133 | Ziya Tong on Realities We Don’t See

It’s a truism that what we see about the world is a small fraction of all that exists. At the simplest level of physics and biology, our senses are drastically limited; we only see a narrow spectrum of electromagnetic waves, and we only hear a narrow band of sound. We don’t feel neutrinos or dark matter at all, even as they pass through our bodies, and we can’t perceive microscopic objects. While science can help us overcome some of these limitations, they do shape how we think about the world. Ziya Tong takes this idea and expands it to include the parts of our social and moral worlds that are effectively invisible to us — from where our food comes from to how we decide how wealth is allocated in society.

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Ziya Tong received a B.A. in psychology and sociology from the University of British Columbia, and an M.A. in communications from McGill University. She has served as host, writer, director, producer, and reporter from a number of science programs, most notably Daily Planet on Discovery Canada. She is a Trustee of the World Wildlife Fund, and served on the Board of WWF Canada. Her book The Reality Bubble: How Science Reveals the Hidden Truths that Shape Our World was published in 2019.

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0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And I’m pretty sure I don’t need to tell anyone who’s listening to this podcast that there’s a difference between the world of our everyday senses, the world we see around us, and the picture of that world we construct mentally with tables and chairs and people and stuff like that, and the world as it really is. And this distinction between the world that we immediately see in the world as it is comes in a number of different flavors, we could talk about quantum mechanics, and we could talk about the fact that the real world in some sense, as far as we know it right now, should be thought of as a quantum wave function of a set of fields in spacetime rather than a bunch of objects with masses and positions located in the universe.

0:00:47.0 SC: But there’s another sense, it’s sort of a more down-to earth sense, in that we just don’t see or sense, I should say, everything that is around us. And in the most obvious way, we don’t see the entire electromagnetic spectrum, we see visible light, we don’t see radio waves or x-rays or whatever. We don’t see neutrinos or gravitational waves or all the dark matter particles that are passing through us. There’s a very direct sense in which we don’t see all of the world, and there’s another kind of deeper sense, which is that we tend to pay attention to certain aspects of the world, right, to things that happen on more or less human scales. So we know that there’s microorganisms inside our body and whatever, and we know that there are events that only happen once every million years or something like that, but those don’t really impinge upon our everyday awareness.

0:01:37.4 SC: And to some extent, science helps us overcome these limitations, we can look at very tiny things, very big things, we can think about very short timescales and very long timescales. So today’s guest, Ziya Tong, who’s very well known in Canada, she’s the co-host of Daily Planet, which is a science program on Discovery Canada, and she’s also a producer, host, writer, director for a number of different science shows. A couple of years ago she wrote a book called The Reality Bubble, and it’s about this, about this fact that we sort of create a version of reality from the data that we immediately get, and there’s a whole bunch of data that we filter out.

0:02:16.5 SC: But the reason why I thought it was worth having a Mindscape episode about this was because Ziya goes beyond this idea that we don’t have immediate sensory access to everything that’s going on in the world to draw sort of philosophical and even social, moral, economic political lessons about this. It’s not just that we don’t see microorganisms, we also don’t see the power structures around us, we don’t see the invisible features of our lives that we take for granted, we don’t see our food being produced, we don’t see where the plastic goes that we throw away, we don’t see the rules that we choose to live by, or if we know that they exist, we take them for granted. So she develops this idea of the reality bubble, of we filter out much of the data that exists out there and only accept some of it to go beyond just the physical and the biological, to deeper questions about the social world in which we live, and whether we should, what should we be thinking about? What are the things we should be aware of that we’re not necessarily?

0:03:17.4 SC: So whatever your take on what we should do about these things, I’m of the opinion that we should know about them, even if you kind of don’t want to do anything about this factory farm or this power structure out there, you should know that it exists, right, and that’s why I thought this was a good conversation to have. There’s a tremendous amount of food for thought that we have here, it’s a very ambitious program that she’s talking about, and I think you’ll enjoy thinking about it, there’s a lot to chew on, so let’s go.

0:04:03.2 SC: Ziya Tong, welcome to The Mindscape podcast.

0:04:05.3 Ziya Tong: A joy to be on the Mindscape podcast, Sean.

0:04:08.3 SC: It is, and I’m glad you finally recognize it, so many people have to be cajoled into thinking that. No, we’re glad to have you here and we’re going to talk about your book, The Reality Bubble. So I do actually want to do more, I don’t know, throat-clearing or scene-setting than usual, because there’s a lot going on in this book, so why don’t we start with you telling us what you mean by the phrase the reality bubble.

0:04:35.4 ZT: Sure. I mean, I think that many of us are familiar with bubbles of different sorts, whether we’re talking about real estate bubbles or tech bubbles, and usually when you’re in a bubble, you’re sort of living in a distorted reality, you’re with a group of people who have an idea of reality, and it’s sort of a fiction, and there’s a much bigger picture reality out there, and if you’re basically, if you’re not paying attention to that reality, it can sometimes crash its way in, so bubbles tend to be quite dangerous, and what I’m actually suggesting in this book is that our entire sort of idea of reality beyond what the human being is able to perceive with our five senses, that scientists have been able to detect a different reality that we are not exactly privy to, and because we’re not privy to it, we’re actually in quite a dangerous position.

0:05:31.8 SC: Right, and so is it fair to think of it as an update of Plato and his cave, that metaphor?

0:05:38.1 ZT: I think that obviously people like Plato and different people through the ages, the notion of Maya and the notion of illusions, this has been something that has been with us for millennia for sure. And this is perhaps an updated version simply because with science, we actually have these tools that we can detect this reality with, so it’s not so much philosophical, it’s something a little bit more factual. When I got into reality, I didn’t want to get into whether reality exists or not, I wanted to look at realities that we could actually prove existed. And that was one of the things that I came across working as a science broadcaster, I think now for about 17 years, not to date myself too much, but every day on the show that I worked on, Daily Planet, we had different scientists, so one day or even one part of the show, there would be a soil scientist and then the next part you’d have a rocket scientist.

0:06:37.8 ZT: And what I realized is they were seeing fundamentally different bigger picture realities or sometimes micro realities that existed in my own world landscape that I was not able to perceive, and so when Naomi Klein called this book a sort of kaleidoscopic look at reality, it’s because it was. It’s almost like sometimes I picture the dragon fly’s eye, you know, with that compound lens of 28,000 lenses on it, and speaking to so different scientists, it was really exciting because I could see that they all had this really different vision of the world that they could prove existed, and that was the exciting part. But on the flip side, what sort of really, sort of the engine of the idea for the book took place in the shower. It was one of these showers, a lot of people have those shower thoughts that they post on Reddit all the time.

0:07:30.3 ZT: And the book talks about this idea, which is in the 21st century, there are cameras everywhere, except where our food comes from, where our energy comes from and where our waste goes. So that really struck me, because we’re the most powerful species on earth, and yet we’re fundamentally quite blind to how we survive. So how is it that we have this incredible ability to see outer space, underwater, through walls, all these different visual capabilities, and yet when it comes to some of the fundamentals, we actually can’t see very clearly at all. And you’ve seen, I’m sure, that meme on the internet where they say at the beginning of every horror disaster movie, there’s a scientist who’s heralding a warning, and as I looked through these lenses, I started seeing those warnings and I wanted to put those warnings together in a book.

0:08:23.0 SC: Right, so I wanted to get that in your words, because given the description of the reality bubble as you initially described it, I think there are a couple of places that listeners of this podcast might immediately go, which are sort of not the right places to go, so I wanted that be very clear. Like one place is the idea that the world we see around us looks classical or ordinary, even pre-classical, manifest image, folk science, look, there are tables and chairs, but there’s also a deeper underlying reality which is quantum mechanics and wave functions and quantum fields, and that is not really what you’re focusing on in this book.

0:09:04.2 ZT: Certainly not, not… Because that’s not my area of expertise. I mean, that’s something that I would love to hear from you, like how you see a table or a chair, or do you see it as sort of like this fizz of particles? Of course, this is one area that we can’t necessarily see, although we can detect, so while I do address those sorts of things, that’s not particularly the realm in which I go.

0:09:28.3 SC: That’s right, which is fine, which is perfect, and maybe I’ll be on your podcast someday and we can talk about the underlying wave function. But then there’s the other use of the word bubble that has been… You mentioned housing bubbles and stock market bubbles, but recently in recent years, the idea of a filter bubble and an online sort of news and information bubble that individuals can be in has become very prevalent. And that’s related to what you’re talking about, but it’s also not exactly the same thing, you’re being a little bit more scientific here.

0:10:02.1 ZT: Yeah, exactly, because I think that we are aware that there are political bubbles, and that is a bubble in a sense that you’ve got a certain select group of people with an insular form of thinking, but in contrast, you have other political bubbles that are more differences of opinion or differences of morality or differences of value, whereas what I’m talking about is a bubble where your perceptual faculties tell you one thing, and then scientific tools and technology can basically envision a very different reality, and when there’s a mismatch, that’s when you have something that’s quite dangerous.

0:10:43.2 SC: That’s right, and I do want to… I feel bad about doing this, but in some sense, I want to give away the punch line right away, ’cause you know, people don’t always listen to the podcast.

0:10:52.9 ZT: I don’t even know what the punch line of my own book is, so I look forward to this.

