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The Inexplicable Universe |
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Written by Staff Writer
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Feb 04, 2008 at 06:17 PM |
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Open your eyes at random and you are looking at more than could be described in a thousand years, and more than could be explained in a million. Lift your gaze to the complex, shifting irregularities of the clouds above your head. What sort of description could you ever give that would exhaust their possibilities? And what sort of explanation? Well, you certainly feel that it's possible to give a general explanation, just as it is to give a general description. A meteorologist could identify all the forces involved - winds, updrafts, temperature, moisture content etc. A physicist could name all the optical effects governing the appearance that this particular distribution of water droplets has for us - the angle of the incident light, its reflection or absorption by the droplets, etc. And very useful this might be for all kinds of purposes. But you mean more than this. You want an explanation of how these general forces have produced, not this general effect, but precisely this particular array of phenomena that you see in front of your eyes now.
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Well, we can ask the meteorologist to quantify all the variables. He'll have to quantify them not in the way that he does in a weather report, as average values over broad areas and extended periods of time, but at each of a series of arbitrarily close points in the visible heavens, at each of a series of arbitrarily close moments in an arbitrarily long approach to the present. It's difficult to imagine what any complete statement of these quantities - or any model that represents them - would be like. The only thing we can be certain of, though, is that it will have to be at least as complicated as the cloudscape it is explaining. What point could such an explanation serve? What would it tell you that you can't see more graphically and immediately just by lifting your eyes and looking at the sky?
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Close your eyes, and even what you're seeing now defies your powers of description or explanation just as comprehensively. Limit your consideration to one small, isolated, and relatively defined element of the scene behind your closed eyelid - to that floater which is drifting slowly upwards, now turning and drifting down again. What would constitute a complete explanation of it? Of its provenance and position, its shape and colour, its speed and trajectory? The more you think about it the longer your explanation goes on - and the longer your explanation goes on the more it merges into the universal sea of explanation, in which all things are lost.
Answers can be offered, if at all, only to particular questions. Why does the floater move upwards at that particular speed? Why is it here and not there in the visual field? And we pull back from the specific to the general, from the behavious of this floater to the behaviour of floaters in general, to the force of gravity balanced against the viscosity of the fluid in which the floater is moving. Why does the earth draw apples towards itself? And we pull out to the behaviour of other planets, of stars and atoms - and of apples themselves. You feel that if you can pull back this far you can pull back forever, and ask: why is everything the way it is? But the further you've pulled back already, the less room there is to pull back further; the more general the question, the less there is to take in as explanation.
You can't pull back to show more a of a scene that includes everything already.
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