The Real Gravity of the Situation: Science Fiction Saving Science

The Real Gravity of the Situation: Science Fiction Saving Science “The more we study gravitation, the more there grows upon us the feeling that there is something peculiarly fundamental about this phenomenon to a degree that is unequaled among other natural phenomena. Its independence of the factors that affect other phenomena and its dependence only upon mass and distance suggest that its roots avoid things superficial and go down deep into the unseen, to the very essence of matter and space.” -Paul R. Heyl, Scientific Monthly, May, 19541 Introduction: Gravity and Science Fiction Scientific practice has been the major source of the concepts that define modern existence, but those concepts are seldom explored in all their ramifications, and increasingly, even in their basic meaning. Philosophy has often followed suit in a retreat from the seemingly futile task of forming a concrete understanding of even the basic entities conceived of by contemporary physics and cosmology. Into the cosmological vacancy has stepped science fiction. The ideas and inventions of science have disrupted the symbols and rhythms of traditional culture to such a degree that most traditional art forms have been capable of little more than a reflection of the loss of context and meaning. Consequently, whereas much of art today has become about personal expression, science fiction has become our species’ primary means of pondering the meaning and purpose of our place in what is increasingly framed by science as an impersonal universe. While both high art and popular fiction have echoed the fragmented and disorienting view of the world science has created, it is mainly science fiction that has attempted the difficult task of finding new myths and spiritual meaning in scientific concepts with any degree of success. Much like post-classical physics, science fiction has often had a difficult time finding a coherent perspective on space and time, even if it has relished the fun and ambiguity of infinite realities that certain interpretations of quantum physics have made possible. But unlike contemporary physics, a narrative cannot fall back on mathematics, and when some thematic unity or closure is called for, a story must find the thread that ties the many probabilities and realities together—the cosmological continuity we reach for in our most general theories and most central concepts. Quantum physics has certainly opened up a space for some kind of metaphysical grounding in consciousness, but there is only so much meaning one can glean from the now cliched ideas about how we create our reality. It is a nice thought—it can certainly hint at more nuanced philosophical and spiritual relationships—but without more context, this New Age subjectivism devolves into ambiguity. The larger questions concerning, not just our personal responsibility, but our place in a larger universe, have had little help from mainstream cosmology and the theory of general relativity that undergirds it. At best films like Star Wars have had to fill in the semiotic vacancy with some “force”—which clearly alludes to the language of physics, where scientists have long assumed that some fundamental force or force-field will be found to tie the others together in some meaningful way. Star Wars owes much of its popularity to its role in the formation of our contemporary spiritual sensibility, a kind of integration of the scientific cosmology of cosmic forces with New Age dreams of harnessing these forces—of fulfilling the possibilities of metaphysical power not-so-subtly hoped for in fringe interpretations of quantum theory. But in the end, “The Force” remains mere fantasy. While some unifying factor must exist—the intuitive mind balks at the insinuation that coherence isn’t necessary. And while there is certainly something needed to fill the void in our theories, the soul longs for something more concrete, something to make sense out of why the world is the way it is, not just project our hopes and desires into melodramatic escapism. In our actual world, that is to say, in the world of mainstream culture and the concepts that frame our understanding, gravity is the closest thing to a unifying force, since despite its supposed weakness in magnitude, it dominates the landscape of our cosmology and seems to determine much of what happens in our universe at the grandest scale. Though amid the many ideas physics has supplied to imaginative literature and film, gravity has hardly been a common trope and for a simple reason. There are many things that are not known for certain concerning much of what modern cosmology explores and reports to us, but with gravity there is not even a clear idea to go on. Einstein added content to what was a mystical and unexplained force to Newton, but this merely muddled the metaphorical waters. Admittedly, though, his brilliant equating of inertia and gravity certainly has much metaphorical power—it gets one thinking at least along some direction towards understanding what gravity may be outside of just a name for a mathematically described effect. There is certainly something more broadly meaningful about thinking of gravity as a kind of inertia, since inertia is concretely poetic and easily extrapolated into being thought of as a grounding, fate-defining force. With Einstein’s general relativity, however, with its theory of four-dimensional curving of space and time, we get such an odd and non-visualizable entity in our heads that there is little room for extrapolation. To many scientists, even esteemed physicists like Freeman Dyson, the view of the world given by general relativity has turned out to be “totally sterile”.2 It has shed little light on other phenomena, nor even connects with them logically. And on top of that, it has caused a great deal of wasted effort on the part of many scientists struggling to find the elusive entities that would make the theory work. Very little has actually changed or progressed in the mainstream understanding of gravity since the time of the quote above from 1954. Convoluted claims about finding the mysterious gravity waves only further obfuscate any potential understanding of gravity. For if it is just another force among others, a mere property of a particle (the graviton), or wave, then it can no longer function as a potentially more profound context for understanding them, some observable trace of what is beyond the mere properties of material entities. This, of course, has been the trend with all the forces as conceived by physics, where even when there is some kind of underlying symmetry or unity theorized, the parts never function as a sign of the whole—the particles and forces are not framed in any way that makes them understandable as variations or extensions of some, if not single, then at least some connected process. Gravity conceived as a property of spacetime curvature at least has some potential, since it seems to have some trace of its role as a physical sign of whatever holds the universe together, of what sets the stage for all higher-order structures, like life and intelligence. Yet this trace was bound to get covered over with other convoluted concepts, since it didn’t really explain anything. At least for Newton, gravity was still a spiritual “force” very much like “The Force” of Star Wars. Even if he did not have an explanation for why gravity does what it does, he left open the question in a way not possible when the question “why” is always channeled towards another causal mechanism. It is no wonder that Star Wars has made “The Force” a more meaningful and popular concept than any that science or philosophy has produced in recent memory. For if there is no higher “force”, no metaphysical agency—whether conceived as being beyond the understanding of rational minds as it often was in Newton’s very religious time, or conceived in more subtle metaphysical ways, as Newton himself was fond of doing—then there is no opening for the creative intellect. As materialist philosophy reduced Newton’s general concept