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De Laatste Vraag

De Laatste Vraag
VPRO Noorderlicht / 24 min / 29-08-2002
In de deze slotaflevering van Noorderlicht staat de vraag naar de toekomst van de wetenschap centraal. Zijn er nog verrassingen te verwachten of staan de hoofdlijnen wel vast? Een gevisualiseerd debat tussen de auteurs John Horgan (The End of Science 1996) en Sir John Maddox (What remains to be Discovered, 1998).

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VPRO NOORDERLICHT – TRANSCRIPT
AFL. DE LAATSTE VRAAG
UITZ. 29-08-2002
DOOR JOS WASSINK EN GER WIEBERDINK

00:00 LEADER NOORDERLICHT 2001/2002

00:20 OPTOCHT PROFESSOREN
MUZIEK BACH OP ORGEL

COMMENTAAR:
In deze laatste aflevering van Noorderlicht: de vraag naar de toekomst van de wetenschap. Zijn er nog verrassende nieuwe inzichten te verwachten of staan de hoofdlijnen wel vast? Hoe is het eigenlijk gesteld met ons begrip van de werkelijkheid?

00:54 TITEL OVER BEELD: DE LAATSTE VRAAG

DE LAATSTE VRAAG

LANDING NEW YORK BIJ NACHT

TEKST OVER BEELD:

Wetenschap heeft zich in een omgekeerde richting ontwikkeld tot wat je zou verwachten.

Wat het verst weg lag werd als eerste in wetten gevangen, en toen, geleidelijk aan, wat naderbij lag:

Eerst de sterren, vervolgens de aarde, dierlijk en plantaardig leven, het menselijk lichaam,

en tenslotte (tot nu toe erg provisorisch) de menselijke geest – BERTRAND RUSSELL

01:48 BRIEVENBUSSEN, JOHN HORGAN PAKT KRANT,
LOOPT NAAR HUIS EN SCHENKT KOFFIE IN

TITEL: GARISSON, NEW YORK

COMMENTAAR:
Volgens de Amerikaanse wetenschapsjournalist John Horgan heeft wetenschap z’n beste tijd wel gehad. Tot 1997 was Horgan redacteur bij Scientific American maar na de publicatie van zijn boek ‘The End of Science’ werd hij daar ontslagen.

JOHN HORGAN:
I really started thinking about the limits of science in the late 1908’s. And the inspiration was this notion in physics that it might be approaching some kind of final theory that would really explain and solve all the problems that they wanted solved.(…) And so when I started thinking about the implications of this, it occurred to me that biology might also have some final theory and I found that some biologists had actually claimed that biology already DOES have a final theory in the form of Darwin’s theory of evolution. So these were really the seeds from which my book ‘The End of Science’ eventually grew.

MADDOX SCHENKT KOFFIE IN

03:18 PAN LONDON

EXT. WOONHUIS
MADDOX SCHENKT KOFFIE IN

COMMENTAAR:
Horgan’s idee dat de wetenschap op z’n eind zou lopen stuitte op veel weerstand. Zijn meest uitgesproken tegenstander is de Britse wetenschapsjournalist . Drieentwintig jaar lang leidde Maddox het gerenommeerde wetenschapsblad Nature. Na zijn pensionering schreef hij het boek ‘What remains to be discovered’ waarin hij richtingen aangaf voor toekomstig onderzoek.

SIR JOHN MADDOX:
I started writing the book long before I knew of Horgan’s book and indeed when Horgan’s book came out, he and I had a debate about it in New York, we had a certain amount of difficult correspondence. Let me say, I think it’s not an unintelligent a book as his title suggests. The End of History was a book that Fukuyama had just written and (…) it’s natural that somebody should have thought of writing a book called ‘The End of Science’.

SHOT PAPEGAAIEN

SIR JOHN MADDOX

JOHN HORGAN:
I think that is typical of certain scientists (…) science is his religion.(…) And I think his love of knowledge, his love of science prevents him from facing the hard fact that in certain respects this quest, (…) might be coming to and end.

LOOPJE NAAR DE HUT

JOHN MADDOX:
It’s my view that science is more nearly at it’s beginning than at it’s end and it’s a matter of time before people come to realise that there’s enough science left to be done to occupy generations to come. Science will still be discovering new problems five hundred and thousand years from now. And I think it’s a continuing enterprise that’s going to continue indefinitely.

LEZEN OP BANK

MUZIEK #1 ca. 0:10 – 02:00

05:20 BIG BANG!!

CITAAT:

In de eerste plaats is er materie – en, opmerkelijk genoeg, alle materie is gelijk.

We weten dat de bouwstenen van de sterren gelijk zijn aan die op aarde – RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

STERRENSTELSELS (NL 318 EN NL 599)

JOHN HORGAN:

JOHN HORGAN:
Cosmologists have come up with a theory, the Big Bang theory. (…) It describes the origin of the cosmos an the evolution up to this point. It describes in rough terms how galaxies formed, how stars formed, how you got planets round certain stars as in our own solar system.
The Big Bang provides a framework, a general description of the origin of the universe and its evolution since then that -I believe- is very secure. There are ways that we can tweak it, there are certain questions that it doesn’t answer yet that might be answered in the future, but that general framework in is place and won’t change.

REIS DOOR STERREN – OMNIVERSUM
MUZIEK #8 0:00 – 01:30

JOHN MADDOX:
Over the past twenty years, since nineteen eight, since the early nineteeneighties, there’ve emerged serious difficulties with the simple Big Bang theory. For example, the Einstein’s theory of relativity requires where there is mass, the space near it should be curved. Now we live in a part of the universe where there is lots of mass, our own galxy and nearby galaxies and so on, but as far as can be told the space in which we live is not curved.

VERANDERING IN REIS
MUZIEK EVEN OP #8 02:20 – 02:55

JOHN MADDOX

JOHN MADDOX:
Something odd is going on and there are enough inconsistancies in the foundation of the Big Bang to make me think that what we are seeing is a good approximation to what the universe really is, but there’re discoveries yet to be made that will tell us what the real universe is like and how it began.

STERRENREIS: EINDE HEELAL
MUZIEK #8 03:40 – 04:08

BOEKENWAND HORGAN

JOHN HORGAN:
This is where ’s faith comes in. assumes that if there are unanswered questions, that means that our theories are inadequate and that we have to have some holy theory. But that’s like saying that because the theory of evolution can’t give us a really satisfying answer as to why for example sex evolved, that we should discard the theory of evolution. I think you just have to accept that there are certain questions that our theories can’t answer to our satisfaction; there are limits to what science can do. And at some point we’re going to have to accept that.

KAMER MADDOX

JOHN MADDOX:
But we live in a world in which we look for causes and expect to find causes for each and every phenomenon we see. It would be ridiculous to suppose that the most important event of the universe, that is: it’s beginning, had no cause. So, that’s another argument why the Big Bang is not really sustainable in my opinion.

ACHTERGROND CROSS NAAR COSMIC BACKGROUND RADIATION:
COBE1 T/M COBE3

JOHN HORGAN:
With our telescopes we can look back in space and time to the very early stages of the universe. There is something called the cosmic microwave background which is this radiation suffusing the entire universe and that’s thought to be the remnant of the first instant of creation. You can learn a lot about the early universe by studying that. Scientists have allready seen tiny fluctuations of the radiation that give them clues as to how galaxies form. But at some point you try to look past that, there’s nothing to observe. You can’t see back before the Big Bang. Almost by definition, it’s not part of our universe. So at some point cosmologists will have to accept that there is a mysterie that just can’t be explained.

SPIEGEL IN KAMER MADDOX

JOHN MADDOX:
I don’t agree with that at all. I think it’s the goal of science to understand everything. I think there’s no reason to believe that a phenomenon of such importance as the creation of the universe, the beginning of the universe, is not susceptible to analysis, theorising and ultimately understanding.

10:39 MUZIEK #10 0:00 – 0:34
EMBRYO CELDELING NL 318

Eindeloze vormen
beeldschoon en wonderbaar
zijn ontstaan,
en ontstaan nog steeds,
uit zo’n simpel begin.
– CHARLES DARWIN

PLATEN UIT ‘ORIGIN OF SPECIES, OOK PORTRET DARWIN (VA JPG’S)

JOHN HORGAN:
Darwins theory of evolution is arguably the most powerfull profound insight that any scientist has ever had. Because it gave us in a very simple theory a way of understanding not only the enormous diversity of life that we see around us now, but the origins of life and its evolution to this current state. (…)There are lots of problems left to be solved, there are lots of questions for example about how a single fertilised embryo turns into a butterfly or an elephant or a human being. What steps are involved in that process?

RIJERS CELERA (AR22979 (19:02:40 – 19:03:20) EN/0F
TD53193 (19:04:55 – 19:05:28))

JOHN HORGAN:
Those gaps in our knowledge will be filled in within the framework of the knowledge that is already in place. That’s going to be taking DNA-based genetics and (…) understanding things in those terms. I don’t think we’re gonna have the huge revolutions in the future that we had in the past with the theory of evolution and the development of modern genetics.

COMMENTAAR:
Volgens Horgan is de levende natuur het resultaat van Darwinisme alleen. Maddox denkt daar anders over. Hij vermoedt dat erfelijkheid niet de enige manier is waarop eigenschappen zijn overgedragen.

INZOOM PORTRET MADDOX

JOHN MADDOX:
And it’s very likely that the huge amount of junk DNA in our genomes is a relic of a time where a lot of animals got their evolutionary information not from their parents but from viruses moving. Sometimes between different animals or plants in the same species, soemtimes between different species and this is a non-Darwinian process and I think that one of the challenges for the years ahead is to figure out when and how these viral infection mechanisms helped to evolve organisms more quickly then Darwinian evolution will allow. And I suspect we’ll find that certainly where bacteria are concerned -and they occupied the first twothousand milllion years of life on the Earth- we’ll find interesting things about how they got their genetic information. It wasn’t just Darwinian evolution.

13:36 MUZIEK #2 09:30 – 10:20
AANSTEKEN KAARS; MUZIEK

Hoe iets opmerkelijks als bewustzijn ontstaat als gevolg van prikkeling van zenuwweefsel,
is net zo onverklaarbaar als de verschijning van de geest, toen Alladin over z’n lamp wreef – ALDOUS HUXLEY

BOEKENKAST HORGAN

JOHN HORGAN:
In a strange way, I think we have regeressed. It was possible at the turn of the last century, around 1900, for a genius like Sigmund Freud to propose a theory of mind and behaviour that was quite compelling. Compelling enough that there is still people nowadays who call themselves Freudian. In spite of the fact that Freud has been vilefied by others.

TLT UP NAAR FREUD

JOHN HORGAN:
Freudian theory of mind is an attempt to reduce all of human behaviour and mental activity to a single explanation, which is that sex is at the bottom of everything (…) and that our mental lifes can be understood in terms of this sexual repression.

JOHN HORGAN:
In neuroscience and cognitive science in evolutionary psychology and all these other fields have been producing tremendous amounts of information about the brain and the mind and the link between the brain and mind. And it’s almost impossible to imagine how somebody now could take this huge amount of information and create this sort of unified theory of human nature and of mind and behaviour that Freud created. So in that sense, science in stead of illuminating the mind and brain has made it more mysterious then ever.

MUZIEK #2 10:27 – 10:55

TLT UP: OPTOCHT PROFESSOREN (50% SPEED)

Het is zeer wel mogelijk -overweldigend waarschijnlijk, lijkt mij- dat we over menselijk leven en persoonlijkheid..altijd meer leren uit romans dan uit wetenschappelijke studies – NOAM CHOMSKY

COLOR F/O; S.I. HORGAN

JOHN HORGAN:
We have on the one hand theories from neuroscience that attempt to explain our mental life with models involving neurons and synapses and neurotransmitters, physical things. On the other hand you have the subjective sensation of of a sentient being. You have emotions and memories and perceptions. So how do you get from physical stuff, neurons that realy are no different from rocks and other formsof matter, how do you get from that to this bizar mental life.

MUZIEK #3 F.I. 04:50 – 05:50
EEG-REGISTRATIE GEDACHTEN IN HERSENEN
DOOR JEROEN VERBUNT

JOHN MADDOX:
I know there are many people who say that questions like consciousness and so on are so far beyond our present understanding that there’s no possibility of tackling them in the end. But I’m much more empirical. I think we need first to understand where information -memory- is stored in the brain and how it is stored. That should be a practical question. When we understand that, it will be possible better to understand what happens when the brain thinks. But that by itself will not be an answer. Now as to consciousness you see, I think it’s a very shadowy concept.
We don’t know the neural basis for consciousness and we shan’t for a long time. We’ll have to understand thinking first. But I’m not depressed about this. The agenda is huge but it seems to me that people have in the past century demonstrated such cleverness in understanding neurons, the head and even what goes wrong when the head is injured that they have every prospect of working this agenda out.

KAMER HORGAN

JOHN HORGAN:
You’ll never have an explanation so satisfying that you go: Oh, I understand, that’s how a brain makes a mind. There will always be some mystery there.

TLT UP BOEDDHA IN BOEKENKAST

JOHN HORGAN (CONT’D)
Science has left us with an overwhelming sense of the mysteriousness of existence. The origin of the universe is a mystery, the origin of life is a mystery, our own emergence is a complete mystery, consciousness is a mystery.

KAMER MADDOX

MDX.24 NO MYSTERIES!
– Do you accept mysteries at all?
Oh, no! I’m ashamed to say not. I think that science has demonstrated remarkably in the last century that things that seemed mysterious are no longer mysterious. And I think we are at the point where we have a whole string of questions that can’t yet be answered. But no reason at all to believe that any of them is beyond the scope of human intelligence and inquiry.

19:36 MUZIEK #11 0:00 – 0:30
NACHTVLUCHT: KNIPPERENDE LAMP OP VLEUGEL

In het toelaten van onwetendheid en onzekerheid ligt de hoop op een voortgaande beweging van de mensheid..in een richting die niet vastloopt of geblokkeerd raakt, zoals zo vaak eerder gebeurd is in de menselijke geschiedenis
– RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

BG: KAMER HORGAN

JOHN HORGAN:
There are many many things that science can do besides delivering these tremendous revolutionary paradigmes. Science can look for better treatments for mental illness and cancer and malaria and AIDS and all sorts of other diseases. It can look for cleaner, cheaper sources of energy, it can help us understand how our activities, our indsutries affect the climate. Now these are immensely important problems that have a lot to do with the quality of our lifes and our childrens lifes. So science in that sense can never end, will never end. There will always be things for scientists to do. It’s just that in terms of delivering these huge revelations and revolutions that we have had in the past, I think we have to come to terms with the fact that THAT kind of science might be over.

21:06 COMPILATIE WETENSCHAPSBEELDEN:
DUUR 1 MINUUT

JOHN MADDOX:
I’m optimistic about science. I’m not optimistic about the world in general. But that’s a different matter. I mean it seems to me it’s going to be very difficult to live with the consequences of september 11th. It seems to me it’s going to be very difficult to live with the prospect of our steadily increasing population on the surface of the Earth. It’s certainly going to be difficult to live with global warming although that could be done if people were sensible; the trouble is that people are not sensible. And it seems to me that there are all kinds of difficulties, threats to the survival of the human race that come from infectious disease and the like on which we ought to spend much more attention then we are present. So I don’t think the prospect for the human race is as bright as I’d like it to be. On the other hand, the prospect if nothing goes seriously wrong that science understand… help us to understand all the questions we ask about the real world is undimmed.

MUZIEK #11 02:00 – 02:46
23:21 OPTOCHT PROFESSOREN EN AFTITELING

AFTITELING:

SAMENSTELLING & REGIE
Jos Wassink

RESEARCH:
Ger Wieberdink

CAMERA
Niels van ‘t Hoff

GELUID
Otto Horsch

MONTAGE
Floor Rodenburg

MIX
Jack Bol

KLEURCORRECTIE
Xandra ter Horst

ANIMATIES
Jeroen Verbunt, VU
Robin Sip, Mirage3D

MMV
Berend Reinout, Omniversum
Robby Rampersat Omniversum

COMMENTAAR
Tessel Blok

LEADER
Laurens Orij, Bob Stelamp; Merijn Verhagen

REDACTIE
Eugene Paashuis
Simon Rozendaal
Karin Schagen
Marie Lou Schoenmakers
Annemieke Smit
Ger Wieberding
Robert Wiering

WEBREDACTIE
Jacqueline de Vree
Marc Koenen
Frank Nuijens

PRODUKTIE
Karin Spiegel
Madeleine Somer

EINDREDACTIE
Hansje van Etten

COPYRIGHT (c) VPRO 2002
23:51 EINDE


English version

Posted in VPRO Noorderlicht.


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