The Moonshine Memoranda: THE CATCH-22 OF PARTICLE PHYSICS...

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

Time was when physicists argued that the laws of nature were sustained by independent or verifiable evidence, but that is no longer a reasonable position. In the four-dimensional Continuum the idea of the Self is implicit. Based on the observer’s ‘egocentric’ coordinates, it follows its own train of thoughts - unfolding like some enormous brain. For if

God’s aim was to produce something which relied upon irreducible necessity rather than specific form He couldn’t have done it better than with the ‘Big Bang.’ Nothing less explosive can describe an effect so fundamental. Precisely because it is the cause of inescapable effects, the Big Bang clearly involves the act of ‘selection’ among a vast number of potential universes - as well as the foundation of our anthropic identity. The creation of the original cause, therefore, is more properly to be regarded as an act of self-comprehension, more like an irruption into world consciousness of the Ego - the moment at which Being acquires Form - rather than an event in the ordinary meaning of the term. In The First Thought that came to knowledge of itself, chaos became order. Its birth, indeed, is the most intimate and particular property of Relativity: the awareness of an ‘I’ - which is above all a sensation of identity regained, an incipient clarity; the medium through which the universe has come to know its own unconscious self. For it may well be through our very own eyes - to draw a lucid conclusion - that the Universe is able to conceive of itself, of its having both existence and awareness. And like many lucid conceptions, I am deeply and

irresistibly attracted to it.

Indeed, so far as “the mismatch between the futility of the human condition and the brooding majesty of the cosmos,” is concerned, to quote the excellent Paul Davies, it is important to note that we are the Cosmos. Less brooding perhaps, if rather more striking to the imagination. In fact, Man is a metaphor for light - “the point which we call ‘I’”^{^[1]}. And here is the point. What the eye doesn’t perceive is darkness.

But there is a further point. And that's the point at which the conventional scientific recourse to visual 'pragmatism' and the so-called Standard-Model begins to become a liability. In the final analysis, let’s face it, light is a function of cerebral sensitivity. It is first of all a sensation of consciousness regained, an anthropic lucidity. In a joyous burst of metaphor: “It is a light as real as that of dawn, flooding all things and gladdening men’s eyes”, but not one, if objectivity is our guide, that is self-evidently sustaining itself. To wit, it is very generally held that “as the universe expanded the temperature would eventually drop to around 3,000° Celsius, at which point the hot radiation that had been exchanged between the constituents of plasma would be released and the previously opaque universe become transparent...No messing about, literally: Let there be light!”^{^[2]}

Which, of course, is nonsense – well, literally nonsense! It defines an ex post facto rationalization of reality’ that has prevailed for, say, millions of years, when the phenomenon under study is not the Universe - which is not reproducible without the brain - but a set of 'discrete' quantum field theories that depict the different forces animating us. For so far as your personal vision is concerned, you can be quite sure that Light, mostly hydrogen and helium, is an anthropologically determined function of strictly cerebral circumscription – or how the brain receives and interprets signals from the universe. Let’s face it, light comes into existence only when we see photons; burned into the retina they seem to go on forever as the eye gazes into an extended, transparent and illuminated Space - a truly captivating assault on the senses. “Man’s thought, therefore, is visual thought, our concepts are derived from vision, and the whole fabric of our logic is a light-world in the imagination.”^{^[3]}

If Spengler thus recognized the illuminating certainties of light travelling towards him at 300,000 km per second, it was Einstein who introduced the scientific uncertainties of what light constitutes: neither a particle nor a wave, but both. Does this, then, reflect the nature of the observer or of the thing observed? No question better exemplifies the catch-22 of particle physics, since it is altogether impossible to distinguish being from ‘being caused’.

Indeed it is merely a matter of semantic inversion whether we claim that the cosmos is a creation of thought, or thought a creation of the cosmos. But either way, if there is one idea that one takes away from contemplating the universe, it is that of pure intelligence.

The simple fact of the matter is this: there are at this level no unchallengeable, absolute, concepts, precisely because theorems are not descriptions. They forego literal meanings. There is no mystery about this. It is only the relations that we observe that are accepted. Indeed, every cosmic phenomenon is a conceptual construction, and every equation the efficient form of the mathematical relationship between one observable phenomenon and another. For the plain truth of the matter is that equations are no measure

of reality; they are merely terms that allow us to describe a certain number of mutually

dependent interactions between the mind and the world. And mind here serves as a synonym for human consciousness – the organizing principle! Indeed, the most tangible evidence of our own existence is its conceptual impact upon space-time itself. Which for me means probing beyond matter into thought itself. In short, our consciousness of the world reflects only how we represent it to ourselves, and that has nothing to do with the thing itself. For whatever philosophical viewpoint one pursues, it is as well to remember that chaos is reality, and that order and harmony only have their origin in our essential need to make sense of it.