Vignettes
On fluctuations in the vacuum of night.
Katelyn and I went kayaking last weekend in the Skokie Lagoons. Mostly notable for the swarms of cicadas, singing their short lived,1 but loud (so loud!) songs, it was also interesting to note the invisible life beneath the murky lagoon surface. Sometimes you’d see a fish or minnow, but more often I’d watch herons or other birds picking out food from depths impenetrable to my eyes. What teems beneath the surface, I wondered, what can’t I see?
In statistical physics, scientists often arrive at an understanding of a whole system by considering an “ensemble,” a large number of copies of the system, each in a different state. The individual particles that make up the ensemble are always fluctuating, in motion, impossible to trace (consider, for example, each air molecule hurtling through this room), and yet we still can hope to learn something from the group as a whole.
Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker: “the despair is never ending, yet I remain silly.” The words were accompanied by a drawing of a cat in pink roller blades and a birthday hat surrounded with colorful stars and butterflies. The cat’s eyes were big and round, staring like there’s a ghost behind me, yet it’s little pink mouth, with just the slightest curl, held on to something — I wish I knew what.
I mean, I know some of what. We were out to dinner with a friend the other night, meeting at the Moonlighter before she moved across the country, getting closer, as I’m inexplicably drawn to do, before we must separate. Somehow squeezing the extra joy from the togetherness of the moment seems worth it, despite the knowledge of the impending pain.
Anyway, right during a lull in our conversation, the guy at the table next to us says, casually, “yeah, the parking lot was on fire at school today.” The girl across from him starts, “excuse me, say what?” My ears were perked. But then the person running trivia started talking in his microphone and Katelyn got back from the bathroom and our conversation moved on.
Why is the leaving of a close friend so destabilizing? Why do I need constant reminders that I assume the world is more stable than it is?
For example, it’s not raining now, I probably don’t need to bring the umbrella. Or, as you may have noticed, somehow cold fronts and warm fronts seem to never sink in for me: my clothing choices just never seem to catch up to the simple truth that things, like the weather, change.
When I board a 26 foot sailboat in the harbor in downtown Chicago, it seems like a pretty good sized boat. Room down under the cabin, room to walk on the foredeck and hang on the shrouds, channeling my inner Jack Sparrow. Sailing out of the harbor it’s easy to feel like big stuff. That is, until you get out on Lake Michigan, when the waves that looked so small suddenly seem much bigger, the shoreline more distant, and you look out to the horizon in each direction and see your boat as a tiny matchstick tossed by the great sea.
There’s a story I read in childhood by Hans Christian Andersen about a little match girl who freezes to death, lighting her matches against the wall to warm her hands. There’s a futility to matches: how quickly they flare up and burn, and then go out. In the simultaneously haunting and blood boiling story, as the new year’s sun rises on her frozen corpse, burnt match stubs locked in her iced fingers, all anyone can say is "She wanted to warm herself.” Maybe that’s all there is to say.
But the narrator, no, the narrator tells more. Each time the little girl lights a match she sees visions of wonderful things, of fires and hearths and her grandmother, who eventually comes to take her home. “No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen, and how happily she had gone with her old grandmother into the bright New Year,” the narrator concludes.
Have you ever struck a match in a dark woods, seen dirt or trees or faces suddenly come to life in its light? Henri Poincare writes: “Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but the flash is everything.”
The average human blink lasts something like 150 milliseconds; we blink nearly 20,000 times a day. Scientists understand blinking to be an an essential function of the eye. It spreads tears across the eye, protecting, cleaning, and lubricating it, and plays a key role in our visual processing.
The scriptures teach us that humans are made imago Dei — in the image of God. Does God blink 20,000 times a day?
Brain fried after a long day working from home, I left to take a bike ride. It had been a lonely day, and I was pining, I suppose, to escape the confines of my room, and for a little contact with the outer world. At the bottom of the stairs, next to the outside basement door where I get my bike, I met a guy, perhaps mid 30s with just the slightest air of awkwardness, squatting down on the concrete, alone. He had a glass of what looked like questionable apple juice in his hand, and was pouring small amounts of it on the sidewalk. I must have given him a quizzical look as I fumbled with my keys, because he looked up at me sheepishly. “There was a bee crawling around, so I thought she might like some sugar water,” he said. “So I was giving her some… but she doesn’t seem to like it - she moves away from the wet fast - so I don’t know.” He shook his head a little, and then quickly stood up, and walked away embarrassed.
I wanted to call after him, but I couldn’t find the words. I hadn’t meant to interrupt. I unlocked the door to the basement, grabbed my bike, and, not knowing what else to do, continued on my way. When I returned later the pavement had dried, the man and his bee friend no where to be found.
A line from a short story hit me hard the other day. Watching her kids swimming in a hotel pool, thinking about the impending consequences of changing climate and her wrinkling age, the narrator looks out at the purple sky and orange mountains “like actual arms around them.” Under her breath, to every single thing she whispers “Stay. Just stay,” …
One of the many potentially unsettling consequences of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (a well tested, key tenant of quantum mechanics) is that empty space itself — rather than just being pure, smooth emptiness — on the smallest scales is more like a boiling soup, with photons and other particles continuously popping into and out of existence. Not that we can observe these fluctuations directly – indeed, when Heisenberg first announced the theory, no one took this mathematical curiosity too seriously. But over time we’ve observed their consequences. As a University of Regensburg press release put it “modern physics is increasingly discovering how our universe is shaped by fluctuations of physical fields, which not only lead to tiny shifts of spectral lines of atoms, but moreover may cause the evaporation of black holes, and are ultimately responsible for the large-scale structure of our universe.”
Say what? Our universe, like it or not, seems to be painted on a canvas of tiny, invisible fluctuations: energy and matter dancing continuously into and out of existence. Indeed, some physicists go further, suggesting our entire universe is just one tiny fluctuation in a sea of them, blown up to near infinite proportions. Crazy? Perhaps. Multiverse theories often border on theology. But then again, I sometimes wonder if in the quantum vacuum fluctuations of our universe there might be more theology than we give it credit for. Perhaps a beautiful boiling sea of fluctuations is just one more way for us to See.
Indeed, the internet told me they have only three to five wild weeks in which they must mate and lay their eggs before they die.