of spiritual “force” down to a generic action of mechanical agencies, and all knowledge became a mere cataloging and postulating (or at most a narrowly-creative harnessing) of these agencies, often the only place left where creative agency could exist has been in the imagination. And indeed, even science fiction fans have criticized Star Wars for being mere “space fantasy”, not true scifi. The materialism of classical physics was somewhat undermined, of course, by the quantum revolution, but without an underlying metaphysics, the results have been mixed. Even throughout the post-Newtonian era, gravity remained somewhat of a recalcitrant sign of a missing metaphysics, since until Einstein, there was no convincing mechanism. Surely one existed, our materialist priests assumed, and when Einstein provided a way of talking about, and more importantly, quantifying some of the mysteries, they were often considered explained—nevermind that it actually made the whole phenomenon even more esoteric and enigmatic. In some science fiction films, however, gravity has been given a central place, and the results are quite telling. The inclusion of this stubbornly opaque concept in our imaginative media is an interesting sign of issues that are becoming more pressing in our world, and of the possible transformations to come. Science Fiction and Alternative Science In the film simply called Gravity, we are given a story that is rather simple, but which mostly served as a means by which those that saw it in theaters could be brought into a very concrete feeling of the “gravity”of our planet. Indeed the film cut right past all the science and theory to the basic meanings of the word, to the weighty feeling we get around something important, to that which ties us to our purpose on this planet, as well as tying us viscerally and literally to the planet itself. Since the trend in visual media has often been more about the migration to small and personalized viewing, with the more personal—and therefore less visionary— writer-driven media of serialized character dramas, the movie theater has become something of a relic, with its visionary aesthetic and grand scope being used more and more for a rehashing of stale comic book myths, updated to reflect the dark gritty tastes of contemporary audiences looking for another rehearsal for the end of the world. But in the right hands, the venue and technology of the theater can be used well. The films discussed in this essay especially could be seen as positive expressions of another development, of another migration in media towards a totally immersive environment—something that can be used to bring the audience into a powerful sense-saturating resonance with its subject, for good or ill. Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, for instance, uses the overwhelming sense-experience of the theater, not to override reason with spectacle, but to give one an inescapable feeling and understanding of the gravity of the situation we face as we venture out into space, of the contrast between the vapid chaos and catastrophe that is outer space, and the powerful pressure of Earth’s grounding and penetrating sense of order, purpose and place. The feeling can illuminate all the abstract theories with an intuitive light, revealing, perhaps, some clue as to what gravity really is. One of the biggest problems with current science is its ad hoc conjuring of disconnected concepts and forces for every new set of data, in every field. Without a sense of how each thing is related to other things, to things we know and can experience, the capability of real understanding and real critique, becomes impossible. With gravity we experience it continually as a constant pressure, though this experience doesn’t tell us much without some poetic extrapolation, and it quickly becomes something very abstract and unimportant. However, when one lets the concrete felt meaning of an experience guide one into knowledge, even into the abstractions of science and philosophy, one can begin to critique and understand with a mind for the whole structure of relationships that goes into the experience. Something like this was the scientific method of Goethe, the poet who dared to challenge Newton on his theory of light. While Goethe has inspired and influenced many in the history of science, he is an especially important figure to the tradition of people thinking outside the box of institutional science. The esoteric thinkers and intuitive theorists of today’s scientific underground are, knowingly or not, working in the tradition of Goethe, forming a vital counterculture of knowledge in the eclectic corners of the electric media of the 21st century. While much of mainstream physics proceeds through piling layers of mathematical abstraction upon abstraction, alternative physics has been practiced mostly by scientifically-oriented generalists and engineers, non-specialists more interested in understanding and connecting things on a concrete level than the culture of P.H.D.s, who, by institutional necessity, must aim for niche discoveries over any comprehensive understanding. The result in academic physics has been a confusing mess of so many different forces and effects, measured in arbitrary units, and, of course, often named after scientists. There are many eccentric theories and niche discoveries in the alternative science field as well, but the dominant theme is a desire and willingness to reexamine foundational assumptions to achieve some kind of thematic or conceptual unity. Such an examination has led to a rich and fascinating culture of new ideas—particularly with the works of Dewey Larson and those that have followed him. Larson developed a coherent and meaningful understanding of gravity and the universe by teasing out and connecting what is hidden and implicit in the empirical data of fundamental science and its collage of concepts. Similar results have emerged from academic philosophers and complexity theorists attempting to understand the core principles of organization potentially found in all systems. Even buried beneath the disconnected forces and unexplainable constants of mainstream physics, there is a thoroughly connected tapestry of ratios and relations without the need for arbitrary constants. Indeed, all forces can be understood in the context of changes in these relations. For instance, we can easily see that the specific force in physics known as “gravity” is a kind of abstraction from the relationship of other concepts such as mass and space. But with a feel for the larger patterns in science, we can see this is one particular context for looking at some kind of fundamental motion, a motion that is not just downward as our bare observation would suggest, but inward, towards an organizing center, in opposition to the outward motion with which it forms some kind of equilibrium. Science has come up with many other concepts for different manifestations of these essential motions—the inward, organizing, and the outward, dispersing—names like dark matter and dark energy come to mind at the large scale as the most recent inventions conjured up to save the theory of gravity. While at the atomic scale we have such a confusing mess of forces that most physicists have given up hope of any kind of coherent or visualizable model. This way of conjuring up and naming forces leads us away from any clear feeling for what a force or an energy actually is—that they are not things in themselves, but an emergence, an activity, a transformation. While electromagnetism has come to be most often considered as the most important force because of certain assumptions that were made about the atom, and now “energy” and “information” have come to designate the fundamental entities for scientists and spiritualists alike, the situation has made it difficult to unearth any more fundamental relations that could reveal what these things actually are, what force, energy, or information are beyond the function they serve in our system of ideas. In reality, the idea that there are forces out there, each with their own laws