Floating Landmass in Outer Space Wcolumn Building Art Surreal
"Every formula which expresses a police of nature is a hymn of praise to God," pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell wrote as she contemplated scientific discipline, spirituality, and our conquest of truth. A century later, Carl Sagan tussled with the same question shortly before his death: "The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."
It is, of form, an abiding question, every bit quondam as consciousness — we are material creatures that live in a textile universe, yet we are capable of experiences that transcend what we can atomize into concrete facts: dear, joy, the full-being gladness of a Beethoven symphony on a midsummer'south night.
The Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr articulated the basic paradox of living with and inside such a duality: "The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. Merely that does not mean that information technology is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get the states very far."
Nearly a century afterwards Bohr, the physicist and writer Alan Lightman takes us farther, beyond these limiting dichotomies, in Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (public library) — a lyrical and illuminating inquiry into our dual impulse for belief in the unprovable and for trust in truth affirmed by physical evidence. Through the lens of his personal experience every bit a working scientist and a human being with uncommon receptivity to the poetic dimensions of life, Lightman traces our longing for absolutes in a relative world from Galileo to Van Gogh, from Descartes to Dickinson, emerging with that rare miracle of insight at the meeting bespeak of the lucid and the luminous.
Lightman, who has previously written beautifully most his transcendent experience facing a immature osprey, relays a parallel experience he had one summertime night on an isle off the coast of Maine, where he and his married woman have been going for a quarter century. On this modest, remote speck of state, severed from the mainland without ferries or bridges, each of the six families has had to learn to cross the bounding main by small boat — a task especially challenging at dark. Lightman recounts the unbidden revelation of ane such nocturnal crossing:
No one was out on the h2o simply me. It was a moonless night, and quiet. The merely audio I could hear was the soft churning of the engine of my gunkhole. Far from the distracting lights of the mainland, the sky vibrated with stars. Taking a chance, I turned off my running lights, and it got fifty-fifty darker. Then I turned off my engine. I lay downwards in the boat and looked upwards. A very dark night sky seen from the ocean is a mystical experience. After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star-littered sky. The gunkhole disappeared. My trunk disappeared. And I institute myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I'd non experienced earlier… I felt an overwhelming connectedness to the stars, as if I were part of them. And the vast surface area of fourth dimension — extending from the far afar past long earlier I was born and then into the far afar future long after I will die — seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire creation. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something accented. Later on a time, I sat up and started the engine again. I had no idea how long I'd been lying in that location looking upwardly.
Lightman — the first professor at MIT to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities — syncopates this numinous experience with the reality of his lifelong devotion to science:
I have worked every bit a physicist for many years, and I have always held a purely scientific view of the world. By that, I mean that the universe is made of textile and null more than, that the universe is governed exclusively by a small number of fundamental forces and laws, and that all blended things in the world, including humans and stars, somewhen disintegrate and return to their component parts. Even at the age of twelve or thirteen, I was impressed by the logic and materiality of the world. I built my own laboratory and stocked it with exam tubes and petri dishes, Bunsen burners, resistors and capacitors, coils of electrical wire. Among other projects, I began making pendulums by tying a fishing weight to the terminate of a string. I'd read in Pop Science or some similar mag that the time for a pendulum to make a complete swing was proportional to the square root of the length of the string. With the assistance of a stopwatch and ruler, I verified this wonderful law. Logic and pattern. Crusade and upshot. Equally far as I could tell, everything was discipline to numerical analysis and quantitative test. I saw no reason to believe in God, or in any other unprovable hypotheses.
Yet after my experience in that boat many years subsequently… I understood the powerful allure of the Absolutes — ethereal things that are all-encompassing, unchangeable, eternal, sacred. At the same fourth dimension, and peradventure paradoxically, I remained a scientist. I remained committed to the material world.
Against our human finitude, temporality, and imperfection, these "Absolutes" offer infinity, eternity, perfection. Lightman defines them as concepts and behavior that "refer to an enduring and fixed reference point that can anchor and guide united states through our temporary lives" — notions like constancy, immortality, permanence, the soul, "God."
Building on his before reflections on why we long for permanence in a universe of constant alter, he writes:
A fascinating feature of the Absolutes — in fact, a defining feature — is that there is no style to go there from here, that is, from inside the physical world. There is no gradual, step-past-step path to go from relative truth to absolute truth, or to get from a long period of time to eternity, or from express wisdom to the infinite wisdom of God. The space is not merely a lot more of the finite. Indeed, the unattainability of the Absolutes may exist part of their allure.
