They call Missouri the "show me" state. But in reality, as a species, we all live in a state of "show me." It has always been that way. If we couldn't see it, well, it just couldn't be. So the stars were painted on the inside of a sphere we could almost see. The sun and moon rotated around that same sphere, with a consistency we could visualize with constructions like Stonehenge scattered throughout the globe - with us naturally at the center of the sphere. But the sphere was as far as we could see, so beyond it - nothing.
The same was true of the oceans, with the exception of the imaginings of grog-addled fishermen, the world stopped at the horizon. Between the beach and the horizon there was empty water and, turning the other way, beyond the high mountains lived dragons. What we could not see, we filled with myth and fantasy.
But that existential stasis was always being challenged by another of our internal drivers - curiosity. And among those who accepted the emptiness beyond the end of sight were others who wondered, as Louis L'Amor put it, what lay beyond the blue mountains, past the ocean's horizon, even behind the sphere that held the stars , the sun and the moon?
So those hardy souls set forth to see what they could find - struggling over the mountains and tackling the seas with seemingly death-inviting crafts. But curiosity took an even more insistent hand in the 1500s and 1600s when the precursors of our millennium's garage tinkerers, named Jobs and Wozniak, were presaged by Hans Lippershey, Zacharias Janssen, and Galileo Galilei.
Restless minds who began to mess around with lenses, and tubes and mirrors and point them at the star-studded sphere. And so planets became real because we could see them. Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek took that same paraphernalia and peered through their tubes into the realm of the very small and spotted the tiny creatures of microbiology.
And so it has gone on until we now loft our telescopes; James Webb, Hubble and Chandra X, beyond our imagined sphere, peering ever further out into space and back into time - seeing more, knowing more believing in more. While particle colliders like the large hadron collider (LHC) at Cern and its kin push Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek's insights into the small past anything they might have dreamed of - new realms revealed to our senses and thus made real.
So what is left? There is no doubt, given resources and a renewed political will, our fascination with the stars will remain. But I wonder if we will put the same effort, time, and resources that we have invested in examining the very large, the cosmos, into exploring the very small?
Perhaps it is that particular slice of curiosity that have made reflections on strings and harmony my recent companions during the wee hours after midnight. But before I walk you down that particular rabbit hole let me refresh you with a really brief and incomplete summary of string theory. [If you want a reasonably readable work by one of the foremost figures in the field google The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. For my own long yet more simplistic take on the issue, drop me a note. I think I still have a copy of The God Chord: Physics in the Landscape of the Heart on my backup drive somewhere.]
Basically, string theory asserts that the universe - everything - is composed of infinitely small, tiny, tiny, tiny, indivisible into anything smaller - vibrating strings. It has always been my contention that vibrating strings, no matter how tiny, make music. Consider all the stringed instruments, consider the wind instruments whose voice depends on tiny string-laden vibrating currents of air, consider the ear drums whose vibrations allow us to hear anything. Wherever there are vibrations there is sound - or as I prefer - music.
However, it is music that we cannot hear. Just as we could not see beyond the ocean's horizon, just as we had to imagine a sphere to give the heavenly bodies a locus, we cannot perceive these tiny strings of string theory, because we have yet to devise the technology that will reveal them, will make them "real." So currently we can only imagine their pervasive influence on our worlds and on our lives and hope we do a bit better than our ancestors who hung the stars on an imagined sphere and watched the stars, moon and sun revolve around us - the center of the universe.
Again I am going to save you the winding rambles of The God Chord, and give you the Cliff Notes versions of the assumptions I make there. They should not surprise you if you remember that my personal four-part existential mantra is: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm. [And yes, I realize I often fall short . . . . ] But I promised Cliff Notes, so:
Harmony: Strings naturally combine with other strings that share their vibrations - characteristics we would hear as tone, pitch, etc. -all those characteristics that we ascribe to music - to create larger harmonic entities. Think of our bodies. Within each of our billions and billions of cells resides our DNA, beloved of police procedural mysteries. And within every telltale snippet of DNA reside more billions of strings - all humming along in harmony.
Discord: It is important to remember that every entity in existence is internally harmonic. A slug no less than an orchid. But those harmonic entities exist in a universe of constant change, and so will undoubtedly occasionally encounter entities whose harmony differs from their own. The result is discord. Consider two orchestras sharing the same stage, but playing different scores. Great way to empty an auditorium.
