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I don't know if I was born near-sighted. I assume I was. But when you are two, or three, or four years old, there is no great harm, and perhaps some benefit, in being so inclined. I remember being able to see things that enchant a lad so young with great clarity; the veins in a leaf, the trails of ants and the paths of raindrops on a window. School, however, valued more formal skills. I remember making a fist over my eye, thumb against my cheek and my little finger creating a tiny opening through which I could peek. When I pointed my little "fist-scope" at the chalkboard in the front of the room, the fuzzy letters on it became discernibly clearer. No doubt my teachers observed my antics and mentioned them to my parents. Not long after, I must have acquired my first pair of glasses. They have been with me, in one form or another, ever since.
I mentioned the possibility of near-sightedness be a benefit. Let me explain. The "uncorrected" near-sighted eye focuses much like a microscope. I have always been able to see things a mere inch or two in front of me with great clarity. So all my life I have been naturally in the presence of a focused reality that those with "normal" vision can observe only with the aid of some artificial - and usually awkward - magnification device. Of course, I needed glasses to see the world as others saw it, but those were common enough - as was, perhaps, the world they revealed.
The point, I guess, is that all my life I have been immersed in a world in which "focus" shifted often, and often radically. Which leads, naturally, to the Large Hadron Collider and the questions the work there raises regarding the nature of the universe, truth and reality.
I have often admitted to being a "physics and cosmology groupie." I read every tidbit I can find about new particles, or black holes, or multiverses, or gravitational waves with the same delight with which fans greeted the latest revelations at Hogwarts or among the nobles of Westeros and Essos. But lately something has been bothering me, and it has to do with that whole issue of focus. It all came to a head when I stumbled across the 2013 documentary Particle Fever the other night - I think it popped up on PBS. Anyhow, the film chronicles the pursuit at CERN to use the LHC to search for, and ultimately detect the illusive Higgs boson. The film ends with the victorious detection of the Higgs, and yet our physicist-protagonists seemingly genuinely caught between the elation that naturally accompanied the discovery and a fear that there was enough wiggle room in the data that they might not have gotten it exactly right, leaving the standard model of physics that rests on these various particles somehow flawed.
It is an axiom in science that, in addition to any answers provided by a particular experiment, new questions are also produced. So one would expect this to be the case with the "Higgs at CERN" experiment. But, at least as portrayed in this film, there was a greater level of "post-results anxiety” than one might expect. It was almost as if the scientists felt that their results didn’t so much reflect the nature of the universe, as determine it. It is an understandable warping of reality. When you spend an incredible amount of time and money peering at existence at a particular “focal length” it is easy to believe that what you see at that focal length is “truth.”
It strikes me that we have probably already captured all the particles. "The problem, dear Brutus, is not in the particles, but in ourselves." We need to stop racking the lenses, stop concentrating as CERN seems to have done, on a rather narrow range of reactions that would reveal the Higgs particle. [I date myself with that analogy. Back in the early days of television, there were no zoom lenses. Instead there was a turret on the front of the camera that had four fixed-focus lenses. So if you want to go from a close-up to a wide angle shot, you would tell the camera operator to “rack the lenses” to whatever focal length was required for the next shot. And the operator would rotate the turret so that the desired fixed-focus lens snapped into position. It was called "racking the lens.”]
If, instead of racking through a set of lenses, one examines a specific moment with the equivalent of zoom lens, slowly observing the moment at every possible focal length, then every particle will eventually come into focus when the particle and our field of observation match. It seems to the layman that most theories of particle physics assert that the all particles, even those quite rare, have passed through our various collectors. The recurring problem, apparently, is that the event needs to occur within the depth of field of a "racked" lens and we needed to have our collector's eyes open at that unique moment. Hence the need for the common "racked lens" process described above. But if we could use a zoom lens model, every event that has been captured by the collector will eventually slide into focus and confirm or redirect our perception of reality.
But, - and this is the point that I keep coming back to - whatever we discover through those various observational processes will not “unmake" the universe. The universe is what it is, what it is, what it is. Or as, somewhat ironically, the doxology asserts, "It is now, and ever shall be, world without end." Defining what the "it" is, is of course, the fierce focus that drives physicists and cosmologists. They, seemingly more than theologists, are turning themselves in knots trying to throw a rope around just what the “it” is, that is now and ever has been. “It” is obviously, more than just our little globe. But is “it" more than just our little universe? And the question drives bigger and bigger colliders and telescopes. And I read about them with great interest.
Still, my concern is that the intensity of the question of what it is has drawn our attention away from the equally, if not more important, question of what does it mean? If form and function are inherently interwoven, what does the form of the universe mean for the function of the individual in the universe? What the LHC and similar undertakings teach us about the nature of the universe will not change the nature of the universe, but those insights do have the potential to change our understanding of ourselves. The danger is that if the investigations continue to use fixed focus lenses, we could just slide past meaning.
