The Three Body Problem | Spencer Klavan

So I don't know if you're familiar with the three body problem, the not the Chinese science fiction novel made a big splash as a Netflix series recently, but it's the novels that really grapple with what you are talking about.

And what's so remarkable about this series to me is that, unlike a lot of American science fiction—you've got Star Trek, Star Wars, which kind of give you this misty secular pseudo-science where it's the metanarrative that pees things together, or it's our humanist values in Star Trek.

In this trilogy of novels, Remembrance of Earth's Past, the first book is named after famously an unresolvable problem in astrophysics in Newtonian mechanics. If you have three bodies mutually attracting each other, it's impossible to lay out a logos exactly what you're describing. That is a consistent system that can be reduced to abstract principles comprehended by the human mind and then used to fly outer space to navigate through whatever situation you find yourself in.

And the reason that Liu Cixin named it thus is because he is genuinely peering into the abyss of what science looks like once you pull the rug of those five principles out from underneath us. That there you might hit a point at which actually the whole structure of reality simply scrambled your monkey brain. It just doesn't compute inside of us because we no longer have this conviction that the imprint on our brain is effectively the hand of God.

So that's the same imprint that writ large is pressed across the whole universe. When Newton came up with his laws, there was a widespread belief derived from Aristotle that there were two sets of rules for the physical world. It was called the superlunary and the sublunary spheres, and there was a notion that because the barrier was supposed to be at the Moon, where the Moon's orbit is, there starts to obtain a whole new set of laws.

The reason people thought this was quite reasonable is that you look at the stars, and they're following these very regular patterns that we can chart and know more and more through observations. You look at things around here; they don't move like that kind of clockwork. Surely you get stones falling to the Earth, you get fire moving up into the air, and so people thought there’s just a different, Christians would say, fallen order down here, and there is a pristine music of the spheres, yes, operating.

Even perhaps the angels are pushing them around, whatever. And what as opposed to forces—as opposed to exactly. Yes, this is a big—in my book, I call them ghosts in exile, the forces. Because, right, and this idea is that when Newton comes out with the Principia for the first time, we now think, “Oh, he discovered gravity.”

Yes, of course, he outlines the way of calculating the force of gravity between two masses, but at a much, much deeper level, what he does is he shatters the barrier between the sublunary and the superlunary spheres because now showing underlying unity, right? Here are the three rules that will govern not only the arc of a comet across the sky but the descent of an apple from a tree.

Why did Newton have any right to expect that he could do that? Why were people working on that problem at that time? It's because of the assumptions that you're describing—that the world is not only organized according to a logos, which is sort of the pagan claim that we talked about in Greece—but also that that logos is answerable to the patterns that are in our minds, however they came about.

You talk about evolution, you talk about whatever, but we now have—and this is what we experience them as. It's dishonest, I think, to describe our experience of these principles as anything else. When we see math, we think we're looking at something universally valid and that something that not only hangs together in our brains but will also send a rocket ship to Mars one day, and that's because of this faith.

And that is something like a transposed monotheistic faith. It's the notion that at the foundation or at the pinnacle there is an ultimate unity in which resides all things in the absence of contradiction. Yes, right. So now we're up against—we wouldn't recognize it this way—but we're up against another superlunary-sublunary barrier, and that is the puzzle of how to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics.

And I know that you've talked to scientists about this on your podcast, and I would say, of course, that like I am not going to be the person that resolves this puzzle. But from the outside, as a scholar of the history of science and also a classicist, I can see that this is the exact same issue. This is two realms that answer to two different and contradictory sets of apparently contradictory laws.

Scientists are currently hammering away—some of them working in string theory, others in other versions of quantum gravity and so forth—are hammering away at that barrier right under the presumption that breakthrough—yes, exactly—that the fact that they can't detect the unity is actually a consequence of their ignorance, not of the fact that reality itself is disjointed.

That there's a fab, there's a seam in the fabric that we will never bring back together, or alternatively that there's a seam in our minds that we can never reconcile. That there's something we need—both of these convictions. And I think that anybody that does science is still operating on these convictions, even if outwardly they would deny it.

Well, if the hypothesis of Jung is true in the broad sense, and that you see, it implies something very interesting that I also saw as a practicing scientist. So I was involved and still am in a lot of research enterprises, right? The production of approximately the equivalent of 30 PhDs, something like that.

And I watched scientists who were genuine scientists and scientists who were careerists and whoers, and I watched how they operate. And it's so interesting because the scientists that actually discover something of value—and I would say the ones that have the deepest careers and the best relations with their students—the ones that are on the right path, yeah, they're suffused by a religious ethos.

And it's very deep. So I spent a lot of time, I wouldn't say mastering statistics because I'm no statistical genius, but understanding how to conduct a statistical analysis, yeah, well enough so that I could do it and actually do it and actually understand it.

Yeah. And one of the things that I realized was like, if you have a spreadsheet that's full of data—100,000 data points, let's say—there is an indefinite number of ways that you can apprehend that matrix, that you can see it, right? There's all the possible combinations of the numbers in the matrix, right?

Okay, so then out of that, you can draw a discovery, let's say that's revealed in the patterns. But you cannot do that if your orientation to the spreadsheet is the progression of your career. The pathways that make themselves manifest in the numbers will be those that further your career.

So this is part of the problem of replicability, so ing—exactly. You can do an infinite number of correlational analyses, and if you do a hundred of them, five of them will be statistically significant. Well, you can just ignore the fact that 95% of them weren't and report on those 5%.

And the thing is, there's a profound pull to do that because in any given experiment, you might have to, any given experiment you might have devoted two years of your life for a graduate student—the success of the analysis might determine whether or not they get their PhD, like there's a lot at stake.

And so then you might say, "Well, why not just discover within the matrix of numbers the pathway that furthers your career?" Yeah. And the answer to that is, "Well, that's a complicated problem." It's like, is there anything other than self-promotion?

Well, I told my students, if you allow your careerist interests to determine the decisions you make when you're conducting your statistics—which will be well hidden, uh-huh, from everyone else, but also from yourself—one of the negative consequences is that, well, you betray the spirit of science.

So you pull the rug out from underneath yourself, but you also convince yourself of the existence of a delusion that you might then chase for the rest of your life. Right? One—so... yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's so interesting, and this is something that scientists don't really concentrate on. It's like, how do you inculcate in the scientific investigator the ethos that produces the desire to search for truth and not career success, let's say, at every micro level of the scientific endeavor?

And I think that once the scientific endeavor becomes sufficiently dissociated from its underlying Judeo-Christian narrative, yeah, there is no protection against that. And I also think that's why the scientific enterprise is corrupting so rapidly.