ILOILO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY MODULE 1

GE 7 SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY LESSON 1 THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

THE BIG HISTORY OF MODERN SCIENCE
ANNEX 1A

The Big History of Modern Science

Hannu Rajaniemi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcWsjlGPPFQ
(video transcript)

We are made from very small things, and we live in a very very big universe. The
small things are so small and the big things are so big that you might think we have no
hope of ever understanding them. However, I am going to argue that in fact, we already
understand them quite well. It is the world in between, the big and the small the world
we live in, that we don't understand and in fact, that world is becoming harder and
harder to understand because we keep discovering more complexity and creating more
complexity and that's something we have to face if we want to solve our biggest
challenges.

Let's start in the beginning. I want to tell you how we came to understand the big.
That's my background I studied physics and cosmology and it also has to do with where
I grew up I grew up in a town called Olivia's got in Finland. It is where you get about four
hours of daylight during the day, so whenever I walked home from school, it would be
dark and I would look at the stars and it's the stars that really tell you how big the
universe is.

Stars are very big as bigger as our Sun, only very very far away and there are so
many of them even with the naked eye you can see ten thousand stars. Now, ten
thousand is a big number but, it's still a comprehensible number. If each star was a
grain of sand, ten thousand would be about three teaspoons of sand so that's not so
bad, but of course, we don't look at the stars with the naked eye anymore, we use
telescopes and already a hundred years ago around 1900 astronomers had good
telescopes and they could see over a million stars now. A million stars is a lot, but it's
still a comprehensible number. It's about a bucket of sand and in fact, those
astronomers were pretty sure that was it, that there were about a million stars in the
universe except for these funny smudges they had seen in their photographs and they
called them spiral nebulae.

Nobody knew what those were and it took a computer to figure out what those
actually we're; a human computer called Henriette Leavitt because back then a
computer was what you called a woman doing calculations for scientists. Now, Leavitt
was paid ten dollars a week to analyze photographs of stars and she was deaf but she
had a very very good eye and she spotted a pattern in the brightness of stars that gave
her a new way to actually figure out how far away stars we're. She died of cancer very
young but I was able to publish her finding but couldn't see it applied.

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ILOILO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY MODULE 1
GE 7 SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY LESSON 1 THE NATURE OF SCIENCE
THE BIG HISTORY OF MODERN SCIENCE
ANNEX 1A

It was Edwin Hubble who later said that Leavitt should have really won the Nobel
Prize who used her method to look at those spiral nebulae and what he found was that
they were much further away millions of times further away than anyone had ever
thought. In fact, they were galaxies, galaxies just like our Milky Way systems of
hundreds of billions of stars. Moreover, we now know that the visible universe has
hundreds of billions of galaxies, so it's not just a bucket of sand, it's not a million stars,
it's seven times 10 to the power of 22 stars now.

Again, if each star was a grain of sand, that would be all the sand in all the
desert sand, beaches and sand boxes on earth times ten thousand, ten thousand wells
of sand so, in less than a hundred years that's how much our understanding of the
universe has grown from three teaspoons to ten thousand wells of sand.

Actually, it's even worse because Hubble showed that the universe is getting
bigger and bigger. All those galaxies are moving away from each other at tremendous
speed, so you may wonder how could we ever figure out what was going on and what
where all those stars came from now. Fortunately, Einstein came along and Einstein
came up with a Theory of Relativity that says that space is really just distances between
points and those distances change depending on what you have between those points.
He came up with equations that tell us how space itself changes when matter and
energy move around in it. His equations work extremely well, so well that's all the
phones in your phones use GPS which is based on Einstein's equations. An Einstein's
equations predicted an expanding universe.

At first, we thought he'd made a mistake but then he found out about Hubble's
discovery and we now know that the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years,
that means it actually started out very very small, smaller than an atom and we call the
moment, the expansion, started the Big Bang. Now, we still don't know exactly what
happened at the very instant of the Big Bang but, thanks to Einstein we do know how
the universe got to be so big. We know that little ripples, tiny little ripples in that early
universe, grew with the universe into seeds that became stars and galaxies so we do
know where stars came from.

Now, one of Einstein's equations had really big implications, not just for big things
but also for small things and that's his most famous equation E = mc 2. E means energy,
M is mass and c2is speed of light. Squared light travels very very fast so, c 2 is an
enormous number almost as big as the number of all the grains of sand in the world and
that means that even the tiniest amount of matter. Even an atom has a tremendous
amount of energy.