The final defining feature of these Absolutes, Lightman notes, is their unprovability by the scientific method. He writes:
Yet I did not demand any proof of what I felt during that summer nighttime in Maine looking upwardly at the sky. Information technology was a purely personal feel, and its validity and power resided in the experience itself. Scientific discipline knows what it knows from experiment with the external globe. Belief in the Absolutes comes from internal feel, or sometimes from received teachings and culture-granted authority.
Conversely, notwithstanding, notions that vest to this realm of Absolutes fall autonomously when they make claims in the realm of science — claims disproven by the facts of the cloth world. With an eye to how the discoveries of modern science — from heliocentricity to development to the chemic composition of the universe — accept challenged many of these Absolutes, Lightman writes:
Nothing in the physical world seems to be abiding or permanent. Stars burn out. Atoms disintegrate. Species evolve. Motion is relative. Even other universes might be, many without life. Unity has given way to multiplicity. I say that the Absolutes have been challenged rather than disproved, considering the notions of the Absolutes cannot be disproved any more than they can be proved. The Absolutes are ideals, entities, beliefs in things that prevarication beyond the concrete globe. Some may exist true and some fake, but the truth or falsity cannot be proven.
Generations after Henry Miller insisted that "it is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis," Lightman adds:
From all the physical and sociological testify, the world appears to run not on absolutes but on relatives, context, modify, impermanence, and multiplicity. Nothing is fixed. All is in flux.
[…]
On the one hand, such an onslaught of discovery presents a cause for celebration… Is it not a testament to our minds that we piffling human beings with our limited sensory apparatus and cursory lifespans, stuck on our one planet in space, accept been able to uncover and so much of the workings of nature? On the other hand, we take found no physical evidence for the Absolutes. And just the opposite. All of the new findings suggest that we live in a world of multiplicities, relativities, alter, and impermanence. In the concrete realm, goose egg persists. Nothing lasts. Nothing is indivisible. Even the subatomic particles found in the twentieth century are now idea to be fabricated of even smaller "strings" of energy, in a continuing regression of subatomic Russian dolls. Nothing is a whole. Zip is indestructible. Nothing is notwithstanding. If the concrete world were a novel, with the business of examining evil and expert, it would not take the clear lines of Dickens but the shadowy ambiguities of Dostoevsky.
Indeed, Dostoevsky himself may exist the prophet laureate of Absolutes, for he asserted a lifetime ahead of Lightman that "nature, the soul, love, and God, 1 recognizes through the center, and not through the reason." The discoveries of reason, which Lightman terms the Relatives — "the relativity and impermanence and multiplicity constitute by mod scientific discipline" — stand in counterpoint to the Absolutes, but these are not binary categories. Pointing to examples like the novelist Marilynne Robinson, whose highly spiritual writing is infused with science, and the Nobel-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, an atheist who nonetheless believes in a "final theory" that promises absolute answers to all of existence, Lightman notes that individual people weave Absolutes and Relatives into their worldview in varying degrees. He writes:
The Absolutes and the Relatives can be considered a big frame in which to view the dialogue between religion and science, or between spirituality and science. But I suggest that the problems get deeper, into the dualism and complexity of human existence. We are idealists and we are realists. Nosotros are dreamers and nosotros are builders. Nosotros are experiencers and we are experimenters. We long for certainties, yet we ourselves are full of the ambiguities of the Mona Lisa and the I Ching. Nosotros ourselves are a part of the yin-yang of the world. Our yearning for absolutes and, at the same time, our commitment to the physical world reflect a necessary tension in how nosotros chronicle to the cosmos and chronicle to ourselves.
Echoing Rachel Carson'due south stunning meditation on the bioluminescent wonder of fireflies — something she saw every bit "one of those experiences that gives an odd and hard-to-draw feeling, with and so many overtones beyond the facts themselves" — Lightman recounts a kindred formative feel of his ain:
When I was seven or eight years old, growing upward in landlocked Memphis, I visited my grandparents for a week at their little beach house in Miami. One dark and moonless night every bit I sat at the end of their dock, for some reason known just to children I grabbed a stick and stirred up the ocean beneath me. I was astonished to see the water shimmer with light. To my mind, the ocean was already a mysterious place, with its changing colors, its space grey skin stretching out to the sky, and its waves flowing in one after another, like the animate of some big sleeping animal. Simply the glow of the seawater was magic of a dissimilar club. My imagination flared. Was this fairy grit? Was this some kind of galactic energy? What other secrets and powers lay below the ocean'due south surface? Excited, I ran into the house and commandeered my grandparents to witness the discovery. Again I stirred the water with my wand, and it happened again. Pure magic. I scooped upward some of the supernatural liquid in a glass jar and took it into the business firm for further inspection. I'1000 not sure what I was hoping to find. What I did find, after the water settled, were tiny organisms floating near. In a dark room, they glowed faintly like fireflies. They felt slightly grainy in my hand. I was brokenhearted. The magic was just little bugs in the water.
