What If We're Wrong? History Suggests Everything Will Be Disproved

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Hindsight is 20/20, right? That's the premise of a new book that poses the question: What if we were wrong?

Chuck Klosterman's "But What If We're Wrong?" (Blue Rider Press, 2016) deals with the fact that the great march of history shows us that, well … we're always wrong. Aristotle had his run as the smartest man on the planet, but he got disproved by Galileo, who was trumped by Newton, until Einstein ruled the roost. And while there have been some hints of "proving Einstein wrong," nothing has really stuck. But even so, scientific "fact" is a fact only until it's proved wrong.

In his book, Klosterman tries to imagine the world today viewed from the vantage point of a distant future, and attempts to suss out what humans might have gotten wrong. Klosterman asks if our belief in democracy might lead to the failure of society, and speculates as to which writer who isn't even born yet is going to be as important as Hemingway, Melville or Kafka. [Read an excerpt from Klosterman's new book, "But What If We're Wrong?"]

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But I am interested in the possibility that we are going to be wrong in the same way that history has indicated that mankind always is. It seems as though the history of ideas is the history of being wrong. And to me, that is a kind of continuum. It's a continual path that shows we don't always know something, but we're always shifting to a path that makes us feel more comfortable in the moment, even if that shift is wrong, and a new shift is destined to happen again.

Klosterman: Part of it is I was watching the Fox reboot of "Cosmos," the one that Neil deGrasse Tyson is the host of. As I watched it, I was always intrigued that whoever was referenced, usually some scientist from the past who had some breakthrough idea, usually turned out to be wrong, and usually within one generation of his life. And it occurred to me that this must still be happening now. We're inside the now, so we can't really see it, but this process must be happening all the time. We just can't recognize it until we get outside of the time frame. [Oops! The 5 Greatest Scientific Blunders]

But all I was trying to do was say, "I'm not trying to contradict what you believe, because in all likelihood, I believe it, too. I just want to know if you think there's the possibility that what we believe now could be fundamentally flawed." And he … did not. I think he really feels that since the Copernican Revolution, we have only been refining our understanding of science because of use of the scientific method and because science is now intertwined with mathematics instead of philosophy. He seemed to think this whole line of questioning was, I wouldn't go so far as to say "dangerous," but definitely superfluous.

And I think I almost have an obligation to accept Tyson's arguments because they do seem foundationally rational. But I feel the way we view science now and the way we will view it in 500 years are going to be radically different. But I don't have the argument for that other than, "That's what everyone thinks until it changes." That's the thing, and that's why a lot of this book deals with the dissonance between what we think and what we feel.

Klosterman: The idea of us living in a simulation makes a lot of sense to me. And you know what? There are a lot of things about life that are explainable to me if we were to accept that this is a simulated reality being played by some person in the future, and that everything we know about the universe and ourselves is just on some supercomputer. That makes a lot of sense to me. It feels right in a lot of ways. But I don't have a persuasive argument to convince anyone of that other than giving them the idea and saying, "Hey, think about this." [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]

Klosterman:I think there are many things about the simulation argument that are sort of comfortably reasonable. I don't know if the 20 numbers are, because the converse to the argument that this is all some kind of computer simulation is the idea of infinity. And in infinity, all things that could possibly happen will happen. If the universe is truly infinite, every possibility will come to play. But I don't know if we as simple people really have the ability to grasp infinity. We can explain it, and we can even explain it to a 5-year-old. But we can't truly comprehend the magnitude of the infinite. [The 9 Most Massive Numbers in Existence]

Klosterman: Well, I address a whole bunch of different categories of thought. This book talks about literature, about rock, about science, about football, about politics, about TV. And what I found is an ultimately predictable thing: Someone who is an expert in television will have issues with the section on television, but assume that everything else makes sense. Or a rock critic will have serious issues with the rock section, but completely accept everything else. So I know in the science category, all scientists are going to see is the simplicity of my thinking, and the evidence that I'm in over my head.

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