The Delights of Mindboggling Physics

Some people cut themselves, some do drugs. I try to understand physics. 

Cosmology, to be precise.

I could have spent the last few decades banging my head against a telescope and achieved the same results I’ve gotten reading about string theory, bubble-verses and, oh my God, Schrödinger’s goddamn cat. 

The first few pages or chapters of these books are often exciting. Tantalizing, even, as the authors take me by the hand and lead me through special relativity, general relativity and black holes, ideas that I understand just barely enough to wish I understood more. But invariably the writer asks me to do something I seem profoundly incapable of. 

It always amounts to some version of this: Imagine another dimension. OK? Just imagine another dimension! C’mon, what are you waiting for? Imagine it!

I’m not ashamed to admit that I have, on more than one occasion, faked imagining. Pretended, even to myself, that I was visualizing a fourth or tenth dimension, a whole other, discrete spatial reality coexisting with our own, while I secretly strained to catch a glimpse of such a thing wafting through my tiny, deeply inadequate mind.

Recently, while reading page 70-something of Brian Green’s The Hidden Reality, a wonderful survey of possible multiverses, I started to sense that The Order to Imagine was imminent, and, instead of defiantly plowing on as I usually do, took a much-needed break. 

Before the end of the day I was several chapters deep and deliciously lost in a novel (The Director, a new book by Daniel Kehlmann about the WWII era German film maker GW Pabst.)

That feeling: of being lost, unmoored, submerged, is what I desperately want but too often struggle to find in my reading of cosmology. 

I realize, of course, that this is very much a “me” problem. When even as deft a popularizer as Brian Greene leaves me momentarily shaking my head with incomprehension, I have no one to blame but myself. 

It’s not that I’m afraid of incomprehension, it’s just that I prefer a different flavor of it, I suppose. In fact, if a book can’t disorient me just a little bit, if it can’t get me some kind of lost, I won’t stay with it for very long at all. 

I don’t mean lost from myself. Literature provides passage toward the self, not away from it, promising escape only from the temptations of escapism. It makes visible a world that exists in the spaces between things: book and reader, author and page, “I” and “Thou.” Another dimension. 

The novelist and the cosmologist are ultimately engaged in similar pursuits, aren’t they? Literature doesn’t depict, it observes. It observes a reality that it conjures into existence by observing it, just like, well, like Schrödinger’s goddamn cat.

Physicists offer all sorts of possible explanations for the existence of this kind of reality, many of them involving the convolutions imposed upon space and time as they are subjected to observation, recording, interpretation, history, and memory. The elements of literature.

Astrophysicists can frequently seem to be engaged in the work of novelists, after all. And by the same token, the best literature is often unabashed cosmology. I began reading physics when I started reading Chekhov:

He went on to the bridge, stood a little, and, quite unnecessarily, touched the sheets. They felt rough and cold. He looked down at the water. . . . The river ran rapidly and with a faintly audible gurgle round the piles of the bath-house. The red moon was reflected near the left bank; little ripples ran over the reflection, stretching it out, breaking it into bits, and seemed trying to carry it away.

“How stupid, how stupid!” thought Ryabovitch, looking at the running water. “How unintelligent it all is!”

Now that he expected nothing, the incident of the kiss, his impatience, his vague hopes and disappointment, presented themselves in a clear light. It no longer seemed to him strange that he had not seen the General’s messenger, and that he would never see the girl who had accidentally kissed him instead of someone else; on the contrary, it would have been strange if he had seen her. . . .

The water was running, he knew not where or why, just as it did in May. In May it had flowed into the great river, from the great river into the sea; then it had risen in vapor, turned into rain, and perhaps the very same water was running now before Ryabovitch’s eyes again. . . . What for? Why?

“The Kiss” (and Vanya, and all of it) sent me toward other stories that explicitly made the universe of the mind their subject. 

And just as Chekhov can sound an awful lot like a cosmologist, a talented popular physics writer like Richard Feynman often seems to be channeling the good doctor:

Some people say, “How can you live without knowing?” I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

I did eventually finish The Hidden Reality without much trauma, and with a great sense of reward. Whether or not Greene, Feynman, Stephen Hawking and their ilk are writing literature, their work is important to me. Not despite my failure to grasp many of their ideas, but because of it.

Their books may be difficult (for me) to read, but as I do, and the universe they describe grows curiouser and curiouser, I become more intrigued. Authors who write well about space and time know there is no distance as great as the thickness of a human skull; that the chasms separating one person’s reality from another’s are as worthy of our attention as interstellar space.

Cosmology is Chekhovian work: watching distances collapse and expand, ghost histories reasserting themselves, futures circling back to the present, minds struggling to reconcile themselves to ever-shifting notions of truth. 

As I read the work of physicists, the limits and mysteries of my own mind become more apparent to me. Even as I look around for a nice, big telescope to bang my ahead against, I feel more conscious, more determined to transcend those limits, if only a little bit, for only a little while.

And that’s when I pick up a good novel.