0:10:57.1 SC: So let me run by you what I think a punch line is, and then you can fix it. Given the description that you gave of the reality bubble, and in fact, given all of the text on the back cover of your book, the subject in the book could easily have just been a list of anecdotes and factoids about cool things that science has taught us about the world that our immediate senses don’t have access to. And you have a little bit of that, but then you have a much… I want to say deeper message or more profound message about not just the physics and biology of our ways of sensing the world, but then you get into political, social, moral, economic impacts of this, not just we don’t see ultraviolet light, but we don’t see the invisible power structures around us, and I think that it’s not really a bait and switch, you’re not being dishonest about it, but I liked the fact that you really tried to see a bigger picture than just some science stories.

0:11:55.8 ZT: Oh, well, I’m so grateful that that’s the punch line you got out of it, because then I think I did my job properly. Yeah, I mean, I think what I found missing, they say often try to write a book that you haven’t seen on the bookshelves, is one that actually does bridge politics with science, political science. Quite often, we know that scientists are creating and documenting more of an objective reality, so we don’t tend to look for the politics there, but of course, that’s quite necessary in this day and age when we look at things like climate change, and my book isn’t exactly all about climate change, as you know, it’s about a whole other spectrum of things.

0:12:39.7 ZT: But I think that it’s really important to be able to bridge that gap. And that’s one of the reasons why the book really focuses on rebel scientists, chapter 1 is looking at van Leeuwenhoek and it is looking at Galileo, and looking at how these two fathers, these big fathers of science and microscopy today, were really mocked and derided and considered charlatans; van Leeuwenhoek certainly was because he was seeing these invisible animalcules that in the 16th century basically didn’t exist. Everybody thought he was a little bit mad.

0:13:14.2 ZT: And the same thing with the church really wanting to silence Galileo. So there is always a political component to when you’re trying to challenge the status quo, so that was definitely a component that I wanted to add. And my good friend Astra Taylor has been a guest on your show, and we’re friends because we do have a strong interest in the political arena, so that is definitely a part of the book that I’m glad came forward for you.

0:13:45.7 SC: I always have to think carefully about the discourse around rebel scientists, and this would take… I don’t want to get too much into it, but I will give you a chance to respond. It would be a whole podcast in itself, but you know, like you say, people like Galileo and van Leeuwenhoek were derided as charlatans, but most people who are derided as charlatans are charlatans.

0:14:10.8 ZT: Exactly, and that’s exactly what snake oil was all about, right, when they were selling snake oil and there was no snake oil.

0:14:14.6 SC: Yeah, exactly. These are people out there, people who want to take it as a badge of honor that they’re derided as charlatans. I must be doing something right because so many people disagree with me. I don’t think that quite logically follows. So we have to be careful about the valorization of rebels. I mean, the successful rebels like Galileo are absolutely crucial, but it’s hard being a rebel.

0:14:39.4 ZT: Yeah, but when you’re actually creating something that is, again, documenting, I mean, I suppose, or exposing something that’s paradigm-shifting, then you’re going up against the status quo, and by that very nature, you are rebellious, not because you’re choosing to be rebellious or provocative in any sense. I mean, Galileo was just basically saying, hey, I’m seeing these mountains and these valleys on the moon, and we thought it was a smooth orb and by the way, it isn’t right, and that we might not be the center of the universe. But that’s of course, as many of your listeners will well know, something that the church absolutely could not allow people to believe. So there was a sort of forced blindness on the population because that would challenge the word of God, but of course, as you know, that’s just the very, very beginning of the book.

0:15:30.6 SC: Yeah, exactly, and honestly, it’s right on target for the podcast, because if I think back to over 130 episodes ago, the very introduction I did to the idea of Mindscape was if there’s one theme I want to sort of tease out, it’s that… Not just the importance of being rational in thinking about the world, but the importance of choosing which things to think about in the world, paying attention to some things and not paying attention to others can be just as important for the conclusions we land on as the reasoning process we use once we pay attention to those things.

0:16:07.9 ZT: Yeah, absolutely.

0:16:09.8 SC: And the final thing, final bit of throat-clearing before we get into the substance of your book, I apologize for this, but one of the features of your book, which I’m sure is entirely intentional, is that you say things that make people feel uncomfortable, that people are going to…

0:16:26.5 ZT: Oh, I do, yes.

0:16:27.4 SC: People are just going to say, I don’t want to hear that. And hearing certain things about the world might naively imply some moral or political conclusions, and I think that’s why people will feel uncomfortable about it or might seem to imply them anyway, but I think we can all agree… I’m going to propose that we can all agree, let me know if you agree, that we should all be able to face the facts. Regardless of what conclusions you draw about how to think about the world and what is right and what is wrong, we can’t hide from our view those facts which make us feel a little uncomfortable.

0:17:03.2 ZT: Yes. And so, as you know from reading the book, it’s divided into three main sort of sections, and the first section really looks at those biological blind spots that we have, these are the things that we can’t see because of our senses. But the second section of the book really looks a little bit more at our wilful blind spots, right, and these are some things that we’re unable to see and sometimes that we deliberately don’t want to see. And then the third section of the book is more civilizational blind spot. So this looks at some of the things that we don’t see from an inter-generational lens that we’ve inherited, that we’ve normalized such that we no longer see them. So there’s different ways of not being able to see different forms of blind spots throughout the book.

0:17:48.4 SC: So don’t you dare surprised if I say that some of the things you say make people uncomfortable, it’s clear that is a part of the plan all along.

0:17:57.4 ZT: Yeah, and especially as a writer, you have to think about some of those things, because you know if you’re writing about things that are going to make people uncomfortable that when you’re sitting with a book, it’s very easy to just close the book, right, you might not want to read further if it’s something that disturbs you, but at the same time, you have to structure a book as an author such that you can keep people interested and keep them going throughout, so that was some strategic thinking that went into the writing process.

0:18:25.9 SC: This is why professors are often not good at writing trade books because they’re used to having a captive audience who gets a grade the end of the course, and they can start with the most boring parts, but… Okay, anyway. Good. Throat-clearing done. I’m glad that the landscape is a little bit clear, and now we can do some science. Let’s start with some of the sort of scientific aspects of the story you’re telling. You talk about… Let’s just go the literal, most literal interpretation of what you’re talking about: What are the ways in which there are literally things going on all around us that we don’t see or sense personally and directly?

0:19:03.1 ZT: Okay, so I mean, even when I’m sitting here right now speaking with you, it would seem that I’m alone in a room, but once you start getting a micro-lens on the world, I start to realize that of course, there’s trillions of beings that surround me, I’m in a very very busy, busy office space right now, and even surrounded by creatures that are crawling on my face, for example. So one of the things that I talk about are the demodex mites that are on almost all adults by the time we reach adult age. They’re arachnids, so they’re sort of relatives of spiders, and one of the strange things about them, of course, as well, they have mouths, they can eat the sebum or or other detritus on your face, they don’t have anuses, so when they crawl about on your face every night, they kind of eventually, when they pass, they do sort of explode their internal guts all over your face.

0:20:07.1 ZT: And then inside of their guts are even smaller creatures which are bacteria, van Leeuwenhoek being the very first person to ever spot them with his microscope. So of course, there’s a huge living, buzzing, vibrant reality with billions and billions of creatures that I’m simply unable to see. And of course, on the other side, perhaps on the macro end of it, and there are so many more spectrum-wise, but I think many of us were aware when scientists were able to image the black hole not too long ago, and to be able to see something like that, something so massive, it’s so much larger and has such a greater mass than our very own sun, and yet it was completely invisible to the naked eye.

0:20:53.5 ZT: So there are many, many things that surround us that are invisible to the naked eye. I mean, forensics workers, for another, are very well aware. I was actually just watching the documentary, The Dissident the other day, this is the one about Jamal Khashoggi. And in Istanbul, of course, the police officers went in and what looked like a perfectly clean room, once they sprayed luminol on the room, which detects the iron in the hemoglobin, you start seeing the blue light, you start seeing the blood splatters all around this room, and it starts to reveal this really grizzly crime scene, this murder scene, that you wouldn’t see at all with a naked eye. So there are so many examples that pepper the book of ways in which we’re able to see.

0:21:38.7 ZT: And I think one of the ones that struck me quite a bit is a story about a surfer, whose name is Mike Sturtevant, and he’s a surfer in Florida, and he loved going surfing, loved going to the beach all the time. And then suddenly, he started getting sick. He started getting people on the beach around him as well, started getting lesions and sores and just feeling very, very unwell, but there seemed no reason for this, because everything locked just fine, nothing externally had changed. And he used to go out at night on his boat and he had a UV lamp that he would use to look for petrol leaks on the back of his boat, so he decided to take that lamp out on night, and he shone it on the beach, and when he did, he was shocked.

0:22:36.6 ZT: And I was shocked when I saw the images, because there are images online, the beach was glowing, this orange color. And what was the cause of that? He had absolutely no idea. So he actually does have a geologist friend, and the two of them together started taking samples, they took something like 70 samples to science labs to try to figure out what this bizarre glowing orange material was on the beach. And that’s when they discovered that it was actually Corexit dispersant. So 200 miles away, of course, there was the BP oil spill, and during the BP oil spill, the desire was to use dispersant, not so much to get rid of the oil, but to disperse the oil. And in dispersing the oil, what they were doing was they were invisibilizing the oil, but here was a man who was finally able to see it. And a beach is considered clean if 1% of 1 meter of it does not have any oil deposits on it. But of course, if you look at it with a different light, quite literally, then you can see that there is a much more dangerous reality that is just beneath the surface.

0:23:44.1 SC: Yeah, I don’t want to let go of the mite story, actually, because it is emblematic of what’s going on here, because part of the message that you have that we’ll get into more is sort of not just that we see visible light and not ultraviolet or infrared, that’s part of it, but also we see on certain scales of time and space. And I think that if you tell the story of the mites living on your face to someone, their instant reaction would be, well, surely, I would notice that if there are all these mites on my face. But the only reason you don’t, I presume, is ’cause they’re very tiny.

