Author: chemistadmin

Edited by Dava Sobel

It is perhaps not strange that the Radiates, a type of animals

whose home is in the sea, many of whom are so diminutive

in size, and so light and evanescent in substance, that they

are hardly to be distinguished from the element in which

they live, should have been among the last to attract the

attention of naturalists.

They say I came to science

through marriage. As though

I wouldn’t have, otherwise.

 

As though I was dragged, by accident,

like a jellyfish caught in a net.

 

The truth is I married for science.

It was a way in. Like

a radiate, I got what I wanted

without attracting undue attention.

Nothing can be more unprepossessing than a sea-anemone

when contracted. A mere lump of brown or whitish jelly, it

lies like a lifeless thing on the rock to which it clings, and it is

difficult to believe that it has an elaborate and exceedingly

delicate internal organization, or will ever expand into such

grace and beauty as really to deserve the name of the flower

after which it has been called … the whole summit of the

body seems crowned with soft, plumy fringes.

We are all lumps, aren’t we, before we find

the thing we love? The things?

My husband and I, lumped together,

blossomed into beauty. I know

that sounds maudlin. Let me try again.

 

These animals … thrive well in confinement.

For some women, marriage is a prison.

They enter it willingly. It keeps them

safe from the world. Our marriage

was more like a boat.

 

They may also multiply by a process of self-division.

We had no children. I took notes.

Another way of saying it is I wrote books.

At every point in our studies

of sea creatures and each other,

I was in charge of the words.

 

The name Jelly-fish is an inappropriate one, though the

gelatinous consistency of these animals is accurately enough

expressed by it; but they have no more structural relation

to a fish than to a bird or an insect.

Jellyfish are neither jelly nor fish,

as I was not truly wife nor scientist.

Have you seen them move?

It looks as if they move by breathing.

 

Encountering one of those huge Jelly-fishes, when out

in a row-boat one day, we attempted to make a rough

measurement of his dimensions upon the spot. He was

lying quietly near the surface, and did not seem in the

least disturbed by the proceeding, but allowed the oar,

eight feet in length, to be laid across the disk, which

proved to be about seven feet in diameter. Backing the

boat slowly along the line of the tentacles, which were

floating at their utmost extension behind him, we then

measured these in the same manner, and found them to

be rather more than fourteen times the length of the oar…

As I write these lines I remember

that day in the boat and how happy

we were. A person could measure

our happiness in oars. A person could

lay down oar after oar and still need

more oars.

 

Our laughter echoing over the waves.

No one to hear it besides each other—

and the biggest jellyfish we ever saw.

Author’s Note: All italic quotations are from Agassiz’s Seaside Studies in Natural History (1865). In addition to her scientific research, Agassiz collaborated with her husband, natural historian Louis Agassiz, on marine expeditions. She was a co-founder and the first president of Radcliffe College.

If you had 1,000 butts, what would you do with them? The marine worm Ramisyllis multicaudata is one of only two known animals to find itself in this rather awkward situation (shopping for pants must be a nightmare)—and it isn’t yet telling. But given that that many booties doesn’t “just happen” to a worm, there must be a pretty good reason, and a new anatomical study has offered up some tasty clues.

The story starts off normally enough. Ramisyllis is a bristle worm that lives inside the water passages of a sponge called Petrosia in a shallow reef off the coast of northern Australia. Its lone, unremarkable and rather lethargic head is buried deep in the sponge. Shortly after that things get weird.

Its body begins to branch repeatedly and without pattern. The legion resulting posteriors may protrude into the seawater through natural holes in the sponge and amble along its surface. One “small” sponge observed by scientists was festooned with more than 100 crawling worm fannies, sometimes more than 10 to a single opening. Although sponges are many remarkable things, sentient is not one of them, and that must surely be counted as a win here.