ruling over their domain, is incoherent and little more than an echo of religious belief. In Dewey Larson’s view of physics, for instance, echoing trends across 20th century thought, it is motion itself that is primary, not objects—changes in movement brought into formative activity through a reference frame that relates them to other motions. Motion, then, just like meaning has come to be thought in some insightful corners of academic philosophy, is a kind of reciprocal relation, whether that relation be between a message and its medium, or between anything as a symbol or sign and its background context, it is between something we judge to be measurably changing against something we must assume to be a static background. But the two actually arise together. While generically speaking, this isn’t that controversial, in a physics whose concepts become encoded and integrated into the whole edifice of cultural world building, it is most important that this fundamental reciprocity of thing and context does not become underestimated as it inevitably does in physics, as coherent understanding always tends to get covered-over with layers of abstraction. Even so, the important relations are still there, at bottom, after all the posturing gets swept away, since motion, the object of physics, is quantified as a clear basic relation between space and time (e.g. meter per second). Beneath all the confusing theoretical games, a clear intuitive picture can be seen of the deeper cosmic game being played between reciprocal motions, one that allows through their dynamic tension some field of higher order and meaning to manifest. While electromagnetism is indeed an important phenomenon, it cannot be understood until energy is seen, not as just some bluntly substantial thing, or some specifically qualified or qualifying force (something or someone’s “energy”), but as an expression of the same polarity of reciprocal motions at work at all scales of the universe.3 The effective artist always takes this intuitive approach of analogical extrapolation, and for this reason often gets closer to the truth of analogical unity than the logician with his often blinding categorical divisions. Even when intuition muddles and conflates, it tends to illuminate something in the process, (even if what it illuminates is not what it thinks— not the object or process it or its logic had identified). One can see a result of this kind, even with the difficult concept of gravity, in the films of Cristopher Nolan. Nolan is a director whose capacity for finding and sharing some kind of intuitive and sensual experience of rather abstract ideas is unparalleled, especially when his films are seen in theaters. As genius as he may be, however, Christopher Nolan—especially when working with his brother Jonathan’s writing—is notorious for convoluting themes and characters with a heavy handed logical maze of concepts, but he also tends to show that artistic flair for finding the intuitive weight of an idea within whatever matrix of metaphors he is working with. He has used another of the heroes of the scientific underground in his movies before—Tesla played by David Bowie in The Prestige—so one can sense his affinity with that section of our culture that champions the intuitive scientist (and perhaps the scientific artist). Though in the film Interstellar, we get something quite special. We see gravity make its debut as the central force that sets the whole plot in motion and ends up being framed as a kind of transcendental power somehow coextensive with love and purpose, though in what way they are related, the Nolans are a bit vague. Yet they must sense their relationship, for they build a beautiful movie out of an intuition that science and its cosmology can be rendered into resonance with something spiritual. This is signified by the repeated use of mythological and even Christian symbolism, all set to a profoundly beautiful score by Hans Zimmer. Zimmer’s use of a pipe organ makes the religious tone of the film explicit. But more subtly, the score departs from the classical habit of constructing a feeling of lack to build an anxious form of musical tension. Instead of relying on an anticipation for resolution to create musical motion, the score builds layer after layer of variations in sound and instrumentation on top of the same few chords constantly resolving into each other.4 The emotional effect is one that reflects a cosmology quite different from traditional Christian—or even much of modern culture—reflected in everything from music to science. Unlike many other cultures, the West has put an often anxious stress on linear developments in time, a restless grasping towards a resolution that reveals its lack of comforting ground. In the wake of the failures of modernism, however, contemporary music especially has often grown tired of the restless reach for the future, with different kinds of minimalism and droning soundscapes ironically becoming the most experimental and novel developments. Like these developments, and like the drone-dependent music of many eastern traditions, the Interstellar score is grounded in the feeling of time as a kind of omnipresent but ever-morphing space, or perhaps, a cycling cosmos whose linear developments are always ever-returning to—or simply moving through—their home key. The score helps Interstellar artfully confront the prevailing ideology that has hijacked science by giving us a powerful and direct experience of a different kind of scientific cosmology. Yet, the film and its music do not simply return us to traditional cyclical time or a fatalistic pre-determined cosmos, but rather a cosmos and time that are endlessly adding layers and variations on themes like the iterations seen in fractal imagery—the often misunderstood but essential visual representation of the complex connectivity of culture after modernism. Some critics have suggested the film perpetuates the scientific hubris that suggests our answers are in the stars, when we should be taking care of our planet, but this is not true. Like the fractal, the image and message of the film resonates with the ancient hermetic dictum, “as above, so below”. We grow and change through reciprocal relations with our medium and context, not by grasping for transcendence or resolution. We find our answers not by looking outside ourselves and our relations, but by understanding how they are woven into everything. Growth, salvation, and a kind of transcendence emerge out of connection, a continuity of meaning we see and hear repeating endlessly through the images and sounds of the film. It is true that “Interstellar” portrays those concerned with and tied to the earth, nature, and existing conditions as narrow and short-sighted (the school teachers arrogantly dismissing science and the reality of the moon landing, the stubborn farmer son), but this movie is quite far from being a forgettable advertisement for NASA, as other contemporaneous space movies like The Martian have been. What this movie critiques is not just narrow mindedness or short-sightedness; nor is it simply promoting science and the human pluck and ingenuity that gets featured in so many humanist narratives. No matter which direction you or the characters are looking or the scope of the vision in view, we get a refutation of life dictated solely by the ego, by the life-driven mind, which, no matter how far it looks, or how deep it thinks, cannot see past its reflection because it cannot see how it connects to everything. It sees only its ends, and so only finds its end, as it cannot escape its demise within the discrete limits of space. It is lost in time because linear time is a road only to death and an eventual extinction of everything. We can fly to the furthest reaches of distant galaxies but will find only barren wastelands. We may survive for a while, but ultimately everything confined to its discrete existence in space is a slave to that which transcends it. This higher being or power over or greater than us, however, is simply a projection covering over the lack we feel when we cannot