1101 by the seashore

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At a Boundless Ocean

from Richard Ostrofskyof Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed)

[email protected]

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 soimpersonal; 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 yourselfriding 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, andmay 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 'blackhole' 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 inevery 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 sometime 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 allits creatures it's a well-defined phenomenon that you can 'surf' on andlive 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
http://www.secthoughts.com/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.secthoughts.com/


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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 mostsuccessful 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 replicatethemselves 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 weirdbeyond 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 beenmade, 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 'darkmatter' 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 threefundamental 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 withone 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. Weourselves 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 notexist 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 limitingcase 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.


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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. Inour 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.

1101 by the seashore

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