Further, each branch contains its own set of internal organs. According to the first detailed anatomical study of these worms, published this year in the Journal of Morphology by a team from Spain, Australia and Germany, these organs are in no way different from that of the unbranched juvenile. They further found that the worm’s gut is continuous throughout the entire labyrinthine animal—but conspicuously empty. No sponge tissue has ever been found inside, nor food particles of any kind.

Yet they also found the worm’s hind gut is covered in cilia and microvilli, little fingerlike extensions that maximize the surface area available for nutrient absorption (your own gut is covered in a similar velvety lining of villi and microvilli). That implies their gut could still function, although how the sprawling animals could survive on invisible food that enters only through their woefully inadequate regulation-sized mouth remains a mystery.

What makes these worms particularly interesting to me is that they appear to be an animal that has adopted a fungal lifestyle. Look at a fungus under a microscope, and you will see a system of branching tubes with a strong resemblance to Ramisyllis. And this similarity suggests what these worms might be up to in their sponges.

Fungi are absorptive feeders. They tunnel into their food, secrete digestive enzymes and then resorb the resulting goo. The reason their highly branched, filamentous bodies put the emphasis on surface area is that rather than having a long intestine crammed into a small body as we do, their entire body is an intestine, inside out. In this setup, the more body you have, the more food you can eat.

It’s been known for a while that soft-bodied marine invertebrates can absorb dissolved organic matter (a.k.a. liquid food) directly from seawater through their “skin.” But Ramisyllis may have taken this to the next level: the anatomy team discovered the worm’s body is also suspiciously covered in long microvilli. Given the strong emphasis on square footage in the Ramisyllis body plan—and the lack of emphasis on producing heads or mouths commensurate with the situation—one must strongly suspect that, like fungi, they have converted their outsides into insides.

If their highly branched bodies aren’t suggestive enough of fungi, allow me to present Exhibit B: their bonkers reproductive system.

The first clue that to their extremely alternative lifestyle is the fact that Ramisyllis is never going to go on a date. Once you’ve crammed your thousands of tentaclelike branches into the water passages of a Petrosia sponge, you’ve made a commitment to a house, not a relationship (or even a hookup). The usual solution is to simply boot your millions of cheap gametes directly into the water, wave bye-bye, and turn on some must-see TV. Corals and sea anemones are notable practitioners of this enviable reproductive art.

But this is not the route Ramisyllis and many other syllid polychaete worms took. At the back of their bodies sits a little tail called a pygidium (trilobites also had this cute butt flap). Just in front of it lies the polychate worm version of the apical meristem in plants: a place where stem cells continuously generate new body parts called the posterior growth zone. Polychaete worms have these in order to make new segments. But it is an unusual situation for animals, and it has led to some unusual results.

Sometimes, instead of making a new standard segment, these regions start building a head containing a rudimentary brain and four eyes. After the head come more body segments stuffed with gametes, and before you know it there’s a sexy little hot rod attached to the mother ship, to be jettisoned when the time is ripe. These stripped-down clones (botanically termed “stolons”; strawberry runners and other horizontal plant stems are also called stolons) are armed with paddles, driving directions, a libido and little else.

In short, Ramisyllis makes autonomous gonads that lie in that hazy middle ground between detachable penis and college freshman. The group to which these worms belong—the syllids—are perhaps unique among bilaterally symmetrical animals in this bizarre reproductive strategy, termed “gemmiparous schizogamy.” Certain insects, of course, do something similar in that they produce ephemeral adults whose sole aim is to knock extremely tiny, extremely urgent boots, but they generally live as larvae for a much longer period. And they do not bud from existing insects. That’s a very mycological way of doing things.

Indeed, the image of a Ramisyllis stolon amidst the branches of its generative worm is strikingly similar to photographs of the fungus Fusarium bearing its distinctive boat-shaped spores. Stolons of other nonbranching syllid species can also be made in bunches or chains, just like fungal spores.

It may be this very reproductive habit is what allowed syllid worms to grow multiple-choice bodies. The ability to make a branch bearing a sex-seeking clone may only be a few mutations away from substituting the regular bits instead.

