Probable impossibilities, p.10
Probable Impossibilities, page 10
* * *
—
But none of these examples from the microscopic domain, including Clausius’s deep pronouncements on entropy, explain our psychological attraction to both order and disorder—our honoring of both the respectable and the mavericks among us. There seems to be something deep in our psyche, something primeval, imprinted in us eons before Clausius or Socrates. Perhaps the embrace of these opposites conferred an adaptive advantage on our ancestors, many millions of years in our past. From an evolutionary point of view, order implies predictability, patterns, repeatability—all of which allow us to make good predictions. And predictions are useful for knowing when game will run through the forest, or when crops should be planted. The benefit to our survival is obvious. More unexpected, perhaps, is how attentiveness to surprise, chance, and novelty can also confer an advantage. If we get too complacent with our routine, we can’t react when things change, when the tiger suddenly appears on the path that we have walked a thousand times without mishap. And we would not take risks, for fear of departing from our familiar routines. So it makes sense that we’ve developed a desire for both the predictable and the unpredictable.
If an appetite for novelty conferred a survival benefit on our ancestors, perhaps it should show up in our genes. Researchers have recently discovered a variation (allele) of a gene called DRD4-7R—or more arrestingly, “the wanderlust gene.” It occurs in about 20 percent of the population and appears to be associated with a penchant for exploration and risk. It makes sense that we’d want most members of our tribe to stay at home, follow routine, tend to the hearth. Yet we also need a few others to venture forth on risky expeditions in search of new hunting grounds and unexpected opportunities. “We have evidence to suggest that the same allele involved in the personality trait of novelty-seeking and impulsivity was also involved in being pro-risk in financial situations,” says Richard Paul Ebstein, professor of psychology at the National University of Singapore and one of the leading researchers of DRD4-7R. “People who have that allele appear to be more risk-prone.” Other biologists rightly point out that it’s unlikely that any single gene could control a trait such as risk taking and novelty seeking—but a group of genes working together might just do so.
Since both order and disorder evidently benefit human beings, it’s worth re-examining our inclination, at least in the West, to divide everything into polar opposites, with an assumed hierarchy of value and unstated preferences—productivity versus laziness, rationality versus irrationality, hot and cold, smooth and rough, white and black. Perhaps, instead, we should view such opposites in terms of a useful balance.
The Chinese have long understood this idea in terms of the ancient Confucian concept of yin and yang: all things exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites. Yin is associated with the feminine, dark, north, old, soft, cold, while yang with masculine, light, south, young, hard, warm. The symbol of yin and yang—two entangled swirls, one black and one white, equal in size, each with a dot of the other color within it—suggests that the two exist in harmony, with neither dominant over the other. Meanwhile, Western thought typically attempts to simplify this baffling world by dividing everything into two. That works for a while, until we look more closely and discover the real complexity lurking underneath. If eventually we are able to stand on higher ground, we once again find simplicity and harmony. The cosmos sings order, and it also sings disorder. We human beings seek predictability, and we also yearn for the new. Embrace these necessary contradictions, say the Confucians. Perhaps Pascal’s Nothingness and Infinity are also part of the yin/yang balance.
* * *
—
It is the end of my day, and I am listening to Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, which the Austrian composer began writing in 1887. The symphony opens with a continuous unfolding of the themes. The second movement, the Scherzo, feels sinister, as if some dark secret is being withheld. But I find myself mesmerized by a section of the third movement, the Adagio. After a haunting and harmonious melody from the strings (perhaps promising to reveal the dark secret), the sounds become increasingly discordant, building in volume, until we hear a thunderclap of the horns, jagged and dissonant, followed by more clashes, like tidal waves pounding the shore. Then a moment of silence. The strings pick up again, quiet and lyrical. This alternation of the melodious with the dissonant continues until the end of the movement. And I wonder if the harmonious sections of the piece would be quite so beautiful if not juxtaposed with the unharmonious, the light with the dark, the smooth with the rough. The orderly with the seemingly disorderly. And of course Bruckner himself—a chance event like all of us, a random collision of cells bringing forth improbable life in this improbable universe.
Miracles
“Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. So the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea on the dry ground, and the waters were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.”
These words from Exodus describe one of the most famous miracles in the Bible. Never before and never since, in any sea or ocean on Earth, have winds created a passageway through which people could walk. In scientific terms, such an event would require a sustained and highly directed column of wind blowing at hurricane force, a phenomenon that could be created only on a small scale in a human-made wind tunnel of the twentieth century. But the parting of the Red Sea occurred three thousand years ago. It was ordered up by Moses and delivered by God. It was a “miracle,” at odds with the behavior of nature, beyond nature, a “supernatural” event, inexplicable except by recourse to divine intervention.
