Turtles All the Way Down

Over the last few months, I have been reading and listening to a bunch of physics.  Particle physics and cosmology.  The micro and the macro of the attempt to understand the universe.  Limitless vistas of space with super clusters of galaxies and more exotic objects that stretch back to the alleged Big Bang.  And inside the proton are the ephemeral quarks and gluons flashing in and out of existence in (I kid you not) a yoctosecond.

And all of this hyperactivity of nothingness just to make it possible for me to push on the keys of my laptop to write this post.  All of those electrons and quarks following all these conflicting forces at various distances; the strong force, weak force, electro-magnetic force and gravity just so that reality can be felt and tasted.  All of these incredibly complex concepts and the mathematics that tries to describe it.  And the weirdness of quantum mechanics and its inherent and explicit ruling out of determinism.  All of this and how far we’ve come from Galileo and Newton.  And all we’ve achieved in technology.

And yet…

What are quarks made of?  What are gluons made of?  What happened five minutes before the Big Bang?  What happens five minutes after the End of the Universe?

There is no bottom.  There is no top.  There is no start.  There is no finish.

The human mind cannot encompass the infinite.  If we find something beneath quarks, I am sure there will be something under that.  And when the successor to the James Webb Space Telescope is put into service in twenty years at a cost of $100 billion or so I’m sure it will show us even further wonders that defy our ability to explain.  And so will the telescope after that.

And as the man said, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”  But that’s the part you have to wrap your head around.  Thinking that scientists have the ultimate truth is a misnomer.  All they have is the latest and greatest explanation as to how things work.

But they’ll never be able to tell you why you’re here or why you should care.  Each of us has to do that all by ourselves.

It’s remarkable.  Five hundred years after the Renaissance put us on the trajectory of man is the measure of all things and God is dead, we come right back to the same place.  The universe isn’t a big windup toy that means nothing and will return to nothing.  And after science tried to convince us that Earth is nowhere and humans are less than nothing it turns out that life is really the only thing with inherent value.  And human life is the miracle that we started out with before we killed God.

The more we study life the more in awe we are of its complexity and miraculous properties.  The more we study humans the more we discover about their potential.

I do not mean to disparage science.  Wresting the secrets of the universe from Nature is a noble endeavor.  And done with proper humility it is one of the finest works that can be achieved by the human mind.  But surely by now all the best minds in the world must be aware that an infinite universe cannot be defined by finite beings.  God built this nursery for us and it’s built to hold us while we grow up.  I can’t imagine we’ll find the door to the nursery unlocked.  At least not on this side of reality.