sense the connections we make that truly determine things and make us who we are. These invisible connections—upon which everything visible depends—are very difficult to understand when our sense of self and knowledge of the world rests on and ultimately reduces to physics, at least a physics that merely extends and reflects the fragmented view of things as simply existing in space and passing through time. To address the cultural incoherence that inevitably results when people experiment with their world, it is crucial to have higher culture, that is, ideas and forms that can reorient and reconnect us as religion was capable of doing before it became at odds with knowledge. One would think that now, with the plethora of scientists and artists available, there would be plenty of paths for our minds to find the meaning of things. Unfortunately, the path has become quite difficult, for minds and hearts alike with them so often at odds. Thankfully we have artists like Christopher Nolan to sense what must be reconnected and attempt it so ambitiously. Especially unique and helpful to the needs of our time is his fascination with the fabric of time and the way ideas and perspectives change or determine it. His later film Oppenheimer could be seen as a kind of spiritual sequel to Interstellar, and so also explores how our creaturely ambition can blind us to this fabric as it exists beyond the distorting lens of our desires and fears. In Oppenheimer, the title character attempts to make essential contradictions in both life and thought coexist by turning them into mere instrumental functions in the industrial machine of his time. This, of course, reflects what happened to physics at this time, where the concerns with conceptual continuity voiced by Einstein were left behind, and the contradictions of quantum theory were more or less turned into pure abstract functions, or idealized as a mystical paradox. In either case, coherent knowledge definitely took a backseat to the compartmentalized technological functions of whatever ideas could serve the desires and fears of the machine. Oppenheimer, likewise, compartmentalized his conflicting desires for power, for an ideal family and work life in his favorite location, along with his desires for sexual freedom, for radical politics and the like. All these things could coexist for him, just as multiple realities exist in some versions of quantum theory, (or perhaps now exist within the highly compartmentalized cells of the classified science world that Oppenheimer helped create—and that some say have achieved various kinds of contact with other realities). But like in Oppenheimer’s life, a system of compartmentalized competition between incompatible fractions or factions of a coherent self or society is not very sustainable. It obfuscates the larger picture of reality beyond each specialized perspective. We cannot see the connections and consequences that straddle the gulf between the short truncated lines of our lives, or between each of our small spheres of self-centered concern. However, film can make the normally invisible visible, not only annihilating the space between us—that is, not only creating lines of empathetic resonance with otherwise distant people and perspectives—but even, in some cases, creating a visionary resonance with the complex mechanics of fate, even with the maze of confused connections that accompany complex and even contradictory concepts and actions. Christopher Nolan excels at this. In his Oppenheimer, he intercuts different time periods and subjective perspectives, giving the sense of a kind of temporal space and continuity beyond what someone living their life, especially the kind of singular life lived by Oppenheimer, could usually see or understand—or beyond what would be possible to portray with a linear narrative, or by attempting to impose an objective causal frame on the complicated conditions that determine the course and significance of someone’s life. Can any life or event really be understood in such a linear causal way? Certainly not a person driven by conflicting ideas, impulses, and historical forces. But, of course, contradiction is a theme in itself, both in Oppenheimer’s life and the spirit of his time. This film brings a thematic continuity to the contradictions of his life—and perhaps even to the contradictions of all life and thought in our age—by artfully portraying the meaningful sense of tragic fate that accompanies a mind, or a world, unable to make that coherent meaningful sense itself. The film makes sense of Oppenheimer and his world, even if he cannot. It makes sense, for instance, to think that a complex and vitally-motivated person like him would have been drawn to—but feel ultimately dissatisfied with—the lack of coherence in quantum theory’s abstractions, and that he would therefore be driven to make the disparities of his life, and his ideas, vitally cohere in some way. It also makes sense that he was seduced by the opportunities a technological and political integration had to offer this impulse. And while he might have been able to hold all the strands together and make them work for a time, the larger meaning of his life and work spun out of his control and threatened the coherence it had briefly achieved, at least in his mind. But this is the nature of a mere functional coherence. Ideas stripped of all meaning beyond their use means eventually they will be put to very different use. They will seem to shift unpredictably from the point of view of a single entrenched perspective or line of time, just as an electron shifts wildly in quantum physics. One can harness that chaos and seem to make it cohere enough to control for a time, but ultimately it escapes—or even explodes—undoing every scheme of control. But that doesn’t mean there is no higher order or harmony, and the Oppenheimer soundtrack reinforces this idea. It finds a complex kind of order in the chaos. It uses, for instance, sudden shifts in tempos—different rates of change in the flow of musical time. Yet this is not a simple metric modulation, for these tempos seem to have no one common metric factor—something one might have expected if the theme had been Oppenheimer’s brilliance, his singular ability to find a deeper mathematical harmony in existence. But this is a story of a different kind of genius, one more interested in tapping the vital explosive heart of things than merely seeing its underlying harmony. The score, however, is full of harmony, not random or atonal at all. It is just that its tonal coherence, much like its rhythm, and much like the coherence of Oppenheimer’s life, of any life, is not reducible to a single scheme, but rather in the singular way each tone or moment alters and connects the meanings of the whole. The more or less unique nature of all things confounds the reductive models of physics, and Oppenheimer’s score reflects this. Its complex melodic line, like a unique line of time, connects different perspectives, which in turn contextualize the line according to their scheme.5 The line basically has different meanings depending on the chords beneath it that give it context, but these meanings are uniquely connected through the singular event of the melodic line. In other words, single notes, like the merely statistically predictable particles of quantum physics, seem to have no overarching context to absolutely determine their meaning or fate. And like a particle, each note at any one point in space or time, can only point to the meaning given by whichever among the contradicting contexts is present in the underlying chords. This, of course, reflects the underlying disparity of quantum complementarity between the wave and particle context of understanding. But the unification of disparate contexts is not in the contiguity or overlap of their contradictions in the abstract space of functions ready for diverse use, but in the continuity provided by the melody of time, by the line that brings different contexts to bear on the same, that is, singular, event of the life lived, or music experienced. Forcing