Still, something about this story bugs me. If their whole bodies can absorb dissolved food, why is there such an emphasis on all the myriad backsides reaching the surface of the sponge? In one specimen dissected by scientists, bunches of worm butts were found stuffed into sponge cul-de-sacs. The scientists interpreted this as the thwarted attempt of said backsides to reach the surface. The tails also contain a bright white pigment of unknown function that they make whether or not they reach topside.

Why is it so vital the tails find an exit? Is the dissolved organic matter really that much tastier outside the sponge? And why are they wearing the equivalent of reflective highway paint? Is it just for sunscreen? Or is there some other use?

Even though Ramisyllis is apparently doing what I would do with a thousand booties—shake them—exactly what that it is really doing with them remains a mystery.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Just before the release in June of the much-anticipated Pentagon report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), I sat down to try to create a list of the greatest hurdles to UAPs’ scientific analysis. What I came up with were five major challenges that are described here, together with a cross-comparison with some of the statements made in the published government report. Although only nine pages long, that report turns out to be thorough, careful and scientifically accurate in that it fully expresses how little certainty can be drawn from the data to hand. As the saying goes: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Challenge No. 1: All UAP/UFO incidents are nonrepeatable: we can’t go back and perform the “experiment” of that exact observation again.

For science in general, this kind of thing is a big headache. A lack of repeatability or replication poses a very significant challenge for the interpretation of data (especially if those data are noisy and incomplete); for filling in obvious gaps; and for eliminating or supporting any hypotheses. As the Pentagon report states: “Limited data leaves most UAP unexplained….” Limited, anecdotal and nonrepeatable are hardly the words you want to use, but they apply here.

Challenge No. 2: There is nothing systematic in how incidents are recorded or reported. Different camera systems, radar systems, data processing, observers and environmental circumstances mean that each incident is, in effect, an uncontrolled experiment, with few ways to ascertain the real quality and sensitivity of data.

Again, the Pentagon report states effectively the same point: “The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP.” The report then goes on to suggest a potentially useful task of: “Consistent consolidation of reports from across the federal government, standardized reporting, increased collection and analysis, and a streamlined process for screening.”

This is really important; the report is very, very specific about the lack of appropriateness of typical military sensor equipment for this sort of analysis. “The sensors mounted on U.S. military platforms are typically designed to fulfill specific missions. As a result, those sensors are not generally suited for identifying UAP.”

Challenge No. 3: There is no easy way to account for “cherry-picking” of data. We don’t know how often pilots or other observers see something unexpected but then, a minute later, figure out what they’re witnessing (or at least convince themselves they’ve done so) and consequently don’t report anything. There could be thousands of such incidents, or very few. We don’t know, and those “mundane” cases could actually represent all cases.

The report does discuss the “stigma” surrounding personnel or observers reporting UAPs, but it also states that out of the 144 reports that were studied, only 18 incidents (covered in 21 of the reports) appeared to demonstrate “advanced technology,” inasmuch as there was an appearance of unusual aeronautical behavior in movement.

In a small (unspecified) number of cases there was even evidence of military aircraft systems “processing radio frequency (RF) energy”—whatever that really means; presumably there was some increased radio noise. But, as for all the times that nothing was reported, either because something was quickly identified, or a pilot just chose not to, that remains a total unknown.

Challenge No. 4: If any incidents or observations are genuinely associated with something tangible and physical, we don’t know whether we’re looking at a single underlying phenomenon or many. It’s a bit like going into a zoo blindfolded and trying to understand what you’re hearing and smelling. If there’s only one species you might figure it out, but if there are 100 species, then decoding your experience is going to be very difficult.

Again, the report hits this nail right on the head, with an entire section titled “UAP probably lack a single explanation.” Some of the possibilities offered are: “Airborne clutter … birds, balloons, recreational unmanned aerial vehicles … debris like plastic bags … that muddle a scene,” as well as natural atmospheric phenomena (ice crystals, thermal fluctuations that can register on infrared and radar systems), classified aircraft and the like, and foreign “adversary systems.”

