Choose Your Magic

Looking back at the leading figures of the Society of Psychical Research (founded in 1882 in England)—and reading the writings of its prominent figures—what strikes me is an interesting contrast between SPR’s main enterprise, to focus research on extrasensory perception in the broadest sense, and the cultural environment in which that research initially took place. That environment was decidedly scientific and its underlying cosmological assumption was progressivist, thus resting on the concept of evolution broadly construed. SPR could, of course, have chosen to call its approach natural philosophy and to have adopted a traditionalist cosmological view—if perhaps festooned with lots of question marks. But such was the atmosphere in England, indeed all over the Western world, then that Science had to be capitalized and the notion of some kind of “emergent” process—in biology this was evolution, a model that soon to spread to other fields—seemed natural, however fundamentally illogical.

I prefer to use the word “philosophy” when talking about matters that transcend the strictly measurable. As for progressivism, that view, I think, ultimately appeals to magic. The notion that life arose from matter, and consciousness from life, appears to me to violate the notion that anything that “comes about” had to have had, at least in potential, that which we now see actualized.  Aristotle 101. Progressivism introduces into matter potentials which we can’t discover using reasonable science. If we could, we would have long ago managed to create “life” by starting with ordinary chemicals. Such efforts have failed—but current attempts at achieving artificial intelligence are a continuation in another modality.

The traditional cosmological view is also labeled “magic” because it assumes that—in order to preserve the logic of the potential-actuality sequence—God had to have created the world. Therefore reality is a top down structure. Such magic, however, is much more believable for me because it is more comprehensive. It contains within it, with God’s presence, the very power, writ large, which we detect in ourselves, writ small, namely consciousness. Matter can’t explain it, but God’s presence can.

When I contrast “progressivist” with “traditional” cosmologies, I’m not disputing the facts of evolution—only its interpretation. Thus the Catholic Church accepts evolution as a means that God may have used; but the traditionalist aspect is that in Catholic doctrine God creates each soul; the soul is not a product of evolution.

Choosing the right magic may help a “scientist” or “philosopher” make the right projections about the future—or not. Around about 1896, when he was finishing his monumental Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, Frederic W.H. Myers, one of the cofounders of the SPR, wrote thus in the epilogue of his book:

I venture now on a bold saying; for I predict that, in consequence of the new evidence, all reasonable men, a century hence, will believe the Resurrection of Christ, whereas, in default of the new evidence, no reasonable men, a century hence, would have believed it. The ground of this forecast is plain enough. Our ever-growing recognition of the continuity, the uniformity of cosmic law has gradually made of the alleged uniqueness of any incident its almost inevitable refutation. Ever more clearly must our age of science realise that any relation between a material and a spiritual world cannot be an ethical or emotional relation alone; that it must needs be a great structural fact of the Universe, involving laws at least as persistent, as identical from age to age, as our known laws of Energy or of Motion.

The evidence Myers presented more than a century ago has become ever better. But his application of a progressivist approach in matters of soul-knowledge was overly optimistic.

Inflation is Back

My reference here is not to Janet Yellen’s appointment as Chair of the Federal Reserve. Rather it touches on Cosmological Inflation said to have happened immediately after the Big Bang. A group of scientists have reported, in Nature, new evidence that the inflation really did take place. Hence the faith in the Big Bang appears to be justified. The team, headed by John Kovac, used the BICEP2 radio telescope, located at the South Pole, to obtain a new look at the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB). Kovac is with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the leader of the BICEO2 collaboration. A CfA press release it here.

The core of the discovery announced is the first actual detection of gravitational waves. What are these? Well, they are hypothesized by Einstein’s theory of relativity to come about because the density of matter deforms something he called spacetime. The issue is competently summarized in the following three paragraphs from the Reuters report on the discovery (link):

Those curvatures of space are not stationary, Einstein said. Instead, they propagate like water in a lake or seismic waves in Earth's crust and so are "gravitational waves" that "alternately squeeze space in one direction and stretch it in the other direction," Jamie Bock, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and one of the lead scientists on the collaboration, told Reuters.

The other, much more recent theory that predicted gravitational waves is called cosmic inflation. Developed in the 1980s, it starts with the well-accepted idea that the universe began in a Big Bang, an explosion of space-time, 13.8 billion years ago.

An instant later, according to the theory, the infant cosmos expanded exponentially, inflating in size by 100 trillion times. That made the cosmos remarkably uniform across vast expanses of space and also super-sized tiny fluctuations in gravity, producing gravitational waves.

The waves detected by BICEO2 team are thought to be physically measurable remnants of that inflation’s squeeze-and-stretch of the primordial spacetime—of which the CMB radiation carries an imprint.

