The Moonshine Memoranda: ECCE HOMO or E = MC2

The following is the abstraction of a topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman

“I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

John 16:12

Ever since the beginning of our era, some two-thousand years ago, thinkers have contemplated a semi-mythical divinity called Jesus who, to all intends and purposes, existed in a state of nature beyond the boundaries laid down by ordinary conventions of cause and effect. Indeed, while the level-headed Jews were altogether sceptical of the Nazarene’s pretensions, it clearly delighted him to have got his mind around apparently inexplicable events. On he went, exploiting a principle that was in its way a thing to behold: driving out demons and healing the sick, performing the trick with the loaves and fishes, having his friends walk on water and – in the moment of His greatest power - bodily resurrection. As a spectacle, it was a form of art which partook of all the elements of the sleight-of-hand and the illusion. Appearance

became reality. But ultimately, the man’s legerdemain – which provided admirable narrative copy – is irrelevant to the bigger question: How was all this possible? Here we run into his magnificent certainty. Conceivably, Christ did not even ask himself that question, sidestepping any psychoanalytical probing. But the impenetrability of his belief was absolutely crucial. Its beauty lay in its simplicity. It proceeded from the assertion that the expectation which he had created and led was the originating cause of the phenomena which ensued. Sleight-of-hand magic depends on the faith of the audience. Indeed, once you saw that it worked you might understand a marvel that otherwise made no sense at all, like healing the incurable. Which was done conceivably enough, provided you could find some way to “Stop doubting and believe.” (John 20:27).

Until then, of course, no one had bothered to add it all up. But what made Jesus Christ so revolutionary? Aside from being very shrewd, he was a man ahead of his

time, a pure man of fact gifted with immense psychological insight. Besides pledging returns that never failed, he really understood his stuff like nobody then or since. A prophet and a peacemaker whose essential sales pitch was word of mouth, his absolute self-belief impressed everyone who heard him. It may well be the modern cynical view that his feats were the delusions of religious obsessives, but before anyone had really grasped the power and pervasiveness of mass psychogenic ‘hysteria’, Jesus had noticed a new faith forming around the idea of the Singularity. Nor did it matter that there was no science behind the miracle, for a singularity is an act of faith. It can be sustained only for as long as people believe it will. And sustaining the belief that there is no barrier between matter and mind is decisive.

The key to what was occurring inside the atom – and thus to a disclosure of the mind-matter relationship which would usher in the process of transmutation that Christ had first spoken of some 2000 years previously – only appeared in the 1920s, needless to say. But its dual character, its deeper mechanism as a converting principle, and its Faustian force and mass was, I believe, the key to His Second Coming: E = mc². Which, of course, has also been referred to as the Second Coming in Wrath. No, really, I mean it. For energy is just another form of faith. Indeed, current associations of physics and mathematics with chance and probability have opened up different avenues of investigation and, with a

sense of secret uncovered, altogether rendered irrelevant the simple determinism of nineteen centuries of natural science. Arthur Eddington condensed the key part of this transition admirably: “There is no essential distinction between scientific measures and the measures of the senses.”^{^[1]} The transfiguration of an entire discipline is encapsulated in that one sentence. Truth to tell, walking on water is not as far-fetched as the facts may suggest to those unfamiliar with the versatility of the mathematical mind. To the late Steve Jobs, a “secular saint” and co-founder of Apple, “the world became an epi-phenomenon, a side effect of the existence of himself.”^{^[2]}Something which Apple insiders referred to as his “reality distortion field.” That something, namely, which arose from the prophetic religions like a premonition and expresses itself in our time in discontinuities, quantum

jumps, discrete particles, and corpuscular light quanta; something, in fact, which has now been anthropomorphised in the intensely totemic technological apps and gizmos that offer an oddly intuitive glimpse into the very foundations of human ingenuity – its capacity to create, to generate, and even to heal.

The possibilities are endless.

There, in a nutshell, you have the man: Ecce Homo. His trust in God – and himself – was immeasurable. It was as if Divine Authority had been replaced by Faith. Which differs from the former as a universal principle differs from a particular law. Its limits are determined less by God than by doubt. And somehow, the sheer incarnate force of this principle must suffice to end a commerce in religious mythologies that has flourished for millennia. Science is the most powerful form of belief. Vanished has all self-doubt - substituted by something altogether superhuman: the empowering

certainties of holistic conviction. Cosmology for the theoretical physicist may appear to have become a study in spatial relations, but consciousness is no longer an observational means external to different bodies in space. It is a conceptual property of space-time itself. It exists in a place where all the cosmologists, physicists, all scientists, thinkers and epistemologists can meet; in the collective QED ether, or its sum-over-histories, rather than in the solitary individual. In cosmological terms, the speed of sound has been replaced by the speed of light. In Biblical terms, the inaudible word entered into visible form; or, in the words of John 14:10 – “It is the [Faith] living in me, [which] is doing the work.”

It never disappointed.

Meanwhile, of course, it is an unfailing mark of the deterioration of the Biblical faith that its Pauline progress with its Mosaic ‘thou-shall-nots’, drove the miracle step by step to extinction. ‘Shall-nots’ which quite often aggravated the very principles for which they stood. Nor do I see any likelihood of their stirring to save the Saviour, which – in purely analogous terms – is undoubtedly physics’ other objective. For out of the slow and agonising death of the Biblical faith arose a scientific miracle. Indeed, it seems to me that we are not studying science at all, but solutions to a different equation. For in my own view it seems curiously reminiscent of what theologians have termed the Holy Spirit, that its Life-force, or the essence of its propositions, should one day found to be residing in physics’ ultimate hypotheses and equations and, finally, be induced to reveal itself to the readers of its riddles.