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.