I p p GARDNER'S WHY WHE ORES MARTIN GARDNER 9 Prometheus Books 59 John Glenn Drive Amherst, New York 14228-2197 Published 1999 by Prometheus Books Gardner's Whys & Wherefores. Copyright C 1999 by Martin Gardner. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Inquiries should be addressed to Prometheus Books, 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, New York 14228-2197. VOICE: 716-691-0133, ext. 207. FAX: 716-564-2711. WWW.PROMETHEUSBOOKS.COM 03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gardner, Martin, 1914- Gardner's whys & wherefores / Martin Gardner. P. cm. Originally published: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. With new introd. ISBN 1-57392-744-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. II. Title: Gardner's whys and wherefores. III. Title: Whys & wherefores. PS3557.A714G37 1999 814'.54-dc2l 99-32953 CIP Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper GARDNER'S WHY WHE ORES In Memoriam: Bob and Betty I Contents Preface to Paperback Edition ix Part Two: Reviews 153 Preface xiii 17. Polywater 155 18. Science in Part One: Essays 1 Ancient China 157 1. The Ancient Mariner 3 19. Great Experiments 159 2. The Mighty Casey 25 20. Gardner's Whys 162 3. The Martian 21. How Science Chronicles 37 Self-Corrects 169 4. A Dreamer's Tales 44 22. Some Trends 5. The Computer as in Mathematics 172 Scientist 48 23. Comfort's Comforts 175 6. Illusions of the 24. Calculating Prodigies 179 Third Dimension 57 25. Arthur C. Clarke 188 7. Kickshaws II 68 26. Did Sherlock Holmes Meet 8. Seven Puzzle Poems 77 Father Brown? 191 9. Slicing Pi into 27. Richard Feynman 194 Millions 81 28. Physics: End of the 10. The Traveling Road? 197 Salesman 90 29. W.V. Quine 211 11. The Abacus 102 30. Mitsumasa Anno 215 12. The Puzzles in Ulysses 107 31. WAP, SAP, PAP, and FAP 218 13. The Fantasies of H. G. Wells 122 32. Secrets of the Old One 229 14. The Fantasies of G. K. Chesterton 131 33. Marvin Minsky's Theory of Mind 238 15. The Fantasies of Lord Dunsany 138 34. Order in Chaos 243 16. Playing with 35. Infinity and Mathematics 151 Information 247 36. The Curious Mind of Allan Bloom 256 Preface to the Paperback Edition Since this collection of essays and book reviews was published in 1989, many of its chapters could profit from updating. However, rather than give the book a major revision, let me gather here some brief references to recent material relating to the book's chapters. In a postscript to Chapter 51,I said no computer is even close to winning Fredkin's $100,000 prize for the first computer to become world chess champion in play against a human grand master. Today, this event is getting much closer. In 1997, in a six-game nontourna- ment match, IBM's program Deep Blue defeated world champion Gary Kasparov by winning two games, losing one, and drawing three. A much surprised and annoyed Kasparov insisted that, now that he knows more about what Deep Blue knows, he could "tear it to pieces" if it enters competitive play. We shall see. The great polywater mania, my topic of Chapter 7, had its coun- terpart in 1989 when two University of Utah chemists, Stan Pons and Martin Fleischman, announced they had achieved cold fusion. Excite- ment among chemists was as great as their earlier excitement over the bogus polywater. If the claims were true, they could lead to unlimited sources of clean energy that would revolutionize history. Alas, it soon became clear that obtaining cold fusion is as remote as ever. For a good account of the matter I recommend Gary Taube's Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993). When I wrote Chapter 28 I could never have expected that a top science writer, John Horgan, would write an entire book titled The End of Science: Facingthe Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996). Although there obviously will always be unlimited problems for science and technology to solve, Horgan maintains that science is on the verge of discovering all the fundamental laws of physics. A few scientists, Steven Hawking for example, also think a "theory of every- thing" is just around the corner. Most scientists think otherwise. For my own skepticism, see my column on "The Unknowable" in the Skep- tical Inquirer (November/December 1998). ix PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION Frank Tipler, about whom I wrote negatively in Chapter 31, enlarged on his controversial opinions concerning astronomy, com- puters, and