Now inflation is based on the theory that the cosmos is expanding. That theory in turn rests on the red-shift of galaxies, and the farther away they are, the more red-shifted their light. The presumption is that, going backward in time, we shall see all of these galaxies converging, joining, and eventually collapsing into an extremely tiny particle, smaller than a proton. Since both space and time, in Einsteinian thought, are the product of matter, both were equally minute. As for what existed before that less-than-proton-sized object exploded, on that we have no theory at all. What the theory of inflation proposes is that the initial expansion of that particle, going forward in time again, exhibited negative (i.e. repulsive) gravity for a fraction of a second. Had such an extremely rapid expansion not occurred, the cosmos would not be as uniform in the distribution of its energy and matter as it is.

Amazing, amazing. Personally I’m sill hung up on spacetime myself, which I take to be a mathematical convenience. As for repulsive gravity, it has much to do with virtual particles, which, per quantum mechanics, are spontaneously formed and destroyed in a vacuum—the modern version of creatio ex nihilo. Such negative energy is also, alas, associated with Dark Energy. And then, remembering Richard Feynman, I recall that time can also run in reverse, at least in Quantum Land. The new discovery published this month, therefore, does not give me what it seems to give to cosmologists, namely closure.

Now if we suppose that the red-shift Hubble observed is not caused by actual motion (or by the expansion of space), or not exclusively caused by it, then, of course, there was no Big Bang and all the vast work that followed to track it has been just for fun. Reversals in science are rare, but they do leave large black eyes. Let us remember that Einstein himself once introduced a cosmological constant, lambda, into his field equations for general relativity (in 1917) because the equations suggested that gravity would cause the cosmos to contract—in an age where the Steady State cosmos was accepted orthodoxy. After Hubble’s finding suggested that the cosmos was expanding, Einstein abandoned his constant (in 1929) and labeled its introduction the greatest blunder of his life. As with that constant so perhaps with the Big Bang. Just give it a little spacetime.

A Cosmic Egg?

News came yesterday of the completion of another survey of cosmic radiation, this one begun in 2009 by the European Space Agency (ESA) using the Planck satellite. The image shown in the papers is the by now familiar cosmic egg we’ve become accustomed to since images were stitched together from the NASA/WMAP (Wilson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) launched in 2001. The latest is best, of course. It has a higher resolution. The age of the cosmos has been tweaked a little: older by 80 million years.

It may have been the illustrations—invariably showing an egg in a surrounding black field. I got to wondering. Is the cosmos really an egg? The answer to that last. First, what are we looking at?

The best way to picture this survey is to imagine that we had a camera able to look through rock. Let’s put it at the center of the earth. It will be able to take photographs of the earth’s surface, its lenses so adjusted that it would see the surface but nothing beyond it. Well, the Planck satellite does just that. It is up in space with its camera able to swivel and move in all directions so that it can take slice-after slice of the night sky. Its lenses are adjusted to pick up only microwave radiation.

To map the results from either of these projects onto a two-dimensional surface requires projection. Let’s recall briefly the Mercator projection. The globe is placed in a tube sized so that it will touch the equators. The image of the earth’s surface is projected onto the tube. The tube is then cut and flattened. The Mercator, and all similar projections, stretch the map in the southerly and northerly directions, therefore deforming distances, shapes, and measurable areas. Alas, no matter what we do in mapping three-dimensional objects in Flat Land, distortion is a given.

World maps and cosmic maps make use of another, the Aitoff projection. That’s what we see when contemplating the cosmic egg. It is named after David A. Aitoff (1854-1933), a Russian geographer. His aim was to produce good global maps, his object being to preserve what he could of shapes and areas while minimizing the space the global image would take up. He began with what is called an equidistant azimuth scale. Such a scale preserves true distances, so that distance on the map is proportional to distance on the ground. But Azimuthal projection significantly distorts continental shape at the borders of the map. Aitoff’s solution, which is, note well, applicable only to spheres, has distortions in all of the measurements, but all of these are minimized. Hence his scale is called a good compromise. He makes his projection by re-scaling the map so that his central meridian is only half as long as his equator. The whole shape of the globe is thus distorted; we get an egg for a sphere; but the contents are reasonably true to reality. Here is the earth mapped using the Aitoff scale:

Let me next deal to the black stuff that surrounds the usual depictions of our cosmic egg. Needless to say, no camera ever took a picture of Nothing. The Planck satellite no more saw the end of the cosmos than our imaginary earth-centered camera could ever see the sky; it only sees hard matter. Therefore we don’t really know what lies beyond the visible. We assume there is nothing there because we believe in Hubble and the Big Bang.