0:24:23.9 ZT: Yes, yes, exactly.

0:24:26.3 SC: How tiny are they?

0:24:27.3 ZT: How tiny? You know, I don’t know the exact size of one of the demodex mites, but I’ve looked at them online, and they’re tiny enough that they can very snugly fit into the roots of your eyelashes, so they’re not so tiny that you need a scanning electron microscope to be able to see them. Yeah, so they’re tiny, but they can crawl something like 17… I think it was something like 17 millimeters across your face an hour, so if that kind of gives you a sense of how small they would be to have to make that sort of journey across your face, but definitely, they’re small enough that you can’t feel their little tiny arachnid footprints walking across your face in the evening.

0:25:14.6 SC: Are they hiding in nooks and crannies or just all over the place on your face?

0:25:19.1 ZT: They’re actually mostly in your eyelashes, but they come to hunt at night and mate at night, well, not hunt actually, they’re basically coming to feed at night, and so that’s when they make that sort of… That journey. And for me, again, just going back into that place of writing, when you… Because the first chapter is about scale, as you know, there’s different chapters that look at things from different angles, but I couldn’t help but constantly feel like I was in that microscopic reality, I was picturing… When I would picture my nose, I no longer pictured it just does this sort of thing on my face, but more like an Everest for the demodex mite, you know what I mean? Like a huge obstacle, a nightly obstacle that these little creatures have to get across in order to mate with each other from one eye to the other. So it’s fun because once you start playing with scale, of course, you just start thinking very, very differently, and you look at grass very differently, you look at the world of insects very, very differently.

0:26:16.1 ZT: And I had the pleasure of meeting an entomologist in England named Tim Cockerill, who is one of the… One of the last… A man who A, wants to revive the flea circus, but B, is a wonderful, thoughtful entomologist. And we sat down and we had a beer together, and the book does start off with this quote that he says, which is quite often you’ll just be sitting at a pub having a beer, and a little speck of something will fall into your beer and you’ll just pick it up and flick it away like it’s soot or like it’s nothing, but that’s actual animal diversity. And if you had the right lens and you could look, he actually found a species, I believe, a brand new species previously unknown to science in a cup of tea.

0:27:06.3 ZT: So there’s just a… I mean, I think and I hope the sense that you got from the book is that there’s a real sense of enchantment and awe and wonder alongside the horror that comes with science when you start looking deeply.

0:27:22.1 SC: Well, I did want to ask about this, and I’m sure this is going to show up again later in the conversation, but one of the things that happens when you tell a story like the mites or whatever, there’s a million different versions of this story, ’cause we’re not very aware of what’s going on on very tiny scales, you do feel a little horrified, a little disgusted at this concept, but it’s kind of an inappropriate response, because you’re not saying in this case, unlike the beach story, you’re not saying something has gone terribly wrong and it’s invisible to us, you’re saying something is completely natural and actually there might even be some symbiosis where the mites are helpful to us, I’m not sure about that, but it’s not wrong, the mites are going to be there and you feel disgust because you’re not used to it, but in fact, it’s just part of what it means to be a big macroscopic organism.

0:28:07.8 ZT: Yeah, and I think that I do write about people who call themselves disgustologists in the book, right, because… And that’s a little bit later when we start talking about some of the horrors of how we treat our fellow species, but there’s a lot that we don’t want to know, and with good reason. If we think that said species carries disease, and that comes up quite often with insects, or if we see things like lesions or death, these are all the things that… Putrefaction… All of these things we’ve traditionally really tucked away and try to keep away from our society and ourselves. And there’s been a sort of an evolutionary biological mechanism that makes good sense for wanting to do that. Things that disgust us traditionally haven’t been really great for us.

0:28:58.7 SC: Right, not healthy.

0:29:01.8 ZT: Yeah, but you’re right, in terms of the mites, this is not something that is harmful, it’s just more harmful when you scale up the animal and you can see what it looks like on a larger scale.

0:29:11.4 SC: And another scale at which that happens is the microbiome, where… I think that the numbers are not quite pinned down, but at least there’s a reasonable estimate that many more of the living cells in a human body are bacteria in our gut than human cells. We’re sort of a delivery mechanism for bacteria more than anything else.

0:29:32.6 ZT: Yeah, I think the number now, if you see a meme, it’ll say that we’re outnumbered 10 to 1, but I think it’s 1.3 to 1, so we are out numbered 1.3 to 1, we’re slightly more bacteria than we are human. But yeah, it’s incredible because, of course, when we’re born, we’re born pretty much bacteria-free, so we pick up a lot of hitch hikers through this journey of life.

0:29:58.4 SC: Well, and it goes to one of the other points you emphasize in the book, which is that the notion of a clear dividing line between the self and the rest of the world is fuzzier than we conceptualize it to be. We human beings are open systems that are constantly interacting with the world around us and what to call us and what to call the other is not always perfectly clear.

0:30:22.1 ZT: Yeah, yeah, and that’s the chapter that is quite tricky in a sense, because it is really the chapter of the illusion of the fact that we don’t see the interconnectedness of all things. So I had some fun there in terms of looking for examples and ways to illustrate how porous we are. And one of the things that I became really quite fascinated, of course, by is neutrinos because tiny, tiny little point-size particles and 100 trillion of them are just flying through our bodies at this very moment, and we are kind of ghost-like figures in a sense that we’re so porous. And so I was really quite interested in looking at that notion of porosity and how we are made up of all these sort of atomic elements that are basically like molecular lego that are constantly interchanging and exchanging with the outside world and rebuilding our bodies and rebuilding the universe.

0:31:24.8 ZT: And of course, you would know that so much of our bodies are made up of hydrogen from the Big Bang, in fact, so it’s really incredible how ancient we are as beings as well as how new we are as condensed beings, let’s put it that way.

0:31:42.1 SC: Well, and there’s an interesting philosophy question to get into, I’m not sure how much you did because it’s not really the subject of your book, but the very idea of taking a world that… Let’s simplify it as a world that is made up of particles, protons and neutrons and electrons, and then forces acting between them, the various physical forces, and then imposing a higher level emergent description on those things to say, oh, there’s a language in which we can talk about human beings and tables and chairs, and this is very natural to us, it’s automatic, you don’t need to really teach children the philosophy of emergence to get there. But when you step back and try to explain, well, what are the principled reasons why I take this table to be an individual and not the combination of this table and the number 5, that’s not a very good individual, that’s a tricky kind of thing, and bringing up this porous nature of of the human self highlights that trickiness.

0:32:41.9 ZT: Yeah, and it’s something that even young children are quite aware of. You’re right when you say that we don’t necessarily have to learn it, we’re aware of the sort of sense of object permanence, and young children realize that one object, two objects cannot exist in one space, and yet as you start to get into these other trickier sort of quantum questions, which are beyond my scope, I would most certainly say, that that reality certainly begins to blur quite significantly, and then you get to ask those much deeper philosophical questions. So I would wonder, even from your perspective, what kind of lens you see the world through given your background when you look at physical reality and the interconnectedness of things, how do you sort of put that all together?

0:33:31.4 SC: Yeah, but I’m a big believer in emergence and levels of description. And my whole book, The Big Picture, was all about how there are different vocabularies in which you can use to describe the world. One of them is, there’s just one big quantum mechanical wave function. But then there’s many others, oh, there are particles and forces, oh, there are chemicals, oh, there are cells, and all of these things, but it’s sort of even though that’s natural to us, it is not easy to say why it’s so natural to us. Clearly part of the story is there’s an enormous amount of stuff going on and we have to simplify, we have to coarse grain the world into individual little objects to talk about them.

0:34:14.3 SC: Like the story I tell is when you go on a date with someone and they say tell me about yourself, you don’t list all of your atoms, that’s not a very useful piece of information.

0:34:24.6 ZT: You don’t?

0:34:25.3 SC: Well, at Caltech we do, but the rest of the world it doesn’t really happen that much. In other words there’s much more useful information to give than just a list of atoms, even though the list of atoms would be very comprehensive. By sort of packaging the world into these discrete units, we get leverage over it in a very useful way.

0:34:46.5 ZT: And our brain does a lot of the work for us, right, so that’s sort of what I was interested in teasing apart too, is the taken for granted world that we have that is sort of delivered to us, that we sort of take for granted as this is the way it is, when in fact, that might not necessarily be the way it is. And I don’t know if we want to skip ahead, but of course, the third chapter is really looking at how different animals and different species see the world, and from what biologists have been able to uncover, that’s a very different picture, again, using biological systems and a biological lens to see the world. A bat would see the world in a completely different way than we would.

0:35:25.9 SC: Yes, Thomas Nagel famously wrote an article, right, we all know, that it’s hard to know what it’s like to be a bat. But I also… The other angle on the same question is, you don’t need to go to quantum mechanics to see the importance of this problem, artificial intelligence is faced with this problem because computers don’t naturally divide the world up into tables and chairs, and teaching them the common sense that every baby knows is a tricky thing.

0:35:51.2 ZT: That’s kind of the… Artificial intelligence certainly has its biases, and I’m quite troubled by the way in which it’s used, especially in surveillance states, but it’s interesting to see how artificial intelligence does parcel out… Its pattern recognition is so fundamentally different than ours that we don’t even understand the logic by which it comes to its conclusions, and yet it often does come to the right conclusion, that’s a beautiful sort of thing in itself.

0:36:19.5 SC: It is, and it’s beautiful on the biological side too, our brains are not blank slates, we’re built in with some way of thinking about the world that turns out to be very useful.

