Daedalus, the great inventor of ancient myth, fashioned wings so that he and his son Icarus could escape imprisonment. But it all went awry when Icarus ignored his father’s warnings and flew too close to the Sun. We know how that story ends—or do we? In The Icarus Question, physicist Gene Tracy offers reasons to hope that humanity’s urge to transcend our limitations need not lead to inevitable disaster. Weaving together memoir, history of science, mythology, astronomy, psychology and literary criticism, these essays are a point of departure for those curious to understand how science, technology and the culture at large can coevolve. From the necessity for empathy and wonder to act as correctives to climate denialism, to how science fiction can school us in the vulnerabilities that make us human, Tracy’s probing and humane analysis calls on each of us not just to strive to understand the world, but to learn to love it better too. Only then will our children have a chance at being able to make a home on that far shore we call ‘the future’.
Daedalus, the great inventor of ancient myth, fashioned wings so that he and his son Icarus could escape imprisonment. But it all went awry when Icarus ignored his father’s warnings and flew too close to the Sun. We know how that story ends—or do we? In The Icarus Question, physicist Gene Tracy offers reasons to hope that humanity’s urge to transcend our limitations need not lead to inevitable disaster. Weaving together memoir, history of science, mythology, astronomy, psychology and literary criticism, these essays are a point of departure for those curious to understand how science, technology and the culture at large can coevolve. From the necessity for empathy and wonder to act as correctives to climate denialism, to how science fiction can school us in the vulnerabilities that make us human, Tracy’s probing and humane analysis calls on each of us not just to strive to understand the world, but to learn to love it better too. Only then will our children have a chance at being able to make a home on that far shore we call ‘the future’.
We lost our farm when I was seven years old. My parents had tried for nearly two decades to make it work, trying dairy first, then growing corn, followed by sheep and chickens, truck-farming vegetables, and finally setting up an excavation company. But nothing ever really caught on. The local economy in that part of upstate New York appeared to be stuck in a years-long post-war slump while other regions boomed. Disappointed, nearing fifty and without a pension or much in the way of savings, my father went to work as a merchant seaman for over a year, traveling to India, the Mediterranean and North Africa. Meanwhile it was my mother who drove our tan and white VW van down the New York Thruway to our temporary home in New Jersey, where we could be near her sisters and their families.
It was a leaden and overcast November day when we made the journey. We couldn’t afford a moving company, and since my brother and I were still too small to do any heavy lifting, my mother had hired a pair of local farmers who were moonlighting during the off-season. We followed behind their rickety flatbed truck, laden with the belongings my parents had decided to keep in the downsizing: a green overstuffed couch, sturdy as a Sherman tank; a rugged, knotty-pine dining room set that my father had made with his own hands; my grandmother’s china set; a chest of drawers filled with clothes; several pairs of boots; a few of our toys; two bicycles; a .22 rifle. Peeking out from under the tarp, it made for a tatty collection, threatening to break its ties and spill all over the road. In later years I came to recognize the look from the sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies and John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939): a wandering family, worldly goods piled high, lumbering down the road toward new horizons.
For years I dreamed of returning to the farm. I thought often about my favorite path to the brook behind the barn, no longer open to me now that the brook, the barn, the house and its surrounding hills all belonged to someone else. If my brother and I asked when we were going back, my parents would nod and say, ‘one day’. They believed it to be an act of kindness. But we never went back, except for those few times my father tried to collect debts from the men he had thought were his friends. Instead, we moved, and moved again, and so went from owning a hundred-acre farm in New York State to eventually living in a trailer park in Baltimore.
I managed to accept the loss, in time. The seductions of reading, music and writing, and later astronomy—and girls—eventually called me away from pining for the hills and meadows of my childhood. I went to university, where I met my wife and discovered mathematical physics. I made a life as a college professor and raised a family. Yet a lingering sense of not being quite at home in the world has remained—linked, I suspect, to that original, unremedied dislocation.
This book is my attempt to understand how we might make sense of a world that often seems unhomely—one major crisis away from complete collapse, capable of setting us on the road in search of a new way of life and a new home. My own migration experience was in peacetime, and it left our family intact. We moved about within the confines of a modern and stable nation state. The transition was caused not by conflict or environmental breakdown, but because we were part of a wider vanishing of the family farm, and the long, slow decline of the prosperity of rural America. Today much of our world is on the move because of war, political upheaval and forced migration, but most of those people, too, are on the road in search of a better life for themselves and their children. They plant one foot before the other, on a trail lit by the faintest glimmer of hope.
As a scientist, I find myself searching for secular stories of hope. Science combined with storytelling can help us to grapple with existential threats like nuclear weapons and climate change. Yet if science can lay claim to producing reliable knowledge about how the world works, it always draws its strength from what can first seem like a weakness: all good science starts from a position of formal humility, a realization that our understanding is always provisional, and that we must always seek more data. If we stop believing in this potential for surprise, we are no longer scientists.
Because I am a scientist, I believe in the power of theory and observation, and in the fact that rigorous agreement can emerge between the two following open debate and discussion. The philosopher of science Michael Stevens calls such institutionalized doubt, with its demand for empirical evidence for all scientific claims, a kind of ‘knowledge machine’, and it has, indeed, delivered wonders.[i] But I also believe that a strict scientific approach to the world can never be exhaustive. Making sense of reality is always personal. Love and friendship, fear and hate: these are real and true, and they exist in the world, albeit not in the same way as a mathematical theorem, a planet, or a nucleus. It would seem that those things that make life most meaningful slip past our measuring instruments because they are embodied in flesh and blood, yet they are so much more. We should thank the Universe for the fact that the cold equations of physics have given rise to a warm world, redolent with the potential for empathy and compassion.
The ancient Greek tale of Icarus and his father, the inventor Daedalus, can speak to us here. They, too, were dislocated, held captive against their will and tried to flee to a better life. Like us, in their efforts to solve one problem they created others. Trying to escape by using artificial wings, Icarus ignored his father’s plea and flew too close to the Sun, melting the wax in his wings and plunging him from a great height into the sea.
Like Icarus, we might also be undone by our striving nature. Do we believe that science and technology can make the world a better place, or that they inevitably lead to new catastrophes? Can we succeed in our interlinked quests for new knowledge, for ultimate power, and for material wealth and control of the planet? Will this urge to transcend our human limitations, to follow our curiosity and our desire to shine the light of our intellect into all the dark places—will it necessarily lead to disaster, or will we always find a way out of any predicament?
These essays are an offering in response to these questions. I have attempted to explore multiple aspects of the rapidly shifting ground of our technologically mediated modern cultures. These cultures can be deeply alienating, even for those of us who grew up as technophiles immersed in some version of them. That makes it all the more important to seek out glimmers of hope, for the ways that we might create a home within the world we are making. Otherwise, we risk becoming rootless, setting out upon the road without a good internal map of our outer physical and social realities. We risk becoming isolated individuals awash in a sea of data, our societies atomized into human archipelagoes. This would be tragic, because we are all eventually carried by the passage of time into a form of exile from the world of our youth. If we are lucky enough to grow old, we are destined to be shipwrecked on some foreign shore called the future, surrounded by strangers that we can only hope will show us some kindness.
As we try to imagine what the future might hold, the question that should concern us is not whether Icarus can avoid disaster, but can he learn to swim?
[i]. Stevens, Michael. The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science. Liveright, 2020.
Gene Tracy's "The Icarus Question: Essays on Science, Technology, and Our Search for Home in a Changing World" embarks on a thought-provoking exploration of the interplay between humanity, technology, and the natural world. Tracy's essays intricately weave together diverse threads of inquiry, inviting readers on a contemplative journey that spans the spectrum of human existence. At times poetic, at times profound, and always eye-opening. I learned a lot and it made me consider so many of these topics (which I had already been thinking about for quite a while) with a fresh perspective.
The book's title itself, drawing from the myth of Icarus, sets the tone for the narrative. Tracy skillfully weaves together ancient allegories with contemporary technological advancements, inviting readers to contemplate the delicate balance between human ambition and the limitations of our endeavors.
Throughout the essays, Tracy showcases a keen understanding of both the scientific and humanistic aspects of the topics discussed. He navigates the realms of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, space exploration, and environmental sustainability with a nuanced perspective, emphasizing not just the potential advancements but also the ethical and existential dilemmas they pose.
I really enjoyed learning about the history of space exploration and the evolution of scientific thought, citizen science, and William and Margaret Higgins. I loved the references to poets like Rainer Maria Rilke, and writers like Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, among many others.
Tracy's writing style is engaging and accessible, making complex ideas comprehensible without oversimplification. He encourages readers to ponder the implications of rapid technological changes on our identities, societies, and the planet as a whole.
"Icarus Question" is a compelling read for anyone intrigued by the intersection of science, technology, and human existence. It challenges readers to contemplate the ethical considerations inherent in our pursuit of innovation and the profound impact these advancements have on our sense of place and purpose in an ever-changing world. Tracy's poignant reflections prompt introspection long after the book is closed.
I’m really glad I read this book. Here are some beautiful passages that spoke to me.
“Rockets are dreams made into fuel and fire. And if we forget to dream, or if we dream only other dreams, we will lose the sky.”
“We want the cosmos to be full of stories, so we can imagine coming to know it.”
“The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that beauty is but the beginning of terror. But terror can also drive the desperate search for beauty, a kind of beauty that transcends the moment and thereby lifts us out of it. As a theoretical physicist, seduced by the eternalized beauty of mathematics, many of my choices in life have been driven by a certain fear, accompanied by a drive to master that fear rather than cower from it. It was my way to avoid drowning. ”