The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

by Alan Lightman

To my mind, it is one of the profound contradictions of human existence that we long for immortality, indeed fervently believe that something must be unchanging and permanent, when all of the evidence in nature argues against us. I certainly have such a longing. Either I am delusional, or nature is incomplete. Either I am being emotional and vain in my wish for eternal life for myself and my daughter (and my wingtips), or there is some realm of immortality that exists outside nature.

So I am delusional. In my continual cravings for eternal youth and constancy, I am being sentimental. Perhaps with the proper training of my unruly mind and emotions, I could refrain from wanting things that cannot be. Perhaps I could accept the fact that in a few short years, my atoms will be scattered in wind and soil, my mind and thoughts gone, my pleasures and joys vanished, my “I-ness” dissolved in an infinite cavern of nothingness. But I cannot accept that fate even though I believe it to be true. I cannot force my mind to go to that dark place. “A man can do what he wants,” said Schopenhauer, “but not want what he wants.”

Suppose I ask a different kind of question: If against our wishes and hopes, we are stuck with mortality, does mortality grant a beauty and grandeur all of its own? Even though we struggle and howl against the brief flash of our lives, might we find something majestic in that brevity? Could there be a preciousness and value to existence stemming from the very fact of its temporary duration?

I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science. The first step in this journey is to state what I will call the central doctrine of science: All properties and events in the physical universe are governed by laws, and those laws are true at every time and place in the universe.

Although scientists do not talk explicitly about this doctrine, and my doctoral thesis adviser never mentioned it once to his graduate students, the central doctrine is the invisible oxygen that most scientists breathe. We do not, of course, know all the fundamental laws at the present time. But most scientists believe that a complete set of such laws exists and, in principle, that it is discoverable by human beings, just as nineteenth-century explorers believed in the North Pole although no one had yet reached it.

We scientists are taught from an early stage of our apprenticeship not to waste time on questions that do not have clear and definite answers. But artists and humanists often don’t care what the answer is because definite answers don’t exist to all interesting and important questions. 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. For many artists and humanists, the question is more important than the answer. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a century ago, “We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.” Then there are also the questions that have definite answers but which we cannot answer. The question of the existence of God may be such a question.

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. The physical universe is subject to rational analysis and the methods of science. The spiritual universe is not. All of us have had experiences that are not subject to rational analysis. Besides religion, much of our art and our values and our personal relationships with other people spring from such experiences. I would argue, again, that the distinction between the spiritual and physical universes closely aligns with the axes of the personal and the impersonal. Events in the physical universe can be recorded with rulers and clocks and lie outside our bodies. Those measurements provide the evidence. Although many of us believe in a spiritual universe that hovers beyond our own personal being, the evidence of that universe is highly personal.

Ernst Gombrich, one of the leading (Western) art historians of the twentieth century, believes that although human beings have a deep psychological attraction to order, perfect order in art is uninteresting. “However we analyse the difference between the regular and the irregular,” he writes, “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. If monotony makes it difficult to attend, a surfeit of novelty will overload the system and cause us to give up.”

Perhaps in asking why the pervasive symmetries in nature are found appealing to the human mind and imitated in our human-made constructions, we are making an erroneous distinction between our minds and the remainder of nature. Perhaps we are all the same stuff. After all, our minds are made of the same atoms and molecules as everything else in nature. The neurons in our brains obey the same physical laws as planets and snowflakes. Most important, our brains developed out of nature, out of hundreds of millions of years of sensory response to sunlight and sound and tactile connection to the world around our bodies. And the architecture of our brains was born from the same trial and error, the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happen in flowers and jellyfish and Higgs particles. Viewed in this way, our human aesthetic is necessarily the aesthetic of nature. Viewed in this way, it is nonsensical to ask why we find nature beautiful. Beauty and symmetry and minimum principles are not qualities we ascribe to the cosmos and then marvel at in their perfection. They are simply what is, just like the particular arrangement of atoms that make up our minds. We are not observers on the outside looking in. We are on the inside too.

Newton’s estimate of the distance to nearby stars was larger than any distance imagined before in human history. Even today, nothing in our experience allows us to relate to it. The fastest most of us have traveled is about five hundred miles per hour, the speed of a jet airplane. If we set out for the nearest star beyond our solar system at that speed, it would take about five million years to reach our destination. If we traveled in the fastest rocket ship ever manufactured on Earth, the trip would take one hundred thousand years, at least a thousand human life spans.

Using Leavitt’s method of measuring great distances, astronomers in the next few years were able to determine the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is a giant congregation of about 200 billion stars. To express such mind-boggling sizes and distances, twentieth-century astronomers adopted a new unit of distance called the light-year, the distance that light travels in a year—about six trillion miles. In these units, the nearest stars are several light-years away. The diameter of the Milky Way has been measured to be about one hundred thousand light-years. In other words, it takes a ray of light one hundred thousand years to travel from one side of the Milky Way to the other.

In the afternoons, I would walk across the courtyard to the humanities building (Building 14 in MIT parlance) and talk to my students about the messy nature of human affairs. The dimly lit alleys of the mind. Greed, jealousy, love thwarted, happiness, revenge, complex and ambiguous motives for action. Students who wrote stories with self-consistent characters, characters whose movements could be predicted and who always acted with rationality and reason, were roundly rebuked for having created nothing more than lifeless hunks of pulp. Real people are unpredictable, I said. A character who always acts rationally is a fraud. Any character you fully understand is as good as dead. Is that clear?

A bit later in the poem, Lucretius says that the mind and the spirit are also made of atoms, so that upon death, just as “mist and smoke disperse into the air, believe that the spirit also is spread abroad and passes away far more quickly and is more speedily dissolved into its atoms.”

“Therefore, death is nothing to us.”

In December 1930, just before a major scientific conference in Europe, the Austrian prodigy Wolfgang Pauli wrote a letter to his colleagues about the troubling dilemma of beta emission. His letter begins: “Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen . . . I have hit upon a desperate remedy to save the . . . law of conservation of energy.”

And on and on. In his essay “Of Miracles” (1748), the Scottish philosopher David Hume writes that “the passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events from which it is derived.” More recently, the French philosopher Michel Foucault has written, “Curiosity pleases me. It evokes . . . a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities.”

Or poet Wallace Stevens, who wrote: “It is the mundo of the imagination in which the imaginative man delights and not the gaunt world of reason.”

Einstein once wrote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

I believe that it is bracing and vital to live in a world in which we do not know all the answers. I believe that we are inspired and goaded on by what we don’t understand. And I hope that there will always be an edge between the known and the unknown, beyond which lies strangeness and unpredictability and life.

Evidently, our impression that solid matter can be localized, that it occupies only one position at a time, is erroneous. The reason that we have not noticed the “wavy” behavior of matter is because such behavior is pronounced only at the small sizes of atoms. At the relatively large sizes of our bodies and other objects that we can see and touch, the wavy behavior of particles is only a tiny effect. But if we were subatomic in size, we would realize that we and all other objects do not exist at one place at a time but instead are spread out in a haze of simultaneous existences at many places at once.