0:36:31.2 ZT: Yes, yes. Especially, I think, we are still… We haven’t evolved that much from 70,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago, we’re still these sort of Neanderthals wearing suits in a way sometimes, I think. We still have a lot of the same biological senses that our ancestors did.

0:36:53.2 SC: You know, I’m wearing a little gizmo that I just recently purchased. It’s a ring that is kind of like a Fitbit, it’s a ring that sort of keeps track of my sleep cycles, and every morning I can see how much time I spent in REM sleep and light sleep, and when I was awake because the cats jumped on me and stuff like that. It is a brave new world of sensory apprehension of our world. We human beings are sort of melding with the technology that we’re building to give us different ways of thinking about the world around us and ourselves.

0:37:25.3 ZT: Yes, and I think the question is, and the deeper question is obviously what are those sensors for and who are the powers who set up those sensors ultimately, and where is that data sort of accumulated, because your Fitbit, it’s being sold to you for the convenience of being able to monitor your heart or where you’re traveling, or where you’re running, or what have you, but ultimately the bigger question is the database and who owns the data of all of our sensory knowledge, our combined collective sensory knowledge today, which is sometimes, of course, used against us.

0:38:02.2 SC: Absolutely, no, and I do want to get there, but there’s one last thing I want to cover on the sort of purely scientific side of things…

0:38:08.2 ZT: Oh, no, I love that you’re going step-by-step, it’s fantastic.

0:38:11.5 SC: Yeah, but there’s a lot of steps, so you don’t want to wallow too much and…

0:38:15.3 ZT: You’re reining me back in from other chapters, I can see that.

0:38:20.4 SC: Well, the other thing on the biological side that you point to, which I’ve often thought about a lot, is this idea of scales of time and space. We pay attention not just to what’s in front of us, but to things that are the size that we are, we’ve already talked about the mites or the microbes which are very tiny, and we ignore things, we don’t pay as much attention to the bigger things that just look sort of smooth and homogeneous to us. But that’s really interesting when you get to time. Human beings have a life span, and we’re very good at dealing with things that happen on month or year-long timescales, but we’re really bad at things that happen on thousand-year-long timescales, much less million year long timescales, and this kinda has implications for our species.

0:39:07.7 ZT: It absolutely does, and I think that this is sort of a cultural artifact, because I know that, for example, in Asian culture, I’m half-Asian, I’m Eurasian, so my grandfather is Chinese, and there’s a much more sort of cyclical, sort of dynastic, sort of long-term thinking in Asian culture. My grandfather used to participate in something known as, you know, they were a thousand-year-old banquets, and the thousand-year-old banquets would be a bunch of his friends that were about 80 or 90 years old, and they would get together and together they would be a thousand years old, for example. So there was always that sort of thinking.

0:39:48.1 ZT: And also a friend of mine, Joel Solomon, when he was working on preserving the Great Bear Rainforest with many great activists working in the west coast of Canada, when they were working on their project, they didn’t come up with a five-year plan or a 10-year plan, they came up with a 500-year plan. Which is when you’re thinking about ecosystems actually a far more reflective and vital timescale to be working in, especially when you’re talking about trees that live a lot longer than we do, so yeah, there is a sort of human exceptionalism in the ways in which we think about time.

0:40:29.5 SC: Is there any sort of advice or operational way that we can extend our thinking in some way? We’ve all heard that climate change is happening, but it still happens slowly, you can stand out on the beach and look at the Pacific Ocean and it’s not actually rising as you see it, and that lack of immediacy and vividness makes it difficult for people to really worry about this maybe as much as we should.

0:40:58.0 ZT: Yeah, that’s really one of the greatest challenges is the fact that this is a slow apocalypse that we’re witnessing, right? Usually in a horror movie or something, the monster comes at you really quickly and you have to be very nimble with your responses, but yeah, human beings don’t tend to respond quite as well with longer timescales, which is why when we’re talking about what we’re facing today is an emergency, but our plans are not reflective of that, when we’re setting dates and targets that are 10 years, 20 years ahead, 2040, 2050 is when we have our plans, then there’s a sort of disjointed approach to being able to really treat the situation that we’re in as an emergency.

0:41:42.6 SC: And it’s both space as well as time that we have this issue with. There’s the famous statement that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, right? If the million deaths are happening far away, it’s just hard to get as emotionally invested in them, and maybe this makes biological sense from that 70,000-year-old perspective and maybe it doesn’t anymore, maybe it is something we’re going to have to change or evolve out of in some way.

0:42:12.2 ZT: Well, I do quite a bit of work with different environmental organizations, I’m a trustee, I’m on the board of WWF International, and I worked with WWF in Canada for eight years, and so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over time over how do you… How do you actually get people to care. You know, I think you can probably tell from this book, I didn’t want to write… I certainly did not want to write an environmental book, and I barely use the word environment when I wrote the entire book, I think I managed to write an entire book without doing it, so that I could put the word in when I wanted to at the end.

0:42:47.1 ZT: But at the same time, one thing that did strike me is the fact that when you’re dealing with that statistic question of a million deaths versus one, one of the best ways to reach people is just by telling them the story of one person. And in fact, there have been studies that have been done that if you even… Let’s say if there’s an earthquake and you just tell the story of one person in that earthquake, you’re able to get far more people responding to that one person than if it’s even two people, and that’s one of the things that I wrote about too in the book, is the sense of scale blindness.

0:43:21.4 ZT: And people have done studies on this. If you have, for example, just hypothetical seabirds, let’s say you have 8,000 or 80,000 or 800,000, people respond in almost the exact same way, they’ll donate $7 or $8 or $7, you know what I mean? They can’t even differentiate even when the difference is 7,000 versus 700,000 seabirds that are covered in oil slicks, for example. So as the numbers start to get really big, we do have a perceptual blindness, we’re not able to really pick that up or differentiate it, and that’s because as cave people, we never really needed to. We were never dealing in the billions when we were out in the savanna hunting.

0:44:07.4 SC: Literally, as you say in the book, our ability to accurately conceptualize really big numbers is kind of pitifully bad. We’re just not very good at that, right?

0:44:18.3 ZT: Yeah, we’re not, but our machines are. And so today, when we see all this stuff going on with these high frequency traders, they’re also trading and working with time, for example, and figures and numbers that are just vastly beyond what we’re able to perceive. You can basically send a signal across the Atlantic there and back something like six times in the time that I’ve said the word go, it’s incredible, the speed at which we work, and which we operate, and our computers operate. And there’s a guy named Sal Arnuk I like to quote, because he was saying by the time a normal person looks at a stock, like a high frequency stock, it’s like a star that burned out 50,000 years ago, our computers are working so quickly and with such big massive numbers and at such high speeds that we can’t perceive that this is, I believe, what Jeremy Rifkin referred to as computime, a sort of time that is just beyond human perception.

0:45:22.2 SC: Yeah, and this whole conversation is a list of ways the human brain is just not that good in some ways. It’s really good at some things.

0:45:30.6 ZT: Yeah, we are meat flesh, but we’ve done… We’ve done well, we’ve done well overall in terms of scaling things up and developing tools. It’s just a bit ironic that we’re sort of… We develop tools that have destructive effects, and then we develop tools that detect that we have destructive effects. Let’s hope we’re able to catch up with ourselves.

0:45:50.5 SC: Pat on the head to the human beings, we have done some good things. But then there’s this conceptual shift, I think, at least from where I’m coming from, the way that I think about it, in the part of your book that sort of we’ve covered where human sensory apparatus and conceptual apparatus filters out some things about the world and pays attention to other things, and then there’s the shift where we say it’s not just like the physical stuff, or by physical, I include biological mites and things like that, there’s conceptual stuff that we filter out. And what it reminded me of is we went… My wife and I went on a power boat ride out of Marina del Rey last summer when you could do the… Not last summer, but a year and a half ago when you do these things.

0:46:36.3 ZT: Yeah, we skipped last year.

0:46:39.2 SC: And the importance of… It’s just a couple of hours on a boat, but the boat is a little ecosystem all by itself, you can’t, on the boat, call for take out, you’re out there, you need to bring everything and be able to dispose of everything, and it’s something we usually don’t pay attention to. And one of the most vivid chapters in your book is about where our food comes from. So why don’t you tell us what do you think is the take-home message here.

0:47:05.6 ZT: Wow, okay. Well, that’s a big one. And of course, food is something that is both the most comforting thing in the world for us because we’re growing up with our families and our familial recipes, and it’s how we all come together around the proverbial and the very literal fire, but also our food system is so damaging to the way, and it actually jeopardize our very existence on earth right now. One aspect, of course, that you know that I start getting into in the book is what a friend of mine actually coined the term, the jiz biz, which is really about the business of semen sales. Because really, we’ve hijacked, we’ve hijacked the sort of reproductive systems of a lot of different animals, so today about 95% of pigs and 90% of cows never really get to do it the old-fashioned way. They’re created through in vitro fertilization.

0:48:09.0 ZT: In fact, every single turkey that you’ll ever eat is something that humans got into the middle of and sort of messed with, and we’ve sort of basically hijacked their reproductive system so that we can take it over, and so that we can turn animals fundamentally into these products that we consume, and in doing so, of course, today, I think many people are aware that they’re… We have 3%-4% wildlife, and the rest of the vertebrate biomass on our planet is our domesticated animals and human beings. So we’ve had our finger on the dial and we’ve been cranking it up, and every year now, we kill 60 to 70 billion animals every single year, but when we talk about blind spots… The real issue is that we don’t see any of it. We see none of it.

