individual level,
the rules of the game are there too,
much more subtle.
But in spite of the fact that in one sense
this is all greek to me,
the agreements are so common to all of us in the West
that wherever you're watching this from now,
it'll make sense.
Even if you don't speak the language,
you know the code.
Look.
The way we are began on the coast of Turkey
about 2,700 years ago
with a group of Greeks looking for somewhere to settle
after centuries of war and confusion
had forced this particular lot to jump in their boats
and head east for a bit of peace and quiet.
Just as well these Ionians as they were called
were a hardy, adventurous, pioneering lot,
because they all fetched up in a part of the eastern Med
not exactly known for its five-star accommodation.
You could see that this wasn't going to be milk and honey,
for instance.
Everywhere they looked, it was the same story:
mountains inland, hemming in a bit of scrubby coastal strip
good for olives, wine, and getting out of.
But since they had just arrived,
the Ionians did the next best thing.
They went into shipping.
By 800 B.C., this intrepid lot
had gone north to the russian steppes,
south to the Sahara, west to the Atlantic,
and their little ionian ships were like floating bazaars--
wine, oil, corn, silk, salt, millstones.
You wanted it, they'd find it for you somewhere.
Now, the thing about people like that
is that they've always been after one thing above all else,
haven't they?
They're always looking for a better deal.
Same with the Ionians.
That's why they left Greece in the first place,
and why, once ashore, in this inhospitable dump,
they started doing something
nobody else had ever done before.
They started looking around
to see what they could make of the place
to make life a shade better than dreadful.
Now, I know it sounds strange that I make such a big deal
out of something that seems perfectly common sense--
taking a practical view of things--
but you have to remember that at the time, 3,000 years ago,
the rest of the world was heavily into myths, gods,
mysteries, and other views of nature
not designed to tell you very much about the world around
except that nature was none of your business.
So when one of these Ionians, a guy called Thales,
started asking practical questions about his environment,
he was really breaking all the rules.
Thales looked at nature with mechanisms in mind
rather than magic,
and he noticed how everything came in opposites:
hot, cold; wet, dry; up, down-- opposites,
just like the two sides of a deal,
a crafty businesslike Ionian like Thales would have said.
This business of opposite in nature and argument
was to go meaningfully well with something else Thales did,
which was to nip off to Egypt and bring back their geometry.
Now, in the laid-back opulence of life up the Nile,
where the local conditions
produced the world's most regular good times,
they lived kind of feet up and mind in neutral,
so to speak.
Problem solving was very much not their thing.
So geometry got used for building pyramids
and measuring land and nothing else.
Thales, with practical needs in mind,
tipped the pyramid on its side
and used the triangle so that two people--
one here and here--
could get a cross bearing on a ship out at sea here
and work out how far from land it was.
Good, eh?
But he did something much more clever.
He took the circle, with its 360°,
and halved it.
So this line had to contain 180°,
half the 360, right?
Okay, try this.
Here's a straight line.
Here's another one.
Now, these angles here and here
must add up to 180, mustn't they?
Let's call them "A" and "B".
And these angles here and here add up to 180 too.
Call them "B" and "C".
Now, if "A" and "B" make 180 and "B" and "C" make 180,
then "A" and "C" must be the same.
Opposite angles are equal.
From a self-evident thing like a circle,
Thales had gone to a nonself-evident thing like this.
That's the basis of geometry:
going from something you know to discover something you don't.
And all this was to turn out to go very well
with that business of reconciling opposites
I was on about,
because by about 500 B.C.,
that's how they were running their cities.
In the town squares,
they'd settle things by the first ever public debates--
well, shouting matches-- called politics.
And that kind of arguing opposite points of view
plus their new geometry went together
to produce an entirely original kind of structure for thinking
with which you could tackle any subject.
So being an adventurous lot, they did.
The Greeks were into questions like, "What's it all made of?
"Where did it all come from?
and what's this constant change in nature all about?"
And the technique they'd developed
for reconciling opposites to reach political solutions
was also a kind of way of thinking things through
in general to reach new ideas,
and so, in a physical sense, was the geometry, remember?
Whatever happened in nature, lines and angles never changed.
And that's where we began.
I mean the rational way we in the west look at things.
The rationalism that is the bringing together
of logic and geometry, that's our way,
driven since the questioning Greeks
to look for the order in nature,
without which there would be chaos.
Today the rationalist greek way has brought us to the stage
where our search for order, our questioning,
reaches out even across the depths of intergalactic space.
