Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Tue 19 Dec 2006 03:24 PM PST
The Café at the Beginning of the Universe
An encounter with Howard Bloom
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to witness the birth of the universe? To watch in slo-mo as matter and energy, space and time, explode and unfurl into being? Well, this might be your chance—as it was ours, one very surprising winter's night, when a group from our editorial staff visited the New York apartment and virtual universe of the remarkable Howard Bloom. Bloom is most widely known as the author of the acclaimed books The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. But perhaps because he is “omnivorously curious about everything in the cosmos,†as he puts it, Howard Bloom is one of those rare human beings who defies simple description. Schooled as a scientist, he probes the human and planetary psyche with the patience of a historian, the precision of a quantum physicist, and the passion of a poet.
After graduating magna cum laude from New York University, Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships in science to become, of all things, a very successful rock and roll publicist, helping to polish the stardom of such giants as Prince, Michael Jackson, Bette Midler, and the Talking Heads. “I wanted to move into the center of the myth-making machine of mass society,†he explains, “where the human mind froths and foams.†It wasn't until 1988, when he contracted chronic fatigue syndrome and took up an almost hermit-like residence in his Brooklyn apartment, that he returned to the world of science full time, plunging headlong into the study of biology, psychology, sociology, physics, and history. He even invented his own field of study — paleopsychology — along the way.
Perched atop a king-sized bed, surrounded by stacks of books and a potted ficus that had shed several seasons' worth of leaves, Howard Bloom took us on such a journey through cosmic history that the most basic realities we take for granted—like matter, gravity, and time itself—began to shift and morph around us. As the blue-jeaned genius danced his story of the universe through our minds (occasionally rising to do a jig atop the mattress that nearly filled the room), the wild and mind-boggling precision of the universe's creative intelligence came ever more fully into bloom.
Howard Bloom: Let's imagine that you and I are sitting
around at an outdoor café table at the beginning of the
universe. Sitting here, we're going to watch the Big Bang and
watch what happens as the universe unfolds. But before we get to
that, there are a few things I need to tell you about, starting
with Hegel. In 1837, he wrote an incomprehensible book that
almost no one reads called The Philosophy of History.
Hegel's message—and it's as applicable in 2004 as it was
then—was that history is a process of spirit becoming
flesh. History is a process of transubstantiation. For example, remember geometry? In my geometry class, they
gave us four postulates at the beginning of the year, four
axioms. They were things like “two parallel lines never
meet.†Simple things. And from these four axioms, week
after miserable week, by the end of the year, we'd derive the
whole euclidean geometry system. In other words, there was an
entire two-dimensional and even three-dimensional world implicit
in what? In four axioms! That's Hegel's “spirit becoming
flesh†in a most remarkable way. At Reed College, we had a freshman math course based on
something similar—Peano's Postulates. They gave you a
sheet of mimeograph paper the very first day in class. It had
four postulates on it, four axioms—just 165 miserable
little words. By the end of the semester, you'd worked out the
corollaries coiled in those four initial axioms and you'd come
up with the entire mathematical system. Positive numbers,
negative numbers, multiplication, division, square roots,
rational numbers, irrational numbers—the whole thing.
That, to me, was flesh emerging from spirit again. So there is something about this cosmos that says, in
essence: If you start with just a tiny number of rules, and then
you work out all the things that are consistent with those rules
and you weed out all the things that are inconsistent with those
rules, you can unfold a universe. You can unfold all of
euclidean geometry in one semester of high school. You can
unfold an entire mathematical system in two semesters at Reed
College. And if you happen to be a cosmos and you can do your
homework in Planck units of time, then you can finish
330,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, Now, if you're fourteen billion years into this process,
many of the implications that hovered unrealized like spirit at
the beginning have been turned into realities. But an
uncountable number of implications of the Big Bang's initial
axioms still lie ahead of you. They are still mere hints waiting
to be uncovered. It takes the universe a hell of a lot of
homework to figure out the next step. The next step has to be
consistent with the initial postulates just to flicker into
existence. Then it has to duke it out with all the other
children, grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren of those
starting postulates if it's going to stick around. The odd thing is this: all of its competitors are cousins.
Everything is a child of the Big Bang. This means that you are a
cousin to a nova. You are a cousin to a nebula. You are a cousin
to a galaxy. You are a cousin to the stone you trip over. You
are a cousin to the animal that wants to eat you. We're all
united. Which does not mean we will all survive. Now for something very strange: This entire planet is
inhabited by only one form of life. Why is this peculiar?
Because current science says, both in evolutionary theory and in
physics, that the universe is random. Quantum physics says the
universe is probabilistic. And a clique called the
“neo-Darwinians†says that evolution is based on
random changes, on random mutations. The mutations that fit
stick, and the ones that don't fit, don't stick. When I worked in the record industry, people went by the
philosophy “throw the s--- up against the wall and see
what sticks.†If this were really a random universe that
uses that philosophy, that just coughs out mutations in totally
random ways and lets those that stick, stick, then we might have
38 different life-forms, or 138 life-forms, or 3,800 life-forms,
or even 1.3 billion life-forms on this planet. But we only have
one. It's the DNA system. The DNA system is the
only system of life we've got. Now how's that for
random? So, in the same way that the universe started by working out
the implications of its initial set of rules from the initial
pin prick of the Big Bang, this planet, for 3.85 billion years,
has been working out the implications of a DNA-based system.