0:49:02.0 ZT: And I sit on another board of an organization that I’m so happy to tout because they do such incredible work, it’s called We Animals, and it was started by a photo journalist named Jo-Anne McArthur, and I just highly recommend anybody who’s listening to go check out her work, she’s been doing this for years. She goes everywhere, she documents the life of animals as they become products in a sense, whether it’s harvesting bears for bile in China or animals in zoos, but of course, a lot of animals in factory farms. And when we talk about this notion of disgust and disgustology, we don’t look there anymore, we’ve moved factory farms very far away from us, and so we don’t see when there is disease or animal cruelty, unless there is some sort of investigative episode every once in a while on an investigative show that will document it.

0:49:52.4 ZT: But these photo journalists actually do go in there and they document a lot of this so that we can actually see what is happening to these intelligent, sentient beings, and in places like Ontario, where I live, I live in Toronto, we’ve just instituted ag-gag laws, which you may have heard of, which are laws that make it illegal to actually go and document any of this, any of these abuses that are taking place, but when we talked about that uncomfortable truth, these are things that we should really want to be able to see if we want to create a better world. So I hope that kind of explains in a nutshell, a very small part of the broken food system, which is one of the three cycles that I talk about, I talk about the life cycle being broken, the death cycle being broken, and the rebirth cycle being broken. So that’s really food, energy and waste.

0:50:46.2 SC: Yeah, let me actually just tease out even more about this fact of the difficulty/ illegality of documenting what goes on inside these factory farms. Because as I started saying out, as we started talking about, you may or may not be happy or content or accepting of what goes on in them, but there’s another thing to say, well, you should be not allowed to know, and that seems like harder to justify, is there some principled case for not allowing people to know how their food is made?

0:51:22.7 ZT: Exactly, you would hope that your food system would be the most transparent system of all, right. And I think it’s Margaret Heffernan that I quoted in the book when she talks about wilful blindness, this notion that something has to actually be really, really bad if you don’t even want to know how bad it is. You know, a lot of people are like, don’t tell me about what goes on in factory farms, I don’t want to know, and they cover their eyes. And I’ve had a lot of experience with that. On Twitter, I post animal images all the time, and they’re my most retweeted tweets, right. If I show a siphonophore or some beautiful sea horse or whatever it might be, people love animals on the internet. And they say that they love animals…

0:52:07.3 SC: Cute animals.

0:52:08.1 ZT: But holy cow, if you try to actually talk about anything to do with what happens to animals, kind of behind the scenes, ooh, people don’t like that, and I will instantly lose followers, it happens every time, and I continuously do it because that’s not a good reason to tweet is by monitoring your follower account, so I still will tweet, but I will notice that if you actually share the truth, very uncomfortable truth of what we do to our fellow species, people don’t like to see that. So you have to be really careful and that was why when I structured the book, to be perfectly transparent about how I structured the book, I hope future readers don’t mind, but I came into the food chapter only after really talking about the wonder and the enchantment of all the different ways in which animals are intelligent, are able to see so, that we remind ourselves of our fellow earthlings and how incredible they are, they’re just as incredible is when you’re watching them on a David Attenborough sort of Life on Earth or Blue Planet documentary.

0:53:13.4 ZT: If you’re watching Blue Planet and you see the sail fish, they’re so beautiful and incredible and awe-inspiring, but then if you were to watch them on a fishing show, you suddenly… You know what I mean? The idea of them as products, when you see them all being pulled up in those nets, we forget that they’re still those beautiful, enchanting creatures that we were admiring on another channel just moments ago.

0:53:37.0 SC: And you have many examples, very vivid examples in the book, maybe just to pick out one to fix ideas, it’s maybe a hackneyed, but still a good one, and it’s the chicken nugget, a very different thing than an actual piece of chicken is what you consume when you eat a chicken nugget.

0:53:55.6 ZT: Yeah, I found a study that was with scientists who did an autopsy on a chicken nugget because they wanted to actually see what’s in the chicken nugget. And what they discovered, of course, was that a chicken nugget is very little actual chicken meat. And it’s actually just the sort of sinew and muscle and fat that people are consuming. They were doing this as part of an obesity study, but as I started looking into that, I really wanted to look at how meat actually became deconstructed and all the different ways in which meat is delivered to us in ways that kind of fool our senses again.

0:54:37.9 ZT: And so one of the examples that you’ll remember from the book is the notion of the Salmofan, which is developed by DSM, and the Salmofan is a fan. It looks like if you went to a hardware store and you pulled out those paint chips and you can see all the different colors that you want to paint your wall, except this is a color paint chip for salmon, because of course, farmed salmon doesn’t eat all the krill and all the sort of rich goodness that give salmon that pink color. So if you didn’t actually taint their food source with a particular color, their flesh would be gray, but nobody’s going to go to the supermarket and want to buy gray salmon. So we have ways of sort of tricking the eye, and the same thing happens with egg yolks as well, right, so we kind of have this idea, this illusion that, oh, it’s an orange egg yolk, it must be really, really farm fresh, and if you’re not buying it from your local farmer, there’s a very good chance that that’s an artificially colored egg yolk.

0:55:43.3 SC: It’s an example of how probably the instincts we have that a pink salmon, a yellow egg yolk, a bright red apple or something like that, instinctively, we think that that’s fresh and beautiful and healthy, and maybe it was a few hundred years ago, but now, whether or not this is a particularly healthy piece of salmon and what it looks like have just become completely separated because we can manipulate that.

0:56:10.7 ZT: And that’s dangerous, right? I mean, it’s not actually the process that’s dangerous as what it’s disguising, it’s that chemical blindness that’s dangerous. So another example that I talk about in the book is the use of carbon monoxide on tuna. So they use carbon monoxide to give that fish that sort of bright red color that people really like if they’re buying sushi or buying red tuna, for example. But what it’s disguising is that that fish might be a year old, it might be… It might have been frozen and thawed multiple times, and that becomes really quite dangerous, because then you could get sick from that fish and you wouldn’t know it, ’cause it would look super fresh, but it’s actually a really old piece of flesh.

0:56:54.5 SC: And there’s just an argument to be made, isn’t there, that on strictly sort of moral grounds, it should be okay for me to ask questions and get the answers about what is actually in my food and what I’m eating, right, just a label… There is controversy over whether or not you have to label what the ingredients are in something, or the… Or the nutritional information, and I just can’t see the principled objection to knowing how many calories I have in my food. But I can see why the businesses don’t want it, because I will confess there are restaurants in the United States that I no longer go to because since they started putting the calorie counts on their dishes, I’m like, oh my God, I’m going to die if I keep eating it.

0:57:37.8 ZT: Yeah, yeah. But I think that you’re right, I think that the ability to know, and that’s why the book… I mean, thankfully, and I’m grateful to have a wonderful editor too. There was no finger-wagging in the book, I didn’t want to say, this is how you should think, or this is how you should eat, it’s just really a question of like, wouldn’t you want to know this? I certainly would.

0:58:00.1 SC: Yeah, you should be able to make an informed decision. And then there’s… You talk a lot about, okay, so where the food comes from, and that’s kind of a mystery box in our current culture, but then what happens when it goes also, there’s questions of the waste that we produce in the world, whether it’s organic or just trash and plastics and so forth, and we tend not to ask very hard questions about that either.

0:58:23.1 ZT: Yeah, and for me, the most staggering statistic, one of the most staggering statistics that I came across is the fact that in terms of all the food waste in the States, it’s the equivalent of if you just like all the energy and oil… If you just stopped all the offshore drilling in the United States, it would be the equivalent of that, right, because that’s how much food we waste, that’s how much energy we waste to create the food that we end up throwing away. And that’s… Absolutely, the enormity of that is mind-boggling to me, and… So yeah, food waste is certainly something, and of course, even the utensils with which we use to eat our food, there’s that well-known meme on the internet, this idea that the energy that is used to go off to a foreign land, probably wage war and then extract the oil and then refine the oil and then transport the oil and then turn part of that into creating plastics, for example, and then shaping and molding the plastic, and then distributing the plastic, and then getting a plastic spoon and then eating some yogurt and then throwing that spoon away is so much more energy than just washing a freaking spoon.

0:59:41.5 SC: It is.

0:59:42.5 ZT: We are not very efficient despite our very global efficiencies that we’ve built into our infrastructure, I suppose.

0:59:50.8 SC: Well, this harkens to something that we’ll get to later, and you get to later in the book, but maybe it’s worth bringing up now, that when you do… When your attention is drawn to some of these features of the world we live in, and you might find them not to your liking, you might want to rebel against them, but most of the time, it’s not because there’s some evil genius manipulating things in the background, it is kind of a self-organized system in many ways, it’s many little micro-incentives have led us to here, and they may or may not be leading us to an efficient outcome, even by the most basic of criteria.

1:00:31.4 ZT: Well, human beings, we are separate from all the other species because we developed a “system,” which is what a lot of this book sort of looks at it, we’re always like, fight the system, you’ve got to change the system, but nobody actually asks what that system is, and that system is our life support system. And we are different because we’ve manufactured systems that make us more efficient, so we’re not beholden to the cycles of nature anymore, we’re only beholden to our own machinery. And the problem is that we got too good at it, we got so good at it that we are actually outstripping the ability for nature to provide the input, which is the actual… The resources that actually make up all of our food and our energy, and we’re not sort of dancing along with nature’s cycles either in the ways in which nature is able to recycle all of those inputs and outputs. And so that’s what part of the damage is, the machine that we’ve created is a little bit… Well, not a little bit, very, very wildly out of whack at this point in time.

