The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 Read online

  * * * * *

  In the wet, sclerophyll forests of eastern Australia lives a bird entirely preoccupied by blue objects. The male bowerbird (not, in fact, pure blue himself, but a satiny black colour with bright purple eyes) builds an arching nest on the ground to attract a mate. He decorates this nest with flowers, gumnuts, stones, berries, feathers and other avian-seductions. Pearl shells and florets collected from the undergrowth are hung as chandeliers in the apex of the nest. Of all the colourful adornments that might enhance bowerbird property, blue trimmings are the most coveted. The males often stage raids on neighbouring bowers to filch desirable blue items from one another.

  Ornithologists hypothesise that the selection of blue objects is intended to offset the bird’s own colour; to make the bowerbird appear more striking against the embellished backdrop of his love-shack. But find a bowerbird nest in the bush today, and it may seem as if you’ve stumbled across a midden of trash jettisoned by delinquent hikers. Modern bowerbirds are librarians of blue plastic – drinking straws, clothes pegs and waxed papers, biro tubes, lids, disposable knives and forks, general bric-a-brac, blue condom wrappers and spent rifle casings – as well as foils and aluminium cans. They gather up all of this flotsam and ferry it far into thickets unvisited. There, amidst the drab scrub, they build tiny temples to human litter. In the distant, blue places we never go, we might be surprised to discover our debris is already deposited and spreading.

  * * * * *

  Psychologists have a term for the phenomenon whereby once you see something and note it as distinctive, you begin to notice it everywhere. A specific number say, or a word, that once you’ve seen or heard seems to appear more frequently. It’s called ‘perceptual vigilance’, and it’s a trick of the brain – a reminder that the physical territory of what we call ‘vision’ is in fact located more in the cerebral cortex than in the eye itself. Which is to say, we only really ever see inside of ourselves.

  * * * * *

  In March 2011, one thousand Italian turtledoves with bluestained beaks fell out of the sky. Residents of the town of Faenza described the birds hitting the ground ‘like little Christmas balls’, bouncing once, twice, softly. Some scientists thought they’d died of altitude sickness, which could have turned their mouths and faces blue through suffocation. This would be odd, given that they were birds and presumably mindful of flying within the boundaries of sufficient oxygen. The image of flocks of birds deliberately plunging upwardly to their deaths, just as human beings may occasionally leap down off bridges to end their mortal lives, is a decidedly creepy one. (We turn blue, of course, when we drown.) The birds were gathered up and incinerated.

  You might also have heard about the bees in France in 2012, which began to produce blue honey after feeding from the effluent from a candy factory. Their honey’s not only blue, it’s opaque and matt – an otherworldly substance that bears about as much resemblance to real honey as tar does to soda water.

  There’s a bee species in the United States called the Blue Orchard Bee: it’s iridescent, and looks a bit like an obese fly. The Blue Orchard is a solitary bee, and although it prefers to make nests in mud, it can live in Styrofoam. The insect is being bred by apiarists to weather the colony collapse that is plaguing its honeybee cousins, causing them to abandon their hives and cease making any honey at all.

  * * * * *

  The announcement comes in an email: unequivocally, the eyeball’s provenance is swordfish. Most likely the eye was cut out as a trophy after the animal was hunted down and dispatched by a spear-fisher, and then it was lost overboard. The eye is so large because only a portion of it is open to the world when it is fastened to its owner: the bulb of the fish’s eyeball is normally enclosed in its head, which, when you think about it, makes sense in terms of streamlining. Being increasingly endangered, swordfish is an unfashionable, though tasty, meal. The real surprise is that the eyeball washed up on the coast whole, when all eyes are made from the sweet soft-tissue so prized by the many things that eat in, and out of, the sea.

