first ran 4/13/00
The most damnable field of math
is algebra, which attempts to seduce english majors by mixing letters in
with numbers. I am not fooled, however--I have never encountered a sentence
in a Dickens novel that contains -a, or (b-c). Shakespeare did not write
2b (-2b). As someone who, since the age of four, has aspired to be a writer,
math is something of an irrlevancy to me. I usually drift off whenever
someone mentions numbers, a habit I acquired in the second grade.
Science, however, is another matter.
I made an effortless 30 out of a possible 32 on the science portion of
the ACT and only a 22 in reading comprehension (which depressed me greatly--I
realized I had chosen the wrong side of my brain to throw all the energy
into). While I avoided science classes as deftly as I avoided math, I did
not forsake the discipline. I read science books and attempted to comprehend
Einstein’s theory of relativity, both the general and the special. My quest
to understand relativity began in the sixth grade when I slogged through
Stephen
Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”, marvelling all the while that
he imagined it was written for general audiences. My quest continues to
this day.
There are algebra-tainted
equations in physics, of course, but I usually skip over them, preferring
to get to the meaning behind the alphanumerics. The meaning behind it all
is the possibility of God.
God is at the heart of physics,
I think. The question for Einstein was not whether God existed but, rather,
in what ways he existed--Einstein was a believer of God and thought that
his inquiries into the nature of the universe would one day help humanity
comprehend the nature of the creator of that universe. Hawking, unlike
Einstein, is not as firm in his belief of God’s existence, but does not
discount God’s existence outright. If God created the universe out of a
void, he asks, how much choice did he have in creating this particular
universe? Was he free to dictate the laws of nature or were those laws
inherent in the the creation’s initial design? Like Einstein, Hawking suggests
that, if the mythical unified field theory (the Holy Grail of Einstein
and many others)
can ever be discerned we will have a representation of the mind of God.
Because it was in the sixth grade
when my own desire to understand God’s mind took hold (I began to realize
he might have lost it sometime around the Crusades), I think I picked up
“Brief History” hoping to find answers to the questions mentioned above.
Who or what is God? If God exists--and this is something people have argued
over for centuries so I do not plan on resolving the issue once and for
all in this column--who created him? Why make the universe? With all the
complexity of space-time, the delicate balance of matter and antimatter,
the artistic beauty of fractals and the violence of the Big Bang, is he
truly more interested in our small planet’s simplistic battle of good over
evil? Or are we, humanity, merely another necessary law of nature, a manifestation
of entropy, perhaps, or superstring theory?
I do not know if God exists, or
existed, or if “God” is just an ancient term for what we now call the unified
field theory. One of Einstein’s major breakthroughs was the suggestion
that time is relative to the observer--the closer to the speed of light
one gets, the slower time passes, for instance. Yet not only do we each
have our own perceptions of time, so too do we all have a seperate perception
of God and by extension a seperate perception of the universe.
If God had no choice in creating
the universe--if the unified theory spontaneously willed itself into being
because of its own immensity and incontainable power--then I wonder how
much choice we have in creating our seperate universes. I wonder if we
are free to choose the laws of our own nature or if those laws are inherent
in our initial design.
After twenty years of searching
for the mind of God, I have not found it and do not think I ever will.
I am not sure I want to find it. Just as, in literature, the quest is more
vital to the tale than is the goal, so too do I think the search is more
vital to my life than the discovery.
On my livingroom wall I have a
poster of Einstein, his white mane wild, his wrinkled face pensive. It
is the face of a man who gave us both the wonder of the cosmos and the
horror of nuclear annihilation. Written beneath his picture is this quote:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
source of all true art and science.”
There is also a quote from Shakespeare’s
Hamlet taped to the opposite wall. It is scrawled in red ink in handwriting
I do not recognize. Someone, at one time and point in the past, copied
the quote on a white slip of paper, folded it in half and shoved it into
a library book. They forgot about the slip of paper and returned the book
to the library. At some other point in space-time, I found it and decided
to stick it to my wall. The red ink says, “There are more things in Heaven
and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
It is my inclination to believe
that “Horatio” is a convenient substitute for all of our names.