Of course, there is an explanation. Human sperm cells develop better at a slightly lower temperature than the rest of our body seems to prefer. Humans aren’t alone in this respect: Most male mammals have testicles that migrate through the inguinal canal during gestation or infancy and eventually take up residence outside the abdominal cavity, suspended in a temperature-sensitive adjustable hammock. This allows the sperm cells to develop at the temperature that’s just right.
But is it really just right? Only if you accept that the ideal temperature is a special fixed property of the universe, like Planck’s constant or the speed of light in a vacuum. Evolution could have simply tweaked the parameters of sperm development so the ideal temperature of its enzymatic and cellular processes was the same as the rest of the body’s processes. Hematopoiesis, the creation of new blood cells, is a close parallel of sperm development in terms of the tissue architecture and cellular events involved, yet bone marrow doesn’t grow outside our body. Nor do ovaries, for that matter.
The answer to the central question at the heart of modern science, ‘Is nature continuous or discrete?’ is as radical as it is simple. Space-time is not continuous because it is made of quantum granules, but quantum granules are not discrete because they are folds of infinitely continuous vibrating fields. Nature is thus not simply continuous, but an enfolded continuum.
In the late 1960s my friend J. G. Ballard phoned me full of outrage. Feeling weighed down by the bad prose cluttering his study, he had dug a pit in his back garden and thrown his review copies in, splashing them with a little petrol. But they proved harder to burn than he thought, so he put one in the kitchen oven, which had a suitable thermometer, to test the igniting heat of book paper. “Bradbury was wrong!” he complained. “Fahrenheit 451 isn’t the temperature at which book paper burns!” But, I asked, hadn’t Bradbury phoned the Los Angeles Fire Department to get the temperature right?
“Well, they’re wrong, too!” announced Ballard, who admired Bradbury and whose own early Vermilion Sands stories echo Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. Ray Bradbury, he said, had shown him that science fiction was worth writing.
Ironically, Bradbury, like Ballard, was primarily a fantast. He wrote very little science fiction, even as he became a measure of how good the genre could be. He said so in a 1999 interview with the Weekly Wire: “I don’t write science fiction. I’ve only done one science fiction book and that’s Fahrenheit 451.”
In real life, Boughton says, “we have American food being the dominant food that’s spread across the world because we won the war. So we had to basically reverse that idea.” A diner set in the narrow neutral zone between the feuding dictatorships is shown in the first season of The Man in the High Castle to have a menu that Boughton says suggests that the “Depression era never left.” You can still get a hot dog; it just may not look like an Oscar Mayer frank because other factories are now making sausages. In the second season, a greasy spoon in a Japanese-occupied territory still has decent counter service and waitresses with pluck. But it’s now the place to slurp ramen instead of chicken noodle soup on your lunch break. “That sort of mixing of ideas is what we like to do to take the viewer of out of it,” Boughton says.