So is the universe an egg? Well, I had a chuckle this morning. In the process of trying to hatch this egg, I came upon two stories (link, link). They suggests that, no matter what the Planck saw or didn’t see, NASA thinks that the cosmos is, even if only ever so slightly, ellipsoid. Well, maybe Ahura Mazda had it right after all….
————————
My images come from ESA and Wikipedia (link).

I Blogged Before I Blogged

In a notebook I chanced across while doing some serious Fall Cleaning, I came across some brief writings—I called them notes. Lordy. I have notebooks upon notebooks just like the one I found—a lifetime’s entirely private effort of making sense of reality and/or capturing insights, never intended for readers. I will reproduce one from April 2005 here. Until today, no one has seen this; but I did read it to Brigitte just five minutes ago.

Carriers of Meaning

Formal systems do not carry meanings—but fairy tales do.
     I assume that worlds full of meaning are actually real—in the conventional sense of the word, tangibly: touch it, taste it. By worlds I mean not only this one, but this one is a sample. I mean the others as well: heavens and hells, choirs of angels, vast imaginal landscapes and oceans of spirit with white ships and billowing red sails.
     By formal systems I mean Aquinas’ Summa or Kant’s Critique. For that matter I also include quantum mechanics and Einstein’s two relativities, as mathematical formalisms. And so on.
     All formalisms produce a kind of satisfaction, but no sooner do I feel the satisfaction than the formalism coils back on itself and causes me to question it; my satisfaction turns uneasy. My mind begins to probe the logic. Thoughts rise and flicker with exceptions. Invariably something won’t properly fit.
     On the other hand the grand epics live on. They shimmer in memory like the events of my own life or true events of history. Tales are good carriers of meaning, but the meaning remains diffused. When I try to concentrate it, I start to build a formal system. Then, with Ross Perot’s vividly put “great sucking sound,” the life departs from it.
     Formal systems are static. Reality is dynamic. To capture that dynamism, algorithms are simply not enough.
     Our inner life is a constant swaying between polarities: the static certainties of structure and the dynamic movements of myth.
     This is in part a comment on these very notes. They are effective because they’re organized disorganization. They are a net that captures meaning without formally reducing meaning to a system.
     Much of this dilemma is due to complexity. We are capable of comprehending it as story, but it loses its coherence as a listing of relationships. I describe living by starting somewhere. Blood circulation, say. The heart seems central. I delve deeply into the muscles of the heart, the electrical triggering of the contractions.
     I go on and build the whole system—the vast highways of arteries, the reflux of veins. I have to explain in turn lungs and respiration, capillaries carrying oxygen to feed the cells.
     I go on. I am still at it, detailing various organs and then organ systems. Then I detail how they relate. I weary myself describing the central and the secondary nervous systems, the autonomic and the central one which gets its stimulation from “out there.” The eyes take me a day, the skin, the olfactory organs.

He took her on a walk, that first time. There was a park nearby. It was toward evening, but not quite dark yet. Fresh. It had stormed that afternoon but the sky was now clear and bright. They stood by the lake for a bit, hand in hand, and she told a funny story about the time when her Dad had carved a boat. It had a little mast and a sail fashioned of a silvery container top. And how the boat, being uneven, listed ever to the side. And how her Dad was down there on all fours, blowing at the little boat, but it wouldn’t go anywhere. It was too heavy… And he, with her, looked at her as she was telling this story, and she was all full of light and merriment, her eyes shining.
     And they were out there, waiting for the sun to sink. And the lake got darker and darker, and the horizon bright, the trees and houses like black silhouettes across the lake, the sun sinking behind them.

This scene, described as system, as sensations, as hormonal movements, as the firing of trillions of brain cells, as blood circulating, as skin sensing a light breeze, as metabolic states mirroring brain messages and brain cells responding by triggering deep sighs, as uncountable sense impressions flooding in, as heat issuing from uncountable pores, gushing from ears and mouths and other openings, would describe nothing of meaning. Yet all of this, this vast machinery, is there. To understand it is important.
     It is a puzzlement. That which permits us to understand something in close detail destroys the phenomenon. That which we experience hides the details. We have a devil of a time disentangling the vehicle and that which it carries, form and substance, structure and function.
     The map is not the way and not the destination, but you cannot get there without a map. When you get there, the destination is a big brick structure painted white in reality and on the map it is a red star on the screen and a black star on the print-out.
     And this all makes perfectly good sense.
     A cosmology—an orientation—is like a map. And little more than that. A really great map has artful figures at the corners, the four winds; their lips are puckered up to indicate that they are blowing. And in the map’s artfully drawn oceans frolic unlikely dolphins spouting bright streams.
     In other words the map is trying to tell a story by way of excusing its own inadequacy of being a mere formalism.

