Only one sentence
A teacher, physicist Richard Feynman, once asked this question of his students:
“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”
Only. One. Sentence.
In reality, we human beings are gifted with an abundance of language. In particular, humanity has a sophisticated spoken language. This “tool” is, as described by biologist Jane Goodall, our greatest advantage. It is our species’ ability to use words that most distinguishes us from chimpanzees.
“What makes us human is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.”
We ask many questions.
We offer many hypotheses.
We gossip about our trials and our errors.
Physicist Richard Feynman was used to such abundance when he suggested his students reduce all of human knowledge into a single sentence. If only one message in a bottle could be sent, what would offer the most value? From what fundamental kernel of truth does human knowledge sprout?
This is how Feynman answered his own question:
“I believe 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. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.”
All things are made of atoms.
This statement is, as far as we know, true. However, there is another answer to the physicist’s question. It is offered by a poet, and it addresses humanity beyond the physical world.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
This verse, nested in a poem, inadvertently splices open the atomic nature of the material world. Poet Muriel Rukeyser speaks to the very assumption of Feynman’s question: that we share information at all with one another. That we are connected. That we are a world.
Even atoms that can be measured and observed are more precisely stories we tell one another about the world we inhabit. Words and numbers crowd together for pages and pages in order to tell the scientific stories of our world. People at desks pour over them, asking more questions, offering more hypotheses. They scribble down their own words and numbers for the infinite book of knowledge.
On the surface, the two answers are a simple dual between the concrete and the abstract.
The physical world is literally made of things called atoms.
vs.
The abstract world is conceptually made of hypotheses we call stories.
However, if you could distill all of human knowledge into one sentence that you pass along to your child, what would you write? What is most true? What is most useful?
Yes, the world is indeed made of atoms. But the parting note you tuck away in your child’s cosmic lunchbox, beside the red delicious apple, for the rest of time, probably says this:
