Bundling the Universe

Abstract

Because they were inherently difficult to span in numbers, images, and words, the extremes of

the scalar spectrum from quantum to cosmos started raising discourse problems in the earlier

20th century. The use of models, metaphoric comparison, and specimens had to be rethought

along with sizes, quantities, time, space, and distances. That was doubly true for those

nurtured on story-form histories of the world and a human-oriented universe based on moral

principles. Venerated philosophic and theological commonplaces proved to be incompatible

not only with evolution but with the new astronomy, with relativity, and a geology that moved

entire continents horizontally. Motion everywhere and variable frames of reference ran

counter to standard language. Subatomic physics raised additional problems with these and

with its counter intuitive concepts and innovations in terminology. That contributed to

returning returned theories of discourse and rhetoric to the prominence they had in classical

education except now with more attention to mismatches between phenomena and means of

presentation.

Key Words: Discourse, relativity, scalar spectrum, models, specimens

Everything in a Nutshell

How we communicate I find more troubling than it might appear I should, given how well

it normally works. Normally is the operative word, because the distances, sizes, numbers, and

speeds that began to fill textbooks from the 1920s onward were anything but. The reasons for that

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are several, but the main one here is the strain the extremes of the scalar spectrum and counter

intuitive concepts put on numbers, images, and words. The difficulty of understanding and

representing the building block level of material reality, for instance, began to drive brilliant men all

but mad in the 1920s and 30s.

That was if special relativity hadn’t already done so in keeping the maximum speed of

anything in the universe to the velocity of light even where two space ships hurtled toward one

another at near that speed. Should they or beams of light cast forward collide it would be at no

faster speed than that of light. To any traveler at any speed going in any direction, c (velocity of

light travel) remained constant. That seemed simple enough, but objective measurements, special

relativity said, didn’t produce the same results with observers differently placed and traveling at

different speeds. What physicists called “relativity of simultaneity” played tricks even with past,

present, and future that appeared to violate the one-way movement of time, as now for astronauts

in a spacecraft traveling at high speed differs from now for those tracking their progress in Hous-

ton. What is present in light arriving from distant galaxies is long past for the sources.

Physicists by the1920s had more or less adjusted to special and general relativity when they

began to break atoms into pieces to see what happened. Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Pauli,

Dirac, Ehrenfest, Schrödinger, and others who met at Solvay conferences in Brussels found

particle behavior puzzling. In advances in particle physics over the next few decades, nothing

within the range of normal perception, meaning relative to our habitual frame of reference traveling

on the rigid body of a planet that seems to stand fast, was found to correspond to the “quark-

quark interaction responsible for holding the atomic nucleus together,” as Joseph Schwartz (1992)

puts it, the quark-lepton interaction “responsible for beta ray radioactivity,” or the W+, W-, and Z0

group that triggered quark-lepton interaction (166). Some particle behavior seemed to be combin-

ing point particle and wave characteristics, difficult as that seemed conceptually. If spin was added

to a particle already traveling at the speed of light wouldn’t that make its perimeter travel faster, as

the top of a wheel turns faster than the vehicle’s speed? (No, it wouldn’t, thanks again to that

steadfast constant c.) Where particle physics concerns mainly matter, relativity concerns mainly

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space/time and perspective from a given frame of reference. The last straw in nature’s quirky

shattering of normal perception was translating gravity, Newton’s influence across distance, into

curved spacetime. That illogically mistook one of the four forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic,

gravity) as a structured process rather than a power.

Sunny Auyang (1995) locates the difference between the new physics and classical physics,

one of the problematic areas, in a shift in space/time relations: “Going from classical mechanics to

quantum field theory, the focus of physics changes from locomotion to dynamical interaction. . . .

The primary form of matter changes from discrete mass points in empty space to continuous fields

comprising discrete events. The primary dynamical concepts change from action-at-a-distance

[Newton] to coupling-on-the-spot” (119). That is an example of the level of abstraction required

by ‘physics for beginners’. Leonard Susskind’s and George Hrabovsky’s The Theoretical Mini-

mum: What You Need to Know To Start Doing Physics (2013) gives other examples. Start doing

physics, most of us might well ask. Metaphoric strings, membranes, waves, fields, and latticework

have since varied the representations, as have Richard Feynman’s visual diagrams charting the

interactions of electrons and photons, in some of which the two particles destroy one another and

produce a virtual photon. (Strange term indeed!) Throw in antiquarks and gluons, and you begin

to see why diagrams needed not only combinations of straight lines, arrows, squiggles, and other

visual signs but attending footnotes.

