Can Bacteria Solve the Mysteries of the Universe?
“Scientists keep trying to formulate a theory of everything, and all they get are headaches. Clearly we’re overthinking things. Our brains are too complex to comprehend the underlying simplicity of the universe. Cyanobacteria are not burdened by all that gray matter.”
– Jonathon Keats, experimental philosopher
History as a Series of Creative Hiccups
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the most elusive puzzles often have the simplest solutions. And that our own assumptions and habits of thinking are our biggest obstacle to solving them. In each generation, our most brilliant thinkers lay the foundations on which lesser lights will build a new, bloated bureaucracy of the mind – until the next big movement comes along to demolish it.
Is this the way of things? Long periods of stagnation punctuated by bloody revolutions? Creative thinking is essential to human progress – yet we seem to have trouble sustaining it for extended stretches. And no matter how hard we “brainstorm” or try to “think outside of the box,” the patterns seem to repeat themselves.
Enter experimental philosopher and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats – a kind of tightrope walker over the chasm of Possibility. This is a man who has copyrighted his own brain on the grounds that its neural networks are a kinetic sculpture he created by thinking. He opened an “anti-bank” in an attempt to counteract the global recession with a mirror economy based on antimatter, issuing paper currency in denominations of 10,000 positrons and higher. Keats has even attempted to introduce legislation in the state of California: the Law of Identity – which, sadly, did not pass – would have stated that “A = A, or: every entity is identical to itself.”
The Point of Art
From his porn theater for plants (showing films of bees pollinating flowers) to his attempt to genetically engineer god in a petri dish, Keats turns science and everyday reality inside out, making the Twilight Zone manifest. His experiments provoke laughter, debate, bewilderment, even outrage. Read these reactions from two Big Think readers to Keats’ Copernican Revolution in the Arts, which would replace masterpieces like the Mona Lisa with less “anthropocentric” works of a uniform beige :
The point of art isn’t to tell us what we know, it’s to tell us to aspire to more than what we know. This stuff is terrible.
Mr. Keats is adding to the repertoire of his own theatre of the absurd. Erase Van Gogh? That would be a nihilistic crime against the best in human nature.”
Commenter 1 believes that art has a single “point,” which Keats has missed. Commenter 2 believes that Keats personally plans to destroy all classical art. What the artist is actually doing is playing freely with familiar ideas and images – in other words, being creative. And it is this creativity – this freedom of thought – that ultimately offends both readers.
The Microbial Academy of Sciences
Among disciplines, theoretical physics has never had much of a creativity problem. It is home to some of the wildest imaginings of science. Still, the successive frameworks within which it has operated – from Ptolemaic to Newtonian to Einsteinian to our present era of Chaos and String Theory – have explained some aspects of of the universe while unintentionally limiting our ability to think about others. Perhaps Jonathan Keats can help us there. At his new Microbial Academy of Sciences, billions of independent researchers (bacteria) will gaze at video feed from the Hubble telescope and (possibly) ponder the mysteries of the universe. There is some likelihood, says Keats, that the organisms’ simple structure will enable them succeed where we have failed – in understanding how it all fits together.
January 3, 2012 – After a century of intellectual shortcoming by humans, bacteria will be given the chance to discover fundamental laws of physics in California this month. A newly-announced Microbial Academy of Sciences will employ more than a billion independent researchers. According to project administrator Jonathon Keats, San Francisco is the first city in the world to open a scientific institution exclusively for the benefit of microorganisms.
“Until today science has been completely dominated by one species,” says Keats, an experimental philosopher and former director of the Local Air & Space Administration. “The human mind is impressive, but our brains are limited by the way they’re made. Scientists keep trying to formulate a theory of everything, and all they get are headaches.” People may not be biologically equipped to understand the universe at a fundamental level, he contends. “Other species might be better adapted to the task.”
Keats believes that the most promising candidates are bacteria. “For years scientists have been saying that the theory of everything must be very simple,” he argues. “Yet the more we work to unify the forces of nature, the more complex our theories get.” Quantum mechanics takes reams of mathematics to explain subatomic behavior, yet fails to account for the astronomically-large phenomena explained by general relativity. Attempts to tie together cosmic and subatomic observations result in even more complicated explanations such as string theory. “Clearly we’re overthinking things.” says Keats. “Our brains are too complex to comprehend the underlying simplicity of the universe. Cyanobacteria are not burdened by all that gray matter.” In other words, their superior intellect is a byproduct of their apparent stupidity.
“But they need facilities,” says Keats. While their minuscule size lets them experience quantum phenomena on a first-hand basis, they have no natural way of exploring the galaxies. For that reason, Keats has obtained funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission to build a celestial observatory in the Arts Commission Gallery.
Privy to construction plans, Arts Commission gallery director Aimee Le Duc explains that “rows of petri dishes filled with brackish water – teeming with cyanobacteria – will be set up atop a flat screen monitor laid flat on its back. The monitor will glow with images of the cosmos provided by the Hubble Telescope.”
“Because cyanobacteria can perform photosynthesis,” Keats elaborates, “they’ll be able to detect patterns of starlight just as human scientists do with their eyes. The difference will not be in their methodology, but rather in the conclusions they reach.”
Keats willingly admits that we may never know what the microbes discover. “They don’t speak our language, and they’re not about to publish their findings in The Astrophysical Journal,” he concedes. Even if they did elucidate a theory of everything, people almost certainly wouldn’t understand it. “But how many people really understand Einstein?” he asks. “What matters is that the universe is understood, not that the knowledge belongs to any one of us.”
The Microbial Academy of Sciences will be open from January 20 to April 14, 2012 at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. More information: www.sfartscommission.org/gallery