The Pentagon report also provides an outline of ongoing efforts, and possible future directions, for trying to improve all analyses. This includes a more systematic collection of military aircraft sensor data, along with FAA data, and applying machine learning to sift through current and historical information to look for “clusters,” patterns and associations with known phenomena like weather balloons, wildlife movements and other Earth-monitoring databases.

Challenge No. 5: The popular association of UAP with hypotheses involving alien technology creates a severe analysis bias. Usually, science tries to move stepwise towards finding support for a given hypothesis or for eliminating hypotheses, and weighs those options as evenly as possible. But in this case a hypothesis that would require extraordinarily robust evidence in order to be supported (as with Carl Sagan’s famous dictum “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”), regardless of what some people say, hangs heavily over any analysis or discussion, and there is a vocal community who feel that the answer is already known. That’s a problem.

In fact, and rather ironically, the “sociocultural stigmas” around recording surprising observations mentioned in the report are undoubtedly exacerbated by elements of the UFO community that express ideas or beliefs that are, well, fantastical in nature.

Consequently, observers such as highly trained, professional pilots are likely going to be reticent to mention things they are very surprised by. This relates to point No. 3 and creates bias because the unreported incidents, if further analyzed, could provide significant insight—especially as to how often human observers are simply confused, as opposed to witnessing genuinely unusual phenomena.

Where does all of this leave us? Well, the Pentagon report does suggest ways to improve data collection and analysis, as I’ve described. It also points out that if some UAP do represent physical hazards, or security challenges, it would be important to figure that out. In that sense, there is some possible risk mitigation to be had by investigating UAP further, irrespective of an eventually mundane or extraordinary explanation.

As a scientist who studies the possibilities of life elsewhere in the cosmos, I find myself saying “Well, it seems worth having some more work done on this.” But that’s not because I think it’s likely that extraterrestrials or their probes could be dropping into Earth’s atmosphere. Although as a rational thinker I can’t, and shouldn’t, permanently exclude such possibilities, my point No. 5 bothers me enough that I’d rather follow the stepwise approach. There are other benefits to that strategy too.

In particular, I think that the idea of a vastly more systematic collection of data (from things like state-of-the-art camera systems placed on aircraft or in monitoring locations) would be an interesting activity regardless of what is actually taking place in our skies.

New kinds of high-resolution time-lapse data and high-fidelity monitoring of our planetary environment could have many additional benefits as we try to navigate our way through a perilously changing world. From atmospherics to animal migration to human-generated garbage floating in the air and on the sea, seeing what’s actually going on is always going to help.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

By Mark Fischetti

1971

How Locusts Control Yaw

“Like an airplane, an insect can roll around its longitudinal axis, pitch around a horizontal axis or yaw around a vertical axis. It appears that locusts have two different yaw-correcting strategies: (1) a rapid change in wing twist, abdomen position and leg position controlled by wind-sensitive hairs on the head, and (2) a slower, subtler movement of the same general character evoked by cervical receptors. It seems that the change in wind angle, indicating a yaw, is integrated somewhere in the locust’s central nervous system, and is followed by independent motor commands to the wings, legs, abdomen and head.”

1921

Tasty Radio

“Two engineers recently conducted experiments to determine the feasibility of reception of radio signals by the sense of taste. Electrodes were placed under the tongue to cause a taste sensation when a source of [electrical] potential was connected to them. Tests were made, using low-potential direct current and 60-cycle alternating current, to ascertain the amount of energy and potential necessary for taste reception. The reception of actual signals from an antenna was tried. It was found impossible, [even with] four stages of amplification. The results indicate that while from an electrical standpoint it is possible to receive radio signals by the sense of taste, it is much inferior to that of hearing, or even of sight.”