The problems raised by an extended scalar spectrum haven’t attracted as much attention in

the theory of discourse as other aspects of natural history and natural philosophy, nor have the

stretched numbers had the effect one might expect on the history of ideas. Studies in discourse

concern mainly the dissemination of science rather than the intellectual revolution that comes with

it where reason prevails over cultural inheritance. In Discourse Studies (2003, 265-279), Grey

Meyers samples some of the bibliography, as do Harvey B. Sarles (1985), Annamaria Carusi and

Aud Sissel (2014), Lorraine Daston, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar, (2014), Norman Fair-

clough (1992), Leah Ceccarelli (2001), Ray Jackendoff (2002), Merlin Donald (1991 and 2001),

and Carmen Pérez-Llantada (2012), and a good many others doing their best to make intelligible

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what scientists themselves scarcely believe in some cases. We can further judge the extent of the

anomalies from Amic Aczel (1999), John Barrow in numerous books (1986, 1991, 2000, 2008),

Robert Oerter (2006), and Lee Smolin (2001), plus a few ventures into counter physics from those

who remain dubious about the standard model like Milo Wolff (1990) and Jeff Yee (2013).

Extended measurements weren’t the only problem that rose to prominence in the earlier

20th century to challenge conventional wisdom. Some doubt always attends scientific inquiry not

only among the public but among scientists and philosophers themselves. Much isn’t known and

never can be, and much of the rest requires equipment, specialists to use it, and mathematics to

formulate what turns up. Whereas a teacher of automobile mechanics or a master carpenter has

something demonstrable at hand to point to, nothing of the kind is available to someone concerned

with what happened in an inflationary instant that lasted only a fraction of a second. The discovery

of areas of perturbation larger than had always been presumed added another area of uneasiness.

We can locate and name areas of chaos and say how they came to be where they are (a hurricane

struck, a bomb went off, a supernova shed a mass of materials), but what has resulted may be as

immense as a nebula 50 trillion miles deep.

Other discrepancies between actual phenomena and received wisdom were more or less

standard. Nothing moves in representations other than in cinema and dramatic enactments, for

instance, whereas in history everything does. Take William F. Ruddiman’s charts in Plows,

Plagues, and Petroleum (2010) or Charles Redman (1978) compressing a 322 page chronicle of

the rise of civilization from early settlements to empires into a one page chart. They present global

climate as far back as the beginning of agriculture but make no attempt to capture the moving

forces that carried climate and farm technology from phase A to phase B. That would have

required a context that included snowfall, irrigation systems, and soil fertility and relations to

planet dynamics, atmospheric chemistry, and crust upheaval. In film, movement can adjust to

some dynamics in continuous fashion, as a virtual approach to earth from outer space first shows it

in the distance, then in the outlines of continents, and finally in Time Square. A mockup of long-

range continent movement can be inserted at any point if we wish to show geography shifting over

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millions of years. Zooming can continue down from there to simulated swarms of microbes.

The televison series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014) hosted by the astrophysicist

Neil deGrasse Tyson, a followup to Carl Sagan’s earlier series, used such visual adjustments

expertly, at one point pausing to deliver in voice-over the blue dot passage from Sagan. The

advantage of that particular distance from the planet besides its uniqueness in the history of

exploration is that it provided an opportune moment to sum up the achievements and follies of

Homo sapiens. Virtual travel and abstractions can do that without the perils and uncertainty of

actual space travel. To be completely immune to those under real conditions, the traveler has to be

a neutrino, lepton, or quark, preferably a hefty top quark. As the dream fantasies of George

Gamow’s Mr. Thompkins illustrate, the life of an electron zipping hither and yon is fraught with

anxiety lest a proton intercept and annihilate it.

The linguistic equivalent to visual adjustments is a paragraph topic sentence followed by

details or an abstraction followed by subtopics. Language performs such expansion and shrinkage

effortlessly and can just as easily combine them with contrasts and paradoxes. A single sentence

can put quite different levels of generalization in relation without confusion, as in saying “mice

have ears and tails” we link one species to others in the ear and tail branches of the animal king-

dom. Whereas in nature ears and tails come attached to individual specimens, when detached and

placed at the animal kingdom level they reveal a common ancestry. We can then pin them to

elephants, lions, and horses. The small tip of a residual tail in humans together with ears tells us

something about an ancestry shared not only with chimpanzees but with other species.