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ILOILO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY MODULE 1
GE 7 SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY LESSON 1 THE NATURE OF SCIENCE
THE BIG HISTORY OF MODERN SCIENCE
ANNEX 1A

In 1898, Marie Curie, discovered an element called radium. It was constantly

radiating so much energy that it couldn't possibly come from reactions between atoms
and people could really excited about radium. Science fiction writer H.G. Wells thought
that it could be a source of infinite power for a utopian society. Some people got maybe
a little bit too excited and too carried away and started putting radium in products like
chocolate and face cream and things something we now know wouldn't would it be a
good idea. Now, Mary Curie did something a bit better, she was able to use radium to
treat cancer. She pioneered radiation therapy but she herself, got exposed so much
radiation that she eventually died of anemia and even her cookbook to this day is
harmful radioactive. But she lived long enough to see what was really going on with
radium and she suspected that there might be something going on inside atoms,
something that was converting matter into energy like Einstein’s equation implied and
she was right.

In 1911, Ernest Rutherford took some radium, fired some of radium's radiation at
a gold leaf, very thin gold leaf and saw something really weird. The atoms were
behaving like there was something much smaller inside something compared to the size
of the atom like a grain of sand in the middle of a football field. He had discovered the
nucleus. The nucleus of an atom is made out of particles called protons and neutrons
orbited by a cloud of electrons. To explain his structure of the atom, scientists had to
come up with a new theory called quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics predicts
that if you split the atom, if you split the nucleus, some matter will be converted into
energy and that's what was going on with radium. But Rutherford himself, didn't think
that atomic energy would be of any practical use. He famously said that anyone who
looks for a soft source of power inside an atom is talking absolute moonshine.

So of course, there was a very stubborn Hungarian who decided that it had to be
made to work and he was called Leo Szilard He was born right here in Budapest. As a
young man, he did a lot of work with Einstein and they became close friends. They work
on quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, theoretical physics and they invented a new
type of fridge. Old-fashioned fridges used very poisonous gases and a family in Berlin
died of fume coming from those gases. Einstein got upset about it and he was certain
that they had to find a better way to build fridges. He asked Szilard for help – to invent a
better one. So they did, it was a genius design obviously but too expensive and too
noisy to be actually practical, but in the end they made some money by selling their
patents to Electrolux.

Szilard kept inventing and his next invention was something much much bigger.
In 1933, one morning in London he was crossing the street and just the moment when
the traffic light changed in a flash, he had a really beautiful and a really terrible idea and
he called it the chain reaction. If you could split just one atom that would release

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ILOILO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY MODULE 1
GE 7 SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY LESSON 1 THE NATURE OF SCIENCE
THE BIG HISTORY OF MODERN SCIENCE
ANNEX 1A

neutrons, that would split more atoms, that release more neutrons, that would split more
atoms and so on and so on, you could make atomic power work and you could also
make a really terrible weapon and that's exactly what happened in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki 12 years later. Szilard himself was horrified, he spent the rest of his life
campaigning against nuclear weapons and he switched fields from physics to biology.

The atomic bomb is a terrible thing. It shows that there is a dark side to our
understanding of the big in the small, but actually, that same understanding triggered an
even bigger explosion that's still going on today. The trigger for that explosion was the
first transistor; it is a device, the simplest building block of a digital computer. It can
store a 0 or a 1 and like the atomic bomb it's based on quantum mechanics. In fact, on
equations worked out by another Hungarian called Eugene Wigner, who is one of
Szilard’s friends as well. It showed that there are some materials that can be made to
sometimes conduct electricity and sometimes not so that gives you the 1 and 0. One of
those materials is silicon and silicon is basically sand, so we make transistors out of
sand and we are now very very very very very good at it. Modern transistor is about 20
nanometers in size and to give you an idea how small. That is all the 2 billion transistors
in an iPhone 6 can be made from just two grains of sand.

So in 1947 there was just one transistor, today there are 3 times 10 to the power
of 21 (3 x 1021) transistors. That's thousand times all the sand grains in the world and in
just in ten years, there will be more transistors than there are stars in the known
universe, so we really have started another big bang.

Now, think about that for a minute. That's a number that applies not to atoms but
machines that we have made. What does it mean, it means we can see things that we
could never see before. The Henrietta Leavitt of today don't have to do it all by hand
computers are storing data and analyzing it for us. Just like telescope revealed a much
much much bigger universe. Computers are revealing a world that is much more
complex than we thought and that world is around us and inside us.

Let me give you an example, this is a human skin cell so it looks pretty
complicated, but thanks to computers we can now read the code that runs it. We can
read its DNA for a long time scientists thought that only about 2% of that DNA did
anything useful and the rest was junk. But recently we got much better at reading DNA
and now we know that that 98% is actually the control system for the cell. So in just a
few years, we found out that the cell is actually at least 50 times more complex than we
thought now to give you an idea of what how big a leaf that is.

