9 | The Nature of the Universe in the Poetry of Quantum Physics

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a Co-Finder of the Table Collective.

Way back in the second Episode, when I asked the question, “where and when did I begin” little did I know the journey it would take me on. 

It has been a very personal journey: back to my childhood and pre-childhood, my family history, my entanglement with people and places.  

It has been a spiritual journey: the question drew me back into the spiritual wisdom of the so-called “eastern” and “western” religious streams: the Gita, Buddha’s teaching, the Tao Te Ching, Genesis, John, the Quran. And I have not only explored the texts, but have frequently paused for meditation, contemplative silence, and what some traditions would refer to as listening prayer. The theme of what I have called entanglement, while described differently in these rivers of wisdom, is prevalent in them all, and has been impacting me deeply.

It has been an intellectual journey: I have discovered new insights and concepts in this process; insights and information about places, indigenous peoples, religious heritages, psychological and spiritual realities, and in particular, information and insights relative to what for me is a relatively new field of inquiry: quantum physics. In fact, that is where the term entanglement first came to me. Prior to that I tended to speak of interconnection. Having said that, I have extended usage of “entanglement” in ways physicists do not, since I speak about “psychic” and not only “physical” interconnections, and by no means am I suggesting they would agree with my extension!.  

And it has also been an artistic journey: the question “where and when did I begin” drew me into describing my discoveries and ways of seeing the world as an artist, through the lenses of my own music and poetry. That includes how I processed quantum physics, by the way. More on that soon. 

At every point along this journey, I have had a growing sense of awe, wonder, and curiosity in the face of the vast, expansive, mysterious, surprising, and as I am more and more discovering, counter-intuitive world we inhabit. 

Ironically, it has been my delving into the world of science, physics in particular, which has most surprised me. It is not unusual for people to assume that the arts, and religion, and the intuitive wisdom of meditation do not correspond with the hard facts of science. The irony is that it has been my digging into the work of scientists that is most responsible for revealing to me how different the world really is from what we assume it to be. Nothing is what it seems.

In fact, it is clear to me that the universe as seen through the lenses of quantum physics very closely resembles the universe as seen through the lenses of the religious heritages I have been exploring.

The task I had originally set for myself in this Episode was to describe “quantum ways of seeing” the world, and then compare that to the several religious heritages I have brought ot the table, and then to summarize the way I see all these voices singing together, whether in harmony or discordantly, by presenting my current conclusions about it all.

 

The Art of Physics: A Poetic Version

But as I have been preparing to record the Episode, I have had the growing realization that it can’t be done in one Episode (not the first time this has happened in the podcast!). Quantum physics has so much to say about the questions I have been asking: is the stuff the world is made of eternal? Are there multiple worlds? How does quantum entanglement affect everything? As such this whole Episode will be needed to let that quantum voice be heard.

But how? 

As I kept digging more fully into quantum theories of the universe, doing so as an artist (which is what my podcast description says the podcast is all about, after all) meant that I was intentionally engaging my artistic imagination as I considered implications of what I was learning about. 

So, I am going to experiment here. I am going to begin with my artistic presentation of quantum physics, in the form of a poem that I have been working on. I will follow that with a summary of what I have learned in my research. And then come back to the poem.  I call it Rippling Skies.

 

Rippling Skies

 

I turn my eyes.

 

The sky ripples

Canopy of lights glowing

Red, growing,

Slowing, dying

Already dead

Seeds in the cinders of stars

Worlds of worlds in an ember,

Every pregnant ash

A fullness of empty vastness

A point of ripening intensity

Density of verdant heat, explosive power

 

Every burst births a cycle

Expanding despanding unspanding respanding expanding again…

Universes begetting universes

 

“Beside, within, before, after”

Are the words that we agree to use.

 

As if we know!

 

Words are flotsam floating atop inscrutable unfathomable seas 

Teeming with creatures 

Frolicking with gleeful disregard for the laws 

Of our pragmatic reassuring necessary grammar

 

But really, real-ly?

 

Every world is a where with no there,

And a there with no where.

In a when with no then,

A then with no when.

 

We live as we live 

Because we must live 

As if we live in place and time,

With these people, 

And plants, and pets, and problems

 

As if all of this in fact works the way it seems to work,

The way we need it to work, 

Need to believe it works

In order to set foot outside a door on a winter morning

Or to see and name in wonder a setting sun.

 

Because this is the only way I can live 

As I live as this I who lives this way.

 

But really, real-ly?

 

I carry in myself and am myself carried by:

Universes begetting universes

Expanding despanding unspanding respanding expanding again…

Every burst birthing a cycle 

A density of verdant heat, explosive power

A point of ripening intensity

A fullness of empty vastness 

Every pregnant ash

Worlds of worlds in an ember,

 

Seeds in the cinders of stars

Already dead

Slowing, dying

Red, growing,

 

A canopy of lights glowing

In the rippling sky.

I turn my eyes.

