Meditation on a Summer Afternoon

It’s a beautiful day. Low 20’s and a stiff breeze. The maples, aspen, and elm that line the back of our property are swaying and swooshing in the wind. It’s a comforting sound—one that reminds me of the waves of Lake Huron against the shore, all night—all day—long.  Which reminds me of the fog horns of the lakers as they passed Sarnia in the night. My childhood memories do not go back to the time when my parents and I actually lived in Sarnia, though I must have spent at least the first six months of my life there. But, visiting a favourite aunt and uncle in the house that my grandfather built on Cromwell Street, always brought that mournful sound in the night, triggering some ancient primitive memories. It makes me want to cry, though I have no idea why.

My office window is next to a maple that is probably about forty feet tall—and I’m about twenty-five feet up so that I am looking directly into the middling branches. Have you realized that there is a mathematical pattern in the branches of a tree? In my maple, wherever a branch begins, another begins at roughly the same place on the other side of the limb. In other words, as it grows, each branch splits into three parts with the central part continuing on and the pair of side branches going off in new directions. Sometimes they split into three, and so on and on. Such self-replicating patterns are called fractals. If you search hard enough and with an open imagination you can find fractal relationships in all living things, from the shape of a snail’s shell to the pattern of seeds in a sunflower, to the pattern found in the branchings of your blood vessels.

I don’t find it amazing that nature mimics mathematics. What else should it be based on? I know many dismiss or belittle evolution as “random” events; in fact, they often say the same thing about our universe. But, nothing could be further from the truth. If our universe was the result of purely random events then we would be living in a state of chaos. Actually, we wouldn’t be living at all because chaos and life cannot exist together. On the other hand, when confronted with the overwhelming beauty and complexity of life, the universe, and everything some insist that there must be an intelligent creative force behind it all. Why? That raises more questions than it answers. Where, for example, can this intelligent force reside if it is outside of our universe (which it must be, if it created it)? And, of course, what came before this “force” or being?

There are many, many things that you and I do not understand when we look around us. How, for example, did my maple “know” that splitting branch growth into three parts would give its leaves the maximum amount of surface area for collecting sunlight? It didn’t “know”—and that’s the beauty of it. Over millions of years trees that depend on manufacturing chlorophyll from sunlight have always “maximized” the surface area of their leaves (some, like cacti, minimize their surface area in other to preserve water.) One way works; others don’t work so well and so such trees do not flourish.  In plants that must preserve water, a tubular shape gives the least amount of surface area. Look at a cactus; look at a tree; different mathematics for difference purposes.

There are valid reasons found in chemistry and physics for the patterns that living things follow. The Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.) when followed by a plant—for example in the organization of leaves in a single cabbage plant—expend the least amount of energy for the layers of growth (cut a cabbage in half along its “equator” to check it out).  Or is it the other way around? A plant “prefers” the least expenditure of energy as it grows and so “created” the first Fibonacci sequence. Life is not modeled on math, but mathematics is derived from observing life.

My trees are still bending and bowing in the wind. It looks like chaos from my perspective, but that is perspective only. If I look down on the forest as the wind blows through it, I would see patterns in the way the trees bend—the same kind of patterns in the waves on the sea. If I looked from even further away I would see the immense patterns of weather across the planet with all its local subsets. And, of course, as we retreat further and further into space we see the patterns in the orbits of the planets; and, further yet, in the orbits of the stars around the centre of our galaxy. And, even further, the beautiful and mysterious patterns (that look amazingly like fractals) in the long filament-like arrangements of the galaxies themselves. If you want to see what it looks like here is a piece of it: http://www.windows2universe.org/the_universe/Cosmology.html.