That dual fascination with wonder and reverence for fact never left Lightman. He reflects sixty years subsequently:
Equally did Thoreau in Concord, I've traveled far and wide on Lute Island. I know each cedar and poplar, each clump of embankment rose, Rosa rugosa, each patch of blueberry bushes and raspberry brambles and woody stems of hydrangeas, all the soft mounds of moss, some of which I touch on my ramblings today. The tart odor of raspberries blends with the salty ocean air. Early this morning, a fog enveloped the isle so completely that I felt as if I were in a spaceship adrift in outer space — white infinite. But the surreal fog, made of minuscule h2o aerosol as well tiny to come across, eventually evaporated and disappeared. It's all material, fifty-fifty the magical fog — like the bioluminescence I first saw as a child. It's all atoms and molecules.
The materiality of the world is a fact, but facts don't explicate the experience. Shining sea water, fog, sunsets, stars. All material. So grand is the fabric that nosotros find information technology hard to accept it every bit merely material… Surely, there must be more. "Nature," wrote Emily Dickinson, "is what nosotros see / The Hill — the Afternoon / Squirrel — Eclipse — the Bumble bee / Nay — Nature is Sky." In the last line, the poet leaps from the finite to infinity, to the realm of the Absolutes. It is nigh every bit if Nature in her glory wants the states to believe in a heaven, something divine and immaterial across nature itself. In other words, Nature tempts the states to believe in the supernatural. But then again, Nature has also given us big brains, allowing u.s.a. to build microscopes and telescopes and ultimately, for some of us, to conclude that information technology's all simply atoms and molecules. It'southward a paradox.
For millennia, we have been aiming our range of tools — from mythology to scientific discipline — at this paradox, but remain suspended between Absolutes and Relatives even as we make progress in fathoming the reality of nature on its own terms. Lightman writes:
Nature may at times announced to be a Painter or a Philosopher or a Angelic Spirit. But deep down she is a Scientist. She is quantitative. She is logical. And nothing better illustrates her ruthless and unyielding adherence to that logic than the law of the conservation of energy. Energy does not appear out of naught. Free energy does not disappear into nada. The energy law is a sacred cow of physics.
[…]
Ii thousand years ago, the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius suggested that the power of the gods over united states mortals is limited by the constancy of atoms. Atoms could non exist created or destroyed, said Lucretius. The gods could not make objects suddenly appear out of cypher or vanish into nothing because all things are made out of atoms, and the number of atoms remains constant… Lucretius's thought was a conservation law. The poet did not know how to tally up the number of atoms, as nosotros tally up the number of joules in a box, but something was constant, and that constancy conspicuously provided great psychological comfort too every bit agreement of nature. Let the gods and the supernatural have their sway, but they cannot alter the number of atoms here in our earthly world.
Lightman observes that when modern physics arrived at the police of conservation of free energy, affirmed by the discovery of the neutrino, it provided the same psychological comfort:
With this law and others like information technology, nature tin be made sense of. Nature tin be calculated. Nature can be depended on. If yous know the initial energy of the unstruck match and so measure the free energy in the heated air, you know how high the weight must exist lifted. The total energy is constant.
Ironically, we have traded ane constancy for another. We have lost the constancy of the stars but gained the constancy of energy. The first is a physical object, the 2d a concept. Scientists cannot testify without a dubiousness that the full energy in a closed organization is constant. Merely any violation of that principle would destroy the foundations of physics and suggest an unlawful universe. The idea of a lawful universe is itself an Absolute.
Four decades later on Carl Sagan awakened the pop imagination to the awareness that "we as well are made of starstuff" and explained how stars are built-in, live, die, and give us life, Lightman writes:
The cloth of the doomed stars and the cloth of my doomed torso are actually the aforementioned cloth. Literally the same atoms… It is astonishing but true that if I could attach a modest tag to each of the atoms of my trunk and travel with them backward in time, I would find that those atoms originated in particular stars in the sky. Those exact atoms.