  

The Art of Physics: A Narrative Version

Human beings have been telling stories about the world for as long as there have been human beings. Physicists are also storytellers, and while I have done a lot of research, and there are many hours of work behind what I am about to present, I am going to approach this as if quantum physics were a novelist, the narrator of a story,  an author who is talking about a novel they have written, sharing their insights into the plot and characters of the book.

In this story the world and the things in it are the main characters, the plotline is the story of how it all came to be. 

In the world our author describes, no thing in the world is what that thing is until that “thing” is experienced. Experienced by another character in the story. Ok, but prior to being experienced, what is that thing, and what is it doing? Our author replies: a thing might be anything before it is the thing we experience it to be.

And our author is quick to admit that this is all counter-intuitive, counter to how we experience the world. Albert Einstein is reported to have asked a colleague something like, “but do you really believe the moon isn’t there until we look at it?” Whatever his science told him, his practical experience suggested something else.

In addition, each thing is somehow connected with, entangled with, every other thing. Not just nearby, proximate things, but things separated by vast distances as well.

But are things the only characters? Even assuming that I am using “thing” to include, well, everything, including sentient beings, is there anything else? 

Let me introduce another character in the novel: matter. Only 5% of the universe is made up of stuff we can see, measure, touch, such as planets, stars, galaxies. That leaves 95% of the universe that cannot be "sensed" with our conventional instruments, leading our author to name this character in the story, "dark matter." Another metaphor!

That brings us to the plot line. How did such a world come to be?

The story is set initially in a universe that until quite recently has been assumed to be something fixed for all eternity, in which time runs from the infinite past to the infinite future, with very little changing in between. However, in a major plot twist, that static picture of the cosmos was destroyed by evidence of distant galaxies which were “in flight”. 

The plot twist was in large degree instigated by improvements in the telescope which provided more and more accurate detail about the universe. As a result a new myth emerged: the idea that the universe is not static and everlasting, it began at a point in time with a big bang, and is expanding.

I say “myth” because that word refers to describing something true and real, but with the use of metaphor, story, and imagination. For example, there was no “bang” because there were no properties for sound. And it was not “big” literally, as the conditions that enable us to compare dimensions did not yet exist. This must all be described in narrative, and thus as myth. So as it happens, science needs art to describe its conclusions.

We may be tempted to ask the author, “what was before the bang”, before the “explosion”, before the singular point of infinite density and temperature that expanded into what we call the universe. In other words, was there a prequel to the novel?

Now, asking about “before” implies “time”. But in the world of our author, time is not what we think.

Time runs at different speeds, for one thing, and only came into being as the result of the “bang” expanded toward its current size and shape. 

Since we currently lack the means to directly observe what existed before the big bang, our author might say simply, “I don’t know” to the question about what was before. I know by experience that it is very common for artists to not fully understand their own work, as well! But if our author were to speculate, they might posit several possible ideas for the “prequel” to their novel about our world as we know it.

One possible prequel is that our universe "bubbled off" from a parent universe, that the singular, compressed “thing” that went bang, and began a rapid explosive “inflation”, was but one of an endless progression of inflationary bubbles, each becoming a universe, and each of these birthing even more inflationary bubbles in an immeasurable multiverse, each “bubble” is ripe with explosive powers.

This plotline also suggests that in that first big push of inflation, after the bang, different parts of space-time grew at different rates. To be clear, we are speaking here of different universes, which have been, as it were, carved off, with each such universe existing with potentially different laws of physics.

Bubbles and pocket universes, sections: notice the use of language. No one thinks there are literal pockets or bubbles, but what other words does the storyteller have at hand? Metaphor. Myth. Art. The story is more like poetry than we might have assumed at the beginning.

It is also possible that, not only are there other bubbles and pockets, other universes now, but also that before the big bang this universe has gone through an infinite series of expansions and contractions. In other words, not only a single big bang, but big bangs followed by big “crunches”, which occur at the point when gravity pulls everything together, “crunching” it all into a vast black hole.  

Indeed in this version of the prequel,  our universe has been born inside a black hole, and every black hole in the universe may contain separate universes as well.

If new worlds are birthed, or banged, from black holes then our world is made up of elements formed deep within the cores of worlds long dead. As the British astronomer Sir Martin Rees, another story teller we might say, puts it, “We are literally the ashes of long dead stars.”

Bangs, crunches, black, holes. Nothing actually went bang, nothing crunched. There is no hole, and it isn’t black. These are all metaphors. Nor are these the only metaphors for a possible prequel: some propose speaking of the cycle of bang and crunch and bang and crunch as “big bounces” instead of bangs and crunches.

Notice the way that every metaphor also smuggles in other metaphors, so “a big bang” suggests an explosion, which is a misleading image. In an explosion, there is an expansion as well, as fragments are flung outward from a central point into a pre-existing space.  But the bang was not an expansion within a space that was already there. It was the beginning of space itself, indeed of what we might call space-ness. There was no “space” or space-ness prior to the bang. 

And in using the word “outward” we have had to smuggle in a metaphor. There was no geographic point to go outward from.  There was no “there” yet, “thereness” came to be at the same moment as everything that was “there”.

Speaking of metaphors, there is another one that caught my attention. Light. Light is a metaphor? In a way, yes. Some physicists speak of light existing before the bang. Though light as we know could not exist "before" the big bang. True, the energy that would later manifest as light is believed to have been present in the extremely dense singularity that preceded the big bang expansion as the "precursor" to light. But it is common to speak of that potentiality for light as light. That is close to being a metaphor.

I wanted to mention light, because as I described in a prior Episode, it is a major theme in the religious heritages and provides one way, at least, of comparing what all the voices at the table are saying. And I will come back to that in the future.

My point with all this talk of metaphors is that explaining science is a form of art, and a genre all its own.

 

The Novel of the Cosmos: A Synopsis of the Synopsis

The reality is that what our “author” is describing surpasses the ability of language to express without resorting to metaphor and analogy. One reason is that language is inherently metaphorical, almost never literally true, but that is a topic for another day. 

Another reason is that, while physicists must by necessity talk about origins and how things work, the reality is there is no comprehensive theory fully explaining things like time and gravity. Thus scientists are forced to use language without, in one sense, knowing what it means. 

And that is more like what a poet does than what we normally think of as the work of the scientist. I once defined poetry as using language to do what language can’t do.

Physicists ask questions like “what happened before…” but they do not know what time is and how it functions. They speak of expansions and contractions of the universe, yet they do not know what “space” and place mean. 

So they have to use language to say things it is in many ways impossible to say.

For we have no other way to speak of origins and beginnings, than to use temporal comparisons, and no other way to speak about this without using spatial terms. Even if we don’t know for certain what it all means.

Another point I want to make here: when physicists employ words and images and ideas and metaphors, and analogies they are using language the way the religious heritages do, the way artists do. They are creating mythic narratives to describe the world and its nature and what happens in it.

Yes, mythic. Not in the popular sense of a myth being false. But in the sense of the way that myths convey truths in ways that engage the whole person: emotion and imagination and intuition, as well as intellect and investigation.

As does art, including poetry.

And so at this point, I want to present again the poem I opened with. Perhaps it will resonate in fresh ways now.

 

Rippling Skies

 

I turn my eyes.

 

The sky ripples

Canopy of lights glowing

Red, growing,

Slowing, dying

Already dead

Seeds in the cinders of stars

Worlds of worlds in an ember,

Every pregnant ash

A fullness of empty vastness

A point of ripening intensity

Density of verdant heat, explosive power

 

Every burst births a cycle

Expanding despanding unspanding respanding expanding again…

Universes begetting universes

 

“Beside, within, before, after”

Are the words that we agree to use.

 

As if we know!

 

Words are flotsam floating atop inscrutable unfathomable seas 

Teeming with creatures 

Frolicking with gleeful disregard for the laws 

Of our pragmatic reassuring necessary grammar

 

But really, real-ly?

 

Every world is a where with no there,

And a there with no where.

In a when with no then,

A then with no when.

 

We live as we live 

Because we must live 

As if we live in place and time,

With these people, 

And plants, and pets, and problems

 

As if all of this in fact works the way it seems to work,

The way we need it to work, 

Need to believe it works

In order to set foot outside a door on a winter morning

Or to see and name in wonder a setting sun.

 

Because this is the only way I can live 

As I live as this I who lives this way.

 

But really, real-ly?

 

I carry in myself and am myself carried by:

Universes begetting universes

Expanding despanding unspanding respanding expanding again…

Every burst birthing a cycle 

A density of verdant heat, explosive power

A point of ripening intensity

A fullness of empty vastness 

Every pregnant ash

Worlds of worlds in an ember,

 

Seeds in the cinders of stars

Already dead

Slowing, dying

Red, growing,

 

A canopy of lights glowing

In the rippling sky.

I turn my eyes.

 

Another Chapter

I said above that at the end of the day the language used in physics and in religion ends up being more similar than we might normally expect. In addition, there will always be things we just don’t know, and can’t know, at least not with the type of knowing that results from reasoning or experimentation or logic or the type of certainty popularly assumed to come from such ways of knowing. 

Referring to the question of what happened before the big bang, Will Kinney, PhD, professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, says, “We don’t know anything about what came before inflation. It’s doubtful that we’ll ever know.” Ultimately the answer to that question pushes us beyond the reach of science, at least at this stage of things.

I can hear someone say, “Oh, I see, now Kevin will say this is where faith comes in, and religion, and yada, yada.”

Well, not exactly. In the next Episode, I plan to explore some aspects of that in the next Episode when I sit at the table alongside the religious heritages and quantum theory and try to make sense of it all. But probably not in the way some may expect.

How? As a bit of a prequel, since I have been using that metaphor, I would just note as one example to explore next is the fact that quantum theories and Buddhist and Hindu thought (or versions of them anyway, there is a great variety) seem to be very much in sync with each other. There are aspects in both which suggest for example, repeated cycles of ending and beginning, of this world or perhaps many worlds. 

As I say, just one example, an appetizer. There is a lot more to say about all of that, and I plan to do so…in the next Episode.

 Until next time!