The Infinite Monkey Cage – How to Build a Universe. Robin Ince
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Название: The Infinite Monkey Cage – How to Build a Universe
Автор: Robin Ince
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Юмор: прочее
isbn: 9780008254964
isbn:
Charles Darwin had a mind to envy but a physical constitution that few would aspire to. He was hampered by ill health throughout much of his life after his voyage on the Beagle. Having spent five years travelling across the world, Darwin lived out the rest of his life in England, mainly in his house in Kent where he mulled over what he had seen and started to understand what it meant, breaking up the day by boiling pigeons to the bone and taking walks around his thinking path. Geneticist and snail expert Steve Jones, a regular guest on Monkey Cage, when asked which of Darwin’s books could be avoided by the casual reader said, ‘Don’t read his books about barnacles, he became overly obsessed.’
This still leaves you with books about orchids, emotions, coral reefs and occasional baboon behaviour interludes, as well as, of course, On the Origin of Species. Darwin studied every part of the animal world, including his own children: ‘I repeatedly observed my own infants, from under the age of one week to that of two or three months, and found that when a screaming fit came on gradually, the first sign was the contraction of the corrugators, which produced a slight frown, quickly followed by the contraction of other muscles around the eyes.’ Darwin was most definitely an attentive father, but he may have let his children cry for a little while longer for the purposes of research. By reading Darwin you will find out that blue-eyed cats are deaf, bald dogs invariably have bad teeth and that it is quite pointless to try to train yourself to stop flinching when a Puff Adder attempts to strike (he experimented with this in the safety of the reptile house at London Zoo).
We are now so used to seeing the world and its enormous variety of species on television that it is easy to forget how exotic and strange much of our planet seemed before mass communication. When Darwin was on the Beagle he was experiencing things that had barely been imagined by other humans. On 28 February 1832, he wrote of his day in the rainforest:
‘The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind, if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over, if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future and more quiet pleasure will arise.’
We may not have ready access to a rainforest, but it is important to remember that however mundane your environment may seem to be, the life you see in it and the lives of the creatures that exist inside it are remarkable examples of a planet that has more ways of assembling atoms into different forms than any other we know of. Stare out of your train window at the hills and think of all the life before you, some visible – trees and grasses, a possible cow, rabbit or alpaca – many others invisible. You don’t need a rainforest for a chaos of delight.
Though many of Darwin’s books explored the exotic, as well as pigeons, his final book was on earthworms, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits. Some may consider that this doesn’t sound like one of his speedier page-turners, and they would be wrong. This is the Monkey Cage’s favourite book about earthworms and we have read three (this is the only one that is non-fiction, though, the others are Superworm by Julia Donaldson and Tim Curran’s novel Worm, about killer worms escaping the sewer and wreaking havoc). We love it for the delight of seeing an elderly man whose curiosity about living things has not dimmed with age.
It contains some of my favourite experiments, each one conceived to understand the earthworm a little more. Darwin saw that, like so many living things, this simple creature performed vital functions. Darwin’s experiments included breathing on worms after chewing on a variety of different things – from tobacco to perfumed cotton wool – to examine their sense of smell, and putting hot pokers near them to see how sensitive to heat they were. It is his experiments on earthworm hearing that I enjoy most, though. He begins with a metal whistle ‘which was repeatedly sounded near them’. Seeing no result, some scientists may have stopped there, but not Darwin. Next up, he brought out the bassoon, which they also took no notice of. ‘They were indifferent to shouts’ and ‘when placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible’ there was similarly no reaction. This series of experiments may well have been how they invented jazz. They were reactive to vibrations; this was discovered by placing them on the piano ‘and the note C in bass clef was struck’, which caused the earthworm to retreat. Darwin then tried the note G, ‘above the line in treble clef’, and had a similar result.
Darwin’s summary of the worm contains his usual mix of beauty and wonder at living things:
‘When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms. It is a marvellous reflection that the whole of the superficial mould over any such expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms. The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of Man’s inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world…’
Now gather up your bassoons and prepare to experiment, your garden awaits.
1 A renowned American botanist (1820–88).
INSIGNIFICANCE
A perspective
There is a problem of insignificance when looking at the night sky.
It takes four years for the light from the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, to reach us.
It takes over 16,000 years for the light from the furthest star visible with the naked eye, V762 Cas in the constellation of Cassiopeia, to reach us. The light we see is older than our civilisation.
The Milky Way is a hundred thousand light years across, and it is one of billions of galaxies. You can understand that when dealing with such magnitudes, people can feel like specks, less than specks, barely the dust of our universe.
During every series of Monkey Cage we receive emails and letters from people questioning their own significance after being bamboozled by a cosmological episode.
‘I wish I’d never looked through that telescope, now I feel insignificant.’
After watching a lecture on the grandeur of the Universe, hearing about the light years between the billions of galaxies and the speed of expansion, with everything getting further and further apart, that sense of tiny speck-ness can be palpable. You don’t have to travel far from the Earth’s surface for human beings to become indistinguishable from the rivers, rocks and sea, and a little further away, you’ll find there’s no visible trace of the civilisation that glows and pulses as we walk through it.