disparities together in the abstract space of potential use in merely functional contexts is a chaotic choice that both Oppenheimer and much of physics embraced, one that misses the harmony that exists in the open-system of time and the unique relations of each event, open-relations which can connect coherently to and even produce other contexts of understanding beyond the ones embraced by the technological machine of military physics. The disorder Oppenheimer helped unleash on the world was in his life and thought all along, but as part of a larger order that was beyond his control or fault. He could not control it, but perhaps he could understand the larger order within the disorder in a way not possible with the limited controlled chaos of quantum physics. The score gives a feeling of the chaos, but also the order within it not as some deeper layer of timeless tonality that resolves the particulars, but a unique order of connections that the concrete tones bring to the abstract harmonies. Its complex patterns restlessly shift in tonal meaning and tempo, yet nonetheless smoothly connect in the creative space and time of the film—just as contradicting ideas can be made to do when framed in a creative vision of their related variations, origins, and effects. Obviously, such a vision is quite difficult—all the more so when science and society become more concerned with the restless search for power than with coherent wisdom. At the end of Nolan’s Oppenheimer, it is Einstein that helps him see some of the bigger picture long obfuscated by his embroilment in the fractured terrain of ego-ambition and power politics. This suggests that Einstein’s famous critique of quantum physics may have some truth after all, that perhaps controlling and predicting short-term consequences is not the same as seeing the big picture, even if he, of course, struggled with wanting to have the single objective vision of things. Yet, if the bigger picture isn’t reducible to a single space or theory, and using different ideas based on how they plug into the functions of our social machine obfuscates their greater meaning and effects, what is the alternative? The State of Wisdom in the Age of Materialism Traditional cultures long had their own effective ways of symbolizing and working with a greater reality beyond the obvious reality and function of objects. As rational consciousness and especially science progressed these realms became matters of religious dogma and an awkward faith in symbols long fractured from sensible meaning. It is still common for people, even the most sophisticated scientists to retain some lingering faith that parrots these now decontextualized religious symbols, but when it comes down to it, we have no real picture or believable faith in what lies beyond, and so instinctively we fall back on and cling to our most basic quest for survival—we cease to dream. Or when we dream, we dream of other worlds just like this one, more planets we can continue this life on (or another life like it), perhaps a little different, perhaps an oddity to be fascinated with for a time, but ultimately a life without purpose, so utterly lacking in meaning. Meaning and purpose necessitate some kind of concrete sense of our place in the universe, and so some idea of the structure of the invisible—or at least some feeling for the reciprocal dance of relations to which all symbols and objects refer. Without that higher context of feeling or ideas, whether we just tend to the crops or design the next spacecraft, we do so only to survive, to live for ourselves and our small circle of concern. Purpose becomes haunted by doubt, by the fear that the inevitable end of all will negate even the legacy of our existence. Whether we stay on our little plot of land or grow into the vastness of space, we do so in vain. The materialist cosmology of merely outward spatial expansion doesn’t just give us disasters as in the film Gravity, but pointless journeys into a vast ocean of emptiness, ultimately doomed to extinction. Interstellar may appear on the surface to be like other films advocating for unlimited scientific expansion and survivalism. The inclusion of the Dylan Thomas poem may seem to signal a belief in human determination, about our fighting against all odds, about our will to stand up and have faith when we had no reason to (yawn). Thankfully, however, the film delves into a deeper determination, not a stubborn will without reason. The protagonist Cooper does display the familiar film trope of attempting some impossible maneuver when all hope should be lost, but he does so, as he says calmly, because “it is necessary”. Necessary for what? To survive? Sure. But more importantly, necessary for the plot. Does he know he is in a movie? Perhaps he just knows he is in a meaningful universe. Perhaps at this point in the story, he knows there is real meaning to time, that the future pulls on him and speaks to him as it did from the beginning of the film. He cannot die now. Not because the future is predetermined, but because his love and connection to his daughter has made what might not have been possible—the chance to see her again—a kind of fate created by the nature and meaning of their connection. Contrast that with the scientists serving as the antagonists of the film, who are unimaginatively and crudely convinced of limited possibilities, even when they rage against them. This same blindness was expressed by Cooper in the first half of the film, but he eventually comes around. At one point Hathaway’s character makes a case for love, for there being a thematic weight to our connections that affect the world of physics that Cooper, giving the materialist perspective, dismisses. Yet, she describes love as an artifact of dimensions transcending time and space, perhaps too closely echoing the New Age side of our contradictory modern faith, which Cooper rightly sees as a projection of her desire to her lover again. At this point in the film, he has not figured out how our inner connections and outer events connect. He only sees the biased projections of her hopes and fears. Science has given us a barren cosmology, so people find their meaning in the personal and emotional, often ascribing spiritual significance to them that clearly signifies a desire for a transcendence of the harsh truth of this world. This often takes the form of romanticism, whether it be couched in spiritual terms or not. Dissatisfied with the deterministic world of classical physics and its mechanistic cosmology, historically it was the “romantic” who turned to the emotions as representing something beyond, something metaphysical (at least this is the story when the science of Romantics like Goethe is not taken seriously). This disconnection between the physical and metaphysical has now become the dominant pattern for our age, since seeing God in the world science describes for us has become increasingly difficult. Transcendence...escape, has become the most viable conceptual option; love, the most tangible spiritual reality. Only those tragically blind believers in a materialist cosmology would act as the two misguided scientists do in the film, but when the only alternative is a vague appeal to love, who can blame them? Michael Caine and Matt Damon’s characters both justify their immorality through a cold logical appeal to the importance of survival. The Dylan Thomas poem underscores the rage at the bottom of these motivations. In the poem, it is a rage not just against death, but against a life that could have been more. Even the wise man in the poem rages because his words had forked no lightning. He knows that dark is right, but still he cannot help but rage against the dying of the light. But is the dark right? Is this the wise man—the man who “knows” there is no point in life, at least no point in fighting death, the man whose only option is to prolong the inevitable, and so cannot help but rage that he could have been more, if only he had more time? Matt Damon’s character certainly is no wise man, even in the poem’s sense (we are told he was a good man, “the