- Self - Host: So, is there any direction to our journey into knowledge? Or do we make up the route as we go along? And if that's the case, what is knowledge? The next and final program will see where that question leads.
- Self - Host: Edison used to say, 'I can never pick something up without wanting to improve it.' Except he didn't. Fifteen loyal and very unknown specialists worked very behind the scenes to obey his pleasant little rule of life: 'There's a better way; find it.' He himself worked to a set of rules. One: Get the money first. Two: Find the market. Three:--only after one and two--Produce the goods.
- Self - Host: We talk about living with uncertainty, but it's this kind of uncertainty: war, crime, disaster, famine, and certainly about how tomorrow will turn out. But in some form or other, it will turn out. That's not the kind of uncertainty those guys back down in that hole live with, where ultimately reality itself is only what you say it is, because it's only there when you and your amazing technology decide it is, in the form your instruments give it. So time, for instance, is only what your clock says, or when your plane takes off. Nothing more. Which is okay as long as you don't pretend it's some kind of real reality, the one we create. If you accept that as we rush headlong into the future, it's a future already defined as the only one our instruments will take us to.
- Self - Host: But it was how Mach used his work on perception that made him such a big wheel among the scientific thinkers of the time. Because he argued that all a scientist could be sure of was what his own personal experience, his five senses, showed him. Take movement for instance: Forces on you acting up or down or from side to side. You might invent some scientific law to explain those forces, but you should always remember that it was you that invented the law. For Mach, there was no reason why the rest of the cosmos should be doing what your little bit was doing. So, science should only describe, not try to explain. And even description is relative. I mean, am I moving, or is the background moving? Or take the position of a star. It depends on where you see it from, which depends on the date and time, which depends on the position of the earth in solar orbit, in a solar system moving round and round at the edge of the galaxy, which itself might be drifting away from some other galaxy and so on and so on. So say you've decided that I'm moving and the background's standing still. How do you know the background isn't moving relative to something else, hmm?
- Self - Host: To a public whose knowledge of science was rising to zero, one man more than any other was to stamp the image of the tireless scientific genius at work for the betterment of mankind on their consciousness forever. Because he made sure of his PR. Thomas A. Edison, inventor extraordinaire. In this laboratory here, he filed no less than 1,039 patents. You're looking at the world's first inventions factory. Well, more of a shrine, really. Henry Ford was so taken with Edison that he moved this lot--lock, stock, and the tree outside--all the way from New Jersey to this museum here outside Detroit. All to the memory of a man who must've been absolutely insufferable.
- Self - Host: You see what that implies. The comfort that science is supposed to provide isn't there anymore. But we ignore that fact. We only see the technology. The electron that caused all the trouble makes a digital watch work, and all that electronic, and that's good enough. As far as we're concerned, the world is still the same as it was at the beginning of this program. Newton's world, when there was a true reality, final certainty, order with everything knowable. A Swiss clockwork type world. But as you've seen in science, that world is long gone.
- Self - Host: Now, if you're getting worried about how things can be two things at once, hold on to your subatomic hats, because the bottom is about to drop out of everything. I'll go slow because I won't understand it if I don't. In 1927, a fellow called Heisenberg decided to take a look at what these particle electrons and the waves they seemed to go with were up to. And he announced that you could either say where an electron was by examining an individual intense wave crest--the electron would be in there somewhere--or how fast it was going by looking at a whole group of waves moving, getting the general speed. But then you wouldn't know which wave crest had the electron. So, position or speed, but not both. And worse: To look, you had to shine a light to see, no? And the light particles would hit the electrons. So you could never be sure that the electrons were where they were doing what they were doing naturally or because you'd hit them. Get it? Heisenberg called this drain down which everything went the Uncertainty Principle. Now we know, he said, that we shall never know. He said that because you can't know if it's a particle or a wave. There's nothing at the fundamental level of existence that you can see as it is, because in seeing it you do something to it. There's no true basic reality to find, beyond the one you yourself make by looking. If there's any reality at all. And in that case, which way is up, for God's sake?