Orange Tree Never Quits

“An ever-bearing orange tree which citrus fruit growers believe is destined to revolutionize the orange industry has been discovered by horticulturists in a small grove at Avon Park, Florida. To protect the specimen, its purchasers have placed around it a heavy wire fence 20 feet in height and stationed guards day and night. The tree has been in bearing continuously eight years, but until recently its existence was known only to the owner and several neighbors, who, according to citrus experts, did not realize its value but regarded it merely as a freak of nature. A syndicate has been formed to propagate the tree so that a large number of trees may be set out in groves in 1923.”

1871

Early Fake Leather

“Enameled cloth enters into many uses as a substitute for leather. Its most important use is that of covering for carriage tops, for traveling bags and trunks, and not rarely is it worked up into rainproof coats and pants. The foundation is cotton cloth, which is slowly passed through a machine’s iron cylinders. It first receives a coating of a black, disagreeable-looking substance composed of oil, lampblack, resin and other ingredients, boiled together till about the consistency of melted tar. Then the cloth is wound upon a huge wooden frame that is passed into a heater to dry. It then is laid on long tables, and workers sprinkle with water and rub with pumice stone, till the whole surface is made perfectly smooth. The fabric is thoroughly varnished, and again passed through the heater. It is now a piece of cloth with a thick, shining coat of black, very much resembling patent leather.”

Wonders of Chloroform

“Chloroform is the best known solvent for camphor, resins and sealing wax; it also dissolves the vegetable alkaloids. As a solvent it will remove greasy spots from fabrics of all kinds, but its chief use is as an anesthetic. There are several other volatile organic bodies which possess similar properties, but none produce the total unconsciousness and muscular relaxation that follow the inhalation of chloroform.”

A clip from The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1978 made the social media rounds in mid-July. The guest that episode—astronomer and science educator Carl Sagan—offered astute criticisms of the then recently released Star Wars film for its myopic (and whitewashed) imagining of how organisms from other galaxies might look. In this collection, reporter Leonard David examines the government report published in June that surveys our evidence for extraterrestrial life so far (see “Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report”), and two of our opinion writers contemplate some specific circumstances for alien contact.

But Sagan’s prescient observations remind me that our search for other life in the universe will always be a strictly human endeavor: how we imagine aliens might look, think or operate and how we look for them or detect their existence— all these factors are based on the human framework of perception. Such limitations will only be problematic if we ignore them and fail to somehow jump beyond the bounds of our minds.

Ever since I can remember, I was constantly asking questions. My parents called me “Miss Inquisity” because of it. I was that quirky kid on the playground who played with butterflies and spied for ladybugs. After I came home from school, I binged How It’s Made on the Science Channel. Oh, that’s what makes my bubble gum so sticky! Or, this is what they put in Oreos, really? I thought to myself. Seeing all this, you’d think that STEM would be the perfect fit for me, right? For a long time, I thought so too. My initial impressions of the field were that it would satisfy my unrelenting desire to know why. But as I grew up, this only seemed farther from the truth.

In high school, when I finally had the academic freedom to explore my interests, I took full advantage. Planning my own classes, I loaded up on every science course I could find. Chemistry, biology, you name it, and it was on my schedule. Though I wasn’t sure exactly what it was I wanted to pursue in STEM yet, I hoped that these courses would help me find out. Come junior year, I was still undecided and even more concerned because it was supposedly the hardest point of high school. I had some of the most difficult classes on my agenda. AP chemistry, precalculus AB—most of my peers would barely give these a second glance. But once I started studying the material, I finally understood why they held back, why I consistently heard so many of my friends ask “When am I ever going to use this?” or “When is this ever going to help me?”

Much to my disappointment, the reality of studying these “hard sciences” is far removed from the way it is shown in the media—unlike anything I’d seen in watching all those episodes of How It’s Made. When you have so many formulas, constants and theorems to memorize, it is far too easy to get lost in the complexity of it all. After all, how motivating is it to remember a bunch of numbers when you don’t really know why it even matters to use them? And trust me when I say I completely empathize! It is hard.

