Coffee—with Strings

Iran into a former coworker in the streets of Boston recently and stole a minute with her in the ubiquitous coffee klatch. A few years earlier, we were editors for a major publishing house, working on grade-school science textbooks together. In the interim, I had left the book production business, gone to work briefly as a science editor for a local newspaper, and then left that as well to pursue freelancing. While stirring granulated sugar into her already sweetened tea, she asked me what I was working on now.

I said I had just had the pleasure of interviewing Leonard Susskind, the theoretical physicist at Stanford University and one of the joint founders of string theory. String theory is an elaborate mathematical proposal, a vast, numerical just-so story that purports, among other things, to show how general relativity could be combined with quantum mechanics. The problem of how to do that has dogged fundamental physics since Einstein's day.

"Oh, I know about string theory," my friend interrupted me. "I studied touch therapy." In my reverie, I was caught short by this nonsequitur. Did she say touch therapy?

"I learned it with a specialist in town," she went on happily. "Superstrings were a big part of his technique."

I remember feeling my lips open partway and close again, a gesture I could see reflected in the coffee shop window. Was this the kind of "therapy," I asked carefully, where the practitioner waves his hands over someone's body but doesn't actually touch them?

"Oh, you can touch them," my friend retorted, a little bemused, "but it's not strictly necessary."

The wisdom of this method which she spent an entire year paying a "professional" to impart to her--was originally based in Kabbalah. Not gematria, she made it clear; many people confused the two. Touch therapy made excellent use of "energy," "fields," and "quantum resonance." It also, somehow, involved superstrings.

I admit to a social impotence in situations like this, of which I am ashamed. It amounts to an unwillingness to throw water on a conversation when I'm with people I enjoy, good people with right intentions, at the moment they begin promulgating astrology or psychic insight or divination. I also recognize this hesitancy as a moral failing on my part. There is no question that the uncriticized belief that Kabbalah and string theory have anything in common is every bit as damaging as the racist, sexist, or homophobic joke we let pass in conversation.

But in that cool, coffee-scented shop, an uncomfortable silence was all I could manage. I believe I made some indistinct gestures, and the conversation moved on. As Carl Sagan said, the candle flame gutters. The demons begin to stir.

I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about this interaction and what it implies for our current situation. Part of the problem, it seems to me, lies in background assumptions. In casual conversation, my default assumption is that people occupy the same reality-testing space as I do, that we are addressing the world from roughly equivalent perspectives. That assumption would not imply anything about understanding high-level physics but would entail understanding the difference between physics and psychics. It would not entail understanding observer-dependent relations in quantum mechanics but would entail recognition that there is an objective reality unaffected by our thoughts. It would not entail knowing contemporary neuroscience but would entail recognizing that minds don't leave bodies, that dreams are not physical journeys, and thus, that Catherine of Sienna (to pick one of my favorite mystics) didn't really travel to heaven, hell, and purgatory any more than Mohammad took a mystical nighttime journey to Jerusalem before he ascended into heaven.

My assumption, it turns out, is incorrect. And even more disturbing, it is incorrect even among the highest tiers of education.

At a university in Ohio, I spoke one night with a tenure-track professor of molecular biology who was also a member of the Ramtha cult and thus believed J.Z. Knight channels a 35,000-year-old spirit warrior who fought in Atlantis. Another academic, a practicing male witch, refused to judge this belief either plausible or implausible on grounds that "we don't know everything." The biologist's boyfriend, I learned, had psychic powers that allowed him to channel their cat remotely in order to determine his wishes when they were picking out pet food (I am not making this up).

Such gullibility goes beyond an inability to criticize a claim properly. These academics were formally schooled; in the case of the biologist, her background knowledge was far in excess of my default assumption. What she, the witch, and the cat-chaneller were lacking was clearly not intelligence. Yet at the same time, a vast sinkhole of stupidity had become lodged in their brains. The rational, critical faculty that could analyze DNA transcription or restriction enzymes had somehow become wholly separated from the emotional, uncritical aspect that was saving canned goods against the day when Ramtha will eradicate unbelievers.