In my half century as the astronomy columnist or editor for Discover, Astronomy, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, NPR, and this page, I’ve heard the same questions revolving around the origin of the universe, the nature of black holes, and life elsewhere. Even issues involving our own lives including questions of consciousness and death. And it’s not merely the public who wants to know such things. Astrophysics devotes extensive resources trying to solve many of these puzzles.
They all seem reasonable. Here on Earth, every kitten and box of Cheerios had a creation date. Why shouldn’t the entire universe be the same? Yet, after centuries of effort by brilliant theorists, we’re left with a confusing mélange of unsatisfactory non-answers.
I’ve yet to see anyone suggest the obvious problem: that we may be using the wrong tool for the job. If you’ve ever had a screw sticking a half inch above a piece of wood and only had a hammer available, you quickly found it wouldn’t do the job. You needed a Phillips screwdriver. A pair of pliers wouldn’t help. A circular saw was of no use. You need the right tool for the job.
So consider the task of finding the origin of the universe, and hence ourselves as well. Using our best equipment, we observe that every galaxy cluster is rushing away from us, and from all others too. It’s happening at a precisely consistent rate. For every extra one million light-years of distance, galaxy clusters recede 13 miles per second faster. All we have to do is retrace their paths and we see that everything must have been in a single spot 13.8 billion years ago. Clearly, the universe originated then and there. And if that really happened, microwaves should now be evenly emanating from the entire sky — and that’s just what we see. On top of all that, we should detect a specific ratio of the elements hydrogen, helium and lithium. That is exactly what we find. Put it all together and every bit of doubt is removed. The Big Bang definitely happened.
There’s just one small problem. It would mean the entire universe popped out of nothingness. And logic dictates that you simply can’t get anything from true vacuity. Which means the Big Bang could not have happened. So the truthful scientific answer, using our best up to date science, is that the Big Bang had to have happened. And, also, the Big Bang could not have happened.
What you’ve just read is a factual summary. Nothing about it has changed in decades. So what can we do with this? When tackling the same question always produces a nonsensical answer, one possibility is that the wrong tool has been used for the job. We need that screwdriver but we’ve only got the hammer.
Today’s subject is: what are the alternative tools? The ones used by science always employ logic and math. These work splendidly in countless pursuits such as aeronautical engineering and gene splicing. Logic operates symbolically or dualistically, which means that words or concepts represent things that are not themselves. The word pepper is not actual pepper, for example. But though this symbolic process works splendidly, relatively few seem aware that while logic is ubiquitous, it’s not real life. The ancient Greeks used to enjoy arguing about this by taking heated sides in the argument over whether “three” is real or merely a mental idea.
In any case, logic assumes the listener is familiar with the item expressed by its symbol. Just as you cannot convey the color green to a person born blind, there are areas of cosmology that lie entirely beyond the scope of our experience. This means that some of the deepest issues of existence cannot be understood through symbolism, so that logic must fail in such applications. Most of us, for example, would love to know if there is full conscious experience after the body dies. Others wonder whether an omnipotent underlying intelligence fills the cosmos. And, for many, whether such a power is personal, contactable, and even responsive. But neither logic nor so-called holy books supply conclusive answers for inquirers who are properly skeptical. Are we then back to Square One?
Through the centuries, many so-called wise students of such issues, especially in the East, averred that everyone is capable of having a full, direct experience of the nature of the universe since, like apples budding on a tree, we ourselves contain the essence of the cosmos. Such a revelatory state of awareness is so valued in eastern philosophy that religions there largely revolve around the individual effort to attain that experience and thereby perceive the absolute truth of the universe. Known by many names such as Satori, Samadhi, cosmic consciousness, self realization, and awakening, the experience, according to those who have had it, lasts anywhere from a few hours to the rest of one’s life. It is always characterized as ecstatic. It’s also described as a deep ancient familiarity and certainty, including an unshakable realization that there is no such thing as birth or death or time. It is marvelous beyond words.
This comes up now, of course, because, as we have already seen, those deepest puzzles of cosmology do not yield to logic and math. But — say those who have “been there” — they are fully obvious via that alternate sense of perception. Bottom line is that the most seemingly insoluble questions of existence are in fact fully knowable. But not through concepts that amount to the entire jumble of questions, ideas and their contradictory results. So despite being continually employed by smart people such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, logical methods have so far proven incapable of letting us know what’s really going on.
Unfortunately, the direct so-called mystical experience of reality does not translate into symbolic language. So those who have experienced the underlying reality are basically prevented from sharing it with anyone. This means that even if your pal Bob was rendered logically inert for three weeks in 1966, and spent that time in the blissful perception of eternal Oneness along with the unshakeable certainty that death is illusory, he would now have to merely provide a crude verbal translation by simply saying that existence never had a beginning but is actually eternal. And that, yes, Nature has an unfathomably deep intelligence – which ought to be obvious to anyone who looks out the window.
Of course, then your columnist comes across as discrediting himself by injudiciously revealing a mystical bias (if so, it couldn’t have been too blatant or I wouldn’t have been hired to teach at Marymount college for years), and not deserving an astronomy column thanks to blatantly giving up on astrophysics (well, only when it comes to the cosmic fundamentals).
Bottom line: Astronomy works beautifully when uncovering the secrets of the planets. It provides the most joyful inspiration when observing lunar features through an enormous telescope. It grants the pleasure of sharing the night’s glory with others. But it also may be time to acknowledge that it’s a science whose attempts to unravel the existential fundamentals have been consistently futile.
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