This is why I nearly give up on pursuing STEM. I clearly remember a moment in AP chemistry, reviewing the basics of elemental composition, when I asked myself, Why do I even need to know this, what is the point of it all? I was drumming my mechanical pencil on the table for five minutes straight, stumped on this one problem, and barely had the stamina to continue. Thankfully, the assignment wasn’t due till a week later when I finally had the wake-up call I never knew I needed.

I didn’t expect to have such a breakthrough in my AP psychology class, but it was Ms. Brown’s unique approach to instruction that made me reconsider the idea of throwing it all away—my desire to pursue STEM, that is. She forewarned us that neuroscience was one of the more challenging units this year, and after my recent fallout with chemistry, I honestly wasn’t looking forward to it.

After she gave our class a brief overview of the unit, she immediately divided us into Zoom breakout rooms to analyze real-world scenarios using neuroscience terminology. I remember one in particular about a man who suffered cerebral trauma in a car accident and couldn’t feel any pain. She surprised us by popping into our room, waiting patiently for an answer. I always hated the awkward silence, and for no other reason than to just break the tension I quipped “Well, the adrenal gland of the endocrine system releases adrenaline, decreasing sensation to pain, allowing the man to feel temporarily stronger, taking control of his situation.” She commended my participation and lightly scolded the students with their cameras turned off as she left the room.

I think I might like this, I thought to myself. Shortly, one of my peers unmuted and said “Wow, you’re really good at this!” But at the time, I didn’t think it was so much my skill, as much as how I loved that neuroscience had reignited my passion for discovering the why. What makes people happy, biologically, what is really going on? What factors in our brains are conspiring to create a certain thought, reaction or emotion? But even more than these provocative questions was the idea that there is still so much we don’t know about the brain—meaning just that much more for me to discover!

So, if you really want to know why more young people aren’t entering STEM, I hope you’ll remember this story. While I may not have a concrete answer, I do have my experiences, and, knowing why—where your learning is going to take you—is one powerful feeling.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

My quantum experiment, which has consumed me for more than a year now, has dredged up a creepy, long-buried memory. It dates back to the late 1970s, when I was a housepainter living in Denver. One day I found myself in a grungy saloon on Denver’s dusty eastern outskirts. Behind the bar was an aquarium with a single, nasty-looking fish hovering in it. A silver, saucer-sized, snaggle-toothed, milky-eyed, blind piranha.

Now and then, the bartender netted a few minnows from a fishbowl and dropped them into the piranha’s cubicle. The piranha froze for an instant, then darted this way and that, jaws snapping, as the minnows fled. The piranha kept bumping, with audible thuds, into the glass walls of its prison. That explained the protuberance on its snout, which resembled a tiny battering ram. Sooner or later the piranha gobbled all the hapless minnows, whereupon it returned to its listless, suspended state.

What does this poor creature have to do with quantum mechanics? Here’s what. Our modern scientific worldview and much of our technology—including the laptop on which I’m writing these words—is based on quantum principles. And yet a century after its invention, physicists and philosophers cannot agree on what quantum mechanics means. The theory raises deep and, I’m guessing, unanswerable questions about matter, mind and “reality,” whatever that is.

More than a half century ago, Richard Feynman advised us to accept that nature makes no sense. “Do not keep saying to yourself … ‘But how can [nature] be like that?’” Feynman warns in The Character of Physical Law, “because you will get ‘down the drain,’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.” Most physicists have followed Feynman’s advice. Ignoring the oddness of quantum mechanics, they simply apply it to accomplish various tasks, such as predicting new particles or building more powerful computers.

Another deep-thinking physicist, John Bell, deplored this situation. In his classic 1987 work Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Bell chides physicists who apply quantum mechanics while blithely disregarding its “fundamental obscurity”; he calls them “sleepwalkers.” But Bell acknowledges that efforts to “interpret” quantum mechanics so that it makes sense have failed. He likens interpretations such as the many-world hypothesis and pilot-wave theory to “literary fiction.”

