Fires40

Because we live some four hundred years after Galileo, Kepler
and Descartes, we would like very much to speak of things directly.
We would like to speak of our dreams directly, but we can't because the
dreams pass out of their surreality as soon as we wake up. We can only
describe their images and events in words, later. We would like to speak
of subatomic particles directly, but we can't because they come and go
too quickly and they are too small even to photograph accurately. We
can only describe images which seem to represent the behaviors
observed through instruments.
We are forced to imagine what it would be like to exist at the subatomic
level, and so we draw lines and arrows and circles and orbital systems,
and we use words like nucleus and electron, which are like the ancient
words earth and planet, and words like decay, which is like the ancient
word retrograde. But in fact things happen in the subatomic world, and
in mathematical representations of the subatomic world, which are so
strange there are not even good metaphors for them. That is, nothing in
the everyday world even seems to correspond to certain behaviors. The
Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox, for example, reveals that pairs of
subatomic particles generated at the same time by the same source
seem to "communicate" with each other over considerable distances
instantaneously. That is, when they are separated, each particle seems
to know instantly what the other is doing. If two photons traveling in
opposite directions are emitted from the same source at the same
instant, and one of the photons is polarized in a certain way, the other
photon polarizes in the same way with no lapse of time between the two.
Another example of a behavior that has no everyday parallel is the
"tachyon" particle, which has never been observed, but which is
mathematically shown to be exceeding the speed of light and traveling
backward in time. These subatomic activities pose a problem for
description, partly because they flatly violate our sense of natural
possibilities, but also because there is nothing in our world to use as
metaphors to talk about them. There is no natural, phenomenal activity
which is "like" traveling backward in time, and so there is no analogy or
picture for a tachyon. Science has not observed any everyday activity
or object which resembles the activity of instant communication --
particles which instantly "know" each other's actions are not operating
by telephone or television or satellite, which, fast as they seem to us,
are under the universal constraint of the speed of light. (Or so Einstein's
special theory of relativity posits.)
Physicists are required to invent terms for these things, just to be able
to talk about them. The word "tachyon" was coined from the Greek word
takhus, which means rapid or swift. J.S. Bell used the abstraction
"inter-connected" to talk about the capacity of particles to know each
other's actions. Another interesting word is "superluminal," which
simply means "faster than the speed of light." Einstein, referring to
quantum physics' explanation of the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox,
said that he did not believe in "spooky action at a distance."

With the word "spooky," we are again in the vicinity of the dream world,
which is uncertain, sometimes scary, and either irrational or somehow
non-rational. It is at any rate not directly comprehensible, and
somehow surreal. Even when the dream world is approached
scientifically, as Freud and Jung approached it, for example, there is
still the unsettling sense that we are operating outside the bounds of
normal reality. The id, ego and superego are arcane, difficult, and
abstract, simply a matrix for understanding the mind rather than actual
entities existing inside us.
The "unconscious" becomes, for Jung, a profound bestower of meaning.
The psychological analog of The Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox is
Jung's idea of synchronicity, which, simply defined, means the strange
quality of meaningfulness which certain coincidences possess. Because
the word "coincidence" is anchored too much in the everyday and
suggests too much of the element of everyday "chance" (God, as Einstein
hypothesized, does not play dice), Jung coined a new abstraction and
suggested that events in the outside world are susceptible to the
imaginative structures of the mind: the mind creates meaning out of
coincidence; therefore, important coincidences are not matters of
chance.
Jung, in his essay "Synchronicity," tells of a woman who before the first
world war took some photographs of relatives and then lost the roll of
film before the pictures were developed. Many years later in another
part of Europe she bought a roll of film, used it, and developed it. When
the pictures came back, they were all double exposed, and the older
exposures, underneath the newer ones, were the pictures the woman
had taken before the war. Somehow the same roll of film had journeyed
around Europe and a war and through various hands, and was re-sold to
her.
The meaningfulness and improbability of this kind of coincidence are
not like anything we can relate to everyday reality, and their
implications are intensely difficult if not impossible to discuss directly.
Similar to the subatomic particles' spooky action at a distance, the
woman's experience with her photos is like a dream experience. It is
real, and yet it simultaneously has the quality and atmosphere of being
unreal. There are in both cases observable phenomena, but there are no
words available to speak of either event directly. Jung, seeking to speak

directly yet lacking even metaphorical language, invents an abstraction
which, like Bell's, really brings us no closer to understanding what
happened.
It is the activity that is inexplicable, not the objective reality. One
begins to think of the universe as a series of activities, or as one
enormous activity, rather than as a concatenation of objects or events.
To represent the activities, one invents not only individual metaphors,
but whole stories, perhaps even allegories, which are more and less
concrete depending on how readily the activities lend themselves to
events in our local, everyday reality. The interconnectedness of two
spin-1/2 particles lends itself very badly to events here and now, and so
must bespoken of abstractly, largely in mathematics rather than even
abstractions. As Arthur Koestler said of Galileo and Kepler, we seem to
be coming by our knowledge like sleepwalkers. We are dreaming.

