Science Musings Blog

If there is a cognitive disconnect in contemporary culture it is between cosmic space and time and human space and time.

Those folks who can seriously grasp the scale and age of the universe, with its tens of billions of observable galaxies and billions of years of evolutionary time, and still believe the universe (or its Maker) attends to them personally -- well, they are more daring thinkers than me. Or more credulous.

Which is why, I suppose that nearly half of Americans believe the universe is less than ten thousand years old -- which is to say, that cosmic history and human history are the same. As for the physical scale of the universe, most people simply put it out of their minds. Conceptually, they choose to live in the cozy cosmic egg of Dante, as if half a millennium of science never happened.

And why not? The vast empty, silent spaces can be frightening. And it's not just that. It's also being cut adrift from our historical moorings, thousands of years of animistic and anthropomorphic tradition, thousands of years of living cheek-by-jowl with the gods. As the Roman Catholic priest Thomas Berry said, the older stories have become dysfunctional, but we have not yet contrived an equally satisfying new story to take their place.

Berry tried, valiantly and well. Teilhard de Chardin tried. But they were fighting an uphill battle against the light-years and the eons, against Robert Frost's exterior and interior "desert places."

But maybe the story we are looking for has been here all along, in the mystical tradition of the absconded god, the god who is not this and is not that, who hides in a cloud of unknowing, who eludes even the personal pronoun "who." "What makes the desert beautiful," said Antoine se Saint-Exupery's Little Prince, "is that somewhere it hides a well."

You may remember something said by Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Little Prince: "What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well."

One could ponder this line for a long while, but I will interpret it thus: It is what we don't know that infuses the world with beauty.

The sudden and unexpected lover's touch that comes out of the blue. The extravagance of a sunset that seems to overwhelm the laws of reflection, scattering and refraction. The exquisite aerodynamic perfection of the dragonfly that lands on a fingertip. Even the perception of beauty itself, which, so far at least, defies the neurologist's understanding.

The usual, the well-understood, the commonplace, seldom move us to ecstasy. It is the inexplicable occurrence, if benign, that warms the heart and drops the jaw.

Mystery is the mother of beauty.

In his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence of Belief, Francis Collins tells us how he found God:

On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

I don't want to belittle Collins' epiphany. Many of us have had similar experiences, moments when the inexplicable overwhelms us. It is the response that separates us. Collins gives the experience a name, a personhood. One might argue that he transfers the experience of his own personhood onto the mystery. He is confident he has found the well in the desert. In effect, he has replaced the mystery with the commonplace.

The Little Prince might say that the beauty of the waterfall arises precisely because its source cannot be named, that it eludes every metaphor.

The greatest discovery of science is ignorance, an awareness of how little we know. Every extension of knowledge -- such as the sequencing of the human genome, which Collins led -- extends the shore where we encounter the sea of unknowing. What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

A few lines from Diane Ackerman's The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral:

At night I lie awake
In the ruthless Unspoken,
knowing that planets
come to life, bloom,
and die away,
like day-lilies opening
one after another…

I've mentioned before that our bed here in Ireland looks out a big window to the south. From our hillside nothing blocks the view of the sky -- cinematic, Imaxy, star-bedazzled. All summer long Jupiter has dominated the night, blazing like a spotlight from its perch in Pisces. No, "perch" is not the right word, implying stability. The planet has been doing a bit of to-and-froing, like a blossom waving in the wind. At the beginning of August it halted its eastward progress and began a three-month retrograde crawl to the west. Of course, the reversal is only an illusion; the Earth is overtaking Jupiter in our respective orbits. On September 21 the giant planet will be directly opposite the Sun in Earth's sky, dead south at midnight, and at maximum brightness -- magnitude -3. By then we'll be in another bed, on another continent, with no view of the sky at all, still awake with the "ruthless Unspoken" but without Father Jupiter to bestow his benedictions.

bromegrass shared with us the other day a photograph of the Gallarus Oratory, a remarkable corbelled dry-stone building, with about the footprint of a one-car garage, just over the hill from our house here in Ireland. The building dates from early Christian times, perhaps the 7th century. It never fails to impress visitors in an almost magical way. This is not the grandeur of the Coliseum or Pantheon; this is a place where you can hear your own breath, feel your own heartbeat. I wrote in Climbing Brandon about the night I spent alone in the Gallarus Oratory; it was as close as I have ever come to feeling the breath and heartbeat of the world.

