Total perspective vortex: A bibliography

The Total Perspective Vortex in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a device capable of extrapolating a complete picture of the universe – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from one small piece of fairy cake.  It is a torture device. The torturer, if she or he so wishes, can plug on one end, the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and the victim can then be plugged into the other end: so that when turned on, the victim sees, in one instant, the whole infinity of creation and their self in relation to it. The experience paralyses or even kills the victim.

Let’s attempt at putting ourselves through a very, very weak version of this device. Because nobody has tried to build these amazing devices born of Adams’ genius, we’ll have to rely on a mix of books and videos.

We can start with watching the powerful short ‘Powers of Ten’ by Charles and Ray Eames. The architect couple, famous makers of wonderful objects like the Eames chair, made this film in 1968 (releasing it in 1977), by far predating Google Maps and The Pale Blue Dot. Starting at a picnic by a lakeside, the video takes us on a quick ride to the outer edges of the universe, and then, back again, deep into the human DNA and the atoms that inform its construction. Once we have established our insignificance in spatial terms, let’s go down a temporal tunnel.

“The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” One of the most enlightening books that will put things in perspective for us would be Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, with its insistence that “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Let’s get on with it, then.

In an approximately 13.8 billion year old universe, our little blue rock formed around 4.6 billion (4600 million) years ago. Protons fused together in stars and new elements formed. The rich diversity of elements on earth created a possibility of millions of molecular permutations. Hydrogen reacted with carbon dioxide inside iron-sulphur bubbles, forming organic molecules like acetate, and a few hundred million years of accumulated reactions later, there were enough complex organic molecules replicating themselves. RNA and DNA evolved, and natural selection kicked in (to understand the principles of natural selection and evolution, read the very brilliantly put together ‘Introducing Evolution: A Graphic Guide’ by Dylan Evans).

Photosynthesis evolved about 3 billion years ago, simple animals about 600 million years ago, the homo-genus appeared around 2.5 million years ago, and homo sapiens started emerging 200,000 ago. It’s been only 25,000 years since the Neanderthals died out and the human being with behaviour traits similar to us today, became prevalent. Play with some evolution timelines online and let the idea of our infancy as a species sink in. I would recommend going to andabien.com, johnkyrk.com and bighistoryproject.com. My personal favourite is www.eoht.info/page/Evolution+timeline (also look up the Human Molecule, while at it).

An obvious choice, at this point, would be to dive into Bill Bryson’s greatly entertaining A Short History of Nearly Everything, but a more poetic place to go to, would be ‘The Lives of a Cell’ by Lewis Thomas - especially for its precious consolation that “There are some creatures that do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish totally into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cell, living all over again.”

Back on our timeline: it’s been about 12,000 years since the invention of agriculture in the ancient near east (roughly modern day middle east), and like all exponential consequences of accumulating reactions, this bibliography is going to explode, as well. The first thesis here, is Jared Diamond’s argument of environmental determinism, “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments”, in the perfectly reasoned, (but also disappointingly Eurocentric) ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’. You could skip the book and watch the documentary instead, as with the mildly amusing ‘The Botany of Desire’ by Michael Pollan. Now, the subtle co-evolution of language, technology and the human brain, is best studied with the neuroscientists - it would be worthwhile to browse through Terry Deacon’s ‘The Symbolic Species’. Yet, the real fun begins with binging on V S Ramachandran’s absolutely incredible talks, but wait, we are skipping a step.

Why do we feel fear, joy, anger, disgust, excitement or disdain? Why do we behave the way we do? Charles Darwin in ‘The Origin of the Species’, and his following works, made the first connection between natural selection and behavior patterns. Yet, it took another century for evolutionary thinking to become the basis of studies in animal and human behaviour, and, consequently, of human interaction, relationships and society - and no book does it better than Richard Dawkins’ seminal ‘The Selfish Gene’, a masterpiece of piercing clarity and scientific reasoning, evolving the field of semiotics into memetics.

To finally counter the nihilism of this adventure, read the prophetic ‘The Last Question’ by Isaac Asimov. And if you are sufficiently inspired by Asimov's transhumanism, have a go at Kurzweil's claim that ‘Singularity is Near’.

The Lives of a Cell

I am midway through a highly engrossing, eyeopening read that I landed upon, on a recommendation that I am now greatly thankful for. (Thanks, Manoje.) I surfed through the book with a highlighter in my hand with the intention of sharing a few quotes and excerpts. I found myself layering practically every other line with a florescent pink. Lewis Thomas' book gave me precisely what I went to it for - inspiration. And now I am glad I threw those half baked bits into my TEDx talk. Ofcourse, somebody kindly pointed out that the wheel has long been invented.

Here are some of the best bits from the first few pages (stripped a bit of context, though). I gave up marking after that. -

"A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours... Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought... I like to think that they work in my interest, that each breath they draw for me, but perhaps it is they who walk through the local park in the early morning, sensing my senses, listening to my music, thinking my thoughts. I am consoled, somewhat, by the thought that the green plants are in the same fix. They could not be plants, or green, without their chloroplasts, which run the photosynthetic enterprise and generate oxygen for the rest of us. As it turns out, chloroplasts are also separate creatures with their own genomes, speaking their own language."

"Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies."

"Theodor, in a series of elegant experiments, has shown that when two individuals of the same species are placed in close contact, the smaller of the two will always begin to disintegrate. It is auto-destruction due to lytic mechanisms entirely under the governance of the smaller partner. He is not thrown out, not outgamed, not outgunned; he simply chooses to bow out."

And this he tells us with a disclaimer that "we violate science when we try to read human meanings in their (the insects') arrangements"-

"It is hard for a bystander not to do so. Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves. The families of weaver ants engage in child labor, holding their larvae like shuttles to spin out the thread that sews the leaves together for their fungus gardens. They exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television."

And this way of looking at ants was reminiscent of a really neat idea Pooja recently came up with... "Distant sources of food are somehow sensed, and long lines, like tentacles, reach out over the ground, up over walls, behind boulders, to fetch it in."

Then there's a lovely essay on pheromones that has instantly inspired a scifi/horror idea. :) Here's a sweet one from "A Fear of Pheromones" -

"It has been soberly calculated that if a single female moth were to release all the bombykol in her sac in a single spray, all at once, she could theoretically attract a trillion males in the instant. This is, of course, not done."

(The mention of the symbiotic relationship of sea crabs and sea anemones and the way the anemone finds its crab attaching itself to its host (very reminiscent to the wand finding its wizard) conjured a B-Movie image of a cheerleader with lethal pom-pons, permanently sewn into her hands.

Saw some really well made films - My Joy and Revanche... and some really crappy ones - Tron and The Tourist. (Btw, Ra.1 smells suspiciously similar to Tron Legacy, or is it just another half baked take on the Ghost in the Machine.? How can anything be worse than Tron: Legacy, I wonder! I guess the mention of RaOne will generate more traffic on this seldom visited blog. The visitors, thus attracted, will be as disappointed as the stall audiences of Hisss.)

And yeah, wishes of a happier new year to friends and family (there's now an app that searches and deletes all new year wishing messages from the phone).