Prospero's Books

Good maps--and poetry

My wife, Bette, and I have been reading George Johnson's Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (see "What I've Been Reading"), set in our new neighborhood, northern New Mexico. (Also reading the book is our niece Andi, a Wisconsin Ph.D. student in plasma physics, in preparation for the great discussions that I know will happen next week when she comes to visit us for a weekend.)

Here we're reading the book in the greatroom of our Rio Rancho home, with its wondrous view, from the west, of the Sandias, a mountain range Johnson mentions often. We interrupt our reading at about 8:15 each evening (the time will get later each day for the next week and a half) to see the otherwise grey-green mountains turned suddenly bright pink, for about five minutes, by the sunset behind us. We then understand why the first Spanish here named the range the Sandias, the Watermelons.

My favorite passage in today's reading is a response to the questions, "When are we doing physics? When are we just conjuring with numbers? We build these systems to represent the world, then we are left to wonder what they mean. What is map, what is territory? Is there really any difference at all?

Johnson continues:

Niels Bohr believed the distinction was meaningless, that all we can hope for is good maps. The problem, he believed, is that the languages, both verbal and mathematical, that have evolved to aid our survival on earth are simply not equipped for navigation in the subatomic realm. "We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry," he told Heisenberg on day as they trekked through the German woods. "The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections" (146).

Bohr makes, I think, the same point I made in yesterday's post: We can never understand "the creative mystery within and beyond the universe--the mystery I choose to call 'God.'" All we can hope for are good maps--and poetry.

The "hand of God"

My favorite science writer, Chet Raymo, has posted, and reflected on, this astonishing photo (click on it to enlarge it).It is an X-ray image of the space near pulsar B1509. He writes, "What do we make of this? A cosmic hand, vast and nebulous, reaching out to quench a fiery inferno. Or is it hurling a luminous discus, a universe in the making? Or conjuring the primeval fire?"

After a fascinating scientific answer to that question, he continues:

Still, we see a hand. Maybe even the hand of God.

It is human nature to see ourselves in the non-human world. Faces in clouds. The Virgin Mary on a water-stained wall. Canals and pyramids on Mars. When the Hubble team published the famous Pillars of Creation photograph, hundreds of people reported seeing the face of Jesus.

Nothing strange about any of this. We necessarily explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, and what is more familiar than ourselves? The gods of all peoples everywhere have generally taken human form. The gods may have multiple arms, or wings, or thrones of gold, or infinite powers, but they are all projections of ourselves. Address God as Father, or Mother, and we are indulging in the same anthropomorphizing as the person who sees a spooky hand in the Chandra image.

Raymo is right--up until that last sentence. To many, of not most, believers, addressing God as Father or Mother is not anthropomorphizing, at least not the "same" anthropomorphizing as seeing a hand in the pulsar photograph or seeing the Virgin Mary on a wall. Instead, addressing God as Father or Mother is a conscious metaphor, a way to describe a relationship with the indescribable.

I have had a human mother and father, and I know that God isn't a parent in that sense. But I also know that the creative mystery within and beyond the universe--the mystery I choose to call "God"--somehow begat me and is somehow connected to me, in a cosmic network that is more like a family than like anything else.

"Farewell lecture"

This spring, my colleague, Richard Turner, and I were asked to give "farewell lectures" on the occasion of our retirement from fulltime university teaching. Mine was about the transparency and opacity of language and the "cosmic" importance of stories. If you'd like to read my lecture, I've posted it on this site.

Brother Bloom

In April, I presented a paper at the Festive Board following a meeting of my Masonic lodge, Lodge Vitruvian in Indianapolis. In the paper, "Brother Bloom," I argue that Leopold Bloom, the central character in Joyce's Ulysses, is clearly a Freemason and that Freemasonry serves three functions in Joyce's depiction of him. I have posted the paper on this site, if you're interested in reading it.

(I hope you won't) Mind the Gap

I hope you'll accept my apologies for the five-month gap in postings. Those five months have been occupied by by my last semester as a full-time faculty member and by a cross-country move. My wife, Bette, and I are now getting settled in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, region.

If you live in northern New Mexico, please let me know; perhaps we'll be able to get together. My new e-mail address is ken [at sign] casa1800.com. And Bette and I have begun a personal and professional site at www.casa1800.com.

Meanwhile, I expect to resume posting very soon.

Thanks for your patience!

Imposing order on chaos

“Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not 

in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.” 

--Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

Prospero's Books Book of the Year

In my library, Ervin Laszlo is tied for fourth most represented author, after Jung, Campbell, and Shakespeare. Since the early 1970s I've been reading almost everything he has published.

Laszlo's 2008 book Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World is (1) a next step in Laszlo's lifetime work on systems theory and evolution, (2) a survey of several recent, albeit controversial, discoveries in physics, (3) an application of these discoveries to the solution of the world's problems, and (4) a description of Laszlo's Club of Budapest and several of its programs. For its thoughtfulness, sweep, and passion, Quantum Shift is the 2008 Prospero's Books Book of the Year.

Laszlo's book joins 2006's Museum of Lost Wonder by Jeff Hoke and 2007's Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies.

Crazier and more of it than we think

Snow

--by Louis MacNeice

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was 

Spawning snow and pink roses against it 

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: 

World is suddener than we fancy it. 

World is crazier and more of it than we think, 

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion 

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel 

The drunkenness of things being various. 

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world 

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes--

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands--

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses. 

The whole story doesn't show

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape--the loneliness of it--the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it--the whole story doesn’t show.


--Andrew Wyeth

(Thanks to Changing Places for the quotation.)

Shift and change

"Physicists may look to a physical particle for answers to questions about the reasons for the existence of mass and its related properties. But the very nature of matter tends to shift and change, making at best a shaky foundation on which to build a solid structure."

--David A. Cornell, "Looking for the 'God particle'--or for Spirit?," Christian Science Sentinel, December 22, 2008, p. 15.