A Looking Glass Universe?

It came from Inner Space - Pic courtesy of Wikipedia

by Trebor Snillor

“You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart.” -- Francis Church, contributing editor of the New York Sun, 1897

Today’s topic is in the area of “weird science”. I’m neither a chemist nor a biologist so I’ll serve up these ideas as speculation. The reader can hurl it to the trash bin as necessary. 

Mainstream Christianity and “mainstream” atheism are uncivil enemies toward one another – the unkindest of adversaries. But they oddly share something in common. Both areas of thought tend towards reductionist thinking. The idea is that humans are the “summa” product of all creation – that anything smaller than us is merely a mindless constituent ingredient in our biological bill-of-materials. Darwinists and Christians are both egotistically infatuated with human-kind – just differing on how we got here.

Religion uses the sky as a metaphor to God – He and the angels reside in the Heavens. Atheism also looks to the sky.. Cosmic rays and solar radiation are thought to cause biological mutations to the DNA. The SETI projects looks skyward and beyond for intelligent life. Both ways of thinking share a similar “bigger is better” idea. Be it God or some ultimate scientific Truth – it looms much larger and higher than us.

Conversely, we look at small things with an odd sort of disdain. Cells, molecules, prions, atoms and even sub-atomic muons – are seen as mindless mechanistic wind-ups. They follow a rote, robotic ritual with no intelligent guidance. Much like a tether ball circling a school yard pole, electrons are seen as thoughtless orbs that obey some simple orbit. In fact, we may even conjecture a smallest particle or time slice – a simplicity that defies all simplicity.

I would like to suggest that we are looking in the wrong direction for anything of substance. The sky gives us nothing but the stellar byproducts of a formative event – gas clouds and nebulae that are lifeless in any way we think of life.

INSIDE JOB

I am proposing something else very different – intuitive on my part. I think we were created by a masterful intelligence but the act of creating was done entirely from the inside out. Something manipulated the bonding properties of atoms and molecules to build living systems – from inside the atoms themselves. The creative capacity here is mind-boggling, it would be like humans aligning stars by gravitational manipulation. There is also some implicit idea that whole civilizations or sub-universes could exist at a micro-molecular scale. “Absurd” you say.

REDUCTIO AD COMPLEXITY

There is much about our thinking that is arbitrary and even well, blinders-on. We know only an alphabet that starts with “A” not “Z”. A globe that would show Australia on top would be all wrong – primarily because of our concrete, conventional mindset. Humans are in a technological infancy.. Of all that is real and relevant we probably know about one tenth of one percent. We don’t know what causes aging or cancer. We don’t know the origin of life and we don’t really understand dark matter. This is not to denigrate science or philosophy – only to say that the journey has barely begun. We aren’t there yet, nor are we even close.

LOOKING GLASS UNIVERSE

Moving beyond the laws of mere physics or chemistry – is there some advanced sub-universe where people are thoughtful and today’s pressing problems have been solved?

There might very well be “somewhere over the rainbow” – a futuristic world where people treat each other decently and priorities are set right. But that rainbow is contained in a dew drop, a tiny smattering of nothingness that just happens to contain all of reality. We humans are lumbering giants full of pride, ego and pre-programmed fallacies. At some point we need to slow down and see what obviously is, even if it’s very small and not directly visible.

© 2014 Snillor Productions