The White and Yolk of the Cosmic Egg

Creation myths probably have this in common. First, they sound reasonable within their own cultures because children learn them and get used to them. As  they grow up they shrug off the odd or primitive features of the myth but retain their essence. That essence is the feeling of wonder the children had when they first heard the tale. That essence has value for life. It’s a poetic truth. Second, to people in other cultures the same creation myths will sound humorous, illogical, charming, or like some ordinary explanation wrapped in myth: motherhood, craftsmanship, kingship. If the foreign culture is wealthy and dangerous, the myth must be scorned. If the culture is backward and weak, a patronizing smile's in oder.

But do humans really have a clue? We use words like time, space, and eternity. These are sounds assigned to enigmas. Their definitions are circular. If matter produces both space and time, the child wants to know what is outside of space? And the child also insists on knowing: What happened before time began? If time began with the Big Bang, what caused that bang to bang? What’s it like to be outside of time? The child is right.

Last Friday at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory a talk revealed something old and something new. Collision experiments have seemingly confirmed a bias in nature already long a doctrine within physics, namely that particles are ever-so-slightly favored over anti-particles. As this news now reaches the laity, the press commits cosmology, as in this sentence in the New York Times today:

According to the basic precept of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

Well, the physicists already know the answer. If particles are the yolk and antiparticles the white of the cosmic egg (the one Pan Gu found himself inside “in the beginning” according to the Chinese creation myth) then there was more yolk than white. End of story.

The point here? Our myths don’t sound like myths. They sound awesome and sophisticated. But we no more explain what gave rise to the Big Bang than the Chinese myth explains how the cosmic egg came into being. We claim to understand what happened in the earliest nanoseconds of the Big Bang—an event we presume happened because the most distant stars and galaxies appear to be receding from us faster than other stars and galaxies. Yet some nearby galaxies are coming toward us, which seems odd if all things are moving away from all other things. We are amazed by the prevalence of matter over antimatter only because our theories teach us that they ought to have occurred in equal quantities. But that a Big Bang actually happened is an unprovable hypothesis.

Francis Crick, venerated in biology as Einstein is in physics, was, with James Watson, the discoverer of the structure of DNA. (Rosalind Franklin, who crucially discerned DNA’s shape, gets mention but not credit.) But Crick could not imagine how life could have originated on earth. Hence he embraced a theory of panspermia, the notion that life was seeded here from elsewhere. Where explanation fails, myth will serve.

The myths of the future will undoubtedly continue to be, like all myth, culturally sanctioned approximations—resonating with the character of the cultures that will hold them. But ours will also, in some future time, get the patronizing smile—the more so because, swallowed by the past, as we shall then be, we shall neither inspire awe nor threaten those who smile.

Swallowed by the past? Well, yes. I imagine Time to be this, this huge, monstrous Snake, its body stretching back into eternity. We live our lives in its huge maw, and all our troubles are explained because the Snake is chewing, chewing, chewing. And swallowing. And as it swallows, we slide down its slimy gullet into its infinitely huge belly, which is what we might call “the past.”

Perspective

Quite a while back I chanced across an automated slide-show titled “Secret Worlds: The Universe Within.” The title is a little lame, but the experience is not. The merit of this project is to enlarge our perspective, an activity fit for that day of the week reserved for contemplation. There are many dimension to reality, but the physical is certainly the one our eyes can’t help but contemplate. This show illustrates in images the Hermetic “As above, so below.” I urge all who see this post to take the tour and click through to see for themselves. The link is here.

For those who didn’t scroll down to the bottom of the page, I note that credit for this innovative view of our fractal universe belongs to Michael W. Davidson and the Florida State University, the joint copyright holders.

The idea for digging up this site—it took me a while to reconstruct the processes of mind that first produced it and to find the two- or three-word strategy I used in my search then—came to me while I was clearing a vast jungle of neglected growths in our back yard. Whenever I do that, and I am in touch with nature, handling branches and weeds and the dried out detritus of the last season still clinging to the soil and forming mats through which the new emerges; and then, always, I’m reminded of the stupendous complexity of everything, living or not—and who’s to say where living yields to dead? Relentless branchings and branchings of branchings of branchings—and looking at the tips of the tiniest things, catching my breath, I realized that I’ve not even begun to see. There’s much, much more, as the ads keep telling us—and so also the world.