Many years ago I read the bestseller Looking Out for #1. I don’t know if you remember it. Hell, I don’t know if I remember it. I do, however, remember the opening of the book.
The author painted a picture of our place in this big vastness we call existence. He postulated that for all we know the earth could just be a ball that rolled off some giant’s table and we are all in for one helluva surprise when it finally hit the floor.
That’s a pretty freaky thought. It certainly was when I read it. But it was just a catchy thought back then. It wasn’t until a few nights ago that I came to realize that this may have some truth to it after all.
No, I haven’t stripped my gears and actually think we’re a giant’s plaything. But I did try to wrap my mind around some ideas that were even too big for my head and I blame Morgan Freeman for it.
You see, Morgan narrates a show on the Science Channel called Through the Wormhole. It covers all sorts of topics, such as whether reality is really real or something we just thought up, or whether there is a God. Pretty pedestrian stuff for me, as I regularly like to think of such things.
But in this particular episode, the theory was that the entire universe is just one big living organism and basically we’re all a bunch of mitochondria in it.
Whoa!!! The physicists on the show, and these are quantum physicists and quantum mechanics types, compared the universe to a living and breathing creature. They started with Los Angeles as an example. The city basically breathes twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. As it breathes life into the economy, it inhales and exhales cars (corpuscles) that travel on interstate highways and roads (arteries and blood vessels).
Confused? So was I. But as the idea got bigger and bigger, it started to get really freaky, and not necessarily in a good way.
We love to think that we are the be-all, do-all of the universe. We want to think that we are unique and pretty omnipotent; in short, we are pretty full of ourselves as human beings. We think we are masters of all we purvey, and this whole theory really throws a monkey wrench into our superiority complex because it reduces us to amoebic creatures that are a shade or two above cosmic dust.
I still haven’t gotten my head around the idea that we could be pretty random creations that are leaching on a big round ball that rotates around one of billions of suns in a living, breathing universe that doesn’t really care if we exist and most likely doesn’t know we exist.
As I’ve noted in a past RobZerrvation, we’re carting around trillions of hitchhikers on our own bodies, these little critters going for a free ride as we go about our day. We don’t know they exist; they don’t really know we exist. For all they know they are vacationing with their family in some ancient forest that we think is the hair on our head. I won’t even postulate where the Grand Canyon could be or Old Faithful.
Scientists argue that the universe is indeed alive as it exhibits characteristics that are found in all life here on earth – unity, regeneration, freedom, sentience and a capacity to reproduce itself.
In short, physicists who once believed that the universe came from nothing and that basically it was dead on arrival are beginning to believe the universe is very much alive. New universes are being created all the time. The universe is growing and expanding. There is a continuous flow of generation and regeneration that is going on all around us. And if this is true, then the universe is indeed alive, not dead.
Freeman Dyson writes about consciousness at the quantum level: “Matter in quantum mechanics is not an inert substance but an active agent, constantly making choices between alternative possibilities … appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron.”
That’s not to say that an electron has a brain or can show up at karaoke and do “Stairway to Heaven.” Rather, it simply says that within a specific set of parameters an electron does make choices, as much as we make a choice between pizza and hamburgers, but on the molecular level.
I’ll pause right here to wait for your head to explode. I told you that it’s really big stuff. It kind of redefines our own world and our place in it, as well as our place in the universe. After all, we’re made up of the same stuff as the universe. There’s only 118 elements in the periodic table and we’re made up of a handful of them.
When we die, the atoms that make up our bodies recombine with others to create new substances. As noted previously, using simple match, each of us has something like 4,000 atoms of Shakespeare in us.
When we die, some of us undoubtedly flies off to combine with other parts of the universe. So perhaps it really is more alive than we think it is.
Certainly, the new ideas coming out of the physics world offer some really mind boggling possibilities about what life is and what the universe is. If there really is a mental component to the universe, as Dyson proffers, then perhaps this isn’t all accidental after all. Maybe there is a purpose to our existence, but one that is much larger than we ever anticipated. We are a very small cog in a big machine, not the masters of our domain as we once thought. Perhaps there are lessons out there for us yet to learn, not only about where we came from, but what we are here to do.
In the Emerald City, wearing a stocking cap so I can catch all the pieces of my exploding head,
– Robb