A 2013 Harris poll found that 74 percent of Americans surveyed believe in God, and 72 percent believe in miracles. Miracles are usually associated with the actions of gods or other divine beings, and they occur not only in Judaism and Christianity but in all of the major religions of the world. In Islam, Mohammad split the Moon. In Hinduism, when Saint Jnanadeva was told that he was not qualified to recite the Vedas, he placed his hand on a water buffalo, which proceeded to chant Vedic verses. Most Buddhists believe that all living creatures experience a cycle of deaths and rebirths, appearing in new bodies and passing through various nonphysical realms on the way.
Miracles, by definition, lie outside science. Miracles are incompatible with a rational picture of the physical world. Nevertheless, even in our highly scientific and technological society, with most of us profiting enormously from cell phones and automobiles and other products of science, a large fraction of the public believes in miracles. Most of us do not ponder that contradiction. One of my aunts was certain that her dead father visited her house and spoke to her every few months, and she got a tape recorder—a device of science—to document his voice. (Whereupon the ghostly visits ceased.)
Miracles come from the world of imagination, of dreams, of desire; science from the world of practicality, of logic, of orderly control. I’ve always been fascinated by our ability to live simultaneously in both of these apparently opposing worlds. Evidently, each reflects something deep and essential inside of us.
* * *
—
While miracles that seemingly defy nature have long featured in human history, so too has our quest to codify nature, to enshrine its properties into so-called laws of nature. The laws of nature are usually stated in mathematical form. The premier example in the history of science is Isaac Newton’s law of gravity: the strength of the gravitational force between two masses doubles when either mass doubles and increases fourfold when the distance between them is halved. (In mathematical form, F = Gm1 m2 /d2.) It is a rule that Newton derived to explain the orbits of the planets, and it can be used to predict how masses will affect one another through their mutual gravity anywhere in the universe. As an application of Newton’s law: since the Moon is ¼ the the size of the Earth and roughly ¹∕100 the mass, you would weigh about ¹∕6 as much on the Moon as you do on Earth. (This little-known fact does not appear in the diet books I’ve seen.)
As another example, which you can test for yourself: drop a weight to the floor from a height of 4 feet and time the duration of its fall. You should get about 0.5 seconds. From a height of 8 feet, you should get about 0.7 seconds. From a height of 16 feet, about 1 second. Repeat from several more heights and you will discover that the time exactly doubles with every quadrupling of the height, a rule found by Galileo in the seventeenth century. (Mathematically, t = constant × √h.) With this rule, you can now predict the time to fall from any height. You have witnessed, firsthand, the regularity of nature.
Why should nature be lawful? One can imagine a universe in which events happened at random, without any justification or regularity. A wheelbarrow might suddenly float in the air. Day might turn into night and back to day at arbitrary moments. In such a universe, of course, scientists would be out of business. Not only do scientists depend on the regularity and logic of nature, most scientists would argue that an irrational and unmathematical universe could not exist. Undoubtedly, the lawfulness of nature, and especially our ability to find those laws—from Archimedes to Newton to Einstein—has brought us human beings a sense of power, a sense of comfort and security, and a sense of control.
Beyond the personal wishes of scientists, the concept of a lawful nature has proven enormously useful. The regular and predictable cycles of the seasons allowed for the development of agriculture. The consistent properties of materials allowed for the development of industry. The repeatable production of T-lymphocytes and other antibodies when exposed to the vaccinia virus allowed the eradication of smallpox, one of the greatest killers of human beings throughout history.
In addition to these practical applications, science has also been able to explain and predict the more esoteric behavior of nature to high accuracy. For example, the orbit of Mercury rotates a slight amount more than could be accounted for by Newton’s seventeenth-century law of gravity. The tiny discrepancy, 0.012 degrees per century, was successfully calculated by Einstein’s modern theory of gravity, general relativity.
Finally, scientists—and to a great extent the population at large—now believe that these laws are discoverable by human beings. That belief was not always so. For centuries, people thought that various forms of knowledge, including knowledge about the workings of nature, were the sole province of God, off-limits to human understanding. The great success of modern science has challenged that view, whether or not one believes in God. In a sense, the success of science, our own human enterprise, has empowered us to proclaim that nature is lawful.
All of the above progress has led to what one might call the Central Doctrine of Science: All properties and events in the physical universe are governed by laws, and those laws hold true at every time and every place in the physical universe. Scientists do not explicitly discuss this doctrine. It is simply assumed. When I was a graduate student in physics, my thesis advisor never mentioned the doctrine, but it was implicit in everything he did in his own professional work and in the guidance he gave to his students. One of my first research problems as a physicist concerned the behavior of very hot gas at the centers of galaxies. For a sufficiently hot gas, electrons and their antiparticles can be created out of the immense thermal energy. Early on, I had to write down the equations governing how matter can be created from energy, a result expressed by Einstein’s famous E = mc2 and confirmed in numerous laboratories on Earth. At no point of my calculations did I have any doubt that the same equations applied to distant galaxies, millions of light-years away.
Philosophers debate about whether the “laws of nature” are mere descriptions of nature or necessities of nature, the latter being rules that nature must obey without exception. The Central Doctrine of Science, and the view of most scientists, is that the laws are necessities.
