“The universe,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “is made of stories, not of atoms.” This seems eminently sound to me. After all, what exactly do atoms amount to?
In The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Eddington notes that if you imagine the nucleus of an atom to be a grain of sand suspended halfway between the floor and the apex of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the orbit of the electrons would be circumscribed by the curve of the dome itself. In other words, the distance between the nucleus and the electrons is astronomical. A creature standing on the nucleus would likely be unable to see the electrons spinning about.
Eddington further notes that if one reduced a six-foot-tall man to pure matter by eliminating the spaces between the particles of which he is said to be composed, said man would be a speck barely visible with a powerful magnifying glass. I recently heard that the entire human race currently alive, all six-and-a-half billion of us, if similarly reduced, would amount to something the size of a sugar cube.
The so-called material universe is, in fact, a vast network of electrical impulses. Perhaps we should think of it as a transmission system and focus our attention more on what is being transmitted rather than on the means by which it is transmitted. After all, taking apart your answering machine won’t tell you anything about the message someone left on it.
Message and transmission really do have little in common. No analysis of the telephone signal will tell you anything about what the caller is saying to you. Any more than a study of paper and ink will give you any insight into David Copperfield or an examination of the Globe Theater will help you understand Hamlet. Likewise, the frequency of a sound-stimulus and the electrical response the stimulus evokes in the auditory cortex are entirely dissimilar.
We like to think that early man was more in touch with nature than we are now. Maybe that’s why the earliest attempts to get to the bottom of things took the form of stories and poems. Maybe life is best understood in terms of symbol and drama. The similarity between the theory of the Big Bang and certain ancient creation myths may be more than just coincidence (which may also be why some scientists find the Big Bang to be, in the words of the late John Maddox, one-time editor of the science journal Nature, “philosophically unacceptable”).
I am not, by the way, advancing any either-or proposition. I like my science and technology as much as anyone. But I am suggesting there may be limits to an approach to reality that is purely abstract, strictly deterministic, and merely quantitative. However much such an approach may tell us about the composition of things, it seems quite incapable of telling us anything about their point. And if one regards such an approach as the only authentic avenue to truth, then one is likely to conclude that things in the end have no point. To insist that everything has a cause is, in effect, to deny that anything has a motive. The world we live in, so far as I can tell, is packed with motivation. And it is motivation that drives stories.
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Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [5])
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