The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

by Alan Lightman

string theory postulates that the smallest constituents of matter are not subatomic particles, like the electron, but extremely tiny one-dimensional “strings” of energy.

ruminations

I don’t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone.

time flies

The evidence seems overly clear. In the summer months, mayflies drop by the billions within twenty-four hours of birth. Drone ants perish in two weeks. Daylilies bloom and then wilt, leaving dead, papery stalks. Forests burn down, replenish themselves, then disappear again. Ancient stone temples and spires flake in the salty air, fracture and fragment, dwindle to spindly nubs, and eventually dissolve into nothing. Coastlines erode and crumble. Glaciers slowly but surely grind down the land. Once, the continents were joined. Once the air was ammonia and methane. Now it is oxygen and nitrogen. In the future, it will be something else. The sun is depleting its nuclear fuel. And just look at our own bodies. In the middle years and beyond, skin sags and cracks. Eyesight fades. Hearing diminishes. Bones shrink and turn brittle.

the second law of thermodynamics.

Anicca, or impermanence, they call it. In Buddhism, anicca is one of the three signs of existence, the others being dukkha, or suffering, and anatta, or non-selfhood. According to the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, when the Buddha passed away, the king deity Sakka uttered the following: “Impermanent are all component things. They arise and cease, that is their nature: They come into being and pass away.” We should not “attach” to things in this world, say the Buddhists, because all things are temporary and will soon pass away. All suffering, say the Buddhists, arises from attachment. If

raison d’être,

religion remains, along with science, one of the dominant forces that shape our civilization.

As part of that struggle, I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.

atheism:

deism.

immanentism:

interventionism

We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong.” We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but in the end we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing.

Ideas in a novel or emotion in a symphony are complicated with the intrinsic ambiguity of human nature. That is why we can never fully understand why the highly sensitive Raskolnikov brutally murdered the old pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, whether Plato’s ideal form of government could ever be realized in human society, whether we would be happier if we lived to be a thousand years old.

Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves.

Einstein’s law of gravity does not include quantum physics,

“Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translations into formulas.”

The sacred books of religion, another kind of religious knowledge, are sometimes treated as grand metaphors, sometimes as literal truth, sometimes as teachings of inspired human beings, sometimes as the direct words of God.

archangel Gabriel

It is sometimes useful to distinguish between a physical universe and a spiritual universe, with the physical universe being the constellation of all physical matter and energy that scientists study, and the spiritual universe being the “unseen order” that James refers to, the territory of religion, the nonmaterial and eternal things that most humans have believed throughout the ages.

For me, there is room for both a spiritual universe and a physical universe, just as there is room for both religion and science. Each universe has its own power. Each has its own beauty, and mystery.

are round. Starfish have five equally spaced arms, each

“Higgs boson,”

construct theories that embody profound symmetry.

(The four fundamental forces, as understood by modern physicists, are the gravitational force; the electromagnetic force; the “strong force,” which traps the subatomic particles at the centers of atoms; and the “weak force,” which is responsible for certain kinds of radioactive decay of atoms.)

Weinberg, arguably the greatest apostle of symmetry in the history of science, believes that symmetry principles are more fundamental than matter and energy and force.

We believe that, if we ask why the world is the way it is and then ask why that answer is the way it is, at the end of this chain of explanations we shall find a few simple principles of compelling beauty.

All theoretical scientists—those who work principally with mathematics—delight in the beauty of mathematics.

quantum chromodynamics,

And it is hard to imagine any universe without the order of mathematics and logic.

A mathematical theorem says that a sphere is the particular geometrical shape that has the least surface area for a given volume.

equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons.

Gaps would defeat the principle of economy.

conjectured that the hexagonal grid is the unique geometrical shape that divides a surface into equal cells with the smallest total perimeter.

The same researchers propose that symmetrical stimuli from the flowers are more easily processed by the

visual system in the bee brain—that is, they require less neurological apparatus. Again, the principle of economy at work.

symmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in. The search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it, must help us make sense of the world around us, just as we find satisfaction in the repetition of the seasons and the reliability of friendships.

although human beings have a deep psychological attraction to order, perfect order in art is uninteresting.

Asymmetric elements in paintings or buildings are most effective when superimposed against a background of symmetry.

Perhaps nature is being the painter when she occasionally violates complete symmetry with irregular coastlines and the amorphous shapes of clouds.

the world of the living is considered to be in symmetrical balance to the world of the dead.

The first is a result of economy and mathematics, the second of psychology and aesthetics.

our human aesthetic is necessarily the aesthetic of nature. Viewed in this way, it is nonsensical to ask why we find nature beautiful.

Looking around in a full circle, all we could see was water, extending out and out in all directions until it joined with the sky.

by comparing its intrinsic luminosity to how bright it appears in the sky, you can infer its distance,

To a giant cosmic being, leisurely strolling through the universe and not limited by distance or time, galaxies would appear as illuminated mansions scattered about the dark countryside of space.

That is, as we build bigger and bigger telescopes, sensitive to fainter and fainter light, will we continue to see objects farther and farther away—like the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Yongle, who surveyed his new palace in the Forbidden City and walked from room to room to room, never reaching the end?

这句还挺浪漫的

Are the “little red dots” on Illingworth’s space maps part of the same landscape that Wordsworth and Thoreau described, part of the same visceral ethos as mountains and trees, part of the same cycle of birth and demise that orders our lives, part of our personal physical and emotional conception of the world that we live in? Or are such things instead digitized abstractions, silent and untouchable, akin to us only in their (hypothesized) makeup of atoms and molecules? And to what extent are we human beings, living on a small planet orbiting one star among billions of stars, part of that same nature?

Pythagorean theorem,