The Universe Is Expanding: Many of Our Most Cherished Truths Are Changing

Here’s something for all of you who work in schools to think about. Educators often debate how to teach kids: progressives want them to “learn by doing,” while traditionalists focus on skills. But if you read the academic or even the serious adult literature on physics, biology, and history, you’ll notice a different sort of challenge is afoot. All of those disciplines are redefining their most basic unit of study.

Let’s start with physics. For a long time, its basic unit was the atom. Then scientists discovered that atoms were made up of subatomic particles, and we were introduced to the billiard-ball model, with individual electrons orbiting a nucleus like planets spinning around the sun. But quantum theory and now string theory have radically changed our basic understanding of how the universe works. No one knows if string theory is really true—and there’s no way of knowing until we have enough data from the mammoth new atom smasher in Switzerland. Still, whether string theory is ultimately verified or replaced by some other argument, physicists no longer look at the physical universe as a collection of individual particles—their focus is on intersecting fields.

On to biology. Just as we once thought the atom was the basic building block of the universe, we’ve also been taught that the fundamental unit of life is the gene—the structure that enables parents to pass on their traits to their children. That’s why all of our biology textbooks feature a beautiful model of DNA’s famous double helix, showing how genetic information is transmitted from generation to generation. And yet now as scientists carefully study each and every strand of DNA, they’re questioning whether they should even use the term “gene.” As a recent article in the New York Times (“Now: The Rest of the Genome”) explains, scientists have discovered that heredity is a lot more complicated than they thought. In fact, they’ve discovered that the process doesn’t rely on single units, or genes, acting in predictable ways like levers in some tiny factory. Instead, heredity relies on a wide variety of agents, which can combine, cancel out, or even mimic one another. That’s why biologists are now focusing on intersecting fields of activity.

And that leads me to history. As I’ve written before in this column, scholars are changing our basic understanding of American history. Thomas Bender, a history professor at New York University, recently observed at a gathering of educators that we have traditionally associated the word “national” with American history and “international” with everything else—as if the U.S. isn’t part of the wider world. But today’s historians are tearing down those barriers and discovering a far more interesting, truer, and, indeed, more relevant view of our history. For instance, to help them understand the American Revolution through the eyes of those who lived during that time, historians are focusing on the global interactions that took place. When we just focus on the American Revolution as a series of isolated events, we train students to believe our nation is best understood as being different from everywhere else.

To be clear, in some ways colonial America was different from the rest of the world. And who knows? The study of heredity may lead scientists to formulate a new and clearer definition of the gene. Or physicists may one day reject strings and waves in favor of subatomic particles. But right now, when your students go off to college, they’re being trained to study interactive fields—not isolated events or entities. No wonder Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is calling for a new science of networks to help us understand how we use the Internet.

At this very moment, we’re linked together by digital connections. And right now, scientists and scholars are studying fields of interaction to uncover the building blocks of life, the universe, and human history. It’s a very exciting time to be a student or a teacher or a person who’s genuinely curious about the world—as long as we’re willing to reconsider what once seemed like the solid building blocks of life. And what could be more thrilling than that?