I did a paper last semester on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. As I continued to write the paper late into the night, what began as a last-minute attempt to squeeze out the minimum of 5 pages turned into a 10 page monster. I blame Beethoven. There were so many little things to pick up on, so many elegant ways in which everything fit together, in which the entire piece was planned. For some, perhaps, this would reduce the joy of the music. Not for me. For me, every time I hear that piece, it will mean even more to me. Understanding it makes it even more sublime.
Music has a peculiar power of the human spirit. It can make us feel things in ways nothing else can. Especially words. The most inane poetry can reach us deeply if made into music. I mean, really, “in the desert you can remember your name, ‘cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain”? Because of its power, music has often been the vessel for important messages, that can resonate with you in entirely new ways. Such was the case when I first saw one of the videos of “The Symphony of Science”. I have always had a deep sense that there’s something profoundly spiritual about a scientific understanding of the natural world, yet when I watched “The Unbroken Thread” it hit me powerfully. It probably helped that it was near midnight. But also the words of scientists expressing their deep reverence for the universe, put to music, had a stunning effect.
This reverence is one I share. People have commented that the language I and those such as Carl Sagan use to describe our feelings about the universe are suspiciously similar to that used by religious people to describe their experience of god. They are absolutely right. The difference is that we take God out of the picture. Why can’t we admire the universe not because we view it as the work of God, but because it is simply something worth being admired? I feel that the natural, material world is so full of mysteries and beauty that it is almost a waste to concern ourselves with spirits and angels and gods. This is the hypothesis I’d like to put before you: that there is nothing beyond the natural, material world. No spirits, no gods, no karma, no qi. I call it a hypothesis because I honestly do not know enough to say for certain that such phenomena do not exist. But I want to show why, for me, they are unnecessary for filling the spiritual need.
Let’s start close to home. Really close to home, in fact. Let’s start in our heads. Put your fists together like this. Your brain is slightly lager than this. An utterly insignificant lump of jelly, when you get down to it. Yet there’s something bizarre about this lump of jelly: it contains you. Everything about you. All your memories, the maps of where you’ve been, your personality, your perception of me. It contains our ideas. If you are an artist, it produces your creations. If you are a writer, it is capable of inventing and keeping track of entire worlds, worlds with other personalities in them, vast fantasy landscapes contained within this small lump of matter. Think about it. Really think about it.
Think about how, when you look at the night sky, you are looking at the source of every particle in your body. Every ancient particle. You are made out of matter that has existed since nearly the beginning of time. You are constantly exchanging that matter with the universe around you. At a subatomic level, there is nothing, really, separating you and the rest of the universe. Think about how the little dots you see are stars many, many times, sometimes thousands of times larger than our earth, which is so huge we cannot even perceive it as round. Some ofwhat you see are galaxies, which are collections of billions of these starts, which look close together in a picture, but are really light-years apart. A light year is about 6 trillion miles.
Think about each individual cell in your body. The complex machinery, honed over years of evolution. And we can’t even see them. We are made of trillions of them. Think about all the other intricate machines that constitute life. (give examples)
Think about the pebble you kick down the street. How that pebble is also made of particles that have been around for nearly eternity. How it’s made of minerals that were forged in the collision of dust particles and rocks that created our earth, burped up from the inside of our earth, and hewed by billions of years of geology.
Think about a rainbow. How it is a product of photons produced by nuclear fusion deep within the sun, which take thousands of years to push their way to it’s surface, finally escaping and zipping across millions of miles of space, before colliding with water droplets in the atmosphere and getting refracted into all sorts of different wavelengths, then traveling through the air to your eyes, where the hit your retina and produce electrical sensations that travel to your brain and are perceived as color, and then spread out and activate your capacity for pleasure, for memory, for imagining the entire cosmic play I just described.
Some people are scared to think about it. For some reason, they believe that to understand beauty is to kill it. Those such as John Keats accuse Isaac Newton of unweaving the rainbow by explaining it. Why should discovering the intricate, elegant laws that underlie the world make it any less beautiful? If an artist attempts to portray the meaning of a rainbow, it is beauty: if a scientist attempts the same thing, it is somehow ugly. If someone can appreciate the wonder and beauty of a scientific worldview, they are somehow seen as a little weird: a nerd, an egghead. So many people don’t want to hear about the fascinating underpinnings of everything they experience, about the new ideas that scientists are constantly coming up with. The scientist is often the fool on the hill who sees the world going round, but who no one wants to listen to. I must admit, I am not entirely sure why. Because while people may think that because I live in a world understood it must be dull or dry, nothing could be further from the truth. I live in a world that constantly amazes and fascinates me. I am never without a source of stimulation if I want it: not when I can consider the mysteries of my brain, not when I can look at the sky and imagine space stretching out into infinity, with pricks of light that are galaxies incomprehensibly huge, not when I can feel my connection with everything around me. Not when I can look at the familiar as though it was unfamiliar, as something new and exciting. Science let’s us look a little more deeply into things. It isn’t a methodology or collection of facts. It’s an attitude. It’s an appreciation that beauty understood is even more beautiful. To understand the symphony of science is only to make it more sublime.
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