The Latest Cosmological-Physics Theory of Everything

One of the most amazing insights I’ve read about lately was made by the early Greek “atomists,” Leucippus and his student Democritus. Observing a fish moving through water, Leucippus asked himself how is this possible? After all, both fish and water are “things,” both apparently having mass and occupying space. The only way, he reasoned, that this could happen is that if the water is actually composed of tiny particles separated by a void. The fish, therefore, in moving into the void between the particles of water, is able to push particles out of its way. It was a short step to realizing that everything is made up of tiny particles (that he called atoms) and the characteristics of things were defined by those atoms and their relationships to each other.  He pictured atoms as having hooks that linked them together. Solids had more hooks and so were bound more tightly together than the somewhat “slippery” atoms of liquids. Brilliant! And done without any “scientific” experiments or direct observations.

But, did you notice that these atoms, in Leucippus’ view, are separated by a “void?” What on earth is that?  It’s simply nothing, you might answer. But what is that? Parmenides, for one, rejected the idea of the existence of a nothing. Everywhere, he argued, that there appears to be nothing there is actually something, like air. Though the Greeks couldn’t reach the altitudes where air does not exist, you might still argue that outer space itself is not nothing; the average density of the universe (including all dark matter and dark energy) being approximately 6 protons per cubic meter, and the density counting just the observable matter and energy is closer to 1 proton per 4 cubic meters. Protons are rather small, so what is—and there is a lot of whatever it is—between them?  Even more so, the distance between an electron and the core of neutrons and protons that it orbits, is comparable to the distance from our sun to Pluto. Even on the subatomic level, that is still a lot of something?

So, what is this nothing of which I speak? Parmenides argued: "You say there 'is' a void; therefore the void is not nothing; therefore there is not the void." That seems a rather circular argument that relies more on grammatical relationships than on observation, because if it were true that there is no “void,” then all motion would be impossible. Contemporary physics usually describes the void as the “quantum foam” out of which pairs of negatively and positively charged bits of energy are continuously coming into being and annihilating each other. If I understand this correctly, then that means that what we call nothing is actually something akin to a randomly-arranged chaotic and continually changing backdrop on which everything depends.

In The Unobservable Universe: A Paradox-free Framework for Understanding the Universe, (Albuquerque, NM: Galaxia Way; 2011) Scott Tyson argues that the “nothing” from which particles of opposite-charged energy emerge is the part of our universe that we can never observe (he calls it the voidverse). Characteristics of the voidverse are that it is dimensionless and timeless. In other words, when matter emerges from the voidverse into our observable universe (he calls it the observerse) it comes from anyplace, anytime in our perspective. The universe will eventually reach a state where the energy in one “verse” so greatly exceeds that in the other that the flow will reverse itself.

He uses this argument to explain how it is that photons can take several different paths simultaneously and can be “entangled” at any distance from each other. He throws out the string theory (or M-theory) argument explaining that 10 or 11 extra dimensions are not necessary in describing the universe and its behaviour at subatomic levels. Gravity, which has always been a difficult subject for the sciences, is not, he claims, one of the four basic forces of the universe (the weak force, the strong force, and the electromagnetic force being the others), but is, rather a characteristic of space, rather than of mass. String theorists in particular have had to resort to elaborate constructs of parallel universes in order to explain why gravity is so weak compared to the other three fundamental forces. In their view, the strings that represent gravity (gravitons) are attached to a parallel universe (called a brane in string theory) which bleeds off a lot of their energy.

Tyson doesn’t rely on infinity (which, in some theorist’s minds means that there are an infinite number of universes, logic dictating that somewhere, at some time, there is a duplicate of you doing what you are doing now). He postulates that infinity exists only in our minds and that the universe as he describes it has bounds. His theory is elegantly simple: the universe has two parts, one we can never observe (i.e. “nothing”) and one that we can observe (i.e. “something”), and that these two parts are forever swapping energy maintaining a perfect equilibrium such that (Kenetic Energy action in the observerse) X (Potential Energy reaction in the voidverse) = 1. This expansion of Newton’s Third Law embraces both the quantum world and the large scale world. The preservation of energy has been a problem at the quantum level because energy has been observed to pop into and out of existence. However, taking the “non-existent” aspect of the universe into account, unity is re-established.

Pretty neat, eh?