Afterword
The crippling affliction poliomyelitis, like smallpox also carried by a virus, has re-emerged in one area of Pakistan. It is, at the time of writing, pronounced extinct in India. There has been no case there for three years. Polio is all but extinct in most of Africa though it has returned in regions torn by civil war and religious hatred. The appalling African cattle disease rinderpest is also extinct: the decision to eradicate each of these diseases was separately taken but both inherited momentum from the successful assault on smallpox. Ali Maow Maalin, the planet’s last victim of wild smallpox infection, went on to work for the World Health Organisation polio eradication programme, launched in 1988 with support from some of the veterans of the smallpox triumph.
Maalin died in July 2013, of malaria, another global scourge under concerted attack from the WHO and other agencies. In 1963, more or less when this story begins, a Somali girl born that year had an average life expectancy of 38 years; a girl born in India could expect to reach 40, a girl born in the United Kingdom could reasonably expect to reach the age of 73. Now, after five decades of medical advance, the average life expectancy of a newborn baby girl in Britain is 84, in India, it is around 66, and in Somalia 52 years. The dream of a fairer, more just and more equitable world – the world in which people gave peace a chance – has not been realised but even in the poorest nations, there are clinics and medical services, health ministries, and government programmes that owe something to the extraordinary and unprecedented decision in Geneva to obliterate one human disease.
That anyone can find such lifespan projections for, say, a Somali girl born in 1963 is a consequence of the planet-wide revolution not just in healthcare but in health statistics and recording, itself set in motion in many regions by the decision to eliminate smallpox. That anyone can call them up and compare them at the touch of a keyboard or a mouse or just a finger on a screen, is a product of the communications revolution signalled first by Telstar in 1962. In 2013, more than one billion smartphones were sold to customers: phones that are not just telephones but messaging devices, radios, music-players, calculators, street directories, sound recorders, satellite navigation devices, map stores, cameras, video recorders, information finders, electronic reading devices, games machines, travelling film libraries and even (I watched a women adjust her mascara and eyeliner using the video app on her phone to do this) mirrors. Take a moment to contemplate that number of one billion: that is, in one year, in a world of seven billion, many of whom survive on an income of $2 a day, one billion smart phones were sold to new customers. The practical use of space-based telecommunications has become the most familiar, most easily-assimilated of the science revolutions described in this book. It has, of course, played into the other 1960s revolutions in quite unexpected ways.
In March 2011, the world experienced one of the most powerful earthquakes of recorded human history: magnitude 9, about 70km off the coast of Japan, and 30km below the seabed. This earthquake was violent enough to actually move Japan 2.4 metres eastwards, closer to America. It was violent enough to shift the axis of rotation of the whole planet by a few centimetres: estimates say more than 4cm, less than 25cm. And it generated a tsunami with a crest of more than 40 metres, a giant series of waves that drove 10km inland, ran up hillsides, swept over all local defences, washed away offices, factories and homes and claimed more than 15,000 lives. It also swamped a nuclear reactor at the coastal town of Fukushima and precipitated an energy crisis for the whole nation. The catastrophe was so overwhelming and so unprecedented that nobody had time to reflect on what didn’t happen. What the earthquake – one of the worst earthquakes ever recorded – did not do was kill many people. The calculation is that perhaps 230 people died from the shaking earth; the rest perished in the tsunami. That is because a better understanding of the machinery of earthquake could be matched with a faster response to the event.
The Japanese have always known earthquakes: their islands remain one of the brightest and fiercest spots on what is known as the ‘Pacific ring of fire’. This is a seemingly continuous chain of either earthquakes or volcanic discharges (or sometimes both) that seemed to follow a distinctive geographical pattern: from the Aleutian islands in the Bering Sea down through Japan, Kamchatka, Indonesia, New Guinea, New Caledonia, New Zealand, the Chilean and Peruvian Andes and the US and Canadian Rockies. Until the revolution that began with the acceptance of sea floor spread and continental drift, this ring of fire had simply been an unexplained phenomenon. Now the earthquakes and volcanoes are evidence of active margins of tectonic plates: the leading edges of great blocks of continent and sea floor remorselessly on the move, plates that grind against each other, or slide over each other; plates where the edges crumple upwards as mountains ever rise, or dive down into abyssal trenches. Earthquakes happen because although the plates are inexorably on the move, the edges where they meet can lock fast for months or years, to spring free unevenly and at unpredictable intervals, with a release of energy that becomes converted into ground tremor. It is of course the tremor – the shaking of the ground, the extent and speed of the shaking – that does the damage.
Armed with the knowledge that earthquakes were therefore inevitable but unpredictable, and equipped with increasing technological knowhow, and still in recovery from a disastrous earthquake in 1995 that destroyed much of the Japanese city of Kobe, the Japanese set to work on a hair-trigger warning system. Earthquake waves move through bedrock at colossal speeds: around three kilometres a second. Light, however, travels at 300,000 kilometres a second. In the first seconds of the earthquake, as the nation’s seismometer network picked up the vibrations, the computers at their heart began to calculate their direction and potential destructive energy, and set in train a series of planned procedures. It took only about 20 seconds for the very first seismic waves to reach the nearest coastal towns but by then a number of carefully-planned automatic safety shutdowns had begun all over the Japanese mainland. The shinkansen high speed train system came to a dead stop long before any rails could buckle or bridges could collapse. Gas supplies were shut off, petrol stores sealed, and automatic warnings were distributed by radio and television. The most destructive aspect of an earthquake is not just the collapsing buildings, but the fires that spring up in the structures that still stand. It was fire that killed so many in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755; it was fire that destroyed four-fifths of San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906. There was also – there has been for decades – a high-speed, transpacific tsunami warning system but what happened to the sea above the focus of the earthquake, the bit of crust or seabed immediately above the epicentre, was without precedent.
Japanese ports and cities were prepared for tsunami – the word after all is Japanese – but the sheer scale and height of this one had been beyond any imagining. It cascaded over natural and prepared barriers, and washed far above the higher-ground zones that a citizenry had been educated to believe would be safe. The nation is still recovering from the destruction that followed, so nobody trumpets the warning system as a success. But, where it worked, it worked brilliantly. And the new and better understanding of the plate tectonic movements will continue to work, will continue to save lives. If earth scientists correctly measure the rate at which plates should be moving against each other, then they can identify those places where they can most expect sudden movement. It’s not the same as predicting an earthquake, but at least they know where the earthquake is most likely to start, and can begin to take bets on how violent it is likely to be. Because they know these things, they can advise governments on the kind of building structures most likely to survive, and they can educate citizens in how to react in an earthquake. They can advise on the soils, bedrock and topographies most vulnerable to violence; they can identify and monitor the dormant and temporarily quiescent volcanoes of the world, and advise on the behaviour of the 50 or so that are active at any time.
That anyone can confidently measure the movement of Japan 2.4 metres closer to America in one dramatic shunt during one minute on one day in March 2011 is because the revolution in earth sciences has been accompanied by remarkable advances in space, and space communications, and because satellites orbit or have orbited not just the Earth but the moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and its moons and Saturn and its moons. There have also been instrumental descents onto the moon, Mars, Venus and Saturn’s moon Titan, as well as a human presence on the moon, and all of these adventures have enriched the understanding of the Earth.
Ironically, while down-to-earth science has made sense of the planet in ways that could never have been imagined, highly practical studies of the very early universe has opened the door to a bewildering series of questions about the very beginning of space and time, and about the nature of space and time, and about the substance of all the matter that occupies it.
Yes, it’s official. The universe had a beginning: that is, the universe in which humans evolved had a beginning. But that makes the question more mysterious. If it could happen once, could it happen twice? Could it happen an infinite number of times? Is it happening now, to some other universe? Are the fundamental values of physics in this universe – the ones that permit stars to burn, planets to form and humans to evolve – the only values that can be? If any of these values were even the tiniest bit different, neither the stars, nor any citizens of Earth would be here at all. So cosmologists now talk about a package called the multiverse, in which any number of universes could be happening, one of which we happen to be in.
So there is a crazy dilemma. The reasoning behind the original argument for a big bang works: that is, theoreticians use it to predict things, such as the Higgs boson that imparts mass to matter, and once predicted, experimentalist physicists can discover it. But such predictions lead to questions that don’t seem, for the moment, to have answers at all. Why is the universe mostly matter, rather than antimatter? If this matter emerged in the first fraction of a second of time, what form did it have before it emerged, in an even smaller fraction of the first second? If all the stars, galaxies and planets in the universe add up to only 4% of its mass, what is the rest of it made of? Dark matter and dark energy are only labels, they don’t explain anything. And what, actually is space? If it emerged with the big bang, and then started expanding, it must have some sort of substance, some sort of granular structure, however small. And if time is a quality of space-time, what actually is it? We experience time, but does it really exist?
The science of the 1960s both saved lives and enhanced them. It brought the world closer together in the sense that it made it possible for practically anybody, practically anywhere in the world, to be in contact with someone else at any time, and it made sense of what – until then – had been an arbitrary planet, on which things simply happened. And it provided an accurate and precise history of the universe from the first second or so onwards. But paradoxically, when it asked the biggest, simplest question of all – why are we here? – there was no answer and there remains no answer. We have a timetable for creation, but no clear idea of what it was that was created.
All of which does give tomorrow’s physicists something to live for. The chase for answers is not over yet.
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