Probable impossibilities, p.9
Probable Impossibilities, page 9
I take a step back, blink. But there is only the silent, dead air. There was a house here. There was a cosmology of lives lived here, meals of fried chicken and mashed potatoes at the wood table in the kitchen, closets of clothes, drawers, homework by the light of the maroon double lamp, cops and robbers games with my brothers, my father shaving in the morning, evenings watching TV. I try to put the house back where it was, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the closets, my father practicing his guitar, my mother dressing in front of her long mirror. I try to will it into solidity. It was here.
Some careless god has cut the ribbon of my life. The sixty-five years of the past, and the remaining years of my future. The piece that was the past has slipped away into black eternity, or perhaps into nothingness. Until this moment, I was sure that the past was still present, caught in the spaces between things, in photos, in books, in places my body had been. I try to spool back time in my mind. I walk to a spot near a disheveled azalea. Here, in this empty corner of air, I remember waking up with a bad dream and getting into my brother’s bed beside him. Our beds were six feet apart, a desk against the wall, a closet, a white woolly rug on the floor. Here, where I am standing at this moment. And over there, I remember helping my father get the boat paddles out for a trip to the lake. Second floor. A closet with a dangling bulb for light. And there, the mahogany secretary with the leather-bound books, where my mother wrote letters in her back-slanted script. I can see her sitting there at the desk in her bathrobe, twitching her legs nervously under her chair.
I am trying to remember where I came from this morning—another city, another house, my wife, what precisely she said as I packed my small bag. I try to picture her face, her hair, what clothes she was wearing. I try to remember what we ate for dinner last night. Partial images slide through my mind, a scattering of words spoken. Neurobiologists say that memory isn’t the replay of a video camera, but instead a pastiche of neuronal fragments gathered from here and there, wandering smells, oddly cut visual scraps, translucent experiences laid on top of one another. It’s all in the electrical currents and flow of particular molecules. Neurobiologists say that connections between the billions of neurons in a human brain change over time. If so, the universe shifts and shifts and shifts in our minds.
I am remembering wrong. I wish that my brothers were here. I want to see the people who lived in my past, the piece of the ribbon that has slipped away. We could compare testimonies. They lived in this house. But their heads are not mine. They have their own billions of neurons with shifting connections. Some philosophers claim that we know nothing of the external world outside our minds—nothing compared to what sways in our minds, in the long, twisting corridors of memory, the vast mental rooms with half-open doors, the ghosts chattering beneath the chandeliers of imagination.
If there’s a mismatch between what you remember and what you see ten feet away, which one is real? Chairs. Smells. Brothers. What do you know? How do you prove that the drawer that you opened this morning is the same drawer you closed at night? And the billions of neurons go spinning their tales.
I remember a moment from when I was twelve years old, as I watched my father get measured for a shirt. His tailor had come out to the house and met him in the middle bedroom downstairs—about ten feet from where I stand now. My father would have been forty-one years old, a slight man with handsome, delicate features. The tailor wrapped his tape measure around my father’s neck and they talked casually as if they were old friends, laughing together. I strained to hear the exact words. I had never seen this tailor before, but he and my father were on such easy terms with each other that it brought a calm over me. A world where a friendly tailor comes out to the house to measure my father for a new shirt is a safe world. Is the world still safe? I am standing there now. I am standing here now. I am waiting, and listening.
I am imagining it all. Perhaps even myself. Or rather, the sense that I am a self, something other than the massing of atoms and molecules, the tinglings of neurons. From all of those chemical and electrical tremblings, the illusion of consciousness. “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion,” wrote Emerson. For the moment, my body has left me. Physicists say that time is relative. Here, in this space where there once was a house, time has also dissolved. I’ve been tricked and defeated by time.
A landscaping truck is coming up the driveway. It parks. Two men get out of the truck with shovels, plants, bags of manure. One of them gives me a puzzled look, as if to ask why I’m here, then ignores me and sets about spreading the fertilizer and digging into the soil. Perhaps I am not here. I look at the men and imagine that I can see right through them as I see through the slab of air where the house used to be.
These guys have no conception of what was once here. They go about their business digging and placing the plants, and all they see is an empty lot. Their neurons are different from mine. They have their own cabinets of memories. Perhaps at this moment they are thinking of their own gardens and yards, places they’ve been, girlfriends and wives. I wonder if I’ll remember these two men tomorrow. They are brief, here at this moment. For a couple of days, I might remember them as they seem now, wearing jeans and boots and dark glasses, gloves, one smoking a cigarette. The picture will grow dimmer and dimmer, until it is gone, lost like the house that was here—part of the past that does not exist.
I am back in the restaurant of a few hours ago. It is all here as I remember it. The people typing at their laptops. The blue flames in the gas fireplace. A piece of paper in my pocket says that I am flying away tomorrow. Someone I used to know sits at a table. I think it is him. “David,” I say. Perhaps he does not hear me.
