The following is based on Bloom’s latest book, The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates.
Picture this. You and I are seated at a café table in the nothingness before the big bang. You are a wildly imaginative visionary and I am a hard-nosed, gotta-see-it-to-believe it conservative. You have extraordinary visions, and I am a stick-in-the-mud, a crust of toast committed to logic and to common sense. You and I have nothing better to do, so we’ve been sitting here at our outdoor table sipping one espresso after another and piling up empty coffee cups by the thousands ever since the nothingness began. You should see the size of our tab.
But here’s the point. Absolutely nothing is happening, right? Why? Because there is nothing, no thing, no action, no space, no time, no form, no substance, no shadow, no sunshine, no sticks, no stones, no bones, not a single solitary thing. And there never has been.
Suddenly you perk up. You have a nutty vision, an insane daydream. You point to a spot in the blackness a few feet away from our table. And you tell me that if I watch very carefully, I will see a pinprick infinitely smaller than a pinprick smash from the nothingness, then expand at superspeed. Blowing up like a hyperkinetic balloon. Sneezing forth like an expanding handkerchief. A speed-rush sheet on steroids, a manifold, of raw space and time.
The boredom must have gotten to you, I tell you. What you’re claiming is loony. And it defies the laws of logic. I’ve been sitting here across the table from you forever. I’ve kept my eyes peeled. And there has never been a pinprick of any kind. What’s more, this wacky stuff you call space and time has never existed either. Nor will it ever exist. Why? Because nothing comes from nothing. Zero plus zero equals zero. The idea that this basic fact could ever change is ridiculous. And it defies the first law of thermodynamics, the law of the conservation of matter and energy, a law so basic that every respectable twenty-first-century scientist will someday declare it thoroughly and completely right.
While I, in exasperation, am trying to get simple logic across to you, wham, a pinprick infinitely smaller than a pinprick suddenly shows its head. It’s what physicists like Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose will someday call a singularity. I am stunned. This simply does not make sense. But you stay cool and act as if nothing is happening. Meanwhile, that pinprick blows up so fast that it makes me dizzy. And sure enough, it has three properties that have never existed before. Three properties that, if common sense prevailed, should not exist. Those properties are time, space, and speed–time, space, and energy. How in the nonexistent world did the nothingness pull this off?
The pinprick keeps whooshing outward like the rubber sheet of a trampoline on a growth binge, unfurling as a superspeed space-time manifold. I am stunned. What the heck is space? What in the world is time? And what is powering all this speed? Who in the world invented these peculiar things? And if they weren’t invented, how the hell did the utter emptiness burp them out?
While I’m sitting here with my jaw dropping, you are as cool as a scoop of gelato in a block of ice. Finally you open your mouth again. And you make another of your wacky predictions. That unfurling sheet, that giant sail of space and time, you say, is about to produce something called “things.” And those things are going to precipitate from the sheet of space, time, and speed the way that raindrops precipitate from a storm cloud.
Now I know you’ve lost it. You got me with your prediction about the pinprick. But that was beginner’s luck–and dumb luck of that kind doesn’t strike twice. Now listen to me very carefully, I tell you. There is no such thing as “things.” There have never been things. And there never will be things. That’s why this place we’re sitting in is called the nothing. The no thing. Get it? That sheet that’s speeding open a few feet away from us has only three properties: space, time, and energy. And those are wacked-out enough all on their own. Let’s get logical. Everyone knows that one plus one equals two. Garbage in, garbage out. Add space, time, and speed and what do you get? You get space, time, and speed–period!
Then, far less than a second into the existence of your blasted space-time-speed manifold, there comes a rain, a hail storm, a blizzard. Of what? Of things. Gazillions of them. Roughly 1087, 10 with 87 zeros after it, to be a bit more precise. What are they? They’re elementary particles–quarks and leptons. All popping simultaneously from a mere whoosh. And it makes no sense. In fact, it is impossible. So why in the world have you been right twice? And why is my down-to-earth logic, my sturdy and sober rationality, my clear and sensible thinking, all wrong?
