Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse by David Jay Brown

Author:David Jay Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2019-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chemistry and the Mind Field

An Interview with Kary Mullis

Kary Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which revolutionized the study of genetics. The journal Science listed Dr. Mullis’s invention of PCR as one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in human history. It has influenced popular culture, science fiction, and even paleobiology. Dr. Mullis earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of numerous scientific papers as well as the book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, in which he makes a compelling case for the existence of greater mystery in the world around us. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1998 and is a Distinguished Professor at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute in Oakland, California.

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D AVID: Where do you think humanity should be focusing its scientific efforts right now?

K ARY: I think that if we, as a society, want to survive for a long time, then we’ve got to put up an umbrella over our heads to protect us from the things that are obviously going to fall on our planet.

I often wonder, given that the universe is so vast, with so many stars that must have planets like ours, why there aren’t aliens down here trying to trade us beads and trinkets for Manhattan? ( laughter) We must have something that they’d think was cool, and yet it just doesn’t seem to be the case. If it is, they’re not making themselves known.

Maybe it’s because cultures tend to get wiped out by asteroids. We have gotten to the point where we can look into the near vicinity of space and see the things that are a serious danger to us. The asteroid belt is full of things that don’t have stable orbits. Maybe by the time a culture can recognize that, it’s too late, because they have gone off on some ridiculous tangents. I think we’ve done that, in terms of our science.

We’re not pragmatists anymore. For at least a couple of hundred years Americans have always been thought of as pragmatic philosophers—if it doesn’t matter, we’re not going to worry about it too much. We’ve spent billions and billions trying to understand something called “the Grand Unified Theory of Everything”—and all you have to do is take LSD one time to realize that that is not going to happen. ( laughter) You’re just not going to find “the Grand Unified Field of Everything.”

You can pretend to find it by spending vast sums of money and building huge machines. We’re building this great big thing called BABAR, which looks like an elephant. It’s an attachment that detects B-mesons, and will sit on top of the Stanford Linear Accelerator. They’re making something that’s going to produce a lot of what’s called B-mesons, and, from its particular properties, physicists hope to understand enough to provide the final structure of the universe—“the Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

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