* * *

The size of the universe is also like that: an expanse of 15 billion
light years is incomprehensible. In some surreal way, you can
understand what the phrase "15 billion light years" means, but the
expanse itself cannot be directly comprehended.** That is, we can think
of the size of the universe only indirectly, and the distance from hereto
the farthest quasar cannot be correlated with any everyday reality.
Even the term "quasar," although it stands for a natural object which has
been directly observed through telescopes, betrays the uncertainty of
what is comprehended, what is understood, and what has merely been
seen. "Quasar" is a foreshortening of the phrase "quasi-stellar object,"
which is precisely vague because for two decades no one knew what a
quasar was or did, or even exactly where it was. For a time in the 1980s
and 90s quasars were confidently thought to be a type of newborn
galaxy, but recent information strongly suggests they are something
else, merely associated with galaxies. No one knows what else. A quasar
is sort of like a lepton out there, behaving, and real at some level, but
unreal at another.
When we use a word like "galaxy," we speak of something more directly
apprehensible: it is common knowledge that we live in the Milky Way
galaxy. It is easy to find out that the Milky Way is an immense
aggregation of between 100 billion and 400 billion stars, depending on
what astronomer makes the estimate. It is shaped like a spiral, with at
least three great arms of younger stars whirling out into space around a
central bulge of older stars. The three arms are called the Orion, Perseus
and Sagittarius arms. A fourth arm, called Carina, may be simply an
extension of the Sagittarius arm. The disk of the spiral is estimated to be
about 100,000 light years across, and the central bulge is about 25,000
light years through the middle. Dense groups of extremely old stars,
called globular clusters, orbit the perimeter and inhabit the center of
the central bulge. All the stars in the spiral arms and the central bulge
appear to be revolving around the center of the galaxy, which is
hypothesized to be an immense black hole.
It is easy to find out that the Milky Way is believed to be an average
galaxy, of average size and shape. "Average" means that it is like the
preponderance of other observed galaxies - most are spiral shaped,
some are roughly elliptical, and a small observed percentage is
"irregular, "shaped like shreds of cloth and pine boughs and watermarks.
Astronomers believe there are billions of other galaxies. Some are
relatively nearby. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which appear
to be orbiting the Milky Way, are relatively small irregular galaxies
about 169,000 and 210,000 light years away. They contain about 20
billion and 2 billion solar masses each. Some other "dwarf galaxies,"
each containing about a million solar masses, are in the vicinity of the
Milky Way, too, at distances of from 160,000 to 980,000 light years.

M31, the "great" spiral galaxy in the constellation Andromeda, is about
2.2 million light years distant, and is believed to be quite similar to,
though somewhat larger than, the Milky Way. It appears to be about
170,000 light years across, and seems to contain upwards of 400
billion stars. Although it is much farther away than the Magellanic
Clouds and the dwarf galaxies, M31 is nonetheless said to be in our "local
group" of galaxies. Another local spiral galaxy is M33, also known as the
Pinwheel Galaxy, in the constellation Triangular. It is apparently about
60,000 light years across and about 2.4 million light years away from
the Milky Way. M33 and M31 seem to be about 570,000 light years
distant from each other.
These galaxies are said to be nearby the Milky Way, or in our galactic
"neighborhood," as some textbook writers say. Our local group consists
of about twenty galaxies held loosely together by gravity within an area
of about 3 million light years. Our group is in the vicinity of other
groups of gravity-linked galaxies, the nearest being perhaps 10 million
light years distant. A typical group contains about 100 galaxies, and all
these groups of galaxies are part of a supercluster of groups, spanning a
distance of perhaps 100 million light years. The Milky Way is believed
to move around a central cluster called the Virgo cluster. Apparently
there are superclusters of galaxies throughout the universe, at least, as
far as anyone can see through a telescope. At the fringes of the universe,
some 10 to 20 billion light years away, are quasars, and probably other
strange, indescribable things.