Commentaries on representation that draw on the rhetorical tradition usually don’t venture

very far into movement, chaos, and miscellany, nor have natural philosophy and science done so as

problems specifically in discourse and what it selects out. More interesting to theory have been the

warped geometric shapes of Mandelbrot sets, fractal geometry, and such paradoxical visual

demonstrations as Escher stairwells and Moebius strips. In John D. Barrow’s succession of “key

images in the history of science” (2008), one of the more striking combinations of manmade

symmetry and nature’s is Escher’s “Moebius Strip II’ (323), which adds to the manufactured

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regularity of the strip red ants crawling about on it. Ants too have uniformity and symmetry, but

linking them to a construction of squares twisted in a belt underscores the fact that the manmade

mechanism is more exactly geometric and of course isn’t alive and crawling. Beyond ants and the

machine in this case is the artist Escher making a mental game of comparison-and-contrast and

bizarre tricks of perspective. That twists communication roughly in the manner of a metadrama or

metapoem, art reflecting on the making of art. That is partly what theories of scientific discourse

have been doing as well, putting discourse as such beside raw nature as such and looking to see

what the discrepancies are.

Trimming the Details

The shortcoming of the myths and fables of antiquity that continue to prevail many places

has always been their inability to include any great amount of natural history. Other kinds of

representation can’t be exhaustive either, but by means of species titles, enumeration and account-

ability to natural history they have expanded their capacity exponentially. In myths of origin,

removing details and squeezing measurements sets the stage for substituting an illusory human

centrality in the cosmos for realistic assessments of what even in daily life scarcely looks uniformly

life friendly. The typical shortfall was in about the proportion of the few creatures that go up the

ramp of Noah’s Ark to an estimated 8.7 million existing species. Kinds of mineral and rock,

insects, most of the animal kingdom, billions of years of history, trillions of stars, and practically all

cosmic perturbation went without notice in the history of ideas. The revision didn’t get truly

underway until Copernicus and Galileo and didn’t come to a head until Darwin. The discoveries of

the earlier 20th century in special and general relativity, the astronomy of galaxies, the geophysics

of moving continents, and the physics of particles put the finishing touches on the discarding of

prior concepts of the planet. Neither Newton nor Maxwell in his work on electromagnetism raised

quite the problems with conventional beliefs that came with modernism. The suppression of detail

was a discourse necessity, since as the scale increases detail has to decrease, but the difference in

the selection process was pivotal. In a naturalistic frame of reference it depends on how abstrac-

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tions, axioms, invariable laws of physics, and mathematics work in seeking to be answerable to the

data. Universal laws, for instance, need no illustration. If light travels at the same vacuum speed

everywhere, all anyone needs is a figure, not examples. The reason algebra uses x, y, and z is the

applicability of the letters to a range of numbers. The range doesn’t have to be stipulated or

illustrated. The template fits all examples.

Other condensed representations include blueprints and mockup scale models, invaluable in

their reduction of the whole while retaining structural relations and proportions. Silvan Schweber

(1997) and Robert Oerter (2006) place the Standard Model in physics above any other such

compression because of its inclusiveness. It “will be remembered–together with general relativity,

quantum mechanics, and the unraveling of the genetic code–as one of the outstanding intellectual

advances of the twentieth century,” Schweber believes (645). The result is a scheme applicable to

mass/energy conversions everywhere. At that level, nature’s heterogeneity need not be cited in

any detail, merely named. The data assembled under comprehensive theories would be over-

whelming without the models, charts, tables, and category names. According to the website “how

stuff works,” computer assisted stuff may one day extend to Cotta quantities, or 2^80 =

1,208,925,819,-614,629,174,706,176 bytes.

Human memories may come somewhere near that in capturing impressions every waking

hour of every day, but until we bring stored instances forward for specific purposes, the bits and

pieces resemble a cluttered heap more than a filing system. Putting millions of books in an indexed

repository brings similar quantities into a semblance of order. An index is the detail suppressing

mechanism we use to summon selected parts of an inventory. Cascading files do something similar

in a descending order of abstractions. It is thus possible to locate most of a given category in a

library if not as speedily and easily as calling for it electronically. As in the game of Twenty

Questions, the procedure is to begin broad and keep narrowing. A subject entry in a browser can

give access to millions of sources that have scarcely any connection other than the topic. What

does the summoning can be an abstraction but is more likely a key word or phrase acting as a

thematic sample.

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Numbers are the most detail-excluding way to summarize much in little whether by logical

category or by something as invisible as attraction and repulsion. The figure10-21 of a second is an

effective way to put the duration of positive and negative particles. According to one theory of

what could conceivably exist, the figure 10500 proposes the maximum possible arrangement of

components in a multiverse. Not listing the 20 zeroes in one case and 499 of them in the other is a

mathematical equivalent to abstraction. Objectivity (detail) wanes as theorems and mind-over-

matter increases. Captions without content are empty. Content without captions is chaotic.

Alphabetized indexes and cascading files make selective access relatively easy, but degrees of

difference in instances necessarily go unrecorded.