The answers we get from this antenna
come from millions of light-years away,
and if you look around here
or wherever you are now,
you see how the modern world is made up of answers,
answers to questions in the past that were so good,
we hung on to them.
They are all around us, influencing the way we are.
This is an 18th-century answer.
I mean being able to build a gigantic metal structure
like this radio telescope.
Because the answer to a question being asked in the 18th century
showed how to generate the power to make things like that.
And when you can cut metal on an industrial scale,
you can make machines on an industrial scale
and manufacture on an industrial scale
to solve the problems of a rising population.
Steam power was the answer to that 18th century problem.
They produced enough to feed themselves all right
and, in doing so, started things we still live with:
regular work for regular wages, factories and unions,
the expectation of a steadily rising standard of living,
and the problem of unemployment.
The telescope here maps the sky.
You feed in the coordinates, and it gives you that.
It's a radio map of a galaxy
2 million light-years straight out that way.
This is a map of our galaxy.
There's Andromeda.
There's the galactic center.
That use of coordinates
to map the sky or where you live or anywhere
is another answer we found and kept in the 15th century.
Back then, the question was,
how does the newly affluent florentine merchant
get a bit of class into his life?
The answer was to go to Greece
and pick up some classical culture,
which they did,
together with an entirely new way of measuring things,
things like the world,
with a system that used gridlines,
the kind of technique we use today for town planning
or placing an intercontinental ballistic missile
within 10 feet of its target.
But we live with more than just physical answers from the past.
When any good attitude or concept or system worked well,
we hung on to it.
We preserve representative democracy
intended for a time when only a few could get to the capital
to speak for the many.
Modern finance was designed in the 17th century.
Literacy as a test of intelligence
came in the 15th century.
The idea of progress is 19th century.
And yet all those things
are part of our mental furniture today,
because when the answer to a question,
a solution to a problem, suits us,
we kind of institutionalize it
so that it won't change even when we do.
The business of questioning itself
has been institutionalized like that
in the kind of place Jodrell Bank Telescope belongs to:
a university.
If we are what we know,
then this is where we pass on what we are
to the next generation.
And in the interest of safety,
to keep the boat from being rocked too much,
we teach the young to ask questions
that have, in the main, already been answered.
"Tristram Shandy asks us to help write the novel,
but in so doing, we write ourselves."
Good, I like that,
particularly, I think, what you said about time.
And to make sure we've passed on the view
of how things are unmistakably, we test.
After all, that's the only way you can be sure
they know what they're supposed to know.
And the system's worked well for hundreds of years.
You can see how much we value this answer from the past
in the way all education is conservative, cautious.
It's as if we wanted to reassure ourselves
that in the risky business
of asking questions about knowledge,
we were confidently operating with tried and tested ideas
that hadn't failed us
since when people dressed and talked like this.
In nomine Domini, Patris, Filli, et Spiritus Sancti.
The oldest answers
to the most basic questions about how to operate
are common to virtually every culture on the planet,
because at the simplest level,
every culture needs to keep order,
especially this kind.
This is one of the things in life we protect most
against being changed when knowledge changes us.
We protect it by turning it into a ritual.
When you get married or buried,
get christened or anything else too important to play by ear,
the event is turned into a kind of play
where everybody gets a role they act out.
It's a kind of public agreement
to stick to the general rules about whatever it is.
The people doing it are effectively saying,
"no matter what else may change, we won't rock the boat.
"We're not maverick.
you can trust us."
Expressions of approval follow.
Most of these ritual ways of answering a social need
that we got from the past look like it.
They include some thing from an ancient rite,
in this case, the old symbol of fertility,
the ring.
And then it's all done
in the presence of a supernatural being, a god.
So the agreement is also made
under what was once a real threat of heavenly retribution
if you broke your promise later on.
Some things, this ritual says, must be permanent.
Rituals, if you like, permit change to happen,
like the change in the status of the two people involved here.
But it's change strictly by the book,
ceremonial, formal, nerve-racking.
"Phew", is usually the feeling at this point.
Well, a ritual wouldn't be much of a ritual
if you didn't feel you'd been put through the wringer,
would it?
So now it's official in every sense.
The new order of things-- two are now one--
gets public recognition,
and for just a few minutes, limited disorder is permitted.
Mind you, most of the rituals in life
don't involve a booze up.
In most cases,
if something becomes common enough to turn into a ritual
and then starts to involve really large numbers of people,
that's when the ritual becomes something else.