1:01:39.7 SC: Well, and speaking of the systems that we construct as human beings, you have a couple of chapters that were interesting to me because I wouldn’t have expected to find them in the kind of book you’re writing, but they sort of made sense after the fact, about time and space, these grids that we human beings impose on the world, and then we sort of get used to them and treat them as natural, so maybe I shouldn’t talk and I should let you explain what you have in mind when you’re talking about these things. Well.

1:02:08.5 ZT: I just started… That was the question, once you have the system that’s completely out of whack, you have to ask yourself, well, we made this system, so why are we not able to fix this system? And that’s when I really wanted to look into those intergenerational blind spots, those sort of civilizational blind spots that we were chatting about earlier. And to do that, I felt we needed to look into the blind spots of time and space and the ways in which as human beings, we have created systems that scale time and space in some sense into a human scale, because we know time is sort of this big infinite thing from the Big Bang well into some sort of future singularity, and space is absolutely enormous.

1:02:51.6 ZT: But we are given what we’re given on the planet and given our minute timescales as human beings on our lives, and we’ve chopped up time and space, and we’ve turned time and space, these vast dimensions, into these little measures that we can buy and sell amongst each other. So of course, the most simplistic version of that is the way in which we’ve chopped up time into a human clock that we can buy and sell each other’s time, such that some people’s time, like Jeff Bezos is like, I don’t know, however many hundreds of millions of dollars he makes per day versus a Dalit, who makes maybe a few pennies a day. And our space as well, we’ve chopped up the dimension of space such that some people today are inhabiting ghost mansions and other people are living in the equivalent of spatial coffins.

1:03:48.0 ZT: And that’s really the big picture overview of how we have chopped up time and space, but of course, going into the book, that’s the political dimension, but I’m always looking at it from sort of a scientific dimension of how did we get there, how we… How did we develop all these sorts of measurements, and I’ve always been kind of fascinated by that too, so that’s another part of the story that gets us in there.

1:04:11.1 SC: Yeah, and almost despite yourself, some of these ways that we have of chopping things up that you talk about are quite charming, like the idea of the smell clock, I really was sort of compelled by. I kinda want to get myself a clock that will let me know what time of day it is by how things smell in the room, which kind of incense is burning.

1:04:31.1 ZT: Yeah, and that’s the way Chinese people used to be able to get people to know what time it was or what time it was to go to the temple was by changing the incense and having different incense clocks, and I love that they’re… Over time, there have been different, this notion that Linnaeus came up with of a flower clock, of being able to tell the time by different blooms. And people who have come up with bird, the sound of birds, because they chirp and they rise at different times, so if you were so well-attuned, you would know what time it was by knowing the sound of which bird was singing outside of your window.

1:05:12.5 ZT: So there’s many different ways in which we’ve approached time. For example, I think I mentioned in the book, in Madagascar, they measure time by a cricket frying, like how long it takes to fry a cricket, and through most of human history, time has been an event-driven process, how long it takes to fry that cricket or to make a bowl of rice as opposed to this very rigid idea of time now, which is the synchronous time that comes to us beamed from a satellite that we’re all marching to, that we seldom think about now. So it’s really, how did we get to be trained out of a natural cycle and into a modern system, and those are the sorts of questions that I really wanted to address because they’re scientific questions. Science brought us here. So I just think that that needs a little bit more reflection. I’m a big proponent of polymaths, because I really always think that science without humanity sort of lacks humanity, and I think that early science sort of was very… It had this really objectifying notion, and I would really love to see the humanity part of it come back in.

1:06:24.7 SC: I’ve always felt some urge to stand up for clocks in the measurement of time, there’s almost a cliched idea that you can be a slave to the clock in the modern world rather than living our lives, we’re beholden to this artificial thing. But part of me, I’m going to try this out on you here, but part of me wants to think if you were the only person in the world, then what time it is wouldn’t matter, except for maybe your crops and whatever, and then it’s not very accurate, but the usefulness of time, measuring time and having clocks all around us is that we’re not the only person in the world, that we synchronize our activities with others. So I would say the happy side of measuring time is that it enables a whole kind of social cooperation that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience.

1:07:15.5 ZT: Oh, for sure. I mean, there’s absolutely the sense that before clocks came along, meetings were very difficult, you’d pretty much be like, okay, we’re meeting at 6:00 am at dawn, or we’re meeting at dusk, or we’re meeting at high noon, that many options. And certainly, synchrony is a beautiful thing, but I think, again, it’s how time has been used, we can’t sort of… It doesn’t exist in that wonderful isolation. And so it’s really when… When we became beholden to other people’s time, or to corporate time, or to state time, or to industry time, and the book does go into how that… The emergence of master and slave clocks, which is what they were literally called, that sort of totalitarian authoritarian time that has sort of seeped into us.

1:08:05.4 ZT: And of course, without giving too much away, the resultant effects that our own human machine-made time has now had on biological systems, such that nature is out of whack, you’re starting to see birds now that are flying, and I don’t know if you saw recently in the news, how many birds died of starvation. Did you see that, the migrating birds?

1:08:29.6 SC: No.

1:08:29.9 ZT: It was in the news, and I don’t know if it’s attributed to this particular example of phonology, and phonology is sort of like the timing in nature, but we’re seeing a lot more mismatches now of, it used to be the early bird gets the worm. Well, now, when you’ve got flowers and trees blooming a lot earlier and insects coming earlier, when you actually finally have the bird migration, the birds are all late, right, and so the birds are all starving. Ad so that’s actually a result of how we have structured our time, and it’s incredible, so it’s pretty strange that’s something that seems sort of imaginary and seems sort of poetic in some way can actually restructure the temporal systems of nature.

1:09:17.1 SC: Is this because our human influence has changed the flowering and growth cycles of the plants?

1:09:23.6 ZT: Yes, well, we’ve ultimately, the ways in which our human systems have become so efficient and hyper-productive and used so much energy that of course we’ve created climate change, and climate change is something that is affecting plants, and plant blooming times and all those sorts of things.

1:09:40.9 SC: Yeah, so I looked up in the index of your book the name Michel Foucault, because it seemed like there was a lot of resonance there, so it appeared, but it was only one glancing kind of reference. Were you at all heavily influenced by him, or did you just sort of… Are you fellow travelers in some sense?

1:09:58.9 ZT: You know, I wouldn’t say heavily influenced, although if I peek over right over here and I look on my bookshelf, I can see that I have the book Power here by Foucault. But no, I wouldn’t say altogether influenced. Certainly, I read Foucault when I was in university, but not necessarily… No, I wouldn’t say so, and I think that’s probably reflective of the fact that there’s only one little quote in there. But I think I would like to write a book on power very much, that would be my next topic, and I think… Then I think I’m going to crack open that old Foucault book and take a better look.

1:10:39.2 SC: Well, I thought it was a fascinating move in your book where you went from the sort of direct physical science of what we can perceive about the world, and then the sort of dynamical infrastructure in which we find ourselves embedded, and yet don’t pay attention to different aspects of it. And then in the final section of the book, you’re talking about invisible power structures that really only exist in human minds, yet exert an enormous effect over how we live our lives and what we consider to be good, bad, right and wrong, common, weird, right?

1:11:13.7 ZT: And the manifestation of that in early days was, of course, the Panopticon, but the Panopticon has become real. It starts off really looking at where we’re blind and where we can’t see, and then sort of really questioning, well, why is it that now we’ve also created a state where the eyes are all turned on us. We are blind, but we’re also so deeply and heavily surveyed and of course, why would that be? Why would that be? And so much of it is to keep us conforming to the system that we’ve built in, to not stray or to not go too far out of line.

1:11:50.2 SC: Well, I first read about the Panopticon when I was reading Foucault an undergraduate. That’s what made me think of it. And he wrote about it in Discipline and Punish.

1:11:58.2 ZT: Right, right, right, exactly, exactly.

1:12:00.2 SC: But you’re right. You make a very vivid point about the surveillance, and the statistic that you quote, which hopefully you can elaborate on, is that 75% of United States companies in one way or the other are looking in on their employees as they work.

1:12:16.2 ZT: Did I have that? I mean, I wrote the book a couple of years ago, so I wouldn’t know what the statistic is today, but I mean, that wouldn’t surprise me at all, because there… There’s so many different forms of surveillance, right. And I talk about so many of those different forms in the book, so it isn’t just, say, having a camera on you, although that is the most basic form of surveillance, so it would easily be 75% now. If you think of any single work place that you go into, you’ll see one of those black orbs on the ceiling or you’ll see cameras, but of course, there’s deeper levels of surveillance that we see as well, right.

1:12:51.1 ZT: You see that with, if you’re a trucker, all of your truck stops are monitored and surveyed. Gosh, in China, the level of surveillance is such that they even have people wearing helmets to monitor, monitor whether they’re focused or paying attention. So yeah, surveillance is incredibly, incredibly deep. And I lay out a lot of that because I think that the average person still is not aware of the degree to which surveillance seeps in. I think that we had the Snowden revelations several years ago, and there’s always the old refrain of, if I’m not doing anything wrong, then why should it matter? And I think that hopefully by the time the reader finishes the book, you definitely get a sense that it’s not about that, it’s not about what you’re doing, it’s simply about who you are. If you’re the wrong category of person, with the flip of a switch, for example, even when Trump obviously had power, if you happen to be Muslim, if in another country you happen to be gay, if you happen to think a certain way or have a certain political alignment, well, there’s a lot of data on you now, and that data can be used against you.

1:14:01.3 SC: And like we said before, with the million that’s being a statistic versus one story being compelling, the individual anecdotes really bring it home, and one of the things you mentioned is that several cities, including Las Vegas, one of my favorite cities, have… If I’m going to get it right, in the street lamp, there’s not only video cameras, but audio recording devices, eavesdropping on the conversations of people walking down the streets.

