From such beginnings, an alternative explanation of the universe came into being. It didn't involve gods, at least directly, so it didn't find much favour with the priestly class. Some of their descendants are still trying to stamp it out, even today. The traditional priesthoods (who then and now often included some very intelligent people) eventually worked out an accommodation with this godless way of thinking, but it's still not popular with postmodernists, creationists, tabloid astrologers and others who prefer the answers you can make up for yourself at home.
The current name for what has variously been called 'heresy' and 'natural philosophy' is, of course, 'science'.
Science has developed a very strange view of the universe. It thinks that the universe runs on rules. Rules that never get broken. Rules that leave little room for the whims of gods.
This emphasis on rules presents science with a daunting task. It has to explain how a lot of flaming gas and rocks Up There, obeying simple rules like 'big things attract small things, and while small things also attract big things they don't do it strongly enough so as you'd notice', can have any chance whatsoever of giving rise to Down Here. Down Here, rigid obedience to rules seems notably absent. One day you go out hunting and catch a dozen gazelles; next day a lion catches you. Down Here the most evident rule seems to be 'There are no rules', apart perhaps from the one that could be expressed scientifically as 'Excreta Occurs'. As the Harvard Law of Animal Behaviour puts it: 'Experimental animals, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, do what they damned well please.' Not only animals: every golfer knows that something as simple as a hard, bouncy sphere with a pattern of tiny dots on it never does what it's supposed to do. And as for the weather ...
Science has now divided into two big areas: the life sciences, which tell us about living creatures, and the physical sciences, which tell us about everything else. Historically, 'divides' is definitely the word, the scientific styles of these two big divisions have about as much in common as chalk and cheese. Indeed, chalk is a rock and so clearly belongs to the geological sciences, whereas cheese, formed by bacterial action on the bodily fluids of cows, belongs to the biological sciences. Both divisions are definitely science, with the same emphasis on the role of experiments in testing theories, but their habitual thought patterns run along different lines.
At least, until now.
As the third millennium approaches, more and more aspects of science are straddling the disciplines. Chalk, for instance, is more than just a rock: it is the remains of shells and skeletons of millions of tiny ocean-living creatures. And making cheese relies on chemistry and sensor technology as much as it does on the biology of grass and cows.
The original reason for this major bifurcation in science was a strong perception that life and non-life are extremely different. Non-life is simple and follows mathematical rules; life is complex and follows no rules whatsoever. As we said, Down Here looks very different from Up There.
However, the more we pursue the implications of mathematical rules, the more flexible a rule-based universe begins to seem. Conversely, the more we understand biology, the more important its physical aspects become, because life isn't a special kind of matter, so it too must obey the rules of physics. What looked like a vast, unbridgeable gulf between the life sciences and the physical sciences is shrinking so fast that it's turning out to be little more than a thin line scratched in the sand of the scientific desert.
If we are to step across that line, though, we need to revise the way we think. It's all too easy to fall back on old, and inappropriate, habits. To illustrate the point, and to set up a running theme for this book, let's see what the engineering problems of getting to the Moon tell us about how living creatures work.
The main obstacle to getting a human being on to the Moon is not distance, but gravity. You could waIk to the Moon in about thirty years, given a path, air, and the usual appurtenances of the experienced traveller, were it not for the fact that it's uphill most of the way. It takes energy to lift a person from the surface of the planet to the neutral point where the Moon's pull cancels out the Earth's. Physics provides a definite lower limit for the energy you must expend, it's the difference between the 'potential energy' of a mass placed at the neutral point and the potential energy of the same mass placed on the ground. The Law of Conservation of Energy says that you can't do the job with less energy, however clever you are.
You can't beat physics.
This is what makes space exploration so expensive. It takes a lot of fuel to lift one person into space by rocket, and to make matters worse, you need more fuel to lift the rocket ... and more fuel to lift the fuel... and ... At any rate, it seems that we're stuck at the bottom of the Earth's gravity well, and the ticket out has to cost a fortune.
Are we, though?
At various times, similar calculations have been applied to living creatures, with bizarre results. It has been 'proved' that kangaroos can't jump, bees can't fly, and birds can't get enough energy from their food to power their search for the food in the first place. It has even been 'proved' that life is impossible because living systems become more and more ordered, whereas physics implies that all systems become more and more disordered. The main message that biologists have derived from these exercises has been a deep scepticism about the relevance of physics to biology, and a comfortable feeling of superiority, because life is clearly much more interesting than physics.
The correct message is very different: be careful what tacit assumptions you make when you do that kind of calculation. Take that kangaroo, for instance. You can work out how much energy a kangaroo uses when it makes a jump, count how many jumps it makes in a day, and deduce a lower limit on its daily energy requirements. During a jump, the kangaroo leaves the ground, rises, and drops back down again, so the calculation is just like that for a space rocket. Do the sums, and you find that the kangaroo's daily energy requirement is about ten times as big as anything it can get from its food. Conclusion: kangaroos can't jump. Since they can't jump, they can't find food, so they're all dead.
Strangely, Australia is positively teeming with kangaroos, who fortunately cannot do physics.
What's the mistake? The calculation models a kangaroo as if it were a sack of potatoes. Instead of a thousand kangaroo leaps per day (say), it works out the energy required to lift a sack of potatoes off the ground and drop it back down, 1000 times. But if you look at a slow-motion film of a kangaroo bounding across the Australian outback, it doesn't look like a sack of potatoes. A kangaroo bounces, lolloping along like a huge rubber spring. As its legs go up, its head and tail go down, storing energy in its muscles. Then, as the feet hit the ground, that energy is released to trigger the next leap. Because most of the energy is borrowed and paid back, the energy cost per leap is tiny.
Here's an association test for you. 'Sack of potatoes' is to 'kangaroo' as 'rocket' is to, what? One possible answer is a space elevator. In the October 1945 issue of Wireless World the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke invented the concept of a geostationary orbit, now the basis of virtually all communications satellites. At a particular height, about 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above the ground, a satellite will go round the Earth exactly in synchrony with the Earth's rotation. So from the ground it will look as though the satellite isn't moving. This is useful for communications: you can point your satellite dish in a fixed direction and always get coherent, intelligent signals or, failing that, MTV.