The most remarkable thing about the Gallarus Oratory is that it exists -- intact. There are ruins of maybe half-a-dozen similar structures hereabouts; over the centuries they must have been tempting as ready piles of building stone. Why did this one survive? No one knows. Perhaps because it became identified in popular lore with some particular saint, Brendan perhaps, or acquired the protective aura of fairydom. Even today one sometimes sees a "fairy tree" standing unmolested in the middle of a large track of consolidated fields otherwise made suitable for cultivation by agricultural machinery. This landscape is so rich in archeological artifacts -- pre-Christian and Christian -- that it is not easy to shake off the superstitions of the past.

The fairies are in retreat, of course, and the saints are not far behind. The challenge now is to preserve the past with protective legislation. The first step is to catalog what remains. This was done some twenty-five years ago with an exhaustive archeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published as a thick oversized book that sits here on my desk -- everything from megalithic wedge tombs to holy wells, literally thousands of entries. One can hardly take a step on the peninsula without tripping over the past. Almost all of these artifacts are on private property, which raises delicate issues of access and preservation.

Why? Why preserve the detritus of former ages? Because we cannot know who we are unless we know who we have been. I've noticed that when tourists approach the Gallarus Oratory they invariably fall silent. Even when a coachload of tourists descends on the place all you hear is the click of cameras. That little stone building seems to whisper: "I am the womb wherein was gestated the silent longing of your race."

Click, and then again if you wish, to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

Take your pick. The Age of Reason or the Romantic Revolution. Laplace or Rousseau. Newton or Goethe. Locke or Liszt. Thinking or feeling. The world out there or the world in here. "It" or "me."

It has to be said, I think, that science owes its success primarily to the first terms of these polarities -- to detached mind in interaction with the world. By design, science leaves little room for the explicit "me." No doubt a lot of "me" goes into the making of science at the highest level, but what is made must stand on its own without the authority or the aura of "me."

Which is what inspired the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, and what drives much anti-science feeling today. We like a world soaked in "me." We like to look into the world and see ourselves, or something very like ourselves. Animism and anthropomorphism are the default philosophies. As Piaget taught us, young children imagine the world operates in the same way they do, consciously, willfully, and why not? What other model do they have to go on?

So children draw smiley faces on crayoned pictures of the Sun and flowers. Adults imagine a god Helios who drives a golden chariot across the sky. There was a time when our ancestors endowed every tree, brook, animal and mountain with a humanlike spirit. Slowly, with the advance of empirical knowing, the naiads, dryads, oreads, nereids, limoniads, potamids, fairies, gnomes, leprechauns, elf children, banshees, hobgoblins, incubi, succubi, and gods of heavenly bodies were banished to the realm of superstition. The crowded pantheons of Greeks and Romans were collapsed into one abstract person, the omniscient, all-powerful Father of the monotheistic faiths (albeit with a retinue of angels and saints). Still, we want to know that what goes on inside -- our very own hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows -- matters, not just to ourselves, but to the universe.

And maybe it does, only not in so consequential a way as we once imagined. Do I really need to believe that an anthropomorphic deity who created the universe has "me" in mind? Might it not be enough to draw into myself my immediate environment, those other creatures, human and otherwise, whose lives I touch and am touched by? Is it not enough to balance the exercise of reason with the romance of here and now?

To have Voltaire and Wordsworth too.

Walking the nearby wild Atlantic coast we came upon this pile of rocks. How long it had been there I have no idea, although it is hard to imagine it holding up to the wind for long. Some person or persons with a sense of whimsy clearly sought to assert creativity in the face of the elements. Very Andy Goldsworthyesque.

Reversing, if only briefly, the wreck of worlds.

This bit of coast is made up of Silurian siltstone, with some volcanics, 425 million years old, or thereabouts, from a time when an older "Atlantic" Ocean, the Iapetus, was closing up. We have found trilobite fossils in these rocks, small ones, and inch or two in length -- they scratched out an existence on the shallow sea floor as volcanic islands rose up around them. A crush of continents!