1:14:27.8 ZT: Yeah, yeah. IntelliSystems, I believe, had those, I haven’t checked on them very recently, but certainly… You know, that reminds me of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, whenever I came across that. The sense that you could be in the forest and trees could be spying on you, and of course today, it’s not just your lamp posts, sometimes it’s your kettle, sometimes when you’re walking in a store, we haven’t done this for the past year, but it’s mannequins. I mean, there are sensors and surveillance and camera systems just about everywhere, and of course, the ones that we pay the least amount of attention to are the ones that we carry in our pockets or that we stare into in our laptops every single day, but… Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of them everywhere.

1:15:15.2 SC: Well, this is… The joke going around on Twitter is that people are afraid of the idea that Bill Gates is going to implant microchips in the coronavirus vaccine, but they go out and spend hundreds of dollars to carry around microchips in their phones that are actually tracking them.

1:15:33.9 ZT: Exactly. It’s like, I don’t know why you would need to have the… Yeah, you wouldn’t need to be microchipped, you’re already carrying the surveillance device in your hand, absolutely. I laughed at that when I saw that as well.

1:15:43.6 SC: I mean, we do know that our phones know where we are physically in space, do we know how much control we have over that data? They try to hide it from us, I know that, but I can turn off location services. Who gets this data, who uses it? Do we have any idea?

1:16:01.3 ZT: Well, all different actors use it, whether it’s state actors, or whether it’s companies trying to vie for you to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, so that we all become hyper-consuming beasts. Or security agencies who are hired security firms who are hired to track down individuals. Again, I mentioned the film Dissident, only because I saw it just a couple of nights ago, but here’s a situation where a young man here in Montreal was using his phone to chat with Khashoggi and he had received a piece of malware from the Saudi government, and they had access to absolutely every single thing on his phone. And it wasn’t benign at all, it resulted in a very gruesome death of a person who was an advocate for free speech in the Middle East, so these little eyes can be used to silence us in very big ways.

1:17:01.4 SC: And you mentioned the famous example of Cambridge Analytica, that not only tracked people on Facebook, but tracked the friends of the people who answer these quizzes and so forth.

1:17:11.3 ZT: Yeah, a lot of scraping, as we’re aware. And so that’s one of the things that we have to think about today, it’s not like Cambridge Analytica and any of those tools which were not just spying on people, but looking at their preferences and looking at their psychological weaknesses to be able to shape behavior, it’s the fact that now that that’s part of the way in which “business is done,” that’s still being used, we have all these bots, we have all these trolls, and we have all these ways of shaping opinion, and they haven’t gone away, they’ve just been sort of tucked under the surface for right now. So it’s important that we don’t look away, that we don’t turn a blind eye to those mechanisms that are still out there in force.

1:17:56.9 SC: But it’s interesting to think about how people react to knowing this. You brought up the example of China, where it’s more, even more extreme than I guess we’re used to here in the US, the extent to which the government tracks… I think you talked about… Again, correct me if I’m wrong, that there are monitors in hats that you wear, and if you work in certain Chinese industries where they’re basically keeping track of your brain waves.

1:18:24.4 ZT: Yeah, well, I mean, I… Again, being half-Chinese, I write about the Uighurs in the book, and I have a huge problem with the Chinese state and its surveillance system, but at the same time, I’m also really against the hyper-demonization of China that I’m starting to see, because China does some amazing stuff too. A state is not necessarily its people. And I also marvel at the Chinese engineers who’ve been able to create their incredible 300,000-kilometer bullet train system, and I kind of wish that we would look to China cooperatively for some of those technologies, because I think it would be just a godsend.

1:19:01.6 ZT: And I wonder if in the States, we could have high speed bullet trains as we do in China, and I think that China, again, when we talk about the sort of cyclical dynastic sort of structure and way of thinking is very different. This is not to excuse Chinese state surveillance, which as I said, and as I will emphasize again and again, I don’t agree with, but I do think that the Chinese have a very different way of thinking that… Wow, I mean, it’s tricky. It’s tricky, I’m Eurasian, so I have that sort of built into my mind how they see the world, and I just… I don’t demonize it quite so much. They have, what is it now, 1.6 billion people. And Chinese culture is a very collective culture, and it’s really one of the reasons why today, when we look at COVID, there’s two viruses, there’s a physical virus and there’s a mind virus, and the mind virus is this anti-vax, anti-mask virus that we have going quite strong here in the States and in Canada.

1:20:02.4 ZT: I’ll tell you, that virus is not in China, you know what I mean? For better or for worse, that mind virus does not spread over there, it doesn’t have the opportunity to, quite possibly because it has been clamped down. But when you have to look at… I get, I’m guessing, I’m totally guessing here, but I’m thinking if you’re a Chinese leader and you know that you’re kind of responsible for 1.6 billion primates on earth and that they can’t kinda go completely haywire, I can sort of understand why such a surveillance system would be put in place, because Chinese people have a lot of sense of filial piety and conformity and collective sort of response, so the surveillance system there is kind of… It’s quite different culturally than how we perceive it. I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but it’s hard for us to put our Western values on Chinese culture.

1:21:03.7 SC: No, it does. In fact, I did a recent podcast with Joe Henrich, a psychologist, anthropologist at Harvard, who talks about the weird societies, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, and how they are very different, and how we tend to treat our norms and morals as universals, but they’re not. There are different modes of being. But I was actually not going to be judging about China, I think that’s a complicated question.

1:21:27.2 ZT: Oh, no, I don’t think you were… I was actually just venting something I wanted to vent because I just feel like sometimes you see that a lot on Twitter.

1:21:33.8 SC: That’s why we’re here, so let me vent. My my side of it is, one might think, given what you just said about the differences between Western culture and Chinese culture or whatever, that we rugged Western individualists would just… Who live in nominally democracies where we get to choose what the laws are, we would never let it happen, that we’re constantly surveilled and our data is constantly kept because we’re very private and we want to keep that stuff. But in fact, most people are like, eh, I’d rather have Google Maps tell me where to go and not undergo the inconvenience of not telling it where I am. So there’s sort of a collective action problem, right, we don’t quite live up to our own stated ways of thinking about this.

1:22:17.9 ZT: And we are equally surveilled, and we’re so equally surveilled such that we’ve seen the impact of that surveillance be able to nearly topple democracy very, very recently. Whether it was Brexit or whether it was the voting in of Donald Trump, Cambridge Analytica had a very big part to play in that, and that has to do with surveillance culture, right, the ability to shape opinion based on surveilled data.

1:22:47.4 SC: We’re talking about 20 different topics, all of which deserve a podcast all their own, so I apologize to listeners who think that we’re skipping over, but one last thing I did want to talk about, and it’s a big, deep, provocative idea, just about… The way that I would put it is the idea that we invent laws and political systems and economic systems, and they develop and they evolve into certain kinds of structures, and then once they’re there, we kind of treat them as natural, even though in some objective way, they’re not only not natural, but sort of wildly unequal and maybe not very good for many people. So that’s all very vague, but I wanted to let you comment or put that into your own words.

1:23:31.0 ZT: Sure. One example, when you talk about all these laws, and let’s call them imaginary systems, almost, because they’re human constructions and how they sort of tend to trump natural reality in many ways. I think for me, the most important chapter in the book is the final chapter, and it is the chapter that sort of brings all the other chapters, hopefully, together, I’m not going to give it away, ’cause I hope some of your listeners will become readers…

1:24:00.6 SC: Buy the book, yes.

1:24:00.7 ZT: But it is the main sort of a purpose, really, even of writing the book. But one of the things that’s an example of what you just said is kind of illustrated in one story that I kinda came across, and it’s about the Little Mahoning Watershed. I don’t know if you remember reading about that, but there is a bunch of activists and this watershed, they were… It was getting fracked. And so many different places around the world right now, some of the activists were trying to get rights for this watershed, so I don’t know if you know, but there’s a river in New Zealand that basically kind of owns itself now, it has rights, just as there’s a part of the Amazon Basin that has rights, so that human beings can’t just trample all over it and has some legal, legal rights.

1:24:52.1 SC: Sorry, just to be super clear about this, you mean not the people of that area have those rights, but the literal part of the earth has those rights?

1:25:01.0 ZT: Yeah, I think the technical term is sort of like ordinances of nature, so the actual river has almost a form of personhood, if we might put it that way, such that it could go to court and sort of fight for its own existence. So they were fighting for this at the Little Mahoning Watershed, and in the States, I can’t remember which state it was exactly, but the judge threw it out, and the judge was just furious with the lawyers for saying that, making up this artificial idea that this watershed should have rights. And what I loved about the legal response to that was the fact that they pointed out, well, who’s fighting us in this court case, it’s a corporation, you’re trying to tell us that a corporation is more real than a river, or than a watershed, or than an ecosystem.

1:25:55.5 ZT: And so that for me was a little bit profound in the sense of these sort of organized systems and structures that we have and the power that we’ve given them to sort of re-order our natural world today, and the need for us to sort of look a little bit more deeply about that. That’s of course not the chapter, I don’t want to give it away.

1:26:14.2 SC: There’s more, there’s more than that.

1:26:15.9 ZT: That’s a little small teaser about it.

1:26:18.0 SC: Well, yeah, my personal attitude is that, by and large, I’m a fan of the idea, for example, of private property in some cases, but I completely think that it’s something we invented, like we tend to invent it and then treat it as sacred and hand it down from an objective feature of the universe, but we did invent it, and presumably we invented it for reasons, and if that concept ends up being used in ways that go against what the original reasons were, then we should rethink our attitude toward it.