It becomes widespread enough
to affect that general agreement we all share.
So that's when the responsibility for running it
goes out of your hands
to be taken over by the institutions set up
to run the rituals that matter on a regular basis
so that people can have clear rules and regulations to follow
if they decide to get up to that particular ritual.
The institutions take the admin out of daily life
and run it for you:
banking, government, sewage, tax collecting.
Or if you break the rules and regulations,
one institution can take you out of daily life:
this one.
In every community, the law,
whether it's dressed up like this
or the village elders telling you what the local custom is,
the law is all those rules I was on about earlier.
This may be double dutch to you, but you get the point.
I suppose what institutions like this do most of all
is the dirty work.
While they're putting 'em away here in the law court,
for instance, that leaves us free
to get on with making money, having a career,
and avoiding the social responsibility stuff
these people have to deal with.
And after a few centuries of this buck passing,
the institutions get big and powerful
and reach into everybody's life so much,
they become hard to alter
and virtually impossible to get rid of.
The name of the game here
and in all the institutions that run your life
is keeping order,
because if the institutions didn't do that,
it would be the end of civilization as we know it,
wouldn't it?
So the institutions are usually old-fashioned,
don't like change.
Well, we all like to know where we stand, don't we?
I mean, you wouldn't want this place
to make up the rules as it went along, would you?
The extreme way to protect yourself against change
and keep total order in the face of awkward questions
is to do it the way they do it in eastern communities,
where, say, buddhism is a way of life.
In that case, you're not bothered by questions
because you're not looking for answers.
Basically, all the answers a buddhist needs
were found over 2,000 years ago.
Their explanation of the universe is set
in theological concrete, and in any case,
it's a universe that doesn't change,
so there's no need to go looking for change in it.
The reason this culture is not like ours
is because, like us, they are what they know.
But since what they know doesn't change, they don't.
The symbols and monuments that surround them
are a part of their daily living.
To our way of looking at it,
they don't live with bits of the past affecting them;
they live in the past.
The nepalese way of life
reflects their lack of interest in novelty.
They don't change not because they're backward
but because they don't want to.
We, on the other hand, do.
And that gives us a problem.
In spite of the way institutions can act like a safety barrier
against the effects of change,
because of the way we've made asking questions
one of our institutions,
we do something that doesn't appear to make sense.
Where other societies do things,
organize themselves to keep things the way they are,
we, because of our rationalist beginnings back in Greece,
create places like this to do exactly the opposite,
to make waves, to rock the boat,
to ask questions knowing that the answers will change things.
It's a scientific research lab.
Through this inverter,
which has to drive the signal up
through about 5,000 microns of metal
and about 2,000 of poly.
Right here we had to get a cal-com.
Difference between the modus simulation
and the advice.
Modus isn't quite as accurate.
It will not latch this data in time.
In places like this,
we've institutionalized the business of change itself.
And as for the other institutions,
this kind has taken root
ever since science first started affecting our daily lives.
Today the mysterious world of the research lab
comes up with so many answers so fast
that only a few insiders know what the question was.
If, as I said earlier, we are what we know,
then this particular kind of institution
spends its working hours finding ways to make things
that will sooner or later change what we are,
our view.
Once, it took decades, even centuries for us to change.
Now it could happen with every new discovery.
But these places aren't just here to design fancy new gizmos.
These semi-independent scientific communities
spend as much of their effort involved
in the kind of abstract theoretical thinking
that may never have an application.
But you never know.
What they produce is ultimately approved by us or not
when it gets onto the market.
If what they make doesn't sell,
then the kind of change it would have brought
wasn't the kind of change we wanted.
The problem is, we often don't know what they produce
because it's not the kind of thing you'd know about
unless you read scientific magazines.
As often as not,
the product changes the way we do things
rather than the things themselves.
They modify the world around us.
Like you still go on using lifts;
they just work differently.
The buildings still go up;
they're just built
with different construction techniques.
The phone looks just the same,
only it does more things for you than it did before.
Thanks to research labs like this,
that kind of change happens every day, everywhere.
Time to wake up.
The point about all this technological pizzazz
isn't the gee-whiz high-tech stuff.
It's the secondary effects of using it.
Take, say, what this chip could do
to change the pattern of work.
With this, you could have telecommuting.
That's where you work at home from a screen,
and you never go into the office.
Great, no more rush hour.
But what does that do to the public transportation system
and the taxes it uses
or to the car manufacturers and their workers' jobs
and the rest of the economy that depends on their output
or to the concept of the city itself
with its support systems and businesses
or to the downtown property values
where maybe your pension fund's invested
not to speak of working at home day in, day out
and what that might do to a marriage?
And what do you get out of work when it's only you?
What would be the effect of isolating
and fragmenting the community like that
from just one application of this microchip?
And every innovation modifies life like that,
and our culture's been doing it for 1,000 years.
That's the way we are, and it shows.
Look at any western city, and you'll see a culture
trying to come to terms with constant change.
Look at the detail of your hometown
or this place,
and you see the way people saw things in the past
and how different their views were to ours.
You can still see those attitudes
because of what they left behind them.
Some of those past views lasted long enough
and were so certain of themselves
that they left behind really major bits of evidence
of what they thought was important.
Look at this for instance.
19th-century San Francisco built churches
and believed in heroes.
How many statues do we build to honor great men today?
And look at the public buildings of the period,
almost imperial.
And they obviously didn't think things were going to change much
or they wouldn't have built like this,
for a view that obviously thought
it would last as long as the Greeks did.
Today power lies with the quick fix,
with the marketplace, and big business.
And where once a home was a house,
today it's a box in a skyscraper.
We've gone from this way of looking at things to this
in a generation.
Now people work at night
because somewhere else on the planet, it's not night.
Train 238, Central.
That's a 10-4.
Your route is coming up.
I'm receiving the-- the train now.
Richmond train currently at Coliseum.
The public transit system exists
to deliver millions of people to their work every day
like an extension of the production line process
that runs the modern world
and that everybody has to fit into
and that changed the meaning of work 200 years ago
when it first happened.
Life, now, is working to buy this year's model
because last year's is last year's.
KFRC
Good morning and welcome
to the absolute ultimate radio program.
And everywhere, freeways, expressways, throughways,
all to make it easier for everybody to go places faster
and in greater comfort than they were able to only yesterday.
KFRC
We live caught between more and more change
and less and less time to adapt to it.
We believe in the right of the individual to do his thing.
But at the same time,
we change what that thing is all the time.
So this is what questioning has brought us.
If we are what we know,
then what we are in the modern West
is unsure about how long it will be
before what we know is out of date.
You can see how a culture reveals itself
by what it does.
All that evidence about ours down there,
you can read it like a book.
And in our case, the message you get
is that the only constant in life is change,
not just in the physical shape of the world around,
in standards, attitudes, ethics, values, morals,
all shifting.
The inevitable end product
of that greek rationalism I talked about earlier
is all around you.
It's our world of here today and gone tomorrow.
I said at the beginning
all cultures think their view is worth defending to the death.
But we more than most are split between yesterday and tomorrow,
defending a way of life that is, by definition,
a question mark.
So here we are, committed by our greek origins
to a life of asking questions that provide answers
that turn out to create more questions
and no end in sight.
And as our amazing abilities grow more amazing,
the more questions we ask,
we're reaching the stage
where it's not a matter of what novelty of change
the future will bring next
but what kind of future we care to invent, make happen.
We can make deserts bloom or make deserts,
move mountains, maybe create life,
all because we can't leave things alone.
But why do we go on asking questions?
If the only point has ever been to find the right answer,
to explain all this lot,
what was wrong with the one the Greeks found?
Why didn't we stick with their view of the universe
or any of the other views
that have come along since the Greeks?
Why didn't we stick with one of them?
Well, in a sense, we did.
Part of the way we view things now does come from the past.
Many of the institutions and attitudes we have
originated in the past,
born of different answers to different questions
in different times with different problems.
But they continue to exist, still operate,
modified but basically the same,
still affecting us like living fossils.
Even in a world of constant change like ours,
many of those systems that control,
organize our view of things
and the way we do what we do are outdated.
So why do we keep them?
Well, that's also what this series is going to look at:
the changes in knowledge
that brought them into existence in the first place,
the problems they were designed to solve,
and the way they made us what we are today.
It was the earliest of those changes in the past,
the one that gave birth
to one of the most powerful institutions
in the modern world,
that I want to look at first in the next program,
because the knowledge generated then
gave us the idea basic to life ever since:
that we could shape the future.
That change I'm talking about happened, oh,
900 years ago in Spain almost by accident.
And funnily enough,
given the fact that it made us all think
that we could shape the future--
and I'll leave you with this thought till next time--
it actually involved people looking in crystal balls.