The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch Read Free

But even if you could print Wikipedia in its entirety, its hyperlinks replaced by cross-referenced page numbers, you’d still be a far cry from a manual enabling a community to rebuild civilization from scratch. It was never intended for anything like this purpose, and lacks practical details and the organization for guiding progression from rudimentary science and technology to more advanced applications. Moreover, a hard copy would be unfeasibly large—and how could you ensure post-apocalyptic survivors would be able to get hold of a copy?
    In fact, I believe you can help society recover much better by taking a slightly more elegant approach.
    The solution can be found in a remark made by physicist Richard Feynman. In hypothesizing about the potential destruction of all scientific knowledge and what might be done about it, he allowed himself a single statement, to be transmitted securely to whichever intelligent creatures emerged after the cataclysm: What sentence holds the most information in the fewest words? “I believe,” said Feynman, “it is the
atomic hypothesis
 . . . that
all things are
made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion,
attracting each other when they are a little distance apart,
but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.
”
    The more you consider the implications and testable hypotheses emerging from this simple statement, the more it unfurls to release further revelations about the nature of the world. The attraction of particles explains the surface tension of water, and the mutual repulsion of atoms in close proximity explains why I don’t fall straight through the café chair I’m sitting on. The diversity of atoms, and the compounds produced by their combinations, is the key principle ofchemistry. This single, carefully crafted sentence encapsulates a huge density of information, which unravels and expands as you investigate it.
    But what if your word count wasn’t quite so restricted? If allowed the luxury of being more expansive while retaining the guiding principle of providing key, condensed knowledge to accelerate rediscovery, rather than attempting to write a complete encyclopedia of modern understanding, is it feasible to write a single volume that would constitute a survivor’s quick-start guide to rebooting technological society?
    I think that Feynman’s single sentence can be improved upon in a fundamentally important way. Possessing
pure
knowledge alone with no means to exploit it is impotent. To help a fledgling society pull itself up by its own bootstraps, you’ve also got to suggest how to
utilize
that knowledge, to show its practical applications. For the survivors of a recent apocalypse, the immediate practical applications are essential. Understanding the basic theory of metallurgy is one thing, but using the principles to scavenge and reprocess metals from the dead cities, for instance, is another. The exploitation of knowledge and scientific principles is the essence of technology, and as we’ll see in this book, the practices of scientific research and technological development are inextricably intertwined.
    Inspired by Feynman, I’d argue that the best way to help survivors of the Fall is not to create a comprehensive record of all knowledge, but to provide a guide to the basics, adapted to their likely circumstances, as well as a blueprint of the techniques necessary to rediscover crucial understanding for themselves—the powerful knowledge-generation machinery that is the scientific method. The key to preserving civilization is to provide a condensed seed that will readily unpack to yield the entire expansive tree of knowledge, rather than attempting to document the colossal tree itself.Which fragments, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, are best shored against our ruins?
    The value of such a book is potentially enormous. What mighthave happened in our own history if the classical civilizations had left condensed seeds of their