This means that everything around you, whether it's alive or
not, is your cousin. We are all children of the Big Bang, which
means that every stone and every volcano that flash-fries us
with its lava is our cousin. So if we talk about an environment
that's distinct from us, it is an artificial way of hacking
things up. The environment is part of the same process we're a
part of. We're all children of the Big Bang, and we're all children
of the system of DNA. This means that not only do we have a
history in common that goes back fourteen billion years, but we
have a future in common that's implicit in us at this
very moment. And what that future is depends on how far into the
future you want to go. It's a future that's going to get wilder
and wilder. One thing that we know about this cosmos is that the
cosmos is a wiz at creating astonishing surprises. Astonishing
surprises! So with or without us, this universe is going to pop
out new things that will blow minds, if there are still minds
around to be blown. And that brings us back to our café table, our coffee
table at the beginning of the universe. Let's start with the
instant of the Big Bang. All you've got are four forces, and
this enormous flash of something called energy. Forces are
rules, social rules. Who will be attracted to whom? Who will be
repulsed by whom? The four forces are an Emily Post book of
etiquette, but for things that don't exist yet. So what does it
mean to say there are only four forces and there are no objects
of any kind yet? It's sort of meaningless. We're sort of stuck
here. We're also stuck because—what's the dictionary
definition of energy? “The ability to do work.â€
Well, what does that really mean? The ability to move something.
But there is nothing. There are no things in this universe yet.
Okay. So let's get down to the problems and rules. The universe
starts out with this big enormous flash of something we'll call
energy. And we're living in Planck time. Do you know what Planck
units are? When a little bit of energy emerges from an atom, it
doesn't emerge in just any willy-nilly form whatsoever or any
willy-nilly size whatsoever. It always comes out in a standard
size, like a brick. No one ever thinks about this, but bricks
are standardized. They're modular pieces of mud. They're all the
same. And the fact that they're all the same makes it possible
to build city after city out of bricks. Well, the universe works
that way, too, with modular units. And the modular units are
Planck units. So if you're an electron, and you're circling in
an outer shell around a nucleus, and you drop down a shell, you
give off a bit of energy. It's not just any random bit of
energy. It is a specific unit of energy called a Planck unit.
It's a photon, and it's precisely a Planck unit of energy that
you give off.
000,000,000,000,000,000,000
homework assignments in just one second. If you keep
that up for fourteen billion years, what do you get? You get a
universe! Quite a universe!
So here we are, sitting around, and we're measuring things in Planck units. Okay. Something that happens in a second, for us takes an eternity—we get to see this in slow motion. You and I are sitting here and watching this huge flash, this unbelievable flash in slow motion, a flash that will eventually produce an entire universe from a pinprick—which means an awfully, awfully big flash. We're watching this flash together, and you are a dreamer and I am a skeptic, and you say, “Howard, you know, I have this feeling that in, oh, let's say, one to two hundred Planck units from now, all of a sudden, there are going to be these new things called things.†But there never have been things before. There's just been energy. So I say, “You're crazy. I've been sitting around in this universe ever since it started, dozens and dozens of Planck units ago. I know this universe. I know how it behaves. There never have been things and there never will be things.â€
And then, suddenly, whammo! These quarks appear in six different forms.
Now, think of this for surprises, okay? We've never had a thing of any kind before. You have made this lunatic, absolutely maniacal prediction, and it has come true. And what's also remarkable about it is that quarks come out in only six different forms, right? We've got something like ten-with-eighty-five-zeroes-after-it number of quarks that have just appeared in the universe, and they're in only six forms! Where the heck does that uniformity come from?
What's the answer? Well, there is no answer yet. I'm working on the aspect of it that I call supersameness and supersimultaneity. That's the question: Why have so many things emerged together with such amazingly precise identicality? It's astonishing, but so far as I can tell, this is a question physicists haven't answered. My hypothesis—the Bloom answer—is that in the first flash of the cosmos you're so close to the initial axioms that your wiggle room is very, very small. Your wiggle room is so small that yes, it will allow you to produce six quarks, and yes, that's a big step up from just four forces, a big jump in the number of forms of processes or things. But sorry, kids. We're still so close to the initial rules that that's as much wiggle room as there is. As a consequence, when you've got things emerging, they're all emerging as an expression of the same rules. They're all pushed forward by the same thing, that operator we call time, the gizmo that moves things forward, that gives you new homework assignments at every step, every Planck step. The combination of the operator and the initial rules is only going to give you a very tiny number of different things, but it will give you huge quantities of duplicates because there was so much energy in what you started with.