Consider dust. It is a veritable marvel because its pieces lack viscosity and don’t conduct

heat. It has no sub categories or rules of relation. Is each speck distinguishable from the others,

or are they exactly alike? No one is going to put any great number of them under a microscope to

find out, but nebulas composed of ice, gas, and dust clouds do contain variants. One name for

dust, the “perfect fluid,” acknowledges that it goes beyond even the thinnest substance in discon-

nection. Unlike droplets of fog that have settled on a leaf, dust in space has nothing on which to

land to give it a configuration. Towering clouds like the Carina and Eagle nebulas are irregular in

shape. Except for the proper name and estimated boundaries, the disconnection of the parts defies

math and iconic representation. Like chaos it has only the detail-dropping name plus a few

adjectives to characterize it. Clouds of dust can thin and thicken and move at a measurable speed,

but just that and not much more doesn’t tell us anything substantial about them.

Where most representations whether in fables or in science shed details, samples and

specimens retain them in a particular instance taken to be typical. A specimen isn’t an abstraction

or a symbol but a clue that someone can examine in detail. A specimen differs from an idealized

model in starting at that inductive level. In contrast, a model is a mental construction based on

core properties or a body of similar ones. In that respect it moves a step toward fable. The

equivalents in language are a proper name and an abstraction, which can be without a designated

referent. A model or category title is less a problem with non sentient specimens than with most

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things biological, because an atomic weight is determining and the laws of formation invariable. In

biology nature’s gradations are too slight and likely not to be measurable and hence aren’t decisive

in adjacent samples. In igneous and metamorphic rock the same process works every time in

producing quartz and gneiss, though a given sample may contain mixtures. Sedimentary samples

range from relatively uniform gypsum to mixed breccia. In the latter every sample differs from

every other. A specimen is meant to approximate the class.

Story-form Nature and Nature Sized, Numbered, and Timed

What the post Galilean universe required by way of charting came into an intellectual

climate accustomed to entirely other views of natural history, downsized and centered for the

benefit of mankind. It was a storybook written in stars. The book of creatures, too, was slim and

often moralized. Moral teaching in parables had served well for thousands of years. Why fables

were so dominant when the sources of material things remained unknown isn’t hard to see. Some

social psychologists and historians of empires have even endorsed the notion that people without

mutual beliefs based on fables would have too little cohesion to function in an orderly fashion.

Social orders both ancient and modern do demonstrate that governance is aided by reigning

illusions. The notion that they are necessary to social cohesion is nonetheless debatable. It

assumes no binding principles strong enough to work are available in economic and social realities.

Moreover, on the negative side it would be equally true to say that social orders that assemble and

motivate armies to pillage and conquer would also lack the organizing principle they need for that

purpose. The fact seems to be that once large collectives are drawn together they can either build

libraries or raise havoc. The usefulness of fables, legends, and other illusions for generating social

orders, then, is clear enough, but the necessity not so.

It is also true that for all their use of fantasy, ancient myths weren’t necessarily unrealistic.

Fables can teach quite harsh lessons. As the encyclopedist Arthur Cotterell (2000) remarks, “The

abiding interest of mythology, European or otherwise, is its frankness about . . . basic human

drives. It could almost be described as sacred literature undisturbed by theologians. The raw and

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ragged ends of existence are still visible in its tales” (7). What was initially a poetic invention

becomes pseudo history, as in Mesopotamia the Anunnaki (council of divines) was credited with

ordinances and laws that would have had less authority without them. They were oft-told tales

invented by visionary poets that, in getting moralized and converted into articles of belief, became

theologically disturbed. They concerned not only gods and goddesses but feats of heroism,

strength, cruelty, barbarity, beauty, and natural wonders. It is probably safe to say that most

revolutionary movements mix realistic factors and illusions, as the Puritan rebellion in England did

in gathering a following on combined social and religious grounds. We’ve no reason to think that

Cromwell and his party actually had the divine backing they claimed any more than in epic we need

think that Mars and Venus oversaw the battles of Troy and Italy.

Whereas science and math make quite specific translations of the signs they use, myths and

fables generate multiple interpretations. Their symbols are multivalent, dense, and ambiguous. An

explanation of Venus rising from the sea can occupy pages of commentary and is likely to be only

one of several. Symbols and exegesis go hand in hand in that respect. In contrast, conventional

notations like + or � make limited and arbitrary assignments of meaning. Quantities are to x and y

just what a mathematician determines. An equation in that respect is a scale model. Because

nature’s invariable laws work the same everywhere, they are set up for defined equations. A single

sample makes a valid universal. That is true of events in material history as well as in invariables

like the mechanical laws of gravity. Suppose astrophysicists were to investigate a fragment of the

asteroid Vesta or the mini planet Ceres and apply the crystals they found there to other land

masses. If the sample is representative of earth’s igneous rock, the logical conclusion is that the

mini planet, too, once contained magma. The next step of such a research team, a real one in this

case led by Beverley J. Tkalcec of Goethe University in Frankfurt, will likely be to publish its

findings and explain how it reached its conclusions. To go more broadly public might require a

science writer such as Amina Khan to write it up for a newspaper such as the Los Angeles Times

