Fires41

Words like "local" and "nearby" and "cluster" are highly figurative, in this
context. If M31 can be said to be "nearby," then Neptune, whose orbit
averages some 3 billion miles from the Sun, or 2.9 billion miles from the
Earth, is practically on the doorstep. For perspective on the
exaggeration of the figure "nearby" when applied to M31's distance,
consider this: it takes light, traveling at about 186,000 miles per
second, roughly 2.2 million years to travel from the edge of M31 to the
Earth, and just over 4 hours to travel from Neptune to the Earth. It
takes about 8 minutes for light to travel 93 million miles from the Sun to
the Earth. In 1 second a photon of light can travel around the Earth
about 7ź times.
Despite the fact that we can see M31 on a clear moonless night, or that
we can see the Milky Way spreading across the sky, billions and billions
of stars flowing through Cassiopeia and Cygnus on autumn nights, we
comprehend nothing directly about them. The structures and processes
which give numbers like "2.2 million light years" are abstractions. They
are such incomprehensible abstractions that they can only be
understood in terms of everyday reality: because a quasar is thought to
be 15 billion light years away, M31 is "nearby." Because one natural
object has a mass of over 400 billion Suns, and another has a mass of
about a million Suns, the latter is a "dwarf." A star hundreds of times
bigger than the Sun, on the other hand, is a "red giant." Jupiter and
Saturn are the solar system's "gas giants," although they are pinpoints
compared to red giants like Arcturus and Betelgeuse.
The descriptive words of astronomy are all metaphorical, contextual
and relative. Even the word "galaxy" is inherently metaphorical: it is
derived from the Greek word gala, which means milk. A more abstract --
though still figurative -- scientific word like "local" represents no real
reality. The distances and sizes of galaxies are both local and unlocal,
real and unreal, at the same time: they are seen directly as patches of
light, mainly through instruments, and yet what they are believed
actually to be is really nothing like what is directly perceived. The
experience of a galaxy is the experience of immense nuclear fires, and
pervasive gravity, and incomprehensible quanta of velocity and
nothingness, and strong-nuclear-force collapse; it is inhuman and
unreal to us. It is a stupefying problem to wonder what it would be like
to be a galaxy. It is too direct a question.

* * *

The most surreal world of all is the local world. In the context of
photons and galaxies, "locality" signifies both proximity and activity,
neither of which can be comprehended in everyday terms. For galaxies,
"local" means distances of anywhere between 160,000 and one hundred
million light years. "Local" means the aggregations of aggregations of
stars which are connected partly by their gravitational pull on each
other and partly by light traveling between them, eerily supplying
information to minds which can represent the information, but cannot
experience the information itself.
For subatomic particles, "local" means, roughly, the condition of being
connected by forces which can be represented by everyday metaphors.
Subatomic particles and galaxies are hypothesized not to act spookily at
a distance, but to be bound by forces such as gravity and
electro-magnetism (light) which operate more or less inside the bounds
of our ability to picture them in human terms. Unfortunately, the
Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky experiment contradicts this hypothesis, and
Einstein's phrase, "spooky action at a distance," is simply an admission
that something is not being understood. That is, something is happening
which cannot be represented in either the direct terms of rational
science or the indirect terms of metaphor. Something is happening
which escapes our imagination.
The phrase "15 billion light years," I want to say, is similar to the phrase
"spooky action at distance." "Superluminal interconnectedness" is as
unreal an abstraction as a time-space figure purporting to describe the
width of the universe. Yet as unreal as both things are, they are also
real. The difficulty with speaking of galaxies and the universe is the same
difficulty as speaking of subatomic particles: they cannot be thought of
as objects, or substances. They are more like activities, despite their
surreal appearance of having some kind of physicality. The inherent
surreality of galaxies is virtually identical to the inherent paradoxical
properties of light. Light can be spoken of in two ways, or both at the
same time: as particle or wave. If it is a particle, there is a word,
"photon," to represent the particle. If it is a wavethere is really no word
to describe the substance of a wave. A wave is more in the nature of an
activity. When the attempt is made to speak of light as both wave and
particle together, the term "pilot wave" is sometimes used.

This also does not help. What is a pilot wave? What is a photon? What is
a galaxy? What is a quasar? What is a star? What is a human being? Plato
suggested, some 2400 years ago, that every human being was at the
time of creation appointed to a star, as the Demiurge-Creator had made
as many stars as there were souls, and that after lifetimes of
incarnations in bodies, experiencing human sensations and feelings, "He
who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his
native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence"
(Timaeus 42b). In a sense Plato's metaphorical description of the
journey of human souls is a kind of allegory for the quantum idea of the
non-local: everything is interconnected, it is spooky action at a
distance, through time.
In the seventeenth century Kepler, Galileo and Descartes tried to make
a language that became decreasingly metaphorical, or indirect, in order
to deal rationally with previously unknown direct phenomena. In the
twentieth century, the language of science has gradually become
decreasingly rational, or direct, and increasingly metaphorical, or
indirect. It seems to describe a surreal universe because its words
reflect two contradictory views: one which seems everyday and real,
with objects obeying classical physical laws, and another which seems
extraordinary and unreal, with classically impossible activity or size.
One world seems filled with comprehen-sible objects, another filled with
incomprehensible activities.
A language which seeks to discuss activities needs to overcome its
compulsion to discuss objects. A language which cues itself on activities
must necessarily congeal the apparently contradictory
complementarity principle of Neils Bohr: an experiment is not an
aggregation of parts - observer, observed, instrument -- but an activity
in which the parts inevitably complement each other's participation.
The language of activity is the language of the dream world. In dreams,
there are no real objects, only the events of figures, and the entire
experience of a dream is of an activity in sleep. And simultaneously it is
significantly interconnected with objective reality through its familiar
images, like a roll of film exposed once, and lost, and unwittingly
exposed again years later by the same person. Photons of light, may I
say, course between the Milky Way and M31 in waves, conveying
information, instantly, between their twins and, across two million light
years, between localities.
Our knowledge of these activities, to speak beyond the confines of the
Freudian mind and rational language, is intuitive. No one knows or
comprehends how intuition works. Yet Plato understood that the world
was made of tiny triangles -- a precursor of Democritus' atoms -- long
before scanning-tunneling electron microscopes created images of
triangular silicon atoms. And Kepler understood that planets traveled
elliptical orbits before there were Voyager spacecrafts. Einstein
understood that time could expand and contract before there were
atomic clocks. Edwin Hubble understood that galaxies existed out
beyond the reaches of the Milky Way before there were space
telescopes. They all described reality through some sort of non-local
communication between the mind and the universe itself. The language
of activities interconnects abstractly with the language of objects at the
human intuition. There is no reason to believe, in the worlds of Plato's
stars and J.S. Bell's interconnected photons, that a galaxy is not a living
being. There is no reason to believe that -- observed, observer and
instrument taken together, or signified, signifier and speaker taken
together -- we cannot or have not communicated with M31.
The activities of the universe, it seems, are localized and nonlocalized
inside the human mind. The universe, like words, appears to be the
mind turned inside out. appears to be the mind turned inside out.