So further consider, if you will, the possible result of such discord in the world around us. I will choose to ignore the pervasive discord we read about in the newspapers or see on our various screens. That discussion would take us far afield from these Cliff Notes. Instead let us consider our own lives and our interactions with other people, internally consistent, hence unique harmonic entities - made up of their own billions and billions of strings, within their DNA, within all the cells of their bodies. Whew.
First, in situation A, as Oscar Hammerstein II put it, "some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger across a crowded room, and some how you know, you know even then, that somewhere you'll see her again and again." You fall in love. In my Cliff Notes version of string theory - your billions of strings are in harmony with your now beloved. Love at first sight.
However, in situation B you meet someone who - in scientific terms - just creeps you out. They may be quite ordinary - face, form, voice, demeanor - all those easily observable cues that you might find acceptable - possibly even attractive. But there is just something . . . . yech. And that something, I would contend, would be billions of strings that are discordant with yours. Their strings are the orchestra playing the other symphony.
OK, those are not outrageous scenarios. Ones most of us have experienced to some degree. But they are not the ones keeping me up during the tiny hours. Rather it is the implications of strings functioning outside humanity that keeps me tossing and turning.
The number of studies examining interactions in the animal kingdom continue to multiply. Primates, elephants, horses, dogs, even those haughty cats - take your pick. They all seem to possess interaction patterns that can be, without straining credulity, seen as analogous to the humans in the harmony/discord examples above. But wait, it gets weirder.
In the interest of Cliff Notes I'm going to skip - inexcusably - the insects who make up the mass of life around us. Dancing honeybees, carnivorous bugs with intricate masquerades to attract prey. Just too much there that I could, if allowed, fit into a discourse among strings. So, I'll move on.
What is the largest living organism in the world? Blue whale? Wrong. But a good guess. Here I'm going to defer to Google and give you its take:
"The largest living organism on Earth is the "Humongous Fungus" (Armillaria ostoyae). Located in the Malheur National Forest in Oregon, this single fungal network spans approximately 2,385 acres (3.5 square miles) and weighs an estimated 35,000 tons.
By Area: The largest single organism by physical area is a massive seagrass meadow (Posidonia australis) in Shark Bay, Australia. It covers roughly 180 square kilometers (about 44,500 acres) and is a single, self-cloned plant.
By Mass (Plants): "Pando" is a clonal colony of quaking aspen trees in Utah that share a single, massive root system. Spanning 106 acres, its collective weight is estimated at 6,000 tons, making it the heaviest plant organism."
Yeah. There is a humungus fungus among us, and a couple of mind-blowing plants. All of which are, at their absolutely most basic level, made up of unique entities we have never seen, heard, smelled, touched or tasted - yet, confusingly - make up everything we have ever seen, heard, smelled, touched or tasted. Yes, strings.
I wonder what would result were we able to perceive strings? Sense them in some way? "Oh, hi there! I see you are a C-sharp , 8-beats to the bar! Me too! Would you like to get dinner?" No, that's silly.
But would sensing existence on that string level allow for the degree of change made possible by the other significant insights resulting from an enhanced ability to see and understand the world around, and inside, us? NASA, CRISPER, vaccines, painless surgery, the Internet unfolding the world across our screens, instant communication, atomic power, and on, and on.
The idea intrigues me. Would medicine advance on the string level? "Oh, there is a cancerous growth here. It's a basic discordance. We simply need to re-tune the strings in this area." "Whoa! Broke that ankle skiing? Just lie back and we will get a string wrap for you. You'll be back on the slopes tomorrow. Try to stay off those black diamond runs! OK?" Not totally absurd bits of conjecture.
But some other things intrude in the tiny hours. Strings beyond sentience. Art that speaks to us. Think of your favorite painting, sculpture, song, poem, novel. It really does "speak" to you. But how? Is beauty, like falling in love, a concordance of strings? Did the artist arrange color, form, sound, words in such a way that the strings underlying those elements [remember everything is made up of strings] result in a construction that is harmonic with others? And are "classics" harmonic with a wide range of "audiences" over many years? So, it follows that every creative act is a composition, so we are all, in our own way, composers.
And finally, and strangest of all, is there a sentience threshold for strings? If everything is made of strings, isn't everything making some sort of harmony? Was my younger daughter heartbroken when "bunny" got lost at the hospital because there was a shared string-level resonance between her and that inanimate, insentient construction? Maybe animism got more right than it is currently accorded.
While finally drifting off to sleep to the early morning twitters of the birds in the trees beyond my window, a thought came to me "panphonism" - the notion that maybe everything really is made of music, and maybe someday we will figure out how to listen to it.