(21 January 2013). Recent discoveries of friction-generated heat in the frozen wastes of moons

orbiting Neptune and Saturn reflect on microbes beneath Antarctic ice that have never seen the

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light of day. More revealing still is the recovery of a stellar fossil from the most ancient kind of

metal-deficient, dark-age stars. Such a sample represents an era of hydrogen and helium formation

before the elements had gotten much further. It thereby corroborates a theory derived from other

evidence much as a fossil supports evolution. If the theory weren’t right, the samples wouldn’t be

there. A failed test has more negative proof value than a confirmation has positive value. Only

one exception disproves a theory.

Natural phenomena are now removed from the story-form sign and symbol category

altogether in science in that a storm is no longer a sign of an angry storm god. Personal matters

such as a narrow escape from a plane wreck are sometimes still taken to be providential on the

popular level but not in natural history or natural philosophy. Anyone tempted to say that a

seemingly miraculous event must have been intended and is therefore part of a meaningful narra-

tive needs to reconsider the odds, which in mathematical calculations are stacked heavily against

whatever happens, good, bad, or indifferent. Going back any length of time makes it unlikely that

what happened yesterday could have, with each grain of sand positioned with respect to others,

followed by the arrangement of the next moment. The odds are against any particular ball being

selected in a lottery but it is certain that one will be. After the fact one can’t then argue that the

selection was intended. Without a law at work on the sample or in the model, the incident itself

has no representational value other than its function as a specimen. It betokens nothing. What a

plane falling from the sky exemplifies (besides gravity) is most likely a pilot or tower mistake or a

mechanical failure.

In the wake of the English Civil war, Marvell’s country house poem “Upon Appleton

House” comes to roughly that conclusion with respect to local topography, which is

a rude heap together hurled,

All negligently overthrown,

Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone.

(“Upon Appleton House,” 762-764)

Marvell implies nothing at that point about symbolic value or intent, merely that the rude heap falls

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under the class names gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone, all natural things therein sampled. Thanks

to microscopes and telescopes–the former still a novelty in Marvell’s day–making the small large

and the large small adds plane relativity (not special or general relativity) to common nomencla-

ture. Where the observer stands influences the perception of the rude heap, which from a mile

away would look different, as what are cattle from one distance from other distances look like

facial blemishes, fleas, or stars in a constellation. They

shrunk in the huge Pasture show

As Spots, so shap'd, on Faces do.

Such Fleas, ere they approach the Eye,

In Multiplying Glasses lye.

They feed so wide, so slowly move,

As Constellations do above. (457-464)

Constellations are configurations generated by how scattered stars appear from a given angle.

That seven stars are grouped in an image of a dipper is disconfirmed from every other angle. What

they have in common with grazing herds is a scatter.

Modularity and Brainwork

We normally use the word modular broadly to mean something drawn to specifications.

Cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists, however, apply it to the brain to describe inborn

development. Much animal behavior can be classified as modular. We also have a related cate-

gory to draw upon, namely patterns learned and practiced until they become automated, such as

walking and learning to talk. More behavior is instinctive in what David J. Buller (2005) and

others have labeled the “massive modularity thesis” (126), under which brain modules are pro-

grammed genetically to develop on schedule. (Buller cites Noam Chomsky, John Tooby, Leda

Cosmides, Steven Pinker, and others.) How many and which instincts might be programmed

remain open to question. Any degree of modularity assumes at least some specialized capacity,

such as one module to handle the kidneys, another to ease the way into learning grammar. We

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don’t have to learn kidney functions or make them habitual. Another way of looking at recurrent

behavior is to assume a flexible, generalized brain that adapts to situations as needed without being

programmed to do so, something that ravens do quite well. Other possibilities, too, besides

acquired habit lie somewhere in between, such as a latent capacity that doesn’t unfold until called

for and then does so with less effort than a skill foreign to the brain. Recurrent occasions in any

case extract habitual patterns from us, either having done so enough times in evolution to create an

inheritable capacity or in the developmental stages of individuals.

In combing through the debate as to what a genotype is and what a phenotype, Buller

concludes that merely to say that people are both modular and adaptive is to say very little, since

no one denies the combination. What remains debatable is the possibility that much of what we

attribute to reality we impose on it by way of packaged concepts. That includes math patterns.

