The most powerful fact of science
As that great REM song from the 80s declared: it’s the end of the world as we know it. A gigantic asteroid can be seen looming in the sky, more imposing with every day drawing us nearer to the inevitable impact. Or maybe a particularly dangerous strain of the flu has managed to jump to our species, spreading through the planet in days despite the paralyzed gaze of the WHO, decimating our population. It’s also possible that the tensions between Russia and the Western nations reached an irreparable point, and atomic bombs became official ambassadors of non-existent dialogue, destroying the main cities and plunging the planet into a heavy nuclear winter. After the fateful event, the actual mechanism that ended our civilization becomes mostly irrelevant. There may be radioactive areas, extremely low temperatures or infected undead trying to eat your brain, but the reality that every remaining human faces is singular and evident: life has become an exercise in survival.
Behind are the days of counting with technology, or the specialized knowledge of our peers, to guarantee our basic sustenance. Even if the world’s infrastructure were still standing after the end (like in the case of a global pandemic), most people trained to use it would no longer be among the living. The survivors would necessarily turn back to live off the earth, relearning long abandoned techniques, and maybe forgetting a big part of everything we’ve discovered through hardship during the centuries following the scientific revolution.
I find it distasteful to be the messenger of such terrible news, but you –dear reader– are part of the immense majority that didn’t make it. After several decades, when the fires died out and nature aggressively recovered urban spaces, a group of explorers rediscover by accident your place of eternal rest, and find your last message –what you wrote down on a piece of paper when you realized you couldn’t go on. It’s the knowledge you considered essential to transmit so the new civilization didn’t fall back to the dark ages, everything there is to know distilled in a single phrase handwritten by you.
Now tell me, ghost from the past, what was written in the page?
Facing a similar question, physicist Richard Feynman often said with excitement that if he could just save one piece of information, from the total of our scientific understanding, it would be that “everything’s made of atoms –small particles that move continuously, attracting when they’re close, but repelling when they get too close”. To him, this was the most powerful fact of science, that concentrated the larger amount of deductions in the least number of claims. I have said repeatedly that The Origin of Species is the single most important book ever written (and many copies should definitely be saved in the case of sudden apocalypse), but I have to agree with Feynman regarding the powerful economy of the atomic theory: analyzed correctly, it explains everything.
Of course, on first sight, this doesn’t seem to be the case. As American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “the world is made of stories, not of atoms”, as it really isn’t easy to establish a clear relationship between the behavior of particles and the emerging complexity of the world we inhabit. Feynman’s genius, as you’ve probably guessed, lies in including not only the existence of atoms in his phrase, but also the supremely important van der Waals interaction: the natural oscillation of the electron cloud that surrounds the atom, causing slight unbalances between electric charges, and allowing for the creation of the molecules we observe. In such a simple manner, the physicist tells us that matter in the cosmos tends to electromagnetically combine, but never enough to collapse in on itself. Without mentioning Coulomb’s law or Pauli’s exclusion principle, we’ve understood the basic mechanism that makes matter solid, so our feet don’t fall through the ground until we hit the planet’s core.
But that’s not the end of the story. The curious explorer that keeps thinking about the phrase’s implications, will note that if everything is made of these tiny particles, then it’s their characteristics that define the different properties objects can have, giving rise to the observable phenomena of nature. As Antoine Lavoisier did in the 18th century, and then John Dalton and Dmitri Medeleyev in the mid-19th, post-apocalyptic scientists could start to progressively build a periodic table, with the knowledge that “half an atom” is impossible, and so every element that they identify will be part of a pattern that applies to the entire universe. A fact that they will easily prove to themselves by analyzing the light from the farthest stars.
Likewise, it won’t be difficult from them to imagine temperature as a measure of the atoms’ movement and speed, explaining water evaporation in warm days, and freezing during winter. A knowledge that will direct them without major detours to the reinvention of steam engines, reactivating part of our industrial capabilities.
Given some more time, the survivors will be able to generate their own electricity –probably by building a voltaic cell with reused components– and will observe with wonder how almost any metal can be used to produce and electric current, revealing the particles responsible –the electrons– as a fundamental part of the atomic structure. Not only that, for any prolonged exploration of this resource will likely produce a photoelectric effect, exposing light’s particle-wave duality and its relationship with magnetism.
Inevitably, wanting to know more about these phenomena will lead them through the road previously walked by Rutherford, Bohr and Schrödinger, as they discover that besides the gravity and electromagnetism they experiment every day, nature hides powerful nuclear forces, responsible for the formation and evolution of matter. If their calculations are true, they’ll finally realize that only inside a sun could the elements of their bodies be produced, and their faces will light up noticing they are star stuff, carbon organized by billions of years of interactions. From so simple a beginning, humans will remember who they are.
Fortunately for those alive today, this apocalyptic scenario is only an intellectual exercise. Undoubtedly, preventing it will require appreciating that both Feynman and Rukeyser were partly right: everything’s made of atoms, and every atom is a story. If there’s something to learn from our history, is that only by balancing these two perspectives can we make safe use of the magnificent powers that knowledge provides.
