Cosmology and Purpose

Those dancing strings sure can make the world odd..

As I finished up my reading of Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds yesterday, I'll freely confess that large chunks of it came off as coherent as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.  As uffish in my study I thought whilst sitting by the Tumtum screen, the words describing string theory and superstring theory came whiffling through my tulgey brain, and burbled as they came.

Part of this...a large part of it...comes from the inhuman scale of quantum mechanics.  I'll catch images here and there, as my spacetime-formed mental clutch graunches gears mightily against eleventh dimensional cogs.   The best I can get are approximations, images that rise out of my knowledge base in a feeble attempt to represent a reality that is utterly beyond my capacity to experience.  As I struggled to conceptualize strings, the best I could do was think of those little wiggly dragon tongues from James and the Giant Peach.  When Kaku got into talking about the challenge in modeling the music of membranes, the dimensionally expanded forms of string theory that provides the "M" in "M-theory," I found myself thinking of drum-heads.

This is the pesky thing about being a mystic and not a mathematician, I suppose.  The swirl of symbols that Kaku doubtless uses to conceptualize these things are surely more precise.

Then again, when it comes time to lay out the "why this matters" conclusion, the summative chapter of Kaku's book has no answers.  As far as Kaku is concerned, the structures of the universe may prove to be elegant and beautiful mathematically.  But there's no meaning to be found there.  He writes:

...I do not believe this design gives personal meaning to humanity.  No matter how dazzling or elegant the final formulation of physics may be, it will not uplift the spirits of billions and give them emotional fulfillment.  No magic formula coming from cosmology and physics will enthrall the masses and enrich their spiritual lives.  (p. 358)

And then, Kaku goes on.  While he claims not to derive his ethics from his cosmology, the purpose Kaku finds in life is remarkably relativistic.  We build our own meaning, says he.  Meaning is what we make of it, nothing more, and nothing less.

Being a good sort, Kaku tries to articulate this in a way that affirms some generally good stuff.  If we're really creating meaning, then, well, we're going to create good meaning.  Work hard!  Love people!  Carpe Diem!  Be a mentor!  Work for justice!  Dominate the globe with your unstoppable army of quantum-forge-powered robots!

Well, not that last one.  Kaku's brilliance in cosmology seems to wander into Joel Osteen's shallow waters when it comes to ethics.   It's earnest and well-meaning self-actualization talk, but without a clear vision of what that might mean relative to concepts like "good."   He tries, for a whole page, to talk purpose and ethics, but it's just a gloss.  A pity, because the vision of being he proposes does seem to give a foundation for talking about "good" in terms that integrate with his physics.

When he talks about fulfilling potential, it feels for an instant like he's catching the importance of intentionality in an m-theory universe.  When he talks about the fundamental unity of quantum reality, it almost...almost...feels like the foundation of the mystic ethos.    But those things flutter away, undeveloped.

No matter.  It's still a faskinatin' book, and Kaku's efforts to translate this mindboggling complex stuff into lay language are to be strongly commended.

Bigger Universe, Same Ol' Jesus

As I continue to pore my way through theoretical physicist Michio Kaku's exploration of M-Theory, one of the things that has struck me is the degree to which the heavens have expanded since the first century.

We tend to fixate on that moment when folks realized that the earth was round, not a flat plate with a dome over it, but a sphere.  That was a big deal, of course, but only the first in an iterative series of deepenings.

There is also the struggle experienced by Galileo and the early astronomers.  They noted that the earth was not the center of the universe, and...well...there was some resistance to that, as I recall.   The church defended ecclesiastical authority and it's Aristotelian assumptions about the universe with much vigor, vigor that now seems absurd.  Jesus and his teachings are unaffected by our elliptical orbit around the sun.

As Kaku explores the history of cosmology, though, there are other moments when the universe grew exponentially bigger.  Like, say, when we realized that all those wee little stars were suns like our own, and suddenly heliocentrism evaporated in the vastness of the interstellar sky.

Or when we realized that those little fuzzy swirls we saw in our telescopes weren't just bits of dust or proto-stars, but galaxies, vast agglomerations of stars billions of light years across and unfathomable distances away.  Suddenly, the universe expanded again, and again our place in it became exponentially smaller as the cosmological floor of creation dropped out from under us.

But none of those things impact Jesus and his teachings.  You can be just as truly a follower of Jesus of Nazareth in a rapidly expanding Big Bang universe as you would have been in a 6,000 year old dome-world, had such a thing ever really existed.

The quantum-based and data-bolstered speculation of M-Theory represents just such a shift.  A multiverse-cosmology represents another expansion, like from earth to solar system, or from solar system to star system, or from star system to intergalactic space.

While it's a paradigm shift, that shift does not in any way impact the existential impact of the Nazarene on those of us who see in his story the fundamental purpose of our lives.  We are here, now, and in this time and space Jesus matters.  

Operating in Parallel

Yesterday, I started in reading the first in the series of books I've lined up as background work for my next writing project.   The project...an exploration of the interface between M-Theory and Christian faith...has a deliciously windmill-tilty feel about it.  Nothing like writing about a topic that no other Christian seems to care about to ramp up the book sales, eh?  

Still, I've got this gut sense it's a fascinating topic to explore.  If I'm going to explore the science of it, though, I'm operating under some significant limitations.  First and foremost, I'm not a scientist, nor do I play one on TV.  Feigning expertise in this area would be a fools errand.  Equally foolish would be trying to start a second career as a physicist.  There's just not enough free drive space in my cerebellum to attempt that.

What is worth doing, though, is reading through some of the lay-accessible literature on M-Theory cosmology.  These are works written by folks with scientific street cred, but who are trying to interpret and present the results of quantum, string, and M-Theory for bright-eyed Neanderthals like myself.  In the absence of the late lamented Carl Sagan, there are still plenty of folks out there interpreting for the laity.

First among the works I'm perusing is Parallel Worlds, a book by Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at CUNY.  It's a good accessible read, and one that seems even within the first few pages to point strongly to a creative tension between M-Theory and faith.  Kaku begins with noting the tension between our linear, temporal, and changing spacetime...with a beginning and an end...and the idea of the eternal and unchanging.  The great narrative arc of Genesis and Creation seems to stand separate from the concept of God the Impassible and Eternal.    

Not being a theologian, Kaku assumes that this is a tension that only exists if you contrast the Judeo-Christian narrative to the Buddhist understanding of Nirvana.  Honestly, though, it's a tension that exists within Christian faith.  How can God be unchanging, and still be the God of Love?  How can we who are endless change stand in relationship with the I AM THAT I AM? 

It's also a dialectic that exists within classical philosophy at it's most primal level.   The argument between proponents of being and prophets of change has been going on since Parmenides and Heraclitus had at it in Fifth Century Elea.  That's Fifth Century Bee See Eee, folks.  

Within the framework of an M-Theory Creation, some of that ancient tension may be resolved.  As Kaku promisingly puts it:

What is gradually emerging from the data is a grand synthesis of these two opposing mythologies.  Perhaps, scientists speculate, Genesis occurs repeatedly in a timeless ocean of Nirvana.

Not just scientists, eh?  I'm looking forward to reading more of Kaku.