The fables and myths I discussed earlier are prime examples of a universal human tendency to

animate the inanimate. Introspection doesn’t detect genetic modules at work and not all habits, so

not much can be determined by that means. Daniel C. Dennett in Consciousness Explained (1991)

finds the architecture of the mind lacking a central headquarters or Central Meaner (253), but even

that wouldn’t put everything on automatic pilot. The brain combines innate and cultural models

with choices and individual differences. The cultural models come in “thousands of memes, mostly

borne by language” that “take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and

thereby turning it into mind” (254). Memes are humanly contrived, but we don’t create them out

of individual adaptable intelligence. Rather, cultures over time add to them, convention preserves

them, and education, formal and informal, transmits them. That would presumably have been true

of behavioral patterns under proto language too as soon as clans gathered and had information and

concepts to communicate. Primates illustrate cultural conventions and tribal distinctions among

crows and ravens demonstrate learning passed down in flock culture.

Merlin Donald settles for calling the mind a hybrid with much given, much acquired, and

again no one would disagree. Consciousness isn’t uniquely human but has more to do in people

equipped with symbols than in animals with a limited listening vocabulary and only a few variants

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in sound and body language. Consciousness changes “the rules of the cognitive game because it is

a self-regulatory system, fundamental to all voluntary mental operations” (8). Individualized

combinations of modules plus irregularities in people who aren’t normal account many of the

variants we observe. It is easier to separate eccentricity from objectivity than it is to separate

widely held convictions from what is true. The agreement of most observers before the 17th

century that the sun and all the stars orbited the planet was a mistake based on custom as well as

appearance. That’s what it looked like, and if nearly everyone said so it must be true.

The debate over modularity presents something of an unsolvable conundrum in that

massive modularity poisons the well. It holds that whatever people think they are inventing or

choosing an implanted module or a meme has put there. To pursue such a line to its logical

conclusion would be to negate moral judgments that distinguish necessity from choice. It would in

effect convert first degree murder into manslaughter and theft into circumstance. The extended

prehistory of hominids complicates the question still more. What is genetic and what acquired

would have been mixed together for a very long time, with less of what our distant ancestry did

being voluntary before grammatical language and more after language multiplied the options.

How verbal, numeric, and visual transcriptions work may never be established beyond

doubt, but clearly however modular our perceptions may be we must learn to recognize specific

patterns one by one. Evolution couldn’t have planted anything pertaining to scalar extremes in the

human brain. What we learn by rote is by definition not inborn, though it is modular in the sense

that little individualism is involved in learning the alphabet and multiplication tables. Whether or

not some natural correspondences to number patterns exist, nature doesn’t add 2 and 2 to get 4,

though it may generate more foursomes and pairs than chance accounts for. It also generates a

good many right angles where vertical meets horizontal, and it tends to level jagged mountains into

level plains. Such correspondences to geometry are explicable by means of natural laws. That

universal grammar has subject, verb, predicate sentences could be due to individuals reaching out

for something, thus subjects acting on objects. Undeniably a good many patterns come built in,

like the rhythm of walking.

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However much the mind organizes and compresses, compared to computers the genetic

hardware at work in our matching of words, numbers, and images to things and actions has

limitations in speed and in the number of computations it can handle, and of course we have

trouble with counter intuitive phenomena such as how travel at high speed shrinks time. Robert

Pollack wonders in fact if in being the product of evolution the brain hasn’t become too outmoded

for complex computations: “Just as the past has established that there are odors we cannot smell

and colors we cannot see, there may be ideas we cannot consciously articulate" (The Missing

Moment, 36). Carrying pi out to a million digits requires a computer. The brain by itself isn’t up

to the task. The brain handles likeness and verbal grouping better than it does massive computa-

tions. Mathematicians invent what doesn’t match anything exterior, like the “excessive” numbers

Pythagoras held to be built into the order of things when they are actually no more so than steps

carved up a hill. That the divisors of the number 12 (1, 2, 3, 4, 6) add up to 16 means nothing.

The sum of divisors in 6 (1, 2, 3) make that number what is called perfect without anything

correspondingly perfect in things. Mathematicians have discovered more correspondences be-

tween natural phenomena and number sequences such as the Fibonacci sequence than one might

expect, but it remains to be shown whether or not these are more frequent than random chance

would account for. Much of algebra and calculus is a numbers-only game whose ciphers may not

represent anything. Among solids such things as broken fields of lava rock and rugged canyons

aren’t subject to surface geometric description. Clouds may temporarily resemble something and

may come in pillars or layers, but math has little application to that and language only such loosely

applied titles as strata and adjectives like billowing.