In Defense of Disorder
The Buddhist monks from Namgyal monastery in India engage in a ritual that involves the creation of intricate patterns of colored sand, known as mandalas. As large as three meters across, each mandala requires a couple of weeks of painstaking work, in which several monks in orange robes bend over a flat surface and scratch metallic vials. The vials extrude sand from tiny spouts, a few grains at a time, onto areas bounded by carefully measured chalk marks. Slowly, slowly, the ancient pattern is made. After the thing is completed, the monks say a prayer, pause a moment, and then sweep it all up in five minutes.
Although I haven’t witnessed this particular ritual, I’ve seen a number of mandalas during my travels in Southeast Asia. For Buddhists, the creation and destruction of a mandala symbolizes the impermanence of Earthly existence. But the ritual also reminds me of the profound symbiosis of order and disorder at the core of our world.
Somewhat surprisingly, nature not only requires disorder but thrives on it. Planets, stars, life, even the direction of time all depend on disorder. And we human beings as well. Especially if, along with disorder, we group together such concepts as randomness, novelty, spontaneity, free will, and unpredictability. We might put all of these ideas in the same psychic basket. Within the oppositional category of order, we can gather together notions such as systems, law, reason, rationality, pattern, predictability. While the different clusters of concepts are not mirror images of one another, like twilight and dawn, they have much in common.
Our primeval attraction to both order and disorder shows up in modern aesthetics. We like symmetry and pattern, but we also relish a bit of asymmetry. The British art historian Ernst Gombrich believed that although human beings have a deep psychological attraction to order, perfect order in art is uninteresting. “However we analyze the difference between the regular and the irregular,” he wrote in The Sense of Order (1979), “we must ultimately be able to account for the most basic fact of aesthetic experience, the fact that delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion.” Too much order, we lose interest. Too much disorder, and there’s nothing to be interested in. It’s something about the human mind. My wife, a painter, always puts a splash of color in the corner of her canvas, off balance, to make the painting more appealing. Evidently, our visual sweet spot lies somewhere between boredom and confusion, predictability and newness.
Human beings have a conflicted relationship to this order-disorder nexus. We are alternately attracted from one to the other. We admire principles and laws and order. We embrace reasons and causes. We seek predictability. Some of the time. On other occasions, we value spontaneity, unpredictability, novelty, unconstrained personal freedom. We love the structure of Western classical music, as well as the freewheeling runs or improvised rhythms of jazz. We are drawn to the symmetry of a snowflake, but we also revel in the amorphous shape of a high-riding cloud. We appreciate the regular features of purebred animals, while we’re also fascinated by hybrids and mongrels. We might respect those who manage to live sensibly and lead upright lives. But we also esteem the mavericks who break the mold, and we celebrate the wild, the unbridled, and the unpredictable in ourselves. We are a strange and contradictory animal, we human beings. And we inhabit a cosmos equally strange.
You can see the creative tension of the order-disorder nexus in our science versus our art. In his law of floating bodies, formulated in 250 BC, Archimedes prefigured the coming age of science when he expressed one of the first quantitative laws of nature: “Any body wholly or partially immersed in a fluid experiences an upward force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.” In other words, a body sinks just to the level where the weight of the displaced fluid equals the weight of the body. To verify this elegant law, Archimedes would have done the experiment over and over with various objects of different shapes and sizes, and with different liquids such as water and mercury. (Scales were available in the Greek agora for weighing wheat, salted fish, glass, copper, and silver.)
Evidently, the world of masses and forces was logical, rational, quantifiable, predictable. Yet two centuries earlier, Socrates—that wandering sage whom Plato and others described as resembling a satyr more than a man, short and stocky, with a pug nose and bulging eyes—celebrates the creative power of madness: “He who, having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.” Creativity has always been associated with novelty, surprise, and what psychologists and neuroscientists call divergent thinking: the ability to explore many different avenues and solutions to a problem in a spontaneous and non orderly fashion. Convergent thinking, by contrast, is the more logical and orderly step-by-step approach to a problem. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré in 1910 described the gestation of one of his mathematical discoveries as a dance between the two:
For 15 days, I strove to prove that there could not be any [mathematical] functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning…
Undoubtedly, some of our creativity is ignited by a synthesis of convergence and divergence, working together in symphony.
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The critical role of disorder in nature was not articulated until two thousand years after Socrates praised the mad poet. The task fell to the German physicist Rudolf Clausius. He was born in 1822 in Pomerania, a region split between Germany and Poland, and educated at the University of Berlin. Perhaps under the influence of his religious father, a clergyman, Clausius led a principled life. “A chief characteristic was his sincerity and fidelity” was how his brother, Robert, described Clausius at his death in 1888. “Every kind of exaggeration was opposed to his nature.”
Like Einstein, Clausius was a theoretical physicist—that is, all of his work, including his seminal work on disorder, consisted of mathematical feats performed with pencil and paper. Clausius’s great paper on disorder, “On the Moving Force of Heat” (1850), was published the same year that he became a professor of physics at the Royal Artillery and Engineering School in Berlin. In that paper, Clausius showed that change in the physical world is associated with the inevitable movement of order to disorder. Indeed, without the potential of disorder, nothing in the cosmos would ever change—like a row of upright dominoes held rigidly in place, or like a completed Buddhist mandala locked in a bank vault, safe from the brooms of the monks of Namgyal. “Heat” occurs in the title of Clausius’s paper because increasing disorder is often associated with the transfer of heat from hot bodies to cold—but the concept is more general. In a later paper, Clausius coined the term entropy as a quantitative measure of disorder. The word comes from the Greek ἐν (en), meaning “in”, and τροπή (tropē), meaning “transformation.” It is the increase of entropy that is linked to transformation, movement, change in the world. The more disorder, the more entropy. The last two sentences of Clausius’s 1850 paper:
1. The energy of the Universe is constant.
2. The entropy of the Universe tends toward a maximum.
Order inevitably yields to disorder, and entropy increases until it cannot increase any further. It is this movement that drives the world. Clean rooms become dusty. Temples slowly crumble. As we grow older, bones grow brittle. Stars eventually burn out, emptying their hot energy into the coldness of space—but while doing so, they provide warmth and life to surrounding planets. We live off this relentless increase of disorder.
Even something as fundamental as the direction of time is governed by the movement of order to disorder, as I discussed in “What Came Before the Big Bang?” Because everything passes from order to disorder as we march toward the future. One might say that the forward direction of time is the increase in disorder. Indeed, without these changes, we’d have no way of telling one instant from the next. There would be no clocks, no flights of birds, no leaves slipping through the air as they dropped from trees, no breathing out and in. The universe would be a still photo for all of eternity.
Disorder is also the answer to the profound question Why is there something rather than nothing? (Such questions keep physicists and philosophers up at night.) Why does material of any kind exist, rather than pure energy? From a scientific perspective, the question relates to the existence of antiparticles, predicted in 1931 and then discovered in 1932. Every subatomic particle, such as the electron, has an antiparticle twin—identical to the first, except with opposite electrical charge and certain other qualities. Which of the pair we call the “particle” and which we call the “antiparticle” is a matter of convention, like the North and South Poles. When they meet, particles and their antiparticles annihilate each other, leaving nothing but pure energy.
If there were an equal number of particles and their antiparticles in the infant universe, as one would expect in a completely symmetrical universe, all matter would have been obliterated billions of years ago, leaving nothing but pure energy. No stars, no planets, no people—or any other solid material. So why are we here? Why haven’t all the particles disappeared along with their antiparticle partners?
The answer to this physicists’ conundrum came in 1964. In very delicate experiments, we discovered that particles and antiparticles do not behave in exactly the same way. Rather, there is a slight asymmetry in how they interact with other particles, so that immediately after the creation of the universe, particles and their antiparticles were not produced and destroyed in equal numbers. After the mass annihilations of particles with their antiparticle partners, some particles would remain, like a surplus of boys sitting on the bench at a school dance. Those remaining particles and the asymmetry that produced them is why we exist.
Disorder isn’t present only in the minutiae of how matter organizes itself. It also runs deep within the structures of life itself. Perhaps the most well known example of disorder in biology is the shuffling of genes—both by mutation and by the transfer of genes from viruses and other organisms. Through these random processes, living organisms try out different bodily architectures that might have never been sampled otherwise. These spins of the genetic roulette wheel aren’t planned, and their outcomes can’t be known in advance. But without them, biology would be stuck with a small number of inflexible designs. Many organisms would die out, unable to adapt to changing environmental conditions.
Another significant way that disorder makes itself known in biology occurs via a process called diffusion. Here, a lumpy gob of matter or energy is automatically smoothed out by the random collisions of atoms and molecules. You can see this for yourself if you pour a bucket of hot water into a cool bath. At first, the bath will have a hot region surrounded by a cool region. But the hot water will quickly mix with the cool until the bath comes to a uniform temperature. That’s diffusion. To paraphrase Clausius, diffusion doesn’t cost any energy, but it increases disorder—in this case, mixing heat—which drives transformation and change. Without random molecular collisions, diffusion would not occur. The hot water would remain at one side of the tub and the cool water on the other.
Diffusion is a key mechanism for transporting vital substances throughout the body. Take oxygen, the essential gas for energy production. With each inhalation, we produce a high concentration of oxygen in our lungs. The tiny blood vessels embedded in the lungs have a relatively low amount of oxygen. That allows the vital gas to “diffuse” from the lungs to the blood, and then, for the same reason, from the blood to individual cells throughout the body. Such directed movement results from random collisions, tending to transport oxygen molecules from areas of high to low oxygen concentration. Without random bumps and knocks, oxygen in the lungs would remain trapped in the lungs, and the cells of the body would suffocate.