A vast new supercontinent was forming, the Old Red Sandstone Continent -- one could have walked dry-shod from our house in Ireland to our home in New England. I have told the story before, in Honey From Stone, of the role these rocks played in the development of mid-19th-century geology. Richard Griffith, Joseph Beete Jukes, James Flanagan, George Victor Du Noyer, and even the great Roderick Murchison, scrambled along this shore trying to sort out the history of the planet, gaining a sense of the eons of time that Charles Darwin would soon fill up with the history of life. When I walk these cliffs I never fail to think of those eminent men in their top hats and frock coats standing here (no doubt in the rain) where we stand, passing fossiliferous stones from hand to hand, furiously debating their meaning.

Mountain ranges ground to dust, lifted out of the sea, then pulverized again. The rubble of former worlds. And here some light-hearted soul has sought to reverse the arrow of entropy, with a structure even more ephemeral than that of the other anti-entropic creature who has volunteered to provide a sense of scale.

Among Graham Greene's voluminous body of work there is a charming little book that generally slips under the radar -- Monsignor Quixote -- a takeoff on the great Cervantes classic. Our new Quixote is a simple country parish priest, and Sancho is the crusty, Marxist, atheist ex-mayor of Quixote's village. Together they go on a picaresque jaunt about Spain in the priest's dilapidated old Seat automobile -- named, of course, Rocinante -- all the while debating their respective faiths.

And their doubts.

The Mayor put his hand for a moment on Father Quixote's shoulder, and Father Quixote could feel the electricity of affection in the touch. It's odd, he thought, as he steered Rocinante with undue caution round a curve, how sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together perhaps even more than sharing a faith. The believer will fight another believer over shades of difference: the doubter fights only with himself.

It was good to spend of few days last week in the back seat of Rocinante, listening to Father Quixote and the Mayor muddle their way through life, committed to their respective world views, each confident that his way is better than any alternative, but open to the possibility that they might be wrong, and, if only inadvertently, to learning from the other. What a relief from the stridency and certainty of the True Believers of all stripes who presently dominate the American media, and, as always, world affairs. Father Quixote makes a distinction between belief and faith. One can't always believe, he says, but one can have faith. His own faith is hedged with doubt, which is not a comfortable place to be, but at least he is not picking a fight with anyone but himself. "Oh, Sancho, Sancho," exclaims the man of faith, "it's an awful thing not to have doubts."

Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish:

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Yes, we see the words are broken up into short lines on the page, but it is not form that impresses us. We read the poem straight out, in the apparent rhythms of ordinary speech, and the line breaks seem incidental. What we are most aware of is the catalog of exact observations. The fish is hanging at the side of the boat, but it might as well be on a dissecting tray in an ichthyology lab.

How precisely the poet sees. The tiny white sea lice. The rags of green weed. An accumulation of raw data. Only slowly, on a second reading perhaps, do we begin to appreciate the poet's technical finesse, the rhymes -- breathing in/oxygen, lenses/isinglass, engine/orange -- the alliteration -- shallower and yellowed, tarnished tinfoil -- and the metaphor and similes -- the white flesh packed in like feathers, the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. One could spend an hour admiring the art that at first reading seemed so effortless.

And only then, only then, when all of this is contained within the parentheses of the poet's action -- I caught a tremendous fish/I let the fish go -- does the point of it all turn on like a light bulb -- rainbow, rainbow, rainbow -- the startling glory of this old dead fish worn out by life, magnificent in homely death.

Two ways of engaging the world: Fitting content to form; fitting form to content. We are all of us engaged, day by day, hour by hour, in both activities. Even in science we employ both methodologies. What is important is that we know what we are doing. Truth, to the extent we can find it, will emerge with a balance of judicious engagement and unprejudiced observation.

Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, two of the most distinguished American poets of the last century. Moore about twenty years older, a mentor to the younger poet; both died in the 1970s.

Two poems, both called The Fish.

Two ways of seeing and expressing what is seen.

First, Moore's poem.

The Fish

wade
through black jade.
       Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
       adjusting the ash-heaps;
               opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
       The barnacles which encrust the side
       of the wave, cannot hide
               there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
       glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
       into the crevices—
               in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
       of bodies. The water drives a wedge
       of iron through the iron edge
               of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
       bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
       lilies, and submarine
               toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
       marks of abuse are present on this
       defiant edifice—
             all the physical features of

ac-
cident—lack
       of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
       hatchet strokes, these things stand
               out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
       evidence has proved that it can live
       on what cannot revive
               its youth. The sea grows old in it.