* * *
—
Throughout time, human beings have had a complex and evolving conception of nature. Mother Nature exists in every culture on Earth. She was known as Gaia in ancient Greece, Terra Mater in ancient Rome. Ninsun in ancient Mesopotamia. In India, Gayatri. In Thailand, Phra Mae Thorani. The Māori call her Papatuanuku. In early times, when Nature was personified, she could be angry and vengeful, loving, indifferent. Many religious traditions today continue to associate various deities with nature. The 330 million gods in Hinduism permeate nature. The gods, of course, are not bound by the rules found by science, or any other rules. In such a world view, the boundaries are blurred between the rational and the irrational, the predictable and the unpredictable, the ordinary and the miraculous.
But even in the Judaic-Christian beliefs and traditions, those boundaries are blurred. How else to explain that more than two-thirds of the American public believes in miracles while, at the same time, trusts in science every time they turn the wheel of their car to make a slight correction in direction while traveling at sixty miles per hour on the highway? Having myself lived both in the territory of science (as a physicist) and in the territory of the arts (as a novelist), I would like to offer an opinion about how and why such apparent contradictions and blurrings occur.
The miraculous has meaning only by contrast to the non-miraculous, the ordinary, the normal behavior of nature. In our modern world—with climate-controlled buildings, asphalt highways, artificial turf, computers and iPhones with which we can talk to images of our friends thousands of miles away—it seems that most of us have only a vague idea of what is “natural” and what is “unnatural.” Rarely do we observe the natural world without some mediation by an artificial device. Even in science, astronomers no longer look directly through the eyepiece of a telescope, but instead see images collected by digital devices called CCDs and presented on computer screens.
In recent years, the environmental movement has somewhat increased our awareness of nature. In his book Earth in the Balance, Al Gore writes, “The disharmony in our relationship to the Earth, which stems in part from our addiction to a pattern of consuming ever-larger quantities of the resources of the Earth, is now manifest in successive crises, each marking a more destructive clash between our civilization and the natural world.” But even environmental consciousness has not much changed the disconnection between human beings and nature. Most of us still live in cities where we cannot see the star-spangled dark of the night sky. Most of us heat our houses in winter and cool them in summer, insulating ourselves from the cycles of the seasons.
But there is to me a far more compelling explanation for our ability to hold both the miraculous and the nonmiraculous in our heads at the same time. Many of us, consciously or unconsciously, believe in some kind of a spiritual universe existing alongside the physical universe. Miracles, then, involve an interaction of those two distinct forms of existence.
Let me mention two exceptions to this division. In pantheism, a philosophy popularized by Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century, there’s no separation between the physical and spiritual universes. There is only a single universe. Nature brims with God. Nature has no boundaries. Nature is everything. In such a situation, the so-called scientific laws of nature describe only one aspect of nature. In the other aspect, the divine, events occur that are indescribable and unpredictable by science. Another exception is deism, in which the two universes are distinct, but God does not act in the physical universe. There is no intersection. God set the universe in motion and then sat down. Thus, in deism, miracles cannot occur. Deism, which gained prominence in the Enlightenment, provided a way for people to reconcile their religious beliefs with the rise of modern science.
The more challenging world view is that in which the spiritual and physical universes are distinct but engage with each other from time to time, in the form of miracles, which break the boundaries of an otherwise law-based existence. In this view, beings and events in the spiritual universe sometimes cross over and appear in the physical universe. Prime examples include the parting of the Red Sea, the Resurrection of Christ, and the splitting of the Moon by Mohammad. At a more mundane level, many of us report experiencing “little” miracles in our day-to-day lives, such as memories of existence in a previous life, or premonitions of future events that then happen, or socks that have disappeared into hyperspace.
Even some scientists believe in such crossovers. Owen Gingerich, professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University, said to me: “I believe that our physical universe is somehow wrapped within a broader and deeper spiritual universe, in which miracles can occur. We would not be able to plan ahead or make decisions without a world that is largely law-like. The scientific picture of the world is an important one. But it does not apply to all events.” I would estimate that something like 3 to 5 percent of all scientists share Gingerich’s view. Such scientists—who are clearly in the minority—believe that science and the lawfulness of nature hold true most of the time, but occasionally God intervenes in the physical world and acts in a way that cannot be analyzed by science.
Belief in a spiritual universe, I would suggest, arises to a large extent from a human desire for meaning, meaning both in our individual lives and in the cosmos as a whole. While science provides the psychological comfort of order, rationality, and control, it does not provide meaning. Such deep philosophical questions as “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of my life?” “What is the meaning of this strange cosmos I find myself in?” and such moral questions as “Is it right to kill an enemy soldier in time of war?” and “Is it right to steal in order to feed my family?” cannot be answered by science. Yet these questions are vital to our mental and emotional lives. The spiritual universe is the place we turn to for answers to these questions, the realm that contains eternal truths and guidance, the realm that has some kind of permanent existence, in contrast to the fleeting moment of our mortal lives. In such a realm, logic, rationality, and regularity are not even part of the vocabulary.
