In the future, just how wrong will we look today?
We think we’re so smart. Those poor fools who thought the sun traveled around the earth, or thought bad air caused disease — we’re nothing like them, right? Right? In his new book “But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About the Present as If It Were the Past,” Chuck Klosterman says well, actually, we’re probably exactly like them. We almost certainly take as gospel (or scientific) truth a number of what a colleague once called “wrong facts.”
Take Klosterman’s simplest example, dinosaurs. When he was 9, young Chuck was obsessed with dinosaurs, in all their cold-blooded, scaly, reptilian glory. A few years later, he was horrified to hear the theory that dinosaurs were, in fact, warm-blooded. But by the time he was 19, he took it as fact. (He doesn’t get into the whole they-also-had-feathers thing.)
Klosterman, who has written novels, essay collections and rock criticism, doesn’t hesitate to tackle the truly weedy theories, such as the “simulation argument.”
This is the notion that our universe is a computer simulation, like a super-advanced “Sims” game, invented by a much more advanced civilization. “It is, as far as I can tell,” Klosterman writes, “the most reasonable scientific proposition that no one completely believes.”
Spend a few pages with Klosterman, and you’ll more than entertain the thought. Recently, someone proposed that we do live in a simulation, and this election cycle is caused by somebody’s little brother getting hold of the controls. Makes sense.
The writer takes his what-if-we’re-wrong question to elite scientists, with mixed results. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson seems a little put out at the thought — possibly because he spends too much time battling climate-change deniers — and contends that nothing major has been really wrong since 1600. On the other hand, string theorist Brian Greene, one of the major proponents of the multiverse idea that every possible universe exists, seems fine with the notion that we’re probably wrong about something, maybe even gravity.
What is easily Klosterman’s most entertaining chapter is on the future history of rock ’n’ roll. What one act will be re- membered 500 years from now?
Oddly, his answer makes perfect sense, though his conjecture that our greatest writer, going forward, may be someone on the Dark Web, does not. Sometimes the arguments get so weedy they start to smell like weed.
For anyone who spent long dorm nights puzzling out the universe with friends, this book may seem like that to the 20th power. That’s a good thing.
But the best thing is, we’ll never know who or what really did turn out to be wrong.
Or as President George W. Bush once told CNN: “History will ultimately judge the decisions that were made for Iraq, and I’m just not going to be around to see the final verdict. In other words, I’ll be dead.”
“For anyone who spent long dorm nights puzzling out the universe with friends, this book may seem like that to the 20th power. That’s a good thing.”