best”, and faithful to the poem we see how frail his deeds are). He is clearly motivated out of a fear of death and loneliness. Michael Caine’s character however has lived a long life. He is an old physicist, and so characteristically, as he admits, he is not afraid of death (physicists are enamored with the dead world of mechanical law), he is afraid of time. Without confronting this fear, without changing his assumptions about time, Cooper’s scientist daughter discovers Caine’s character is essentially creating a recursive nonsensical diversion. In all his theories, we eventually learn he was doing no more than “buying time”. These are our mainstream theoretical physicists in a nutshell. They cannot change their underlying assumptions, so they keep buying time so they can go on with their lives, confirming and overly-complicating the basic assumptions which have come to define the frame of the world for the rest of us, barely capable of hinting at something beyond. They, like most people today, have long given up hope in understanding what lies behind the veil, though most must assume there is something. Even Stephen Hawking in his disembodied calculations seems to wonder what lies behind those singularities, where all space converges towards something radically other. Interstellar, whether the Nolans are aware of this or not, gestures towards a different science and a different cosmology, where the fabric of time—the destiny that frames our lives and gives it meaning—is no longer a sad dream we clutch for in the dark abyss of space, but a knowledge capable of saving the earth and bringing life and spirit to the material void. Granted there is much in film these days that explores time, but the best they can usually do is overlay ancient myths into science fiction fantasies, where the Jedi Knight or some spiritual superhero fights to conquer time or hold back the monster death and restore peace to the people. Even to the secular person not given to fantasy, the same structure can be seen lurking in every act: a hope that death can be, if not vanquished, then at least postponed, or the pain of life lessened in some way, that there is value in life itself, even though according to our materialist wise man, we are all just dust in the wind. Such is the example laid out in Thomas’ poem: the wise man knows that dark is right, that all is impermanent, but he struggles on because something is unfulfilled, perhaps because he still has hope in a light that we cannot see. A wise man presumably “knows” the struggle is pointless, that light is just a flash in the dark, that it can never win, and yet...he stays in the struggle. Why? The spiritual frameworks of our day can seldom help but mirror our fractured materialist cosmology, so seldom give us any good reason for faith in meaning. We are asked to care and even fight for something despite lacking any sense of what good could really last or matter in the end. For if all is relative, or if emptiness is the final truth and the world an illusion, why would a wise man labor on? We are given many equivocations but our culture seems to be at an impasse where we cannot understand the point of anything, but neither can we just lay down and die. We fight on, knowing dark is right, that is, that we live in a vast dark empty abyss where light and time merely pass us by, but we rage on with the stubborn hope that our words might fork some goddamn lightening, that our force might make a difference, if only for a moment. But perhaps that stubborn passion knows more than the wise man. Perhaps there is something to the passing of time that is more than a transcendent dimension or projection from our quaint little space of life. Interstellar seems to be a trace in the dying medium of film of what is becoming fleshed out in the emerging global media-mind, presaged by the internet. In science fiction—and even parts of the growing conspirituality culture of the New Age—one can see emerging out of a long development, with threads across our culture, the contours of a new understanding of time, no longer as a linear progression within a substantial medium, but a multi-dimensional landscape of interactive media. Though in many ways and forms, our species is still struggling to formulate a concrete and scientific understanding of a world that, without a confrontation between some rather fantastical emerging realities and our basic physical principles, tends to end up being framed only as some radical transcendence of what we can understand or connect to the fabric of our daily existence. This transcendent meaning easily becomes disconnected and vague, as in the movie when Hathaway’s character gives its romantic version: an emotion outside of space and time—again the belief in something that contradicts the harsh truth of what we “know”. But as Cooper comes to see, this isn’t some abstract force outside of space and time, the mysterious metaphysical God behind Newton’s Force which still haunts our science to this day as various grounding abstractions. He comes to see the meaning that is time, manifested through connections within the perfectly crafted stage of our lives in space, and so sees it as us, or as intimately connected with us. In the film’s climax, he must use Newton’s laws of motion in space to launch himself into the heart of a gravity well. He doesn’t transcend the laws of physics. He uses them to reach the point of transformation, the point where those lines of Newton’s divine force we call gravity converge in space. At that point, time and space flip and expose their relative and reciprocal relation, with time now viewed in the foreground in three dimensions, and normal space being reduced to a single position: his daughter’s room. This three dimensional temporal reference system is a natural consequence of a more intuitive approach to physics, one explicitly and formally worked out by the visionary engineer Dewey Larson and others as previously mentioned, itself a modern scientific form of concepts with a long history in esoteric literature. It is in this inside-out reality, portrayed visually as a tesseract, that the film’s protagonist Cooper comes to see the meaning of his life, indeed of all life, and the ultimate end of science and exploration: not to simply survive and make life a little more tolerable for our fellows, however important those things are (though it is pretty hard to not do so at the expense of other fellows), and it certainly isn’t to help them all reach extinction in the timeless and spaceless naught (surely only a solution to the most nihilistic mystic unable to confront the inherent violence of life). He first tries to use time to change the past but he finds his actions are already inscribed into the fabric. In contrast to the predictable science fiction time travel melodrama that projects our fantasies unchanged into a new dimension of freedom and power, (another force wielded by our superhero, now finely capable of defeating time and change, proving shallow New Age quantum cliches were right all along, that we do create our own reality!), in Interstellar we see illustrated what these cliches are naively trying to express: that the connections we make are the very substance of time, which does create our reality because time is itself the invisible structure of space. We may not be able to create reality according to our whims, but the more we understand of the deeper context of our lives, the more we are able to change that context—where time and space are no barrier to transformation. When we are confronted with the truth of the inner planes, either in the sense given in spiritual traditions, or in fully materialized form as Cooper is in the film, the purpose of life comes increasingly into focus. While the purpose and meaning of life may seem obvious and self-evident—however poorly expressed—to those most in touch with that inner reality, the time is coming in our culture where this needs to be more than a feeling, more than personal. But it all starts with that feeling, with the experience of embodiment, with its undeniable gravity and