1:26:55.0 ZT: Yeah, absolutely, and of course, we came up with this invention at a time when we had a very different population here on earth, and I think we’re definitely going to need to re-evaluate some of our inventions like private property in the future, if we’re all to be able to co-habit together, so it may not be a return to the commons as we knew it, but something different than what we have today, for sure.

1:27:22.2 SC: And it is hard in part because of what we started talking about, where human beings are not very good at conceptualizing things that are way bigger or older or more numerous than ourselves, when you have this idea that one person has a net worth a million times or much more than that the net worth of another person, economically speaking, it’s just hard to know what to make of that in some sense.

1:27:48.1 ZT: Yeah, again, that kind of comes down to those artificial rules of the game that we’ve made up when we talk about private property here on earth, it’s funny, when you read the Outer Space Treaty, because the Outer Space Treaty is the one province that is open to all mankind, and it’s like, well, what good is that? Like 0.00067% of us have made it to outer space, but that is the province that we have not actually divvied up and parceled up that one person can own it or another person can’t. So a lot of it is really quite absurd.

1:28:24.6 SC: Well, I wonder, okay, here’s the last questions, then. A lot of what we’re talking about here is extraordinarily relevant to our lives here on earth right now, but it will presumably be deeply affected by technological changes in the future, whether it’s we will go to the Moon and Mars and start living there, or whether it’s we will grow our meat in vats rather than on farms. Do you want to speculate a little bit for how you think this view of the world and the reality bubble is subject to change in the near and far future?

1:29:01.6 ZT: Sure, yeah. It’s funny ’cause I did just write an article for a pop-up magazine on this very sort of topic. And I think that one of the things certainly, as you mentioned, that excites me the most is cellular agriculture, because it’s incredible that today we’ve been able to separate the animal from the flesh, right. The fact that I was watching this video of Just, which Just, as some of your listeners may know, they basically opened up a… Singapore has validated cellular agriculture there, and so they have all these scientists, and they had this chicken, and I can’t remember the name of the chicken right now, so let’s just call the chicken Head, and basically, they took some stem cells from a feather that had fallen from this perfect bird, and they manufactured meat with it, they put it in a bio-reactor, grew the cells and grew chicken meat, chicken breast, chicken flesh.

1:30:05.9 ZT: And the entire Just team is sitting around eating chicken burgers for lunch, and the bird, the perfectly unharmed bird that they’re all eating is walking around and just sort of clucking around them, completely unharmed. And so the ability to put these bio-reactors in different places where there is food scarcity, to be able to produce milk, to be able to produce protein, to reduce the water footprint, the methane footprint, the animal cruelty, all these sorts of things is just fantastic, it’s definitely a win-win sort of situation. And for me, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately is so many of us are indoors now, and we don’t have this sort of 24/7 lifestyle that we used to have.

1:31:00.3 ZT: And I grew up in Hong Kong in my early years, and when I was up to the age of 11, and we used to have 7-11 when I was growing up in Hong Kong, but 7-11 was called 7-11 because it was open from 7 o’clock till 11 pm, right. And it was only later that 7-11 became this 24-hour sort of supermarket or convenience store, and now today, 20, 30 years later, we live in a 24/7 capitalist cycle where day and night, we’re sort of fueling the economy, and of course you can see this from space. But wouldn’t it be really wonderful, and wouldn’t we save so much tremendous energy, if we were able to turn out the lights, so that we would be able to have our night skies again and that birds could migrate again and insects would be able to sort of move with the state of the moon.

1:31:55.1 ZT: And sort of the inspiration for this. As a final digression. Is because I remember, and the story that I told in the article, is the fact that in the 1990s, there was a power outage in Los Angeles, and all these people started calling the Griffith observatory, freaking out, ’cause they didn’t know what that magnificent orb, like cloud was in the sky, and they started fielding all these calls, and the reason was because these people had never seen the Milky Way. And we live in the state right now where we’ve forgotten what it means to be humbled by the state of the universe, we’ve forgotten what it means to be small, to scale ourselves against the vastness of the universe and how beautiful that is and how that can really reposition our place in the world. So those are just a couple of ideas in terms of a path forward.

1:32:47.1 SC: My version of that story is I used to work with Project Exploration in Chicago, which was an outreach organization that worked with disadvantaged children to get them interested in science, and their primary way was to get them to use dinosaurs, which is the second most exciting thing after the universe. So they would… The ones who were accepted into the program would go on train trips to Montana, to a real dinosaur or a fossil site and dig them up, and you would think that would be the most amazing thing that ever happened to these kids, but in fact, what really impressed them is that they could see the stars, ’cause they grew up in Chicago and had never seen stars before. Forget about the Milky Way, you know, the idea of there are dots of light in the sky was a life-changing experience.

1:33:32.0 ZT: Yeah, and that is so profoundly beautiful. And that is very similar to… I was inspired by that because I did meet a friend when I lived in New York, and he had said to me as an adult, he had never seen the stars, and there’s something really beautiful about that, which does bring us full circle back to that very beginning of Galileo just being able to look up into the sky and the numinous, it’s incredibly inspiring.

1:33:55.8 SC: So food for thought, whether or not we’re going to pay attention to where the food comes from… Ziya Tong, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:34:04.8 ZT: As I said to you, I knew it would be a joy. It really was.

[music][/accordion-item][/accordion]

5 thoughts on “133 | Ziya Tong on Realities We Don’t See”

  1. Pingback: Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast: Ziya Tong on Realities We Don’t See | 3 Quarks Daily

  2. “A boundless drop in a boundless ocean” (a part of a phrase from The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran). The Great Chain of Being of the enlightenment.
    For laypeople like me, this talk is another fun platform that invokes wonder.
    Rupert Sheldrake’s theorems sometimes sacrifice causation, sometimes overlook the hard logic or hard won evidence, but very much repositioning our nascent imagination of the casual observer, over the exclusive domain of the genii of an individual field. (too fancy) He strikes out towards wonder, and often leaves out some thoroughly complete science.
    With Zia Tong’s talk, however, the marriage between science and our natural wonder is not divided. We can appreciate both. Thanks I will look for the book, as me and other non-science dreamers can share our wonder.

  3. Re: all the craziness we ignore.
    “Stop this world” Mose Allison.
    Stop this world, let me off
    There’s just too many pigs in the same trough
    There’s too many buzzards sitting on the fence
    Stop this world, it’s not making sense

    Stop this show, hold the phone
    Better days this lad has known
    Better days so long ago
    Hold the phone, won’t you stop this show

    Well, it seems my little playhouse has fallen down
    I think my little ship has run aground
    I feel like I’m in the wrong place
    My state of mind is a disgrace

    So won’t you stop this game, deal me out
    I know too well what it’s all about
    I know too well that it had to be
    Stop this game you know it’s ruining me

    Well, I got too smart for my own good
    I just don’t do the things I know I should
    There’s bound to be some better way
    I just got one thing more to say

    And that is stop this game, deal me out
    I know too well what it’s all about
    I know too well that it had to be
    Stop this game you know it’s wrecking me”

  4. The Church and the center of the Universe

    At 15 minutes into the conversation:
    https://youtu.be/o_uznllLEaI?t=909

    About the fact that the scholars of ancient Greece believed that the Earth is at the center of the Universe. (And presumably it was reassuring to the church officials that the decriptions in the Bible of the Sun going around the Earth received corroboration in the teachings of the ancient Greeks.)

    It’s customary to suggest that the scholars of ancient Greece believed that out of sheer egocentrism.

    However, there is more to the story.

    It wasn’t until Galilei that relativity of inertial motion was recognized. The recognition of relativity of inertial motion is a highly abstract and subtle thing. It’s easy to vastly underestimate just how abstract the concept of relativity of inertial motion is.

    In every day life we never see an object coasting with uniform velocity. Everything that moves comes to a stop. As we know: Galilei introduced was the idea that if it would be possible to eliminate friction altogether then an object set in motion would continue indefinitely. This was a concept of that Galilei could not in verify experimentally. But Galilei made the extrapolating step anyway, and he became committed to the idea of relativity of inertial motion.

    Without the concept of relativity of inertial motion it is inconceivable that the Earth might rotate. Air is not bound to the Earth; if the Earth would be rotating then there would be a constant devastatingly strong wind from the East. There is no such wind.

    That is a sufficient explanation as to why the scholars of ancient Greece did not consider the possibility that the Earth is rotating. The air is stationary with respect to the Earth, it follows logically that the Earth itself must be stationary.

    The same logic constrained the position of the Earth. The air is stationary with respect to the Earth, it follows logically that the Earth itself must be stationary.

    So: it’s not *necessary* to suppose that the scholars of ancient Greece were ridiculously egocentric. Granted: it may be that their beliefs actually stemmed from egocentrism, but given the general concept of motion of the time: putting a non-rotating Earth at the center of the Universe was the only logically consistent option.

    In the history of shifts of understanding of the world it’s never the case that some theory is obsoleted individually. For a shift to occur the shift must encompass an entire interconnected world view.

  5. Maria Fátima Pereira

    Um diálogo interessante.
    Ziya Tong tem uma visão que aprecio sobre muitos aspetos da Humanidade, do universo. Profundamente humanista.
    Interessante a “sensação de cegueira da escala”, (quando estávamos na savana, caçando…). De imediato, veio-me à ideia, a pandemia e nosso comportamento-Não é indiferença aos números de falecimentos, contaminados. Temos a capacidade de habituação, e, de relativizar. Os números precisam de ter rostos. Maior impacto, quando, imagem.
    Obrigada a ambos!

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