Let's think about in terms of computer programs, a small iPhone app like candy
crush, is about 50,000 lines of code, so what 50 times more code give you. It would give

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ILOILO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY MODULE 1
GE 7 SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY LESSON 1 THE NATURE OF SCIENCE
THE BIG HISTORY OF MODERN SCIENCE
ANNEX 1A

you the control system for CERN's Large Hadron Collider; the most complicated science
instrument in the world. So basically, we thought a cell was like candy crush, but it turns
out to be more like the Large Hadron Collider in terms of complexity. So that means, it's
much harder to fix if something goes wrong.

Now look at the Internet in 1977 and then look at it in 2007. It's like a chain
reaction, the more complex things we built the more complex things they allow us to
build. Now, our transport networks, our financial systems, our energy systems are much
much more complex than ever before and there's a problem with that because very
complex systems can become fragile and adding a single grain of sand to a sand pile
can trigger an avalanche and those avalanches are happening faster and faster. We're
all familiar with 2008 financial crisis but in 2010 competing trading algorithms got locked
into a feedback loop that created a trillion dollar stock market crash in 45 seconds
what's called the flash crash of 2:45 p.m. Connections also mean that, problems spread
very very quickly, three billion people fly every year and that means that the next
pandemic we're going to have is going to be truly global in a very complex system. You
can also get cascading failures, one thing failing off to another, this is the electricity grid
of India. In 2012, just one power line being overloaded, crash the entire grid, left 600
million people without power for three days. Sometimes connections can be very very
hard to see. Imagine a forest fire in Russia, what does that have to do with the Arab
Spring. Well, forest fires in Russia led to the grain export ban, which caused massive
financial speculation on food prices, which caused feud riots in North Africa, and
ultimately to people deciding they finally had enough our most difficult problems like
climate change involve both the complexity of nature and the complexity we regret
creating. To fix climate change, we need to understand finance, we need to understand
energy, we need to understand soil and biology and the atmosphere and and the
oceans and quantum mechanics carbon and light, all of those things at the same time.
So we live in a world where most of what we think, we know is wrong. Small things
breaking, means that big things break and when things break, they break very quickly.

Everything is connected and we can't see those connections and to understand

anything, you have to understand everything. So that's a little bit scary but there's no
reason to panic, it's actually also quite exciting from. For me, looking at all these
complexities to like looking at those stars again. That's why I did what CLR did and
switched from physics to biology. There are amazing new opportunities if we can learn
to live with complexity and I think, we can actually. We now have the means to make a
lot of things much simpler. A lot of our systems like finance and energy are fragile
because they have central nodes like banks and power plants that are connected to
everything else, so, what if we took those away. Think about technologies like solar
power or Tesla's power wall. Again, both powered by transistors, maybe we can have
power systems that are much less centralized and much more resilient. We might be

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THE BIG HISTORY OF MODERN SCIENCE
ANNEX 1A

able to do the same thing for finance. Bitcoin is an example of a platform that allows to
have trusted transactions without a central authority
like a bank that verifies them.

But what about the complexity of nature now, cancer and climate change are so
difficult problems that they might be too much even for an Einstein. But what about a
million Einsteins, all working together. Where could we find those Einsteins? Well the
chances are that a lot of those Einsteins are now playing computer games and just all
the hours spent on playing Angry Birds actually would translate into twelve Wikipedia's
every year.

And actually the best way to find a shape of a biological molecule is already a
computer game called Foldit with 15 million players. There are other platforms like that
like Zooniverse. That means that anyone can now try to find cancer mutations or new
kinds of galaxies in huge sets of data and we might even be able to apply that approach
to politics.

Iceland recently tried to crowd source the drafting of the Constitution by social
media and now you might think that was a terrible idea but it actually worked out quite
well. So there are ways to make democracy more transparent and have more brains
working on problems that no single politician could ever understand. It maybe that we
have to give up some ideas about systems that we have.

Like the fact that we may not need to be able to understand the nature of all
systems without understanding them that my company Helix Nano we're trying to build
molecular machines that make writing genetic code easier using machines that we've
evolved in a test tube and not designed. So in a way, we can tackle complexity by
accepting it and embracing it and maybe, ultimately the systems we build will merge
with the systems of nature until we can no longer tell where one ends and one begins.

Einstein said that things should be as simple as possible but no simpler and
that's a good rule for us to follow both as a species and in our lives. So let's embrace
complexity where we must, but find simplicity where we can.

And this is the thought I'd like to leave you with, there's a name for the time in
our lives where everything we think, we know, turns out to be wrong where everything is
too complex, everything is too overwhelming and we don't know what to do and it's
called growing up and that's when our adventures really begin. Thank you very much.

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