Our first impression is not content, but form -- the obvious end rhymes, the strict accounting of syllables (1-3-9-6-8), the physical shape of the stanzas on the page. We lose track for a moment of what it is that we are looking at, until we realize that the poem's form evokes the surge and retreat of the tide in the cliff-chasm, the waving rhythm of the sea-creatures in response to the tide, and the sweeping spotlight of the sun flashed by the flowing water into every crevice.

And so the rhythm is impressed upon us, fixed in the brain, the ebb and flow, and we read the poem again, this time with the cadences of ordinary speech, and we see what the poet sees -- the crow-blue mussel shells (crow blue, not black; how exactly seen!), the ink-bespattered jelly fish, the "dynamite" grooves in the rock.

There are two ways of doing science. In one, we begin with a theory, a preconceived notion of what the world should be, and look to see if the world agrees. We nudge our observations into the form, rounding off rough edges perhaps, or hyphenating an observation if necessary, always hoping not to do violence to the integrity of observation. In the second way of doing science, we focus first of all upon the raw data of the senses, observed as precisely as possible, without preconceptions of what it is we are looking for, and trust that out of exactitude meaning will emerge. Both ways of doing science are seldom pure, and each complements the other.

Something analogous is happening with our two poets and two poems. Having decided upon a form, Marianne Moore waves what she sees against the fixed bulwark of the rocky shore, in and out, back and forth, slosh and flow, and the sea grows old in its ancient rhythm, (forgetting the inscrutable last stanza). Ultimately, as the poet would surely have insisted, the form, though prominent -- here almost overwhelming -- is incidental to delight, to that flush of excitement when nature, language and mind chime together.

Tomorrow, Bishop.

A few days ago a local friend asked me to lead her and a small group of her friends into the Coumanare lakes. This is the wildest, most remote part of the Dingle Peninsula. In all the times I have been there I have never seen another human being or sign of human civilization. Not a fence or a stray sheep. Three cold lakes are connected by a rushing stream tumbling giddily over the rocks. Waterfalls cascade down the surrounding cliffs. Coumanare means "the valley of the slaughter," although whatever event the name commemorates is lost in the mists of time.

The walk I planned would be taxing, taking us miles from easy assistance, and I was a bit apprehensive, not knowing the fitness of four of our party. I shouldn't have been. It turned out that everyone was younger and fitter than me, and all were practiced members of walking clubs -- professionals who in their free time love nothing more than to don their boots, throw on a knapsack, and head for the hills.

I think of the friends Robert Lloyd Praeger lists in his classic book of Irish rambling, The Way That I Went, published in 1937. These included a trunk-maker, a linen manufacturer, a solicitor, a grocer, a commercial traveler, a physician, a shipyard worker, a minister, and a photographer, all with a passionate interest in the outdoors. They were Protestants from Belfast, in the great British ramblers tradition, walking "with reverent feet through hills and valleys, stopping often, watching closely, listening carefully." Catholic Ireland was not so much interested in rambling in those days; scraping a living from the land was about all of the outdoors that anyone wanted.

The recent boom in Irish prosperity has meant a burgeoning new interest in walking for pleasure. Short and long distance footpaths are opening up across the country. It's too late for Ireland to gain the ubiquitous public rights-of-way that make Britain such a delightful venue for the rambler, but the new walking clubs are lobbying hard for right-to-roam legislation in the upland hill country.

Another change: Praeger's companions were all male; we were four women and two men. And why walk? Let Praeger speak for us: "Quite wandering on foot along brown streams and among the windy hills can bring a solace and a joy that is akin only to the peace of God that passeth understanding."

Click to enlarge Anne's Sunday musing.

Oliver Rackham is a researcher in the Botany Department at Cambridge University. His book The History of the Countryside (1986) is indispensable for anyone who loves -- as I do -- the English landscape. His purpose is to show us how the landscape we enjoy today evolved over centuries through the interaction of humans and non-human nature. Certainly the book enormously enhanced my walk along the Prime Meridian (Walking Zero: Discovering Cosmic Space and Time Along the Prime Meridian), and the walk I did last year with sons Tom and Dan along the Ridgeway (recounted on this blog, in nine parts, beginning here).