Today, there are more interpretations than ever, but they deepen rather than dispel the mystery at the heart of things. The more I dwell on puzzles such as superposition, entanglement and the measurement problem, the more I identify with the piranha. I’m blindly thrashing about for insights, epiphanies, revelations. Every now and then I think I’ve grasped some slippery truth, but my satisfaction is always fleeting. Sooner or later, I end up crashing into an invisible barrier. I don’t really know where I am or what’s going on. I’m in the dark.

The main difference between me and piranha is that it is inside the aquarium, and I’m on the outside, looking in. I can take solace from the fact that my world is much bigger than the piranha’s, and that I know many things that the fish cannot. But it’s all too easy to imagine some enlightened, superintelligent being standing outside our world, looking at us with the same pity and smug superiority that we feel toward the piranha.

Plato presents himself as this enlightened being in his famous parable of the cave, which I make my freshman humanities classes read every semester. The parable describes people confined to a cave for their entire lives. They are prisoners, but they don’t know they are prisoners. An evil trickster behind them has built a fire, by means of which he projects shadows of everything from aardvarks to zebras onto the cave wall in front of the prisoners. The cave dwellers mistake these shadows for reality. Only by escaping the cave can the prisoners discover the brilliant, sunlit reality beyond it.

We are the benighted prisoners in the cave, and Plato, the enlightened philosopher, is trying to drag us into the light. But isn’t it possible, even probable, that Plato and other self-appointed saviors, who say they’ve seen the light and want us to see it too, are charlatans? Or loons? Given our profound capacity for self-deception, isn’t it likely that when you think you’ve left the cave, you’ve actually just swapped one set of illusions for another? These are the questions with which I torment my students. Here are some of their responses:

• Clearly, some people are ignorant and deluded, like flat-earthers, and others are well-informed. So yes, we can and do escape the cave of ignorance by going to college and studying physics, chemistry, history, philosophy and so on. We can reduce our ignorance still further with the help of reliable news sources, such as the New York Times and Fox News, and traveling to other countries to learn how other people see the world.
• Yes, we can escape the cave by studying physics and other fields, but we only end up in another cave, with equations projected on the walls instead of silhouettes of aardvarks and so on. The new cave may be more interesting, comfortable and better-illuminated than the cave we were in before, but it’s still a cave. Only a few rare souls experience ultimate reality, like Buddha, Jesus and Einstein.
• Plato wasn’t really talking about worldly knowledge, he was talking about spiritual knowledge, or enlightenment. So yes, we can leave the cave and see the light of truth, but only by accepting the teachings of great sages such as Buddha, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad, and perhaps by practicing spiritual disciplines such as prayer and meditation.
• With the help of philosophy, art, meditation and psychedelics, we can become more aware that we are in a cave, in a state of illusion; we can know, sort of, what we don’t know. But no mere human ever escapes the cave, not even the greatest sages and scientists. Not even Plato, Stephen Hawking or L. Ron Hubbard. Only God, if there is a God, can perceive absolute truth. And maybe not even God.
• Who cares if we’re in a cave or not? If we’re having fun, that’s all that matters. (Although only a few of my students have the courage to voice this option, I suspect it’s what many of them think, especially the business majors.)

To be honest, the fourth option—that not even God can escape the cave, plus the references to psychedelics, Stephen Hawking and L. Ron Hubbard—is mine. But my students come up with the other options on their own, with minimal prodding from me. By the time we’re done with this exercise, I start feeling guilty about rubbing the young, innocent faces of the non–business majors in the world’s inscrutability. To make them feel a little better, I bring up another possibility that usually doesn’t occur to them:

If we realize we’re in the cave, isn’t that the same, sort of, as escaping from it? Actually, if “ultimate reality” is inaccessible to us, isn’t that the same, sort of, as saying that it doesn’t exist? And hence that the cave, the world in which we live each and every day, is the one and only reality? And hence that the business majors are right, and we should just chill out and enjoy ourselves?