theology in The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead. It was first a bestseller in Germany, then did almost as well here. For my low opinion of this book see Chapter 12 in On the Wild Side (Prometheus Books, 1992). Marvin Minsky, the subject of Chapter 33, along with many of his colleagues in artificial intelligence, still believes it is only a matter of time until computers will do anything human minds can do. Hans Moravek, who heads a robotics laboratory at Carnegie Mellon Univer- sity, predicts that this great day is only half a century away! See Chapter 21, in On the Wild Side, for my review of Moravek's Mind Children. I think Moravek's optimism is nonsense. I do not believe a com- puter, of the sort we know how to build-that is, a machine made with wires and switches-will ever become self-aware and capable of the kinds of creative thinking our minds can do. I belong to a small group known as the "mysterians" because we believe there is a deep mystery about human consciousness and free will (in my opinion, two names for the same thing) that science does not yet understand. The mysterians include philosophers John Searle, Colin McGinn, and Thomas Nagel, and scien- tists Roger Penrose and Noam Chomsky. Maybe some day science will unravel how the human brain works, or maybe it won't. On this see my essay "Computers Near the Threshold?" in The Night Is Large (1996). Allan Bloom died in 1992, leaving a posthumous book titled Love and Friendship (1993). The book discusses eight classical writers and thinkers with special emphasis on love as praised in Plato's Symposium-an emotion more profound and desirable than mere sexual pleasure. Bloom's sniping at Freud offended Freudians as much as his attacks on radical feminism offended feminists. Harry Ashmore, in Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins (1989), devotes pages 537-39 to his amazement over the fact that Bloom could defend the importance of the Great Books in giving students a liberal education, and never once mention Hutchins or Mor- timer Adler. In an interview in the Chicago Tribune (November 27, 1988) Bloom apologized: There are not many changes I would make in the book in response to the criticisms I have received but that's one. The University of Chicago was my inspiration, and Hutchins was the University of Chicago. I've always regarded myself as a student of Hutchins, a figure I look up to with the greatest admiration. He was a gem, a genius of an educational administrator. x Preface to the Paperback Edition Note that Bloom still does not mention Adler. The two men had little respect for each other. For Adler's bashing of Bloom see his Reforming Education: The Opening oaf the American Mind (1989). Is there a common thread running through this book's pages? If so, I think it is an unbounded respect for science and reason, combined with an overwhelming emotion of awe over the fact that a universe exists and is so intricately ordered. Think about it. Some 15 to 20 bil- lion years ago the laws of quantum mechanics managed to pull out of the hat of nothing a tiny speck of something capable of slowly growing into the vast universe we know; a universe containing one tiny planet on the surface of which, attached by gravity, are such outlandish crea- tures as you and me. Somehow 'we were potentially "there" in those primeval fields and particles. Was there a Great Magician responsible for the Big Bang, or did the universe pop into reality all by itself? For- tunately, we can avoid meditating long about why there is something rather than nothing or we could go insane. Martin Gardner June 1999 xi Preface Order and Surprise (Prometheus Books, 1983) was a selection of essays and book reviews written over a period of forty years. Aside from the first four chapters, this is a similar collection of pieces written after the publication of that book. Part I reprints essays; Part II reprints reviews. Within each part, the chapters are in chron- ological order of publication. Martin Gardner xiii PART ONE ESSAY The Ancient Mariner But I do not think "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was for Cole- ridge an escape from reality: I think it was reality, I think he was on the ship and made the voyage and felt and knew it all. -THOMAS WOLFE, in a letter of 1932, included in The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Elizabeth Nowell (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956, p.