At a Boundless Ocean

from Richard Ostrofsky of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed) www.secthoughts.com quill@travel-net.com January, 2011 Imagine: You are standing on a beach by the seashore, watching huge waves roll in. You see adults and children running along the strand, laughing in the breakers. You see bold swimmers a little further out. Further still, you can just make out some people with surf boards trying to catch a wave. From time to time, one of them does, and then you can watch admiringly as he stands up on his board and rides it toward you, or watch derisively if he wipes out. The sea is so vast; the great waves are so impersonal; yet there is so much life in them. So many happy people! Maybe some happy sharks! A fantasy gets started. Not so unlike those surfers, you find yourself riding a wave of thought. Suppose that the whole universe we know of is just a kind of wave, a single wave, on an infinite sea of quantized energy. We don't know, and may never know where that primordial energy came from, or how such waves get started. One current suggestion is that they begin as gravitational implosions, or 'black holes,' in some other universe. A 'black hole' is a region of space with a concentration of mass-energy so great that it pulls everything nearby into itself a gravity well so strong that nothing not even light can escape, as it does from ordinary stars. We have found such vast sinks of mass-energy in our own universe, so why not in every other? We don't really know what happens inside a sink of this kind. One possibility is that the centre of such a hole is what mathematicians call a 'singularity': an infinite density of mass-energy that implodes through itself as the 'Big Bang' of a new universe what will appear as a cosmological 'Big Bang' to the astronomers who might evolve at some time in its distant future. This, after all, is what we are seeing now. On such a model, the 'thingness' of a universe and all that's in it is much like the 'thingness' of a wave: From the perspective of its astronomers of all its creatures it's a well-defined phenomenon that you can 'surf' on and live in. But from the God's eye perspective that might contemplate all such universes together, each one of these, each separate universe is just a ripple on some boundless 'sea' of quantized interaction. The vision seems fantastical, but some modern physicists entertain it

in all seriousness driven to such extremes in their search for a theory of gravitation (and therefore of mass and matter) that would be compatible both with quantum mechanics and general relativity the two most successful grand theories they have, which are unfortunately quite incompatible with each other. Lee Smolin, a professor of physics at the University of Waterloo, has even suggested that if universes replicate themselves in this way, they might also evolve: Over successive 'generations,' a kind of natural selection might tune their basic parameters (physical constants like the charge of an electron and the speed of light) toward values that would maximize the production of black holes and, as a side effect, of atoms with complex chemistries, capable of supporting life. Such ideas seem pretty weird, but if science has taught us anything in the last hundred years, it's that reality is pretty weird, and may be weird beyond our comprehension. As J.B.S Haldane said, "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it may be queerer than we can suppose." Niels Bohr once remarked of a theory presented at some conference that it was not crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. General relativity and quantum mechanics have been around for almost 100 years already. Tremendous gains of understanding have been made, but basic physics is still a mess. We don't know why the laws of nature and its fundamental constants are as they are. We don't know why there is a complicated, fascinating universe (with ourselves in it) rather than nothing at all. We conjecture the existence of 'dark energy' and 'dark matter' to account for the measured activities of galaxies, but we know nothing about either not even, for sure, that they exist. We conjecture the existence of 'strings' and 'superstrings' (to link gravity with the other three fundamental forces, and the theory of fundamental particles with that of the cosmos as a whole), but we know nothing about them either. At the same time, we know that in open systems, order can accumulate provided only that the inputs of energy are not too violent to disrupt such configurations as emerge. At all scales from subatomic particles to galaxies, component parts can spontaneously enter into relationships with one another to form systems which are themselves entities and parts of larger systems still. These build up toward a threshold of criticality and then undergo breakdowns of varying magnitudes, thereby creating an increasingly complex environment in which such build ups continue. We ourselves are configurations of this kind. So are the groups and organizations and whole societies that get formed when we interact. These ideas of self-organization and self-organized criticality did not exist when I was a college student, and only came together within my adult lifetime. Today, the clock-work universe of Newton and classical mechanics is pretty dead useful only as an approximation for the limiting case of medium sized objects traveling at low velocities. This is an important special case on the human scale, but it is nothing more than that.

The new paradigm is much more interesting and much more promising for life. It's fascinating, mind-boggling stuff. Its implications for human philosophy for human lives and projects are far from clear as yet. In our world now, there is every excuse for feeling confused or anxious, but none at all for feeling bored. Anyone who feels bored today just isn't paying attention.