Maybe. On good days, I look out the window of my apartment at the shining Hudson River, crisscrossed by boats, and at the Manhattan skyline, a symbol of humanity’s ever-growing knowledge of and power over nature, and I think, Yes, this is reality, there is nothing else. But then I remember the quantum mist at the core of reality, which not even the smartest sages can penetrate, and to which most of us are oblivious. And I remember the piranha, bumping over and over again into the walls of its world, blind to its own blindness.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Further Reading:

Is the Schrödinger Equation True?

Quantum Mechanics, the Chinese Room Experiment and the Limits of Understanding

Quantum Mechanics, the Mind-Body Problem and Negative Theology

I explore the limits of knowledge in my two most recent books, Mind-Body Problems, available for free online, and Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science.

See my recent chat with Russian writer/artist Nikita Petrov, in which we talk about the blind piranha, Plato’s cave and psychedelics.

The White House has rehired a climate scientist who was forced out by the Trump administration, and is proposing to dramatically increase the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Science is back” has become a Biden slogan. But listening to scientists is only the first step—and only a partial step, given the deep distrust many Americans have for experts. We must improve how ordinary citizens help shape science policy.

This is one of the findings of a recent report from the Hastings Center that examines the role of citizens in shaping policy in health and science. That role should not be limited to electing candidates and then, a few years later, expressing approval or disapproval of their job performance. Too many issues are in play at once for the voting–governing connection to be meaningful for many of them, and most people do not choose candidates on the basis of a clear understanding of policies, anyway

It is unlikely, for example, that elections will provide guidance about the governance of new technologies such as gene editing, assisted reproduction or artificial intelligence. That doesn’t mean that citizens’ views can’t help shape those policies through mechanisms such as public comment periods on proposed federal rules and public referenda at the state level. But those who influence rulemaking rarely represent the larger public, and neither comment periods nor referenda are deliberative processes in which people become informed about an issue and discuss it with people who might have different views.

What we need are opportunities for Americans to talk and listen to each other face to face, as equals, ideally in person but virtually if need be, about the values and the facts that should guide policy. Americans are not as divided as elected officials, and where they disagree, deliberation can reduce the distance between them. We also can learn to talk and listen with greater mutual respect. The nation was built on this principle of equality, and Americans of all political perspectives must live it.

There have been many small-scale efforts along these lines, mostly undertaken by academics or small nonprofits in what’s known as the civic renewal movement. Typically, these bring people from a community together to discuss local issues, which can help shift the focus from national politics and disagreements about issues that may be abstract and distant toward immediate, concrete problems and shared interests. For example, instead of discussing climate change in general, which is hard to disconnect from the national political divide, participants can focus on the effect of river flooding on farmers. This kind of local entry point can even lead to a deeper understanding of the broader national issue.

But deliberation is possible, and could be productive, at a national level as well. One example is America in One Room, in which 523 Americans spent a weekend together discussing a range of policy issues in order to become less polarized and more confident about U.S. democracy. Such an event is a logistical challenge, but similar events can be held online, which also reduces costs and allows more people to participate.

Public deliberation could also be tailored to the many issues that tend to elude the voting/governing feedback loop. Gene editing is a prime example. Reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and other bodies around the world have argued that policy on genetic editing technologies should be guided by public deliberation.

Public deliberation could also shape the distribution of scarce resources in a disaster like the COVID-19 pandemic, or the use of public health measures such as vaccine certificates. And the groundswell of support among the public for more attention to climate change suggests that public deliberation could help galvanize the political will to overcome the policy-making logjam in the federal government.

In the end, good science depends on democracy, and democracy depends on a deeper, richer engagement between citizens and governance structures. In a healthy democracy, institutions both private and governmental help create citizens who learn, talk and listen better—who are better able to be engaged and effective—and in turn, active, engaged citizens strengthen the institutions of a good democracy. We don’t just need good government: we need a good society that builds good citizens, who in turn build a better society.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.