My new book The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates is a detective story. It’s a hunt for the answer to that question–how in heck does the cosmos create. If there is no god saying let there be light, how did light come to be? If there is no god parting the heavens and the seas, how did a mere lifeless universe cough up oceans and skies? The God Problem offers five tools with which to explore this mystery. Five heresies. Five rebellions against the rules of standard-issue reason. Five heresies that work because the very universe refuses to obey the rules of logic. Yes, you heard me right. The universe flings a finger in the face of logic. And she does it all the time. Hence the God Problem’s five heresies. Are you ready?
1. A does not equal A.
2. One plus one does not equal two.
3. The second law of thermodynamics, that all things tend toward disorder, that all things tend toward entropy, is wrong. Dead wrong. So wrong that it’s hard to believe that every scientist with a functioning IQ clings to it like a holy catechism.
4. The concept of randomness is a mistake. There is far less randomness in this universe than today’s science believes. And far less randomness than you and I often think. This is not a six monkeys at six typewriters pecking out the works of Shakespeare universe. Far from it.
5. Information theory, the hot new theory of the last 60 years, is not really about information. Not at all. Its equations cover only a tiny sliver of what the theory claims. The real core of information is what information theory’s founder Claude Shannon called “meaning.” And “meaning,” believe it or not, is not covered in information theory. Why is that a big mistake? Because meaning is central to the cosmos. Central to quarks, protons, photons, galaxies, stars, lizards, lobsters, puppies, bees, and human beings.
Why bother with five heresies? Because the cosmos herself is the real heretic, the real breaker of the man-made rules of reason. And thanks to her heretical bent, this peculiar rule-breaking cosmos that you and I have been watching from our café table at the beginning of the universe will soon churn out galaxies, stars, molecules, cells, and DNA. Not to mention thinkers, talkers, lollypops, common sense, croissants, cannibals, café tables, and you and me. But how?
There are clues. Clues in Aristotle’s sneaky tricks, clues in Galileo’s creationism, clues in Isaac Newton’s intelligent design, clues in entropy’s errors, clues in Einstein’s pajamas, clues in John Conway’s game of life, clues in Information Theory’s blind spot, clues in Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind Of Science, and clues in those darned six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. The stories of all of these are in The God Problem. They are puzzle pieces in the mystery that The God Problem sets out to solve.
But clue number one, the first of the clues we’ll dive into in this piece, comes from an obscure 19th century Italian mathematician named Giuseppe Peano. For that clue, let’s put you in my shoes. It's 1961. A dozen freshmen sit around a broad conference table at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. You are one of them. Statistics say that yours is the brightest class of college students in the country. Your class’s median Scholastic Aptitude Test Scores on the College Boards are higher than those in the entering classes at Harvard, MIT, or CalTech. Yet what is about to come is a shock. A shock and an almost impossible challenge.
You can smell your professor coming down the hall before you can see her. Why? In the professor’s hand is a stack of sheets of paper that exude the pungent, sweet smell of the chemicals used to make copies in a now-forgotten technology, mimeograph chemicals. The professor enters the room, positions herself at the head of the table, and asks the student on her right to pass the papers around.
What’s on the paper? Only half a page of type. 165 words. But the 165 words on those pages contain the magic beans that will grow what physicists like Freeman Dyson and Roger Penrose will someday call a “toy universe.” Those 165 words are nearly incomprehensible. But they contain a set of five simple rules you’ve never heard of before. They contain the five simple rules known as Peano’s Axioms. Giuseppe Peano’s axioms. And every week for the next nine months you will be told to derive a new corollary from those axioms. You will be told to pull a new implication from those simple rules. It isn’t easy. In fact, it is barely doable. Despite your brainpower, only one in ten of you will be able to handle the task. And those who are able to tackle this peculiar year-long homework assignment will monopolize the attention of the girls in the class, girls desperate for help with their homework.
But what comes spilling from Peano’s Axioms is amazing: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, squares, square roots, and rational numbers. The entire mathematical system that it took you eight years of grammar school and more than eight math textbooks to learn. Yes, eight math textbooks. The content of over seventeen pounds worth of printed paper pulp, is hidden in 165 words. Hidden in five simple rules. Present from the beginning in the half a page of axioms. Like an entire universe spilling from a pinprick near your table at the beginning of the universe. But how?
Clue number two to the God Problem will come from something entomologists call “stigmergy.” In India and Africa, humans use cow dung as everything from the tiling for the floors of their huts to fuel for their cooking stoves. Termite dung and termite spitballs are even more useful than cow patties. They come out in tidy, round pellets or in rod-shaped bricks. Why is relieving yourself in a consistent form handy? Because there’s a simple rule that obsesses termites: clean up the mess! When you find a lone brick of dung littering a passageway, pick it up and look for a neat pile of bricks on which you can put it. When you see a lump of dirt messing up the corridor, dig it out, chew it into a sphere, and saturate it with your cement-like saliva. Saliva that’s laced with the chemicals of attraction, laced with social perfumes, laced with pheromones. Next, look for the pile with the greatest height and the greatest social magnetism. The pile that has attracted the most attention. The pile with the greatest popularity. The pile whose pheromonal odor is the hardest to resist. Look for the tallest pile around. And neatly deposit your pellet of termite dung on top of the pile.
There, now doesn’t the corridor look better?
What’s the result of your thousands of repeated acts of termite tidiness? What’s the result of what mathematicians call “iteration”? What’s the result of repeating a rule–clean up the mess–over and over again on the heaps that your rule itself has produced? Towering pillar after pillar of termite dung.
Then comes the second rule of termite neatness. When two piles of dung bricks or spitballs rise high enough, climb on top with your cargo of litter and deposit your new contribution so that it sticks out beyond the edge of the column’s shaft. Build the top of the column outward. Outward in the direction of another towering column. In other words, build the tops of dung or spitball-brick towers so that their peaks reach out and touch each other.
What does this second rule of repetition generate? Gothic arches. And massive walls.
Your termite itch for cleanliness results in an architectural masterpiece–a termite hive eighteen feet high with a basement six feet deep. A termite hive 972 times the height of the average termite–the equivalent of a 640-story human building over a mile and a half high and four miles wide. A hive topped with spires or domes. A hive with air conditioning that ups the level of moisture in the room that the workers use to farm the fungus that feeds the colony. A hive whose air ducts tweak the level of carbon dioxide and keep the temperature at a steady eighty-six degrees in the chamber of the queen and in the brood chambers no matter what the outside conditions might be. A hive whose airshafts process one thousand liters of air each day. A hive that houses two million inhabitants.
The moral of the termites’ stigmergy? From tiny obsessions and trivial fixations big things can grow.
But here’s the real mystery, the one that gets to the heart of the God Problem. Is there a termite blueprint for this intricate structure? No. So how does this spectacular termite city arise? From the simple rule of termite obsession–pick up the mess and stack it neatly on the biggest pile around. And from another basic rule: attraction and repulsion.
The rule of attraction and repulsion is so primitive that it showed up 13.76 billion years ago in the first flick of the big bang. Attraction and repulsion showed up at the dawn of the universe among the very first things: quarks. And attraction and repulsion is basic to termite architecture. But it’s attraction and repulsion with sophisticated upgrades. The termite palace owes its existence to repulsion against mess and to attraction toward the tallest pile in the neighborhood. It owes its existence to iteration–to the repetition of attraction and repulsion with obsessive persistence. It owes its existence to the repetition of a rule of attraction and repulsion twenty-six billion times or more.
And guess what? Towns, cities, civilizations, cultures, religions, science, and the language that you and I are using to communicate this second owe their existence to the same ingredients: attraction, repulsion, and repetition. Persistent, unending, obsessive, driven repetition.
At its core, the termite’s simple rule is an assumption…like the assumptions of prophets, priests, popes, and scientists. But unlike many wrong-headed assumptions, the termite’s assumption maps onto reality. And there’s something more. Something gigantic. In fact, the termite’s assumption maps onto a reality that does not exist until the termite makes it. A reality no single termite can make. A reality that only tens of thousands of termites can make. A reality that pulls an impossibility into existence. The termite’s assumption is a rule that makes walls where there were no walls and towers where there were no towers. And, tattoo this on the very forefront of your brain: the termite’s assumption plugs into a world that isn’t there. A world of what is not. A world of what could be. A world of possibility.
The termite’s assumption, its rule, pick up the mess, is something with a peculiar sorcery. It is an axiom. And what’s an axiom? Remember those 165 words on a sheet of mimeograph paper at Reed College? Those were axioms. Giuseppe Peano’s axioms. And axioms have strange powers. But how and why?
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Let’s review. Clue number one to the problem of how the cosmos creates is Peano’s Axioms. Clue number two is the power of the termite. Here comes God Problem clue number three. It’s a mystery hidden in plain sight, hidden in one of science’s favorite fixations, the wave. Imagine that you and the woman or man of your dreams are flying back to the United States after a quick and totally self-indulgent weekend in London. You have a window seat on the right hand side of the plane. It’s midday. You look out the window of the plane at the Atlantic Ocean below you. What do you see? Waves. If you want, you can lock your eyes on just one wave and follow it for minutes. It has a distinct identity. It trails off to the north as far as your eye can see. And its hump seems as well formed as the back of a whale.
Remember when you were a kid and rolled a ball of clay out on a tabletop until it made a long, round clay rope? That’s what the wave looks like. But the wave has a peculiar property. Very peculiar. It doesn’t exist.
What? Of course the wave exists. If you were in a lazily moving blimp you could follow it for a thousand miles. You could follow it from the mid-Atlantic for days until it broke on the rocks off the shore of Maine. If you were in the water with a surfboard as the wave approached the shore, you could ride its hump. And if you carefully picked your way over the slippery rocks of a jetty off the Maine coast to the jetty’s farthest tip and you tripped or slipped while a breaker was smashing its fist against the granite, your body would register the wave’s power. The wave, in fact, would roll, mash, mangle, and kill you by merely rearing to a frothy peak and hammering you on the stone. As the survivors of the tidal waves, the tsunamis, that killed 230,000 people in Indonesia in 2004 and that killed 16,000 in Fukushima in 2011 could tell you. That’s real. Isn’t it? Very real!
Well, yes and no. Imagine that you are a molecule of water in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Like a termite, you follow what complexity specialists call “local rules.” You do what your neighbors hint that you should do. And what, pray tell, is that? You move in a circle that’s anywhere from three feet to 160 feet in radius. Three feet to 160 feet high. First you circle up to the surface. Then you circle back to the depths. You don’t go anywhere. You just keep making the same circular movement over and over again. You iterate. You repeat a simple rule. You rock and roll in place.
But there’s more. When you circle to the surface, you help make the peak of a wave. When you circle to the bottom, you help make that wave’s trough. The next time you circle to the surface you help make the peak of yet another wave. Yes, another wave. A wave with yet another distinct identity. A wave that will retain that identity for hundreds or thousands of miles. A wave that will do a heck of a lot of traveling. But do you ever travel? No. No thing travels to make the wave.
Like the termite, you–a water molecule in the middle of the Atlantic–are part of an architecture too big for you to see.
Now look at it from the wave’s point of view. You are a wave. What are your corpuscles, your particles, your atoms of being? They change every minute. You are nothing. You are no thing. Your equivalent of cells–your molecules of H2O–are never the same for more than sixty seconds. Bear with me while I repeat: no thing travels the 880 miles from the middle of the Atlantic to the coast of Maine. No thing at all.
Yet you, a wave, continue to be yourself. And you travel. But how? The matter that makes you up is constantly changing. From minute to minute, you reassemble yourself with new ingredients, with new water molecules. You are not a crew of unchanging particles. You are not a pyramid with an unchanging collection of stones. You are not an engine with an unchanging team of parts. You are a shape with power over substance. You are a pattern that retains its identity despite moving from one temporary team of draftees to another. You are something impossible: a shape without substance. You are, in fact, a seducer, a kidnapper, and a recruiter. You are a process. You are a form of organization passing over the landscape like a breeze. You are a recruitment strategy.
What in the world is a recruitment strategy? A recruitment strategy is a process that keeps its shape second by second by second. A recruitment strategy is a pattern that imposes its identity insistently even if the matter flowing through it is constantly changing. A recruitment strategy is a pattern that makes matter and energy do a strictly patterned dance. A social dance. Remember Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who said you can never put your foot into the same river twice? Heraclitus meant that when you dip your toe into the water the first time, you feel the flow of water around it. But if you dip your toe in again one second later, the water that has flowed around your toe the first time is already five feet downstream. And the water in contact with your toe on dip number two is water that was upstream just a second ago. Come back two months or two years later, and the water you saw in the river on your first visit has disappeared entirely and been replaced by all-new water. But something called the river is still there. And, strangely, it looks the same. As if nothing has changed. Heraclitus’s ever-changing river is a recruitment strategy. The whorl in a trout stream is a recruitment strategy. And Theseus’s ship is a recruitment strategy. What in the world is Theseus’ ship? It’s a philosophical brain-teaser that goes all the way back to the Greek historian Plutarch, who wrote up a version of it in roughly 100 AD.
Imagine that you are an ancient Greek ship captain. You plan a one-year voyage from the port of Piraeus near Athens to get rare and expensive commodities like copper, tin, and silver from the Spanish colony of Empúries roughly 1,164 miles away. Because the voyage from Greece to Spain will be long, you take lumber to replace any planks of your ship that become worm-eaten or waterlogged. And you budget enough coins to pay for more lumber along the way. You have been at sea for a month when, in fact, some planks become water sogged. So you replace them. Then you put the waterlogged planks on the deck in the sun to dry out. When they are nice and dry and toasty, you cover them with pitch to waterproof them. And when you have enough of these recycled planks, you begin to build a second ship. By the time you’ve been gone a year, you are no longer traveling with just one ship. You are traveling with two. The first ship is the one whose planks you’ve been replacing. And by now, you’ve replaced every single plank. Ship two, the empty ship you’re towing behind you, is built from the planks that you’ve dried out and recycled.
Now here’s the puzzle. When the two ships return to their home port, which ship is the original? Which is the ship you set sail in? Remember, the empty ship that you’re towing is really the old ship in disguise. It has every single worn-down board and plank of the original. And the ship your crew is hunkered down in has all new planks. It’s new from stem to stern. Yet your crew has never stopped sailing in it, sleeping in it, and eating in it. So is the ship with all new parts the original? Or is the original the ship you are towing on a rope behind you? Which ship is the real deal?
Theseus’ ship, like a wave, is a recruitment strategy. So is the puzzle of Theseus' ship. In fact, the puzzle of Theseus’ ship is a recruitment strategy that’s been seducing, recruiting, and kidnapping the minds of philosophers for 1,900 years.
Recruitment strategies are everywhere you look. An atom is a recruitment strategy. A galaxy is a recruitment strategy. A star is a recruitment strategy. An atom imposes its spherical pattern of a nucleus and shells within shells on protons, neutrons, and fast-moving electrons. And it does it gazillions of times in gazillions of different locations. In very much the same way. What’s more, it somehow manages to do the same thing wherever you look despite the fact that it is not communicating with others of its kind to make sure they are all dancing to the same choreography. Then there’s a galaxy. A galaxy inflicts its potato-shaped ellipse and often its spiral arms on ten billion stars or more. What’s more, a galaxy imposes its pattern on masses of matter wherever you look in the sky. In fact, the recruitment strategy of a galaxy has imposed its pattern over 125 billion times in this universe. Why?