sense of meaning. And it is through gravity that we surrender to that feeling (an explicit technique in various forms of spiritual practice).6 Gravity takes us inward—into our own inner world at first, but in time, through time into knowledge—that is, into the structure of relations that determines everything even as it is determined by everything. For it is through knowledge that we have evolved a new more or less collective consciousness. And, however incoherent it may be, this mind and its media are straining towards a higher purpose for humanity as a whole. Our technology has made this possible, even as it threatens to engulf us. So much science fiction has dwelt on this danger, as well as on the possibilities inherent to this machine we have woven ourselves into. Few media narratives, however, have been able to break out of the usual reactions to such an important change. When they do start to grasp the true meaning of our ascent into a new consciousness, the results are vague, as in the star child of Kubrick’s 2001 or the rapturous transcendence in Aronofsky’s The Fountain. Both these wonderful films capture the feeling and texture of time and the evolution of consciousness through their beautiful blend of music and images. They hint at the possibilities of a transformation of death, and even illustrate a possible existence of mankind on a higher level than our limited view of linear time. The metaphors in these films resonate strongly with some kind of truth, especially as it has been developed in certain theories, but most filmmakers are artists and few have the desire to follow their intuition into too heavy a play with scientific concepts. On the other hand, when you do get philosophical artists, like Christopher Nolan and his co-writer and brother Jonathan, there are often other problems. Their films often fall heavily towards the ground of tradition, building on and questioning the underlying structure of things, rather than poetically creating them anew. Though this highlights other interesting differences. Whereas a more natural artist like Kubrick seemed to have found it easy to experiment with the composition of a shot and the way things look in space, Nolan prefers to use time. His shot composition is often critiqued for its unoriginality or formality. An even more common critique concerns his reliance on an overly-rationalized plot, its machinations, and especially its exposition, but all this is intentional.7 He just prefers to use the rhythm of cuts and variations in perspective to alter the way the structure of reality appears under different textures and arrangements of time, rather than creating a new or characteristic artistic space or style. It seems clear that though he is interested in order and structure, he is not some unimaginative realist or reactionary, interested in defending a static spatial order devoid of artistic ambiguity and the magic of media manipulations.8 Rather he seems to dwell on the possibilities of a rational understandable order that is not opposed to or threatened by time, but informed and penetrated by the magic of its power of transformation, its potential to not necessarily subvert and transcend reason, order, and space, but invert them and unearth them, examine and understand them through their many possible variations. There was a similar aesthetic in modern art, before it collapsed into the fractured personal cosmologies and flattened commercialism of contemporary art.9 But modernism failed to form a new consciousness for the same reasons that General Relativity failed, and the fallout is similar across the cultural landscape. Conclusion: The Future of Science and the Imagination Both the science and art of the early 20th century attempted to incorporate time and different perspectives into space, yet too often simply into another space or unified context. This was a sacrifice of essential reciprocity between context and content—a sacrifice which led to artists shedding all historical context and returning to the roots of form and meaning in the abstract image, the personal narrative, or the private cosmology—or the simple reflection of popular mass appeal. It led to physics breaking up into the instrumentalism of quantum theory, the settling for a mere contiguity of incompatible perspectives over any deeper conceptual continuity. A complementarity of diverse perspectives can be good, of course; it was good to affirm that different perspectives should not be forced into the Procrustean bed of a single perspective or space. But a frozen space of diverse perspectives is still just another static space, just a single view that claims to collect or represent the many. Of course Einstein’s Relativity was included as one of the represented perspectives inside what has become the patchwork of theories in physics and contemporary cosmology. And it is true that Relativity does incorporate non-euclidean geometry, which in its own way refutes the limits of a single spatial order. But like modern art, which also moved beyond simple perspectival space by using spatial terms to represent a higher transcendent or temporal dimension, Relativity simply turned time into a dimension within another kind of fundamental representational space. It failed to understand the full three-dimensional reciprocal reality of time and change—that is, the centrality of time to every dimension, and every dimension as a unit of change or transformation, not some static ground. Non-euclidean geometry, like certain developments in Modernist music, makes possible a clear recognition of the limits of reducing time to a single spatial measure. But instead of exploring the shifting contexts for time’s multidimensional effect on space, Modernist music and physics alike simply dispensed with their grounding frameworks of tonality and spatiality respectively. And without that ground they became superseded by pop music and popular science, both more interested in playing with new technology than understanding or expressing the structure of reality. After the dust of the world wars settled, the modernism of early 20th century culture became a quaint part of the background of the new post-war culture—which still inspires new grand narratives and theories of everything, but where nothing fundamental gets questioned in its domain, as all has become relativised and frozen forever in its niche or time period. Now we are free to pick up any cultural artifact and use it like a tool. But the fabric of time is lost as it has merely become a principle of essential difference preventing any change. Time is seen as a single linear dimension or a part of some higher space, where all of the past is frozen forever, and even the future is often considered predetermined, where the tapestry of connection between different times is set by history and physical forces, and therefore hardly examined, let alone seen as a dynamic space formed by the continual connections between things and their eternal activity. Though, it is true, that with the rise of pop culture, art was released from its own sterile entrenchment in—and occasional puerile reaction against—tradition. It became free to hybridize and improvise, to embrace new media and technology, and to examine those media with a new stockpile of symbolism, of “archetypes” digested and broken down from the world’s cultures in the Modernist era into readymade tropes and cliches for our global village of electric media. In the science fiction film in particular we have seen some of the era’s best attempts at forging a new coherence in the popular psyche. The Matrix films were a laudable attempt at forging a mythic level narrative to make sense out of the virtual world of media in which we swim like fish unaware of the water.10 The original Matrix trilogy, despite the problems and usual trappings of the genre, comes close to transcending the usual melodrama of good vs. evil, and establish some feeling of a reciprocal relation between space and time, between the matrix of the mind—the virtual, temporal aspect—and the space of bodily existence. Nonetheless it