Physics and Literature

Besides providing pleasure, storytelling justifies itself by occasionally providing truth, or at least insight. But what if we don’t know what’s real?

The thought occurred while reading physicist Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. It’s one of many popular cosmology books about the origin and nature of the universe I’ve read over the years by scientists such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Frank Tipler, Michio Kaku, Roger Penrose, and so on.

I read numerous titles not because I understand this stuff but because I don’t. Each scientist brings their own set of analogies to help visualize peculiarities hard to verbalize outside the language of mathematics.

Greene is better than most at doing this, but the reality described sometimes sounds as fanciful as medieval monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We take these guys seriously because oddball ideas like relativity and quantum mechanics, proposed in leaps of genius, have subsequently been confirmed by experiment. So new bizarre ideas might eventually be confirmed too.

Consider a few of the impossible things before breakfast these physicists and astronomers ask us to believe:

- That we can’t detect up to 96 percent of the matter and energy in our universe, and that we have little idea what it consists of.

- That the universe isn’t expanding because galaxies are flying away from each other through space. It’s space itself that is expanding, taking galaxies with it. “Expanding through what?” is like asking a clam to imagine a cloud.

- That our universe started as a particle far smaller than an atom weighing twenty pounds (no, I don’t get how they figured that) and that existence picked up the rest of its weight, or mass, by “robbing gravity.”

- That empty outer space is in fact crowded with fields and subatomic particles we’ve yet to detect; an emptiness that is crammed.

- That there are not four dimensions – three spatial and one time – but ten. The others are just too small to see. Oops, make that 11. Or, for another theory, 26.

- That there is a parallel universe a millimeter away from our own, or that our universe is a mere hologram of a more real one, or that there are an almost infinite number of universes with new ones popping up like popcorn, or that even after estimating there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, containing hundreds of billions of stars, we “see” only a tiny part of our own cosmos.

Whew.

Science fiction writers deal with this madness by simply mining it, as I did for my own novel Blood of the Reich, which climaxes at the CERN supercollider near Geneva. I spend a lot of time in the early 19^th Century with Ethan Gage, but enjoy a good dose of mental whiplash by trying to absorb ideas from the 21^st., While I’m still marching with Napoleon, I’m prospecting these nuggets again for a different kind of time-travel story, which may or may not work.

Most other people do just fine ignoring this stuff, since the Wonderland scientists are describing is mostly too big, too small, or too distant for everyday observation. Maybe our explorations will lead to vast new manipulations of nature like nuclear energy, but in the meantime they don’t fill up your gas tank or get you a girlfriend.

Literature and theology, however, have arguably failed to come to grasp with what existence is really like. Books and religion tend to emphasize the inner life more than the outer one, and the personal more than the cosmic. But if the meaning of life was hard to explain two thousand years ago, when the world was presumed flat and at the center of the universe, how much more so when we begin to grasp just how incredibly brief, small, and illusory life really is? We can’t even really grasp what is is, let alone make theological sense of it.

I’ve tried to refine in my head our literary raison d’etre using the insights that have come from microscope, telescope, supercollider and equation, without much progress. I’m not just as hapless as a philosophizing freshman in a dormitory, I’m a mole at an astronomy lecture.

Is science’s frontier so way out that it’s really becoming irrelevant to human understanding of ourselves? Will outer space ultimately provide insights into inner space that revolutionize writing, and will a 24^th Century Shakespeare plumb the soul and spirit with an understanding of outer space we’re just beginning to comprehend? Or are physicists leading us down a rathole of misunderstanding generated only by theoretical calculations on a whiteboard?

I do think these theories are incredibly cool. And that their radical overthrow of our understanding of reality is almost never, ever, mentioned on the evening news…or literature. What does the new physics say about us?