Meanwhile, a star forces its ball-like shape and its fiery way of crushing atoms on octillions of tons of matter. It does it over and over and over again in thousands of billions of separate locations. Simultaneously. Without communicating with other stars. A star, too, is a recruitment strategy.
And your body, which replaces over a billion cells a minute yet retains its identity, is a recruitment strategy. Your personality, a rapid-fire flood of changing communiqués between a hundred billion neurons, is an even more intricate recruitment strategy. So is mine. You are like a wave. A wave is independent of the water that it sucks in, then tosses out. So are you. Today you lunch on watercress salad. Tomorrow you dine on lasagna. The next you eat a steak. Yet you do not become a pasta, a cow, or a leaf. Instead, the pasta, cow, or leaf becomes you. Yes, you are very much like a wave. Every minute, every sixty seconds, you say good-bye to more than a billion combinations of postsynaptic receptors in your brain and replace them with new ones. You do the same with your red blood cells and the cells that line your digestive tract and that make up your skin. Like Theseus ship, you are changing your planks. Meanwhile, you constantly shift your mind from one obsession to another. Yet you retain an identity. Something more puzzling than mere substance continues to impose the shifting flicker of a you. No, it is not an immortal soul. And yes, it will cease when you die. But that does not diminish its mystery. That does not reduce its astonishing ability to persist as something beyond the atoms and molecules of which it’s made.
Why call these things recruitment strategies? Because a recruitment strategy is insistent. It is persistent. It is driven. A wave of yellow light, for example, will repeat its corkscrew dance 540 trillion times a second, always sticking with absolute precision to the limits of its amplitude and frequency. A recruitment strategy is not matter. And it is nowhere–no where. It is in no permanent location. Yet a recruitment strategy imposes its shape on matter over and over and over again. It imposes its way of doing things in location after location after location. But if a recruitment strategy is no where and no thing, then what the hell is it?
For ten years, from 1821 to 1831, in Berlin, the German philosopher Georg Hegel wrote a long and nearly incomprehensible book, The Philosophy of History, a book so hard to understand that few philosophers ever read it. But the central theme of the book was intriguing. Hegel said that all history is spirit becoming matter. Sounds spooky, right? Sounds superstitious and religious. And it certainly does not sound scientific. But in a sense Hegel was right. We’ve been certain that we can understand the cosmos based solely on material things. But we’ve missed the astonishing capacity of immaterial things. We’ve missed the importance of arrangements. Patterns. Shapes. Forms of social organization as stubborn and resilient as matter. Forms of social interaction with structures all their own. Structures that insistently sustain despite obstacles and the vagaries of time and space. Structures that sustain no matter what matter they contain. We’ve missed the secular mystery of a wave, a merry-go-round that masters matter, commands it, grabs it in a fist, then lets it go. We’ve missed the mystery of a you and a me. And we’ve missed the mystery that will someday explain the five heresies.
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You and I are patterns with ambition bursting forth in a cosmos devoid of gods, of afterlives, and of immortality. We are pyramid makers and palace creators on the prowl. We are atoms in multi-generational waves of culture, atoms in culture waves like science. No, we are not the first forms that immaterial pattern has donned. Immaterial identities also work their sorcery on quanta, quarks, atoms, stars, and galaxies. Recruitment strategies are alive in colonies of bacteria and hives of bees. They are equally alive in stock markets and trees. But we are the most complex social project that recruitment strategies have ever attempted to achieve. We are the repeaters of ancient patterns like attraction and repulsion, repeaters through whom the cosmos has sketched new spires and domes and woven whole new tapestries. We are the cosmos’s tools for fantasy. We are her first vessels of dreams. And yet we are only the foothills. Only the stepping stones. Only the starting blocks for the cosmos’s next big leaps.
The moral of the story? The time has come for science to grapple with the mystery of form without substance. The mystery of form with persistence. The mystery of recruitment strategies.
Image by EVO, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
