The Davey Dialogues - An Exploration of the Scientific Foundations of Human Culture. John C. Madden
For the first time, I heard something resembling a hollowed out sigh fill the room.
– I suppose it is hard for you to understand, but I did start to listen in on Bryson shortly after he published his book about “nearly everything”. I don’t even want to think about how many interviews on radio and television he had. His voice was coming at me from all directions, but most of the time the questions he was answering were unhelpful and were posed by people who had not read his book. So, finally I dropped in on him much as I did with you. He was in bed at the time, and he was furious with me. He told me to get lost, go back to where I came from by way of a place called Hell, and never to haunt him again. He seemed not to have much of a sense of humour after all – though you will appreciate that it is difficult to appreciate a sense of humour when there are no shared instincts or culture involved. I believe that most humour arises from a conflict between instinctual behaviour and behaviour dictated by cultural imperatives.
– Sorry it didn’t work out. I hope you weren’t bored by my discussions of time and space. I am convinced that our evolving understanding of those two important concepts has been key to the development of religion and philosophy over the ages. An essentially static universe with Earth at the centre leads to very different conclusions about our place in nature from what we know today about our universe. Similarly, a world that is only six thousand years old necessarily lends a completely different hue to history than a universe which is over 13 billion years old, with intelligent humanity around to appreciate it only for the last 160,000 years or so.
– I appreciate your point, but what about mass, force and energy. Aren’t they key concepts, too? Time and space have a certain aesthetic appeal, but without living mass, such as you, what meaning can they possibly have?
– Of course, you are right – and that is a really tough problem for we humans to get our collective minds around. In our next session I will give you a whirlwind tour of the subject, but don’t expect that you will come away completely satisfied. Despite some early attempts by such brilliant scientists as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, both of whom provided theories that explained beautifully the world as it was known in their time, our expanded view of our universe, illuminated by a vast new store of astronomical data and buttressed by complex particle physics experiments, has shown us that their theories are inadequate to completely describe our universe as we now observe it. To make the data fit our theories, we have to “invent” (most scientists would say “postulate”) great quantities of dark (i.e. unobservable) matter and energy, without any firm idea of their origin. Dark matter and dark energy stand as the two greatest beacons of human ignorance in our time.
– Perhaps, but just think how bored you would all be if you knew everything!
After I had carefully read out the contents of Tables 5.1 and 5.2 reproduced below, we finished our dialogues on time and space, with the promise of a dialogue on matter and energy planned for the following week.
After listening to me read the tables, Davey’s only comment was to say how fortunate it was that he did not visit our universe one or two hundred years ago, or he would have learned nothing of interest!
| Table 5.1 – Some Perspectives on Time | |
| Time | Comment |
| ~13.8 billion years ago | Age of the Universe, that is 13,800,000,000 years ago. |
| ~4.56 billion years ago | Age of our Solar System (including the Sun and the planets). |
| ~3.8 billion years ago | First appearance of life on Earth (see Dialogue 15). |
| 250 million years | Period of rotation of the Sun in our galaxy. |
| ~125 million years ago | First appearance of mammals on Earth. |
| 6-11 million years | Ages of bright stars in Orion’s belt. |
| ~1.8 million years ago | First appearance of primitive man (Homo erectus). |
| 800,000 to 200,000 years ago | Earliest known figurines (Venus of Bereket Ram, Golan Heights, Israel, and Venus of Tan Tan, Morocco). |
| ~160,000 years ago | First appearance of Homo sapiens (cf Dawkins, 2005, pp. 62-66). |
| ~143,000 years ago | First daughter of “Eve” is born. (See Appendix III). |
| 32,000 years ago | Earliest known cave art, Chauvet, France. |
| 10,000 - 60,000 years ago | First migration of humans across the Behring Strait to North and South America. |
| 13,000 years ago | Earliest known pottery (Japan). |
| ~7000 BC | “Dawn of recorded history” (Crete) |
| ~3000 BC | “Dawn of recorded history” (Sumeria) |
| ~3000 BC | “Dawn of recorded history” (China) |
| ~2500 BC | Hinduism founded. |
| ~1000 BC | Judaism founded. |
| ~500 BC | Buddhism and Taoism founded. (Buddha Siddartha Gautama (563-484 BC), Taoism started ~500 BC but not formalized until about 500 years later.) |
| 399 BC | Socrates dies in Athens. |
| 384-322 BC | Aristotle’s lifetime. |
| 0 AD | Jesus Christ is born. (Possibly 4 BC, i.e. before King Herod died.) |
| ~570 AD | Mohammed is born. |
| 1601-1602 | Shakespeare’s Hamlet first performed. |
| 1654 | Bishop Ussher estimates “Creation” started at noon on October 23, 4004 BC. (see Dialogue 3) |
| 1686 | Isaac Newton completes formulation of the theory of Gravity. He started work on the problem in 1666. |
| 1858 | Darwin and Wallace publish the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. (see Dialogue 8) |
| 1900 | Quantum Theory is born (Max Planck). |
| Feb. 28, 1953 | Discovery of the structure and function of DNA. (see Dialogue 11) |
| 2000-2005 | Preliminary understanding of the long term memory function in the brain. (see Dialogue 18) |
| Table 5.2 – Some Perspectives on Distance Measurements | |
| 1.616199 x 10-35 m | |