Three Roads To Quantum Gravity

50 THREE ROADS TO QUANTUM GRAVITY
thing about their histories, both recent and ancient, that we
begin to gain any insight into why being human is expressed a
bit differently in different parts of the world. This may be
obvious, but why should it be so? What is it about a person or
a culture that makes it so hard to describe without telling
a story? The answer is that we are not dealing with a thing,
like a rock or a can opener. These are objects which remain
more or less the same from decade to decade. They can be
described, for most purposes, as static objects, each with
some collection of unchanging properties. But when we are
dealing with a person or a culture we are dealing with a
process that cannot be comprehended as a static object,
independently of its history. How it is now is incomprehensible
without knowing how it came to be.
Just what is it about a story that tells us so much? What
extra information are we conveying when we tell a story?
When we tell a story about someone we narrate a series of
episodes in their life. These tell us something about that
person because we believe, from having heard and understood
many such stories, that what happens to a person as
they grow up has an effect on who they are. We also believe
that people's characters are best revealed in how they react to
situations, both propitious and adverse, and in what they
have sought to do or become.
However, it is not the events themselves that carry the
information in a narration. A mere list of events is very boring
and is not a story. This is perhaps what Andy Warhol was
trying to convey in his movies of haircuts or of a day in the
life of the Empire State Building. What makes a story a story
is the connections between the events. These may be made
explicit, but they often do not need to be, because we ®ll
them in almost unconsciously. We can do that because we all
believe that events in the past are to some extent the causes of
events in the future. We can debate to what extent a person is
shaped by what happens to them, but we do not need to be
devout determinists to have a practical and almost instinctive
understanding of the importance of causality. It is this
understanding of causality that makes stories so useful.
Who did what to whom, and when, and why, is interesting