leaves us with little more than a feeling of cyclical time as a single holistic system. This idea of holistic systems that has become so popular in the New Age has its roots in the life sciences, but it has evolved over the decades into forms of theory that transcend both the single-system narrative of modernism and the fractured spaces so often associated with postmodernism, sometimes even approaching a sophistication that can model the reciprocity of systems in feedback loops with irreducible complexity and nonlinearity. Such models have the potential to transcend disciplinary boundaries, giving hope for a new consciousness and a new society. Even scientists and technicians unaware of these developments are recognizing the need for a more complexity-sensitive approach, and are independently shifting their methods and theory. But so much science rests on the concepts of physics, and, consequently, without a deeper change in its theoretical structure, the other fields are being held back. This is of particular importance to where biology and physics come together. There has been a long struggle between reductionism and holism in biology, with holism and vitalism losing prestige after the Nazis and becoming mostly a trend in alternative health and spiritual culture. Systems theory has brought some of that holism back into serious science. But without grounding the systems in an understanding of basic reciprocal motions, they are easily reduced to a mere relation of parts by scientists, or the parts themselves get reduced to some single whole by those enamored by reductive holism. This is particularly true in biophysics, where the emerging field of quantum biology is exploring how the organism is actually organizing its own space and time.11 The potential in this formulation is diluted, however, without a deeper grounding of the concept of energy, since most theories of biophysics rely on quantum electrodynamics and its uneasy dependence on notions of fundamental substance, forcing it to merely expand traditional physics theories into concepts like “virtual particles”, a kind of oxymoron. However, with a philosophically coherent system of knowledge—with a system of theories in reciprocal cooperation coherent down to the basic motions of physics, and through to the most complex experiences of human social systems, society is free to improvise and interpret the metaphors however it wants, and it only adds to the structure, like a fractal. The possibilities are endless but they always emerge as a reciprocal relation between space and time, or in other words as motion or change in the structure of connections between things, not some single space. Any change can be interpreted as motion in many kinds of spaces or directions in a space, yet like a fractal, its character is preserved through all transformations. With gravity we can see the fundamental movement that defines our three dimensional spatial reference frame. Its movement inward in space allows for a fixed frame of reference from which we can interpret all other motions both in time and space as they get translated into our familiar Euclidean space. The impulse of life to evolve past our three dimensional reference system into an understanding and mastering of the structure of time, is sensed and sometimes approached by our science fiction, but only recently have these attempts started to sense the conceptual structure of the knowledge that will get us there. Star Trek often played with time travel but it was always with a conservative mindset—protect the timeline! Advanced beings called the Q continuum in Star Trek hinted we would one day evolve into masters of time and space like them, but we see little of our great future beyond policing the timeline. Many shows like Quantum Leap or Doctor Who, also feature great heroes fixing timelines, but what is needed is not another hero with some special ability lording over time for the rest of us. Those that have mapped the inner planes with metaphors in past ages have given us a good idea of what kind of universe we live in beneath all the cultural distortions and creative embellishments. Anyone with a decent intuition should be able to confirm the mystic truth that could be contrasted with Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces: though a hero may be a good metaphor for the personal journey, at the larger scale we are all in this together. And we can see the progress our culture makes when we work together. Film as a collaborative medium has been able to go further and touch a deeper chord than the lone geniuses of Modern art. Music and popular culture have evolved and the internet awakened so much collective creative force that traditional art and knowledge academies have become little more than petrified museums of abstraction and elitism. Independent researchers are using the internet to integrate information and form the new paradigms that are solving the problems and facing the complexity that the specialist is barred from even exploring. As that complexity is integrated into a more coherent system of interlocking systems of embodied knowledge and power, we can sense a shift in our experience of time from the meaningless passing of a flavorless quantity to a deep feel for the connections between forms separate in time and space. As our experience of time gets increasingly more dense with added and overlapping contexts and flows of information, what fractal time researchers call “temporal depth” increases; we cease to live in time and space and live more and more through them as a direct medium.12 Developments in our cultural media are setting the stage for our evolution into direct contact with the primary medium, which, up till recently, we have had very little direct knowledge or control of—like characters on a stage set by beings already evolved to that level. The true masters of time are not heroic time travelers, not meddlers nor protectors of any timeline, but rather, those beings that have weaved together so many lines of time and spiritual force, beings with so much gravity that both time and space are merely the eternal play of the harmonies and colors of their light. As Interstellar suggests, they are our self waiting for us to find and make ourselves anew. Notes: 1. As quoted in Larson (1964) pg.2 2. Larson (1964) pg.5 3. See my “Creative Coherence: From Political Physics to Psychic Politics in Hypermodernity” for a detailed discussion of this novel understanding of physics. Though, admittedly, one can also see the same basic ideas in ancient traditions, especially Taoist concepts of energy as “chi”, with magnetism clearly being “yin chi” and electricity “yang chi”. 4. Hans Zimmer Only Used 3 Chords To Make Interstellar Legendary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AI6PG7oj7E) 5. The Oppenheimer Theme's WILDLY Confusing Timing (https://youtu.be/Qd038myjUfc?si=EO5JOWBigIFEZQ7O) 6.In Daoist Nei Gong, standing practice is used first because using gravity is the best way to open up the body to spiritual energies.The “descending force”—as Sri Aurobindo sometimes calls the divine power or “shakti” that comes down as we open our body—is central to not only his integral yoga, but many occult practices, as the pressure from gravity on the body carries a kind of spiritual “weight” for reasons that are clear as one begins to understand the physics discussed here. 7. Christopher Nolan - At War With Style (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBgTWOi6pUY) 8. Some critics, like Slavoj Zizek, have accused him of being a political reactionary. 9. see Ebert (2013) 10.”global village”, “electric media”, and this fish/water metaphor are a nod to media scholar Marshall McLuhan. 11. See Ho (2008) 12. See Vrobel (2011) References: Ebert, John David. Art After Metaphysics. Creative Space 2013. Ho, Mae Wan. The Rainbow and The Worm: The Physics of Organisms. Third Edition. World Scientific. 2008 Larson, Dewey B. Beyond Newton: An Explanation of Gravitation. North Pacific. 1964 Vrobel, Suzie. Fractal Time: Why A Watched Kettle Never Boils. World Scientific. 2011.