Okay. Now, we also start out with another thing that many of my friends in science are only beginning to recognize. And that is that the universe is essentially social. There is nothing, nothing, nothing individual about this universe. There is no such thing as the lone individual anywhere. The four forces are forces of sociality. The four forces are social rules. And those rules say which quarks are going to be allowed to associate with what quarks, and which quarks are going to have to say, “I'm sorry, no. I don't like you. I won't get near you. You get away from me. And I'm going to go away from you.†That's already happening somewhere early in the first second, like in the ten-to-the-minus-thirty-second of a second.
Quarks are social. Quarks cannot exist on their own. So, quarks gang up in groups of three. If two up-quarks merge with one down-quark, that trio is a proton. And if it's the other way around, two down-quarks and an up-quark, it's a neutron. That's it.
We sit around watching these quark threesomes slam into each other and bounce off again for over 300,000 years, and all of a sudden you, the dreamer, come up with another one of your scatterbrained predictions. “These things,†you say, “these protons and neutrons are going to get together with those little things flicking around called electrons.†Now I know you're crazy. So I try to talk some sense into your head. “No, no, no,†I tell you. “You just don't get it. This universe is a high-speed ricochet soup. It's what we call a plasma. Everything is moving so fast that everything is bouncing off of everything else like bullets—bullets slamming at mega-speeds! There's no opportunity for anything to get together. These particles hate each other. Look at them. They're crashing and bashing all the time. And you're telling me these things are going to settle down into some sort of peaceful union with each other? And you're also trying to tell me that a proton, which is 1,842 times the size of an electron, is going to discover that it has a force, a need, a longing that precisely match the need and longing of an electron? And the electron, instead of going in a straight line and doing a head-on crash and then boinging away, is going to slip into a gentle little circle around the proton? And this is going to produce whole new properties that you've never seen and never imagined in your life? And you're going to call it an atom?
“These gang-ups you're predicting just don't square with this universe. They really don't square with the way this universe has been at all. I'm sorry. You're crazy . . . why do I even sit here with you? Why do I indulge a lunatic like you?â€
And all of a sudden, whammo! You are proven to be right again. It's me who doesn't get it. I'm still a traditional scientist, saying everything's going to stay the same as it's been. I'll grant you that there can be straight-line predictions from the way things are, but that's it. “There are no surprises in this universe. I know the whole thing.†That's what standard science tends to say these days. Even though we've got this story of an unfolding universe sitting right in front of us, and it's twitching with amazements.
Well, I could go on and on and on, and tell you about surprise after surprise. Even the attractive power of this stuff we call gravity does not appear until roughly 400,000 years after the universe gets started! There's simply nothing big enough to attract anything else with gravity. The first matter of any substance—matter made up of more than one atom getting together—doesn't appear until over 300,000 years after the universe has started. So there are surprises being belched out all the time—galaxies, stars, star-collapses, whole new forms of atoms, planets, atmospheres, and life.
What I've basically been saying is, right now we carry a fourteen-billion-year history within us, a fourteen-billion-year history of surprises. You are a lump of quarks. So am I. Those quarks are joined in atoms. Those atoms are joined in something very complex called molecules. But we also carry fourteen billion years or more of another kind of time within us—future. The future's as real within us as the universe was real in those first tiny axioms of the Big Bang. I'm not predicting that you and I will be around to see that future. But in one form or another, our basic ingredients sure as heck will be.
And we have a unique responsibility. We're among the first batch of quarks we know trying out this new surprise called consciousness. Every new surprise—every new upgrade—is tested. Protons, for example, were tested to the nth degree. They've gone through every kind of catastrophe you can possibly imagine. They've gone through the bashing of the initial high-speed plasma soup. They've gone through the crunch and shattering of dying stars. And they've pulled through it all. Right? They're the ultimate survivors in this universe. But we'll see whether consciousness is able to survive. We will see.
So, we started with Hegel, and with spirit attempting to become flesh. And spirit attempting to become flesh is just another way of saying that the implications of the universe are implicit in you and me. The implications are hovering; they're with us all the time. Sometimes those implications appear in visions. Sometimes they appear in fiction, poetry, and dreams. Many of our former intuitions and our long-gone fantasies have taken flesh as everyday realities. And the implications of this universe contain huge surprises. Like the development of galaxies that are dark. They have no light. They're simply matter that's aggregated, but what a surprising way to aggregate, in huge spiral pools. When you told me there were going to be the first collections of atoms, I didn't believe you. And now you've got these aggregations that are thousands of light-years across, each swirling around its own center of gravity. And I, the skeptic, told you once that gravity was one of your impossible dreams. Well, that kind of thing keeps coming up in the universe all the time. Quarks were once surprises. So were neutrons, protons, atoms, and “things.â€
What will happen with our thoughts and feelings? Will we transubstantiate them? Will we be an evolutionary misstep, or will we prove our mettle? Will we seed surprises that defy today's imaginings?
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