We approach the extremes of the microcosm and macrocosm by multiplying and dividing

the objects we know from experience and the units of measurement we apply to them. In doing so

we soon reach our limits. The proposed period for the inflationary universe that Alan Guth makes

“responsible for the creation of essentially all the matter and energy of the universe” (15) might

have been as brief as 10-30 seconds: “During this period the universe expanded by at least a factor

of 1025, and perhaps a great deal more” (14). Though knowing a second and a multiplied size

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helps, we can’t truly comprehend anything that fast or explosive. As Lee Smolin points out in

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2001), the quickest thing anyone can snatch out of the air

“takes more than 1040 fundamental moments” or minimal units. The “blink of an eye has more [of

these] than there are atoms in Mount Everest” (62). Such comparisons help, but picturing a

mountain of atoms isn’t much easier than imagining 10-30 second. If anything is instinctive about

such computations it is the desire to see and portray things as they are. Except possibly in the

preference of story-form explanations over numerical and verbal tangles, brains aren’t made to like

error. They like to identify what is truly there and find something answerable to it.

When it comes to managing irregularities, I personally favor poets, painters, and naturalists

with an eye for oddity over philosophers, scientists, and theologians, because they are less prone to

imposing preconceived concepts and systems. Try putting John McPhee adjacent to the prose of a

Greek or Roman rhetorician or such stylists in English as John Donne, Joseph Addison, and

Richard Steele. How does Assembling California (1993) fare beside the verbal hurricanes of a

Donne or Lancelot Andrewes, based as these are on a human-oriented, story-form universe? Quite

well on the match-up-with-reality test I would say, but reading prose responsive to large chunks of

factual matter can be like watching a stiff-legged foal learn to walk:

A few tens of metres of ocean sediments drift down upon the deep cold slab, settling on top

of

a kilometre or so of pillow lavas, under which is

a kilometre or so of sheeted dikes, under which is

a kilometer or so of plutonic rock (plagiogranite, gabbro), under which is

a kilometer or so of plutonic rock in which cumulate crystals settled in layers upon a distinct

chamber bottom–

the Moho–

under which is a kilometer or so of mantle rock, some of which was melted in the spreading

center and some of which is peridotite in its solid original form and if water has reached it is

serpentine (McPhee,115).

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Without compromising the delivery of selected information, such passages move to trochees in

rhythmic batches joined like legato in music. Maybe that is less a stumbling foal than a lumbering

Sasquatch, but some vocabulary like plagiogranite and gabbro is unavoidable. I won’t cite a

Donne or Lancelot Andrewes sermon for contrast, but you get the point. Elegance isn’t the

strong point of 10-30 of a second or “peridotite in its solid form.” We do have to give up rounded

periods and the emotions of moral admonitions to get at the unpretty truth. A fuller account of

geologic California would have to be even more loaded with such technical terms to suggest the

complete inventory of rocks and minerals in the fault-riddled geology of the state.

Another one who turns topographical description into commendable prose is Wallace

Stegner. On the prairies of Canada, eastern Montana, and the Dakotas, the land’s surface ap-

proaches one of the fundamental geometric forms, the flat plain: “These prairies are quiescent,

close to static; looked at for any length of time, they begin to impose their awful perfection on the

observer’s mind. Eternity is a peneplain” (Wolf Willow, 7). Since geometry is based on theorems,

a single peneplain (almost a plane) can be used to represent flat surfaces anywhere, curved of

course on the planetary sphere but looking flat. They stretch with uninterrupted monotony into

the distance like a dreamscape waiting for something to break the plane. Stegner’s prose brings

imagination and reality together in ways illustrated also by nature poets and by outdoor painters

like J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902). The naturalist essay was no

longer new in the earlier 20th century when the outer reaches of the universe and its timeline

expanded dramatically and in relativity collected the preliminary work of Galileo, Newton,

Maxwell, and others. It then took on an obligation to represent those extensions of time, number,

and space.

Additions to digital storage have now provided virtual access to landscapes by visual

means. The technology derives from GSI (Geographic Information Systems) software and

Google Earth. Visual zooming carries easily down into canyons and across plains. Cars equipped

with cameras drive the streets recording vistas for Google and Apple to be spliced into video

systems. Scientists in disciplines as different as biology and oceanography have added software to

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the Keystone digital earth that Google purchased in 2004. After the eighties no further techno-

logical barriers of significance kept anyone from voyaging almost anywhere on the planet and

beyond in virtual form. With cameras mounted in spacecraft they could move in close to distant

planets and moons and recently to Pluto and its moons. Simulated movement through a field of

molecules became as imaginable as space travel through stars. A visual scan is as schematic as a

cascading filing system and a quadratic equation but more concrete. Voice-over provides the-

matic control and makes representative samples out of specimens. Given nature’s extremes, using

foreshortening like that is a necessity.