For an American, the English system of public footpaths, rights to roam, and countryside preservation is a thing of wonder. So extensive are the rural rights-of-way, that on my Prime Meridian walk -- 200 miles from the Channel to the Wash -- I never had to stray more than a few miles from "the line," and seldom put foot on tarmac except as I made my way through London. So deep and rich is the history of the landscape that any extended walk is not just though cosmic space and time, but also through the history books and stories we have read since childhood. I recorded here the way our Ridgeway walk evoked the trek in Tolkein's Fellowship of the Ring. My Meridian walk took me close by the habitat of Winnie the Pooh (the Pooh-sticks bridge is still to be seen).

As I say, to American eyes, the degree of preservation seems remarkable. But even in 1986 Rackham was worried about preservation:

It is not just trough the rosy spectacles of childhood that we remember the landscape of the 1940s to have been richer in beauty, wildlife, and meaning than that of the 1980s. It was, and the Luftwaffe aerial photographs prove it. The landscape of the 1800s was richer still…There are four kinds of loss. There is the loss of beauty, especially that exquisite beauty of the small and the complex and unexpected, of frog-orchids or sundews or dragonflies. There is the loss of freedom, of highways and open spaces…There is the loss of historic vegetation and wildlife, most of which once lost is gone forever…In this book I am especially concerned with the loss of meaning. The landscape is a record of our roots and the growth of civilization. Each individual historic wood, heath, etc. is uniquely different from every other, and each has something to tell us.

As I look out the window of my studio here in the west of Ireland, I see broad fields where only a decade ago there were maybe a dozen smaller fields whose hedged and ditched borders went back centuries, each field with a name (Gort na cearc, the Field of the Hen, for example). The hedges have been grubbed out to make mechanical farming more efficient, the old borders erased, and with them so much history. The big new consolidated fields have no names, at least none that carry a weight of meaning, none that tell us who we are and where we have come from.

Of course, there is no going back, to the 1990s, the 1940s, or the 1800s, but we should at least recognize that we only love what we can name, and names can be as endangered as frog-orchids, sundews and dragonflies.

The poet Yeats said of the poet Shelley, "There is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, for wisdom speaks first in images."

What, I wonder, is my one scene, one picture?

It would depend, I suppose, upon the time of life.

There was a time when I could have stood all day before Monet's room-sized painting of water lilies at MoMA, all gorgeous natural depths, lush, sensual, accepting. The story then was not so much about myself as about the world out there, the world for which I was a curious spectator. I wanted to see the world as Monet saw it, with a kind of X-ray vision that dives through the surface to whatever it is that makes the world go, and glow.

Then I became obsessed with the paintings of Mark Rothko, those haunting, agnostic canvases of floating color that spoke in cryptic utterances, revealing nothing. Those were the days when I kept company with the medieval mystics -- Julian of Norwich and John of the Cross -- and their absconded God.

As I settled into comfortable middle age I might have chosen one of Vermeer's quiet domestic scenes or Pieter Bruegel's The Harvesters, crystal clear in its mathematical precision, its unabashed realism, its sensual celebration of work and rest, food and drink, a brow moist with sweat and the white nape of a neck inviting touch. Not ecstasy or transcendence, but tranquility and immanence. Oh yes, there was a worm in the bud, but hidden out of sight.

And now? And now? I keep coming back to the young Caravaggio's The Rest on the Flight Into Egypt. The black wings and white robe of the angel, curling together -- the yin and yang of a human life. On the left, darkness, a stony foreground, the anxious gaze of the seeking soul; on the right, light, verdancy, the quietude of acceptance; on the left, the masculine, hard, dry, fraught with tension; on the right, the feminine, gentle, soft, wet, conserving. The whole suffused with an erotic frisson. This angel is not one of the Christian heavenly choir; he is Eros. He is Cupid, with music for his wounding dart. And I am Joseph holding the score, a motet in C major by the Flemish composer Noel Baulduin, the text from the Song of Songs, that most erotic of scriptures: "How fair and pleasant you are, O loved one, delectable maiden."