Physics is Good for Your Brane

As I continue my reading of Greene, I find myself enjoying the precision with which he uses language.   That precision makes him really quite accessible, but it has another collateral benefit.   The way in which he articulates the dynamics of quantum theory, general relativity, and the bridge theories that attempt to unify them lights them up in ways I've not had them lit up for me before.

In particular, the way he expresses string theory has allowed me, for the first time, to get a feel for why that theory is so compelling.  It's always seemed a bit on the precious side before, an odd amalgam of awkward imagery and mathematical abstraction.

But as Greene expresses it, the dimensionality of strings has popped.  Strings are...objects/energies that exist in one dimension.  Branes, which are the membranes within m-theory, can be zero-branes (singularities), one-branes (strings), two-branes (membranes), three-branes (three-dimensional), and on up through the ten-dimensions that comprise being.

Yeah, I know, I'm not totally capturing it.  But as Greene describes it in detail in the two chapters dealing with both string theory and it's more robust offspring M-Theory, it presents a compelling story of the foundation of things.

In fact, it's a more elegant vision of the underlying structure of our universe than atomic theory.  Those periodic table elements are just too cluttery...and, in fact, if you go back to what "atom" was originally supposed to mean when Democritus came up with the word, the "atoms" in the periodic table are not "atoms" at all.

If atom means "it can't be divided," then something you can split just ain't it.   But branes?  Those might well be.  M-Theory feels intuitively right.

Another fascinating tidbit in Greene comes when he explores the Many Worlds concept, which is how he terms the concept of the multiverse.  Working off of the writings of physicist David Deutsch, Greene notes that just as M-Theory resolves the tension between quantum theory and general relativity, it also seems to potentially resolve the tension between proponents of free will and proponents of determinism.

As Greene understands it, the idea of a functionally infinite array of multiverses means that free will finally has a place in the structures of spacetime.  Reality at the quantum level simply does not resemble a series of little gears and cogs, but is far more dynamic, energetic and generative.  While retaining a multiverse that is solid-state in it's completeness, this renders a radically mechanistic determinism meaningless.

This meshes with my intuition.  Unlike Greene, though, I see this through the theological lenses of free will and predestination.  If God's creation is what M-Theory describes, there's suddenly plenty of room for Pelagius and Augustine to sit down with a beer on a nice fall afternoon and just chill.

Which, I think, might just be a good thing.

The Fabric of the Cosmos

My delving into M-Theory has continued over the last few nights, as I've waded into Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Greene is a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Columbia University, and his writing for a popular audience is both substantive and accessible.  Unlike Kaku's Parallel Worlds, which routinely used terminology related to faith, Greene is more vigorously secular.  Issues of meaning and purpose are subordinate to determining mechanics and structure.  The book makes very little effort to explore the whole Meaning of Life question.  It's purpose is to go deep into the underlying processes of reality.  Period.

Well, perhaps that's not quite right.  As Greene lays out his own journey of understanding, the first outside reference point relative to meaning and purpose is the existentialist movement.  His opening chapter is full of talk of his adolescent reading of Sartre and Camus...which, of course, endears him to me immensely.

What's interesting in Greene's brief discussion of philosophy is that he neatly steps around the struggle for meaning.  Meaning, Greene assumes, can be found in the "...assessment of the universe at all possible levels."  (p. 21)   That is his Sisyphian "struggle to the heights."  Instead of the application of the will in shoving that rock up a hill, his existentialist purpose comes in shoving knowledge further and further into the mysteries of the universe.

In the midst of affirming the value of heaving string theory up that mountain, Greene surfaces...as, if I'm remembering correctly, did Kaku...a famous quotation from physicist Richard Feynman.  That little snippet of wisdom claims that a knowledge of cosmology deepens appreciation of everything.  In contemplating a rose, for instance, one takes in color and scent and texture, but then that goes deeper.  You see..."the wonder and magnificence of the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes." (ibid).

Here, I found myself suddenly bemused.   I find the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes of creation equally wonderful and magnificent.  But when you go to that place of marvelous complexity, are you still contemplating a rose?  Or has the rose qua rose ceased to be relevant, just as space and time themselves cease to be relevant at Planck distances?

During a time of midweek meditation at my congregation a few months ago with a few of the old saints of my church, I was similarly contemplating a stained glass window in the sanctuary.  It's a bright and impressionist rendering of Jesus.

Deep in meditation, I found myself lost in the the light of the reds and greens, in the rippled textures of the glass, in the way light hung and refracted.  Seen from that level, the reality to which the window pointed ceased to be discernable.  The image vanished.  The meaning and intent of the artist disappeared in a thicket of other inputs.

It was a delightful, calm moment.  Yet at that level of contemplation, something was absent.  The awareness that a sentient being applied to create that particular arrangement of matter, the intentionality that went into creating that image, the narrative underlying that image...all of that was not evident.

There was still beauty.  But the storytelling and the imprint of sentience were gone.

When Greene implies that meaning can be found by knowing the universe "on all possible levels," I wonder if that is true.  One can find beauty on almost all of the levels.  But meaning?