Human life may be a beautiful fact, only it is a tiny subset of the facts of the universe — a universe we took for millennia to vest to u.s.a.. We are only but beginning to recognize that we belong to it. At that place is disquiet in this recognition that bleeds into denial — denial encoded in the statistic that the vast bulk of people in the earth still believe in a personal God who intercedes on their behalf, a belief predicated on the delusion of man axis and our special status amid a cosmos of incomprehensible vastness. Lightman calibrates that notion with the facts of reality:
Data from the Kepler astronomical satellite, launched in 2009 and specifically constructed to search for planets in the "habitable zone" — that is, the right distance from their central star to possess liquid h2o — advise that something similar 10 percent of all stars have at least one "habitable" planet…
There are several hundred billion stars in our galaxy solitary, and a hundred billion galaxies but within the appreciable universe. Overwhelmingly, the odds favor life forms elsewhere in the universe. Although we do not know in particular how life developed on earth, the odds that no life exists on the billions and billions of other habitable planets would be equally improbable every bit no fires ever starting in a billion trillion dry forests. Nearly certainly life elsewhere in the universe would not be like ours. But biologists and fifty-fifty perhaps artists and philosophers would recognize it as life. And with so many life-bearing worlds and billions of years of cosmic evolution, there must be a range of civilizations, some less advanced than ours and some more than.
What God, Lightman asks, would be able to meet the demands of then many worlds and nonetheless prioritize the particular needs of each individual in our detail civilization orbiting our particular third-rate star? What gives pregnant to our existence, he suggests, is not the guarantee of Absolutes or the favors of some imagined cosmic deity but something else entirely — something that fills the smallest units of our temporality with life until they themselves expand into a testament to the age-old insight that "all eternity is in the moment." He writes:
Aught is absolutely motionless, says Einstein, but I'grand centered in this island. Wherever it goes, hurtling through space as the earth orbits the sun and the sunday orbits the galaxy, I go with it. I've planted myself hither, like the Rosa rugosa down the loma, stubborn and thorny. At this moment, I can hear the telephone call of a gull and the wind blowing through trees like the sound of a distant waterfall and the tiny purr of a gunkhole engine far off in the bay. Then there'due south the steady and slight sound of the waves, playing counterpoint to the soft music of birds. But all of information technology slips into the silky silence of this place. I comprehend that silence. I breed silence and am bred by it. On this island, I am light years abroad from the dissonance and heave of the world. Like Thoreau, I came hither "because I wished to live deliberately, to front simply the essential facts of life, and run into if I could not learn what life had to teach, and not, when I came to die, observe that I had not lived." I choose to live. Now, this body of mine, this erstwhile creature, is sixty-seven years old.
Echoing Montaigne — "To complaining that we shall not exist alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to exist sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago," observed the father of the essay equally he contemplated bloodshed and the fine art of living in the same century Galileo unsettled the universe — Lightman writes:
When nosotros arroyo Lute Island past boat and gaze at information technology from a distance, a dollop of rock and green ascension out of the bounding main, I am acutely aware that it will last far longer than I will. A hundred years from at present, after I'm gone, many of these spruce and cedars will still be here. And the wind going through them will sound like a distant waterfall. The curve of the state will be the aforementioned as it is at present. The paths that I wander may still be here, although probably covered with new vegetation. The rocks and ledges on the shore will be here, including a detail ledge I'k quite fond of, shaped like the knuckled back of a large animal. Sometimes, I sit on that ledge (more than sitting) and wonder if information technology will remember me. Even my house might yet be here, or at to the lowest degree the concrete posts of its ground, crumbling in the table salt air. But somewhen, of class, even this island will shift and modify and dissolve. In geologic time, there may be no trace of Lute Island. Xx-five thousand years ago, it didn't exist. Maine and most of North America were covered with water ice, thousands of anxiety thick. Two hundred and 50 1000000 years agone, the Atlantic Ocean didn't exist. Europe, Africa, and North America were joined together in a single landmass. Zip persists in the material world. All of it changes and passes abroad.
[…]
Equally I lie in my hammock now on this belatedly afternoon in August, I tin can feel the seconds ticking away to my stop, and I believe it to be a final end. Merely that finality does not diminish the grandeur of life. As the seconds tick by, I breathe one breath at a time. I inhale, I exhale. These spruces and cedars I cherish and know, the wind, the sweet scent of moist and dark soil — these are my minor sense of enlightenment, my by life and present life and future life all in one moment.
Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine is a splendid read in its entirety. Complement it with Carl Sagan on science and spirituality, Richard Feynman on why dubiousness is essential for morality, and Simone de Beauvoir on the moral courage of nonbelief, then revisit Lightman on the transcendence of creative work and his poetic ode to science and the unknown.
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Source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/03/27/alan-lightman-searching-for-stars-on-an-island-in-maine/
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