Giordano Bruno discovered in the lights of the night sky a bottomless ocean of suns where others saw only sketches projected from human imagination. Alone among the pioneers of science, Bruno fully absorbed the lesson of Copernicus, something even the solar revolutionary himself failed to grasp. Not only is the cosmos not centered on Earth but the very idea of center has no physical meaning. There’s no more a privileged location from which all places are subject to objective measurement than a virgin or a goatfish in the sky.
“For there is in the Universe,” wrote the itinerant philosopher, “neither center nor circumference, but, if you will, the whole is central, and every point also may be regarded as part of a circumference in respect to some other central point.” If Earth seems like the center of all things, that’s only because we live on it. To lunar dwellers the Moon is center-stage. It’s all perspective.
Bruno never hesitated to announce his relativistic revelation to any and all. For this and other “impieties,” the church ordered him burned at the stake on Ash Wednesday 1600.
His successors lacked his penetrating insight. Following Isaac Newton’s observation that massive bodies attract each other at a distance, consensus opinion coalesced around the idea of a subtle kind of matter permeating space that mediates the force of gravity much as water mediates waves on the ocean. In the nineteenth century scientists updated this approach with their contention that electromagnetic waves propagate across a “luminiferous aether.” Aside from serving as a fixed framework establishing the boundaries and absolute center of the universe, the aether was thought to enable the cosmic machine to operate by contact mechanics, not unlike the contraptions we fashion down here on the terrestrial plane.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the great questions of existence seemed to be dissolving in the magic potion of science. The world had never been so clear, the ground never so solid and dependable.
Since then all center and substance have shattered. Bruno could at least count on God. Now we’ve got nothing, adrift in a void without reference points. The Great Wall of Certainty has collapsed under its own density. From the other side Bruno confronts us with crackling skin and blazing eye.
Up until 1897 the idea of material substance wasn’t generally regarded as a pre-scientific mirage. But in that year JJ Thomson cut the “uncuttable” atom. The solid core of matter turned out to be internally differentiated, with vast empty gulfs punctuated by occasional pinpricks of mass. An electron isn’t so much a thing as a field of possibilities across which a “particle” randomly bops around like a speck of static on a TV screen. It’s a dance whose steps can be calculated according to a probability wave. Let’s say an electron is trapped inside a perfectly sealed container. As it bounces off the walls, its probability wave gradually seeps out to the surrounding area until the electron itself is no longer inside the container.
This is why quantum physicists don’t speak of substance. Reality is composed of “information.” The randomness of the quantum level averages out to the predictability of the perceptual level. All that is solid melts into stats.
The de-centering of all centers began in 1887 when Albert Michelson and Edward Morley carried out an experiment designed to prove the existence of the aether. Their “interferometer,” a box containing a telescope and mirrors set at odd angles, could measure the speed of light on Earth relative to its speed in outer space. Since our planet is in motion, scientists reasoned that the light reaching us from a distant source should be either faster or slower than in the stillness of space, depending on whether we’re approaching the starlight or receding. But when Michelson and Morley looked at their results, they found no interference and therefore no difference in the speed of light relative to Earth’s motion.
For years their findings puzzled physicists, though Hendrick Lorentz wrote up some interesting equations meant to explain how the aether was somehow still relevant despite the no-show in ‘87. Not until Einstein came along did anyone see the true weight of the Michelson-Morley results. With a little tweaking of Lorentz’s equations, he demonstrated that space has no fixed framework, no center or circumference. As far as the universe is concerned, we are nowhere. Bruno was vindicated.
Whether you’re adrift in deep space or breezing along at 185,000 miles per second, light always travels faster, at 186,000 miles per second. light always travels 186,000 miles per second faster. Change your frame of reference and the flow of time changes along with it. Only the speed of light remains constant.
Or so we thought. Light has many different speeds, depending on what kind of medium it’s traversing. Water, for instance, slows it down by 75%. In the final days of the twentieth century, researcher Lene Vestergaard Hau imprisoned a beam of light in a frozen cloud of atoms, stopping it dead in its tracks and demonstrating, once and for all, that nothing is sacred.
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You don’t have to consult Aristotle to realize something is holding all this up. You can’t have miles and miles of accident and no essence anywhere in sight. Something’s got to be substantial, not just informational. Absolute, not just relative. Even illusion is illusory only in contrast to reality. Who or what is hallucinating this hallucination?
For the answer we must go back, once more, to that magnetic moment when the world turned inside out. The clock is winding down on the nineteenth century as young Henri Bergson, a Polish Jew transplanted to France, studies philosophy at the Ecole Superier Normale. Captivated by the English positivist Herbert Spencer and his book, Progress: Its Law and Cause, Bergson is dazzled by the promise of a completely coordinated system of knowledge, a synthetic scheme founded on a single absolute principle: the persistence of force. Physical science, prophecies Spencer, shall render the world transparent, granting unimagined power to the human race.
Then one day Bergson is shaken by a terrible insight, as if the whole twentieth-century intellectual meltdown has appeared to him in a blast.
There’s no time in physics.
“Newton’s laws of motion,” according to physicists Christopher Hill and Leon Lederman, “make no distinction between past and future, and time can apparently flow in any direction.” On their website devoted to mathematician Emmy Noether and her principle of symmetry-breaking, Hill and Lederman describe the universe as a movie that could run through a projector in reverse as readily as forward. “When applied to simple systems, billiard balls colliding on the table, atomic collisions, etc., it would not be possible to tell in which direction the film was progressing. The motion we see satisfies laws of motion that are the same, whether run forward or backward.”5 Future and past are effectively interchangeable.
“Notice another peculiar aspect of physics,” write Hill and Lederman. “Nowhere in any formulation does the issue of a special point in time called ‘now’ ever occur. Yet, we humans sense something we call ‘now.’ Is it an illusion? We call this the ‘Now’ question.”
I can’t help but feel present. Even memories concern moments once present. To be human is to be temporal, informed by a past and oriented toward a future. Without ongoing presence our consciousness, the sensation of now, is null and void. Lacking real time, we aren’t real either.
~~Escape From Quantopia: Collective Insanity in Science and Society -by- Ted Dace
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