Salience

Models, foreshortening, samples, and abstraction are enabling devices that help both the

general public and adjacent sciences get past some of the difficulties of the scalar spectrum and

the counter intuitive aspects of particle physics and relativity. Singling out what counts is another

such assist to comprehension along with sampling. Call that the salience principle, an essential

branch of detail selection. Making one or two things responsible for organizing the rest has the

blessing of natural processes as well as convenience. Some of the elimination is in accord with the

operational necessities of natural law. A moon or two could be subtracted from the solar system

without destroying it but obviously not the sun itself. What is nearby and can serve as a sample

assumes importance in representing more, as a wine buyer might sip from one bottle and decide

on an entire vintage. That is another application of relativity in the customary sense. What is

close by is relatively important to well being. The survival instinct developed in relation to that.

The polar bear charging a few yards off is more important to the seal than all the rest of nature

combined. Only to the seal, we acknowledge, but other branches of not special relativity concur.

It is from the point of view of the observer on the wharf that the boat is growing smaller as it

recedes. Objectively we know it remains the same size. Fact often collides with what we value

from where we stand.

Take a chaparral hillside composed of brush and gullies large enough to serve as a topo-

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graphical landmark. When we add the testimony of specialists to the underlying geology and

geophysics, the sample can be made to reveal a typical ratio of order and irregularity and much

more, and if we want to get down to isotopes and their formation we can go from this single

specimen to much of the universe. What becomes visible we can apply to further disconfirming

popular errors in the reading of planet history, for instance Wordsworth’s “Simplon Pass”and its

insertion of a Spirit into topographical irregularity:

The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,

Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside

As if a voice were in them, the sick sight

And giddy prospect of the raving stream,

The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,

Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light–

Were all like the workings of one mind, the features

Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,

Characters of the great Apocalypse,

The types and symbols of Eternity,

Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. (3-20)

A sick sight, a giddy prospect, and a raving stream don’t make ideal illustrations of the mind

Wordsworth assumes to be at work, though saying “as if a voice were in them” refrains from

making an unqualified commitment to that. It is clearly fanciful to think even hypothetically of

black drizzling crags speaking.

Both the Alps and an ordinary hillside discourage a vocabulary of grandeur based on types

and symbols. What is written in gullies and broken boulders is the working of elements over time.

If for the hillside we choose a time when light angles up from the west on a late afternoon, the

scene will lift a little out of its customary blandness and move closer to grandeur in the way of

electromagnetic fireworks at play rather than of animation. Let reddish light dissect the slope,

quilted by paths and fire roads and let that electrified atmosphere spread across neighboring hills

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like energy made visible, which in fact part of the spectrum of light waves does. The scene then

becomes grand not as a sign of something else but as a sample of energy and mass at work.

Doing its best to seem artful, it can then finish its transformation, emulating places that don’t have

to work so hard at it. Glimpsed scalar extremes flash across the surface and on out to sea.

Wordsworth might call these, too, intimations of immortality, but stripped of hyperbole they are

terrain and light with a history this light show has foreshortened. That capacity to exemplify

much that exists elsewhere gives the hill momentary salience. Behind the reading of it is the work

of astronomers, physicists, geologists, and others.

Topography has that exemplary status, not as a fossil represents a species but as a combi-

nation of factors that illustrate nature’s heterogeneity at the object level and require collaborating

specialists to assemble. Nothing in a math, language, or visual representation is fully adequate to

such a scene, but natural history does tell us that this setting is much like others. Nature’s

invariables guarantee that. “The same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all

frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good,” as Einstein’s 1905 summary

in “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” puts it (1952, 37) or as Richard Wolfson (2003)

even more simply puts it, “The laws of physics are the same in all uniformly moving reference

frames” (82). Typicality, not types and symbols, tie means of representation to phenomena,

setting aside individual differences in the interest of dominant features. It is equally necessary to

all major forms of expression, scientific, poetic, philosophic, legalistic, casual talk, and letters to

the editor.

The concept behind all naturalism once it replaced story-book logic is that of a natural

continuum consistent in its laws. In James Lawrence Powell’s words, “Threads from all fields . . .

. bind the tapestry [of Earth History] into a tight and interdependent cloth . . . . The tapestry of

science crowns our species. To tamper with it is no different from tampering with another great

tapestry of human invention: the arts. Imagine removing every fourth note from Eine Kleine

Nachmusik, every fourth line from Hamlet, every fourth brush stroke from Van Gogh’s Irises. To

do so would be to deny and desecrate the finest that our species has achieved” (225). The

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difference is that whereas Mozart and Shakespeare put compositions together meaningfully, some

of nature’s combinations work in conjunction while others remain a miscellany or are in conten-

tion. They are a continuum in that before unfolding into profusion they had a common source, as

the branched tree of species had a main line trunk and the periodic table a hydrogen beginning.

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