And the consideration of that danger bounces us back to The Art Institute of Chicago and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges-Pierre Seurat. It is a huge painting, about 10’ by 7’, and when you look at it from across the room it appears a softly dated painting of exactly what title indicates - gentry enjoying a bucolic afternoon on an island park. And that is what it is - sort of. But it also one of the finest extant examples of pointillism, the process - later brought to its current pinnacle in HDTV - of creating an image from thousands of tiny dots of color. If you get close enough to A Sunday Afternoon to make the guards nervous, the little dots of paint are clearly visible, and seemingly bear no resemblance or relationship to the scene we glimpsed from across the salon. It is only when we step away from the painting and re-adjust our focus that the meaning of the painting becomes clear. Is it so absurd to assume that the same might well be true of the universe? Might concentrating on the tiny dots cause us to miss the meaning that is better understood at a different focal length? Or through a perusal of existence simultaneously through a variety of focal lengths, as is possible in a “light field camera”?
Forgive me, but yet another analogy for both a light field camera and the universe. Imagine that you are slicing a salami. The salami is, oh say, a foot long and 3 inches in diameter. Your slices are an eighth of an inch thick. So, depending on your knife skills, you end up with 90 some slices of salami. The whole salami is analogous to the universe, and each slice of the salami is analogous to an observation of the universe made at a particular focal length through a specific collector. You pull out a particular slice and look at it. The pattern of light and dark captured in that slice paints a picture of the universal salami observed at a particular focal length - a “rack-focus image”, if you will. Cosmology, to date, seems to be dominated by the “single slice” model. The particle folks at CERN and elsewhere, the quantum mechanics aficionados, fans of super massive blackholes and gravitational waves, all seem to fall in love with their particular slice of the universal salami; and, as is true with any obsession, the object of our obsession often blinds us to everything else: we cannot see the salami for the slice.
A light-field camera presents us with a different model. A light-field camera gathers optical information from all the space in front of the lens, simultaneously exposing all the slices of the salami, if you will. This allows us to see the whole universal salami at one time. Your observations are not artificially restricted to one, or a few slices, of the universal salami. Rather, we can examine the whole thing. And, it is, I believe, the patterns discernible in such an all encompassing view of the universe that stands the best chance of yielding information relevant to assertions regarding what the universe means.
Which returns us to the notion of form follows function. If we can discern the whole salami, then we come to know the form of the whole universe, and if form and function are inherently linked, then knowledge of one allows us to explore some assumptions about the other.
It is highly unlikely that any physicist started out to be a one slice scientist. Physicists, and philosophers, tend to be “big picture” people. However, it is often their intellectual journey; the results in the lab, the view from the telescope, the data from the collector, the idea of absolute truth, or the dimensions of beauty that can trap them in a one-slice obsession. But those who avoid that slippery slope are able to maintain their focus on the idea of the whole salami, or, as both physicists and philosophers are more inclined to call it, a theory of everything.
The theory of everything that I find most satisfying as a tool in grasping both what the universe is, and what it means is String Theory or M-Theory. An in-depth explanation of the theory would make this already incredibly long post even longer. Let me point you to a couple of references. Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, is an excellent work for the serious layperson. My own work, The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart, is a further distillation of string theory that also expands the theory to consider the link between string theory and human thought and behavior. It has the additional attraction of being free at Feedbooks.com :-)
For this post let us only consider the very kernel of string theory: Everything in the universe, from the inconceivably immense “Large Quasar Group” to the equally mid-boggling tiny string itself, is made up of indivisible vibrating units call strings. The physical nature of the universe then is dictated by the relationships among vibrating strings. In English we call uniquely vibrating strings notes, clusters of notes become chords, chords in sequence become music. String theory then asserts that we, and everything else in the universe and, yes, the universe itself is made of music. So as we consider the universal salami, and how each slice informs the whole, we would be well advised to consider harmony and discord as the core of both a universal physical and existential discussion.
String theory provides the physical facet to accompany an existential mandate which, together, define a transcendent theory of everything. And that mandate is Harmony. If the mandate were discord, the universe would not have formed after the Big Bang. The micro-second of inflation that formed the cosmos would, in a discord dominated event, have continued an uncontrolled expansion, spewing the nascent universe out of existence. Harmony, the inclination to gather notes into chords and chords into compositions, pulled the strings together and began the composition of the universe. And as I follow the findings of both theoretical and experimental physicists, their results appear - on a variety of levels - to constantly point ultimately towards harmony and away from discord.
So I am willing to assert that harmonic unity is the form of the universe. What then is its function? First, as we obviously move more clearly into the realm of philosophy, I suppose it is possible to imagine a discordant, meaningless universe. Notes without melody, sound without music. That is a deeply dark perspective and one that is, for me, disproved by simply being, and being mindful of the world that surrounds my being. In a discordant world my behavior would have no impact, no meaning. While we all certainly have brushes with such despondency, we also realize that simple actions can increase the harmony that is the universe. And yes, I am talking about little things. Things like acts of “undeserved kindness”; letting the person who is driving with their horn take the parking place, letting your partner choose what to watch on TV, cleaning up the kitchen when it isn’t "your turn." These seem tiny things when compared to the "super-massive black hole gravitational waves" slice of the universal salami, but when compared to the tiny strings themselves, these are world-altering events. It is by such little acts that we - as unique individuals on an unassuming planet in a minor galaxy - assist in the harmonic construction of the universe. To broaden a currently popular meme: all lives matter, all actions matter.
So our harmonic acts demonstrate how sentience is manifested in existence. And if the universe is itself an overwhelming manifestation of harmony, do we not have to at least consider the notion that the universe is itself sentient? Yes, we do. But not right now.
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