  A story that would be better includes the reported sighting of a one-eyed, grizzled xiphid, reconnoitering the breakers, revenge in the set of its jaw and madness foaming in its blood. The term we use is ‘rogue’, because we can’t conceive of an animalistic motivation logically consistent with retaliation. Revenge of course, requires premeditation, previsualisation – at the very least, the ability to recognise individuals or distinguish between different species. Literary precedents abound: Moby Dick, the crocodile in Peter Pan, Old Ben the Bear. Hemmingway’s marlin is fairly well spot-on, come to think of it: the fish ‘beyond all people, beyond all snares and traps and treacheries’.

  The blue eyeball is put in formaldehyde in a bottle in a university. In its small chemical sea, biology sophomores peer back at it.

  * * * * *

  We are familiar today with the notion that many industrial substances from the here are threaded through the faraway. The idea of the ‘there’ has lost its pristine edge. There are few places to go now that are not already comingled with, and altered by, our common appetites. Seeing those long-distance, chromatic blues is a rarity in many parts of the world where perception is pulled up short by air pollution. The horizon is as likely to be the colour of burnt onions in oil, of a greying and fatty effluvium strung over electricity poles, as to dissolve into Solnit’s idyllic ‘colour of solitude and desire’. Fly into Beijing for example, at certain times of the day in certain seasons, and it can seem as if you have developed a glaucoma, so complete is the white-out. For those of us who live in cities, seeing far enough to have sight dissolve is less an expectation of optical physics than a privilege of travel. Meanwhile, if we were capable of looking up and seeing far enough out, we’d notice another blue receding from sight. Ozone, O3 gas (which smells of geraniums), is a duck-egg turquoise. When it deteriorates the ozone layer admits more UV radiation – a fluorescing purple blue energy that goes about breaking through cellwalls, denaturing certain biophysical processes.

  Lately, I’ve been preoccupied by a certain unhappy idea: the places beyond the edge of our imagination, where we cease to send our minds and ourselves, are slowly changing colour. If once these places were pure blue and blue was code for the unknowable and unspoiled regions, now they are tinted differently. The real wild is less wild than the story we have of the wild. The world’s terrestrial cleanrooms are filling up with our refuse, conveyed there by creaturely agents, currents of air and water. In the Antarctic, in the subducted trenches of the Pacific, everywhere you go, there you are. Blue whales choke on blue plastic bags in the bluest quadrants of the ocean, unwitnessed. That shade of blue is not the kind we see from far away, thinking about (what we imagine to be) the unimaginable lives lived in the sea. That shade of blue is all too known to us, for it’s the colour of the supermarket, the colour of landfill.

  * * * * *

  Here is a bolt from the blue: there were no blue things in antiquity. The sea was deep red; ‘wine-dark’, black, or occasionally violet according to Homer. The sky was white or copper. Cornflowers and irises were red (erythros), green (prasos) or black (melas). For both the ancient Romans and the Greeks, the rainbow contained no blue arc. The Bible in its original Hebrew and Aramaic translation contains no blue – other than when it describes a kind of dye made by grinding up molluscs, which could either have been dark blue or bright red, no one knows. Neither do the Vedic hymns mention blue, or the Icelandic sagas. Old maps pick out rivers, streams and oceans in green. The Egyptians had blue originally, but then they traded it to the Chinese on the Silk Road and forgot about it for two millennia. When blue did finally occur to the Ancient Greeks, it was synonymous with darkness, and could only be seen at night. Or it denoted the colour of wax, which could also be white or brown. Or, when blue was described, it was meant to convey a feeling of the colour, not the colour itself – a marker of the feebleness, or lack of intensity, of blue compared to the other colours.

  Certainly the writ
ers of antiquity and the middle ages saw blue – they weren’t colour-blind. The Celts of course painted themselves in blue war-paint and there were polyvalent terms for blue in Latin (meaning that these words could infer other colours too, dependent on context). But colour historians have argued that blue tones were so little appreciated, that they conveyed no symbolism and demanded no words to describe them. Blue objects (blue animals, blue-eyed people) would have been infrequently encountered. Not only has blueness as a category shifted in meaning (for example, from being precious to being ubiquitous), ‘the blue’ as a distinct category hasn’t always existed.

  * * * * *

  The idea of the world apart has a cultural history of its own. One way that history could be narrated is in colour. But just as we once failed to have words for blue, we now fail to have a vocabulary for describing the strangeness of a remote nature that is nonetheless tinged with our anthropogenic presence. Ideas of distance, scale and aspect are shifting in their implications, being less easily connected to the sublimity and spectacle of an untrammelled natural sphere. Conceptually, the pleasure of the blue afar seems always to have resided in us being made to feel the right size – being small in a theatre of larger, more enduring things. Now the world is shrinking, while the scale of our material influence has become geologic, meteorological, expansive. Yet, like Alice in Wonderland, as we’ve grown large the blue dress has grown with us. Though our idea of the world apart is irreparably altered, we grip tightly to old ways of describing it. The romance of a pure wild space, bluest distance unmet, remains a strong compulsion of environmental thinking. Is it beyond us to imagine that world alloyed, and still seek to preserve it?

  What was so compelling about the eye, I realise now, is that it seemed the ocean was watching; that you might meet this kind of trouble eye to eye, and feel, in that encounter, humbled enough to look at yourself. In that gaze was accountability. The Australian mood of blue – not meditative but an active, fighting sentiment – that is the mood I felt moved to, by the eye. Now the dream of the self-identifying monster demands to become the dream of looking at oneself. Finding welded to the monstrous nature within, a great power for change.

  A short walk in the Australian bush

  They’re taking over!

  The now delusion

  Michael Slezak

  Imagine standing outside the universe. Not just outside space, but outside time too. From this spectacular vantage point, you gaze down upon the universe. At one end you see its beginning: the big bang. At the other, you see whatever it is that happens there. Somewhere in the middle is you, a minuscule worm: at one end a baby, the other end a corpse. From this impossible perspective, time does not flow, and there is no ‘now’. Time is static. Immutable. Frozen.

  Fantastical as it seems, for most physicists today the universe is just like that. We might think of time flowing from a real past into a not-yet-real future, but our current theories of space and time teach us that past, present and future are all equally real – and fundamentally indistinguishable. Any sense that our ‘now’ is somehow special, or that time flows past it, is an illusion we create in our heads.

  Physics, in fact, has killed time as we know it. The question is: do we need it back?

  It was Newton who began to stick the knife into now. His laws of motion, formulated late in the 17th century, were the first to capture time in mathematical equations. Soon it was natural to depict motion on a graph with time on a spatial axis. Once that was done, any special, unique point of ‘now’ started to look as subjective as a ‘here’ on a map of space.

  Einstein landed the fatal blow at the turn of the 20th century. According to his special theory of relativity, there is no way to specify events that everyone can agree happen simultaneously. Two events that are both ‘now’ to you will happen at different times for anyone moving at another speed. Other people will see a different now that might contain elements of yours – but equally might not. ‘You can define it, but people won’t necessarily agree,’ says physicist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

  The result is a picture known as the block universe: the universe seen from that impossible vantage point outside space and time. You can by all means mark what you think is ‘now’ with a red dot, but there is nothing that distinguishes that place from any other, except that you are there. Past and future are no more physically distinguished than left and right. There are things that are closer to you in time, and things that are further away, just as there are things that are near or far away in space. But the idea that time flows past you is just as absurd as the suggestion that space does.

  * * * * *

  George Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, does not buy any of that. The block universe contradicts every single experience we have, he says. ‘It doesn’t represent the passage of time, and that’s one of the most fundamental features of daily life. So it’s a bad model of reality.’ What’s more, accept it and any attempt to understand anything about anything becomes meaningless. ‘The whole process of doing science depends on time rolling on. We make a hypothesis, test it, accept it or reject it – the process rolls on in time.’

  Back in 2006, Ellis began to sketch a different picture. His starting point was not relativity, but quantum physics. A strange fact about quantum physics is that indeterminate future outcomes are seemingly governed by probabilities in the present. Quantum objects exist in ‘superpositions’ of more than one state until such time as we measure them, when they adopt one or other of their possible forms. The most notorious illustration is Schrödinger’s cat: locked in a box with a vial of poison whose seal may or may not be intact, it is simultaneously dead and alive – until you open the box, when it is most definitely one or the other.

  Such quantum oddities are a blow to the block-universe conception of an equally real past, present and future, says Ellis. ‘Even if you know everything about the state of the universe today, you can’t predict what will be tomorrow. The future can’t be real because it’s not even fixed yet.’

  For Ellis, quantum physics supplies an objectively defined present moment: it is the boundary between what our experiments have determined and what remains to be determined. We live on the leading edge of a ‘growing block’ universe, on a surface we call the present that shimmers into existence one moment at a time as quantum measurements are made.

  Ellis thinks it is perfectly possible to define this ‘now’ within relativity, too. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published a decade after his special theory, is a full picture of space and time, describing how a combined space–time is warped by the presence of matter to produce the force we call gravity. If we gathered enough data and had a big enough computer, we might take account of all the space–time distortions of all the galaxies, black holes and other matter in the universe to calculate a 3D-surface on which each point is exactly the same age as the point where we are. ‘Space–time is defined up to then and not beyond,’ says Ellis.

  This present is still not ‘now’ as we know it, because not everything on this 3D-surface happens simultaneously: as demanded by special relativity, if you and I are moving at different speeds on it, we will still disagree on what is happening now. But that doesn’t necessarily matter. Within relativity, things that are causally related to one another happen in the same order from all perspectives, even if individual observers can’t agree on exactly when they happened. ‘That’s just psychology,’ says Ellis. ‘It makes you feel happy to think this is simultaneous with that, but it doesn’t mean anything for physics.’

  There are still wrinkles in the growing block. Quantum theory reveals that the future is indeterminate, and that aspects of the present are, too: Schrödinger’s poor feline is an example, if we don’t bother to check whether it is alive or dead. Ellis’s solution, formulated with his colleague Tony Rothman and published in the International Journal of Theoretical Physics in 2009, is that the present is not a solid su
rface, but one pitted with indeterminacies that gradually solidify into certainties. These gaps in the present are not something we’d notice: the cat notwithstanding, quantum indeterminacies can only occur for very small things, and over small timescales. ‘The holes in the present aren’t going to be big enough to fall through,’ says Ellis.

  He is still working to fill in gaps in the theory, most recently how the creation of the future cascades down from the cosmological to the quantum scale (). Not everyone is convinced he is on the right track. Huw Price, a philosopher of physics at the University of Cambridge, isn’t persuaded by the premise of the present as a dividing line between a real past and an unreal future. Even if the future is indeterminate, he says, it still can be real: you might not be able to determine what’s on the other side of a mountain from your current location, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

  Carroll’s beef is that Ellis’s argument depends on the truth of the ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is the idea that acts of measurement determine the world’s future trajectory, and it is the most popular way among physicists to square quantum theory’s indeterminacy with the decidedly determined world around us. Carroll prefers the ‘many worlds’ scenario, in which every quantum possibility occurs in different universes: the present Schrödinger’s cat is dead in some universes, but alive in others. The cat’s future is just as defined as its past; it just has many possible futures. If this interpretation – or any other of the many interpretations of quantum theory – is correct, Ellis’s way of defining the present vanishes.

  That’s one reason why theoretical physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada, thinks that we must be more radical to rescue time. In his recent book Time Reborn, he argues that if we want to square how we perceive time with what physics tells us about it, it’s no good adapting the block universe: we must throw it out altogether.