Neal Stephenson's Past,Present, and Future

The author of the widely praised Baroque Cycle on science, markets, and post-9/11 America.

Mike Godwin from the February 2005 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

����������� � Obviously, I was paying a lot of attention to information technology.

����������� � Historical novels, such as alternate histories, are common in the S.F. world.

����������� � The Second World War has been, and continues to be, fertile ground for novelists and other artists.

����������� � Taking into account all of the above, it was reasonable, verging on obvious, to write a historical S.F. novel about the origins of information technology in the Second World War (Cryptonomicon). That book also ended up having a lot to do with money.

����������� � As I was working on Cryptonomicon I became aware that a) Leibniz had done a lot of work with information technology and b) Newton had done a lot of work on money, and of course I already knew that c) Leibniz and Newton hated each other and had a philosophical war. When I began to study the period of time in which these two men lived I discovered that d) it was a fascinating epoch in many, many ways. So again, it became reasonable, verging on obvious, to write something about that topic. But the complexity of the era was such that I didn't think I could tell the story I wanted to tell in a single book. And yet the excitement and splendor of the times were such that I hoped I might be able to sustain a reasonably interesting narrative over a large number of pages.

Reason: One of the things you discover reading The Baroque Cycle is just how much of today's understanding of the world--not just the physical world, but the social and monetary worlds--derives from ideas that were current in the time of Newton and Leibniz. Was that a surprise to you when you were researching the period?

Stephenson: The initial surprise was that Leibniz had done so much computer-related work so early. I got that from George Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines. When I began to read about the period, I was surprised by the sophistication of the Amsterdam stock market and the complexity of the Lyonnaise financial system. But the greatest single surprise for me was the welter of ideas contained in [Robert] Hooke's Micrographia. Hooke talks about an incredibly wide range of topics in that volume.

One is how we ought to define thinking--what is intelligence? He cites the way that flies are drawn to the smell of meat, which seems like intelligent behavior. But then he cites the counterexample of a trap that kills an animal. To a primitive person who didn't know that the trap had been invented by a person, it might seem that the trap itself possessed intelligence and will. Of course, this isn't really the case; it's just a dumb mechanism reflecting the intelligence of him who created it. But, Hooke says, who are we to say that a fly isn't just a more complicated mechanism that is designed to fly toward the smell of meat? In which case it isn't being intelligent at all, only reflecting the intelligence of the Creator.

The final surprise I'll mention is that Leibniz's system of doing physics, which is based on fundamental units called monads, has got a few things in common with the modern notion of computational physics, or "it from bit." Furthermore, Leibniz's rejection of the concept of absolute space and time, which for a long time seemed a little bit loony to people, enjoyed a revival beginning with Ernst Mach.

One could argue that people like Leibniz and the others were able to come up with some good ideas because they weren't afraid to think metaphysically. In those days, metaphysics was still a respected discipline and considered as worthwhile as mathematics. It got the stuffing kicked out of it through much of the 20th century and became a byword for mystical, obscurantist thinking, but in recent decades it has been rehabilitated somewhat.

At bottom, anyone who asks questions like "Why does the universe seem to obey laws?" or "Why does mathematics work so well in modeling the physical universe?" is engaging in metaphysics. People like Newton and Leibniz were as well-equipped for this kind of thinking as anyone today, and so it is interesting to read and think about their metaphysics. Seventeenth-century chemistry may have been rudimentary, and of only historical interest today, but 17th-century philosophy is highly developed and still interesting to read.

Reason: The Baroque Cycle is an unusual work of fiction in that it includes an extensive bibliography. Were you pre-emptively answering critics who might not appreciate how much of these books was drawn from life?

Stephenson: I didn't anticipate (and so far have not seen) any such line of attack from critics and so made no effort to pre-empt it. It just seemed obvious to me that anyone who actually bothered to read The Baroque Cycle must have an interest in that era and might want to do some further reading, and so as long as I was killing trees I figured I'd try to save them some time and hassle by supplying a few pointers on where they might look.

Reason: Your Newton and Leibniz (and the fictional Daniel Waterhouse) are remarkable characters because of their deep interest in almost everything around them. Are there modern figures who in your opinion show that range of interests?

Stephenson: To be interested in too many things is not conducive to professional advancement in the sciences today. You can't write a general Ph.D. dissertation. You have to pick something very specific. What does happen from time to time is that you'll have one scientist working on a very specific problem in one field, and another working on what seems to be an altogether different